#if only for the fact that it was for most of a century being identified as LEIGH HUNT instead! yeah right

[duxbelisarius]

Back to the Dance Part Two: Environment and Logistics in the Dance

Thank you to those that have read along thus far; here's Part One of this new series if you haven't had the chance to read it yet!

Now that we've covered the political background of the Seven Kingdoms and the lead up to the Dance, we can start discussing the war itself. The next four parts will cover aspects of warfare in this setting and our own history, starting with the environment and logistics; we'll touch on aspects of the plot where it intersects with the topic at hand, discussing what we know about warfare in the pre-modern world, the conduct of warfare in George's series, and where problems arise in the Dance in trying to reconcile the latter with the former. Covering the environment of Westeros and what we know about logistics there, ie how do people, goods, and services move from place to place, allows us to assess how these factors affect warfare during the Dance (or don't affect it). This is important for establishing what is militarily possible for the Blacks and Greens to achieve, before we even get to how the actually fight.

Assessing the role of the environment is necessary given that it generally determines or influences how one fights: the deserts of southern Dorne will require different equipment and approaches to campaigning than the open expanse of the North. We know from F&B that Rhaenyra's coronation most likely took place on the 12th day of the 3rd Moon (March 12th; we'll use our calendar hereafter) 129 AC, and that autumn was well advanced by the team Jace arrived at Winterfell. We thus know that it was autumn by the latter part of March and remained so until Maiden Day the following year, after which it was winter for the next 5-6 years, meaning that the entire Dance took place during autumn and winter. We'll get into some of the issues that years long seasons create for the setting, but the fact that the war was fought for more than two years entirely in the autumn and winter creates immediate problems.

It should be noted that the seasons have symbolic as well as literal meaning in the series for George, who speaks of summer as a time of "growth and plenty and joy" while winter is "a dark time where you have to struggle for survival." There's nothing necessarily wrong with this view of the seasons, but the affect of the seasons on warfare in our own history is something which does not appear to carry over into the books. The years long seasons in particular create problems for the setting given that the cyclical nature of our seasons had an affect historically on two human activities in particular: seafaring and military campaigning.

Written around the early 5th Century AD, Vegetius' De Re Militari identified which months of the year were deemed safe for navigation; while the climate of the Mediterranean is renowned for being temperate and ideal for habitation, the weather can be exceptionally dangerous even outside the expected autumn and winter months, as seen in 2022 when unexpectedly heavy weather blew an F/A-18 Hornet off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman in July. By our modern calendar, Vegetius deemed navigation permissible from May 27th to September 14th, with navigation becoming more dangerous due to severe weather from Sept. 14th to November 11th while Nov. 11th to March 10th was deemed too dangerous, and advising not to venture out before May 15th (DRM, 146). There is room for nuance in this picture however: per Oded Tammuz' investigation of ancient shipping accounts from the Eastern Mediterranean, the risks Vegetius attaches to winter weather (minimal daylight and long nights, dense cloud cover, fog, and violent winds) mainly applied to coastal vessels who risked shipwreck or foundering from taking on too much water, while ships on the open sea only really risked the latter fate. Michael McCormick made similar findings in Origins of the European Economy: Papal communications to France and Germany between AD 580 and 700 did not travel north in January, February or March when sea travel was used, but still took place even in October, November, and December (McCormick, Origins, 79-80). Sailing during autumn and winter was risky but it did take place, most likely on the open sea rather than along the coasts.

With regards to Planetos, the Narrow, Sunset, Summer, and Shivering seas are probably closer to the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean than the Mediterranean, with the latter three arguably being oceans in their own right. The books don't ignore the dangers of seasonal bad weather as autumn is repeatedly described as a dangerous season for ships, especially in Arya's ADWD POV "The Ugly Girl" when the Kindly Man sends her to kill the maritime insurer, while Stannis' fleet is scattered by a storm en route to Blackwater Bay in ACOK. Nonetheless, the risks posed by autumn and winter weather to naval activities should have dire implications for the plot of the Dance; we'll cover naval warfare in greater detail during Part Four, but suffice it to say that the Ironborn are screwed in this scenario. According to F&B, Dalton Greyjoy was able to seize 75% of the ships in Lannisport harbour and sink the rest before sacking the city; just so we're clear, using the distance scale on Atlas of Ice and Fire's map of Westeros gives us a distance of c.400 miles (c.644 km) as the crow flies between Pyke and Lannisport. Sailing around the Westerlands coast to avoid being spotted or wrecked by the weather would probably add half or even double that distance, and oared ships like the Ironborn longboats aren't quite seaworthy enough to handle such navigation as I discussed in the Velaryon Blockade post (more on this in Part Four!).

Shipping was seasonal and so to was warfare, for while George refers to summer as a time of 'growth and plenty,' this is exactly what one needs for waging war. In Logistics of the Roman Army at War, Jonathan Roth notes that the 'campaigning season' for armies in the classical world depended on when grain and fodder from the harvest became available to feed the armies and their animals, with armies preferring to spend the winter months of December, January, and February in 'winter quarters' near supply bases (Roth, Roman Army, 137, 177). Harvest times also varied from region to region; to quote Roth at length:

According to Greek sources, farmers sowed most of their grains in autumn, between October 20 and November 25; harvesting began in Greece in the middle of May and in southern Italy in late May. In the eastern Mediterranean, farmers planted wheat and barley in November and December, harvested barley in April and wheat in May. The Egyptian harvest took place during the months Pharmouthi and Pachon (March 27 to May 25). A fast-growing “three-month wheat” was sown in the spring, sometime in early March, and harvested in May or June; barley, millet, and panic could also be sown in the spring. Spring sowing had the advantage of furnishing a rapid early crop on fallow land, but could be used only on land rich enough to carry a crop every year. In the eastern Mediterranean, grapes were picked through the summer, from June through September although sometimes as late as October. Legumes, such as lentils, peas and vetch were harvested in April and May, chickpeas as late as June; figs gathered in August and September, and olives between September and November. (Roth, 136-137).

We thus have a Mediterranean campaign season which likely began around March or May and continued to November at the latest, meaning 7-9 months at best for largescale warfare and 3-5 months of 'winter quarters' in which this would be off limits or greatly curtailed, unless stores could be drawn upon or an army had no choice but to fight.

We know that Westeros has many different climate regions as according to George, "The Mountains of the Moon get quite a lot of snow, the Vale and the riverlands and the west rather less, but some. King's Landing gets snow infrequently, the Storm Lands and the Reach rarely, Oldtown and Dorne almost never." This should mean that limits on growing even during the winter should not be too severe outside of the North, but the problem this presents should be obvious nonetheless. Years long winters should see long periods in which warfare is drastically curtailed if not absent entirely from large parts of Westeros, owing to the need to carefully conserve existing stores and the harvest produce, save for a place like Dorne where greater rain and cooler temperatures would make warfare more viable. We also have to ask how warfare would function during years long springs, summers, and autumns; would the armies be forced to stop fighting for a time to allow grain and fodder to be planted and replenished? That certainly isn't the impression the books give us: Jaime II of AFFC mentions that 2000 men of the Lannister Army were retained to assault Dragonstone while the rest were dismissed to their homes, but this is due to the War of the Five Kings being all but over; in Catelyn V of ASOS, Robb expects to march on Moat Cailin with 12000 men once Edmure and Roslin are wed and plans to retake the North from the remaining Ironborn despite the inclement weather, sparse population, and economic disruption the North has experienced from the war. The importance of winter quarters to premodern armies is lost in the setting due to the seasons being thrown out of whack, and the logistical challenges that the armies should face are only treated haphazardly by the narrative.

The question of how harvests work in Westeros is another area where the environment's role in the story requires scrutiny, as their timing and frequency is unclear. As Roth's previous quote shows that the relationship of harvest times to the seasons is a complex one, since harvest time is determined by how long it takes for crops to germinate, grow, and ripen, while the climate and weather of a season often determines what can be grown/planted. I bring this up because the books make it clear that keeping track of the seasons is difficult: in Catelyn I of ACOK, Catelyn thinks with regard to autumn that "even the wisest man never knew whether his next harvest would be the last;" TWOIAF outright admits that the Citadel is unable to predict the length or the changing of the seasons, and the best they can do is mark the shortening or lengthening of the days to notify the realm that the change is taking place. With no one able to know the seasons are changing until it is already taking place, how can populations reliably plant and harvest crops in the first place? This should open the door for autumn rains to ruin summer crops and for winter snow and rain to destroy what was planted in autumn, depending on when the planting took place vis a vis the season changing.

The plot of the Dance doesn't help these issues by invoking the harvest as a plot device at opportune times: Jace arrives at Winterfell when Cregan Stark is already in the midst of his winter preparations, while TWOIAF claims the need to keep every man he could for harvesting prior to winter delayed Cregan's sending aid to Rhaenyra; when Aemond and Criston Cole abandon Harrenhal sometime after the 'Fish Feed,' Aemond and Vhagar attack Castle Darry in the midst of the harvest being brought in; the Hightower Army experiences desertion after First Tumbleton as men leave for 'home and harvest;' and finally, Rhaenyra's requests for aid while taking refuge at Duskendale are met with the response that Cregan Stark could not send men until they "bring in our last harvest."

Determining when these harvests took place is possible to an extent: the Battle of the Honeywine took place a fortnight after the end of the Battle of the Gullet, so January 20th 130 AC, and allowing a week for a raven to reach King's Landing means that Aemond's mustering of his forces would be complete by February 10th, while his 20 day march to Harrenhal would have brought him there the day after Criston Cole on March 2nd, meaning the 'Fish Feed' would have taken place some time after and the harvest in the Riverlands would be taking place in March or April; I suggested in Part 9 of the original series that Tumbleton likely fell on April 30th, though April 28th is probably a more accurate date, meaning the Reach harvest would be taking place some time in May or June; as for the North, if we take what TWOIAF says to be true that the riots in King's Landing began on May 22nd, then Rhaenyra would have fled two days later (I mistakenly suggested 5 days before) and probably arrived at Duskendale on June 1st, while her ravens would likely have reached Winterfell after a fortnight which means the northern harvest was ongoing in mid-June. So the Riverlands was harvesting in March and/or April, the Reach in May and/or June, while the North was harvesting in June and may have done so or continued to do so the previous or following months (May-July).

Based on the quotes from George and Jonathan Roth, this sequencing makes no sense: per Roth, the Egyptian harvest ran from late March to late May whereas Italy and Greece to the north and west began their harvests in mid-to-late May. Yet despite the Reach rarely receiving snow and having by far the warmest climate in Westeros outside Dorne, the harvest in the Reach is a month behind the more northerly Riverlands which have suffered considerable damage from the war already? The North is even worse however, as we were told that the snow was already deep around Winterfell when Jace arrived there in March 129 AC, but somehow the North is harvesting at the same time as the Reach or just a month later despite winter having officially arrived weeks before on Maiden Day? In essence the plot invokes harvest time not because it is important to the setting, which would lead to serious questions about how people are to be fed with a war going on, but because it ensures foreordained outcomes by keeping the North 'on pause' and weakening the Hightower Army at the right time.

Instead of the environment constantly affecting the plot even on a small scale, the narrative uses it for deus-ex-machina purposes which causes serious dissonance given the effect the environment has on ASOIAF. Asha and Theon's POVs in ADWD give us a front-row seat for how miserable it is to be fighting a war in the North during late autumn, let alone winter, via the actions of Roose Bolton and Stannis Baratheon's armies. In Arya IX of ASOS, Arya and the Hound find Lord Harroway's Town all but submerged by the flooding Trident, and Catelyn's later POV chapters highlight the struggles of Robb's forces to make progress with so many fords and bridges washed out by the rain. But aside from adding 3-4 days to Aemond and Cole's march on Harrenhal, the rain which we should expect to be affecting the Seven Kingdoms in a year long autumn and at the beginning of a 5-6 year winter has next to no affect whatsoever.

Having discussed the issues with the environment in the plot of the Dance, we can now assess the role of logistics; we will identify the logistical means available to the setting and the extent to which logistics actually influences the armies, or if logistics like the environment is not integrated into the narrative. For those who haven't read the Dorne analysis, my analysis of logistics in the pre-modern era is indebted to Hugh G. W. Davie, in particular his article discussing the economics and logistics of horse-drawn armies (I'll once again recommend checking out his blog if you have an interest in military logistics and the Eastern Front of WWII in particular). He provides a useful model for understanding the logistics of pre-modern armies, viewing them as 'micro-economies' that had to meet their demand with transport and supply inputs to output mobility.

Demand encompasses all the maintenance requirements of an army's personnel and animals, such as rations for humans, fodder for animals, water for both, alcohol for daily human consumption and to substitute water if safe sources are unavailable, fuel such as firewood for warmth, food preparation and operating forges, among numerous other items. We haven't even discussed the amounts of these items that might be required, but it should already be clear that the appetite of a pre-modern army could be voracious, although there were methods on the demand side that could be used to mitigate this. Temporarily reducing ration and fodder consumption or substituting with local forage and grazing the animals could preserve an army's stores and extend its range, forced marches could be used to cover great distance in a short amount of time with reduced consumption, unnecessary baggage, wagons, and carts might be abandoned to cut down on the number of camp followers who would otherwise add to the army's demand, and an army might be divided into separate hosts to disperse it's consumption of a region's supplies so as to avoid exhausting them (the maxim of 'march divided, fight united').

None of those methods save for the last two could be more than short term solutions, and mobility ultimately depended on meeting existing demand with supplies and transport. Supply sources will vary depending on the surrounding environment and enemy intervention, but Davie identifies three primary means with which an army can obtain supplies: Forage, gathered locally by one's troops; requisitions from the local population; and stores drawn from one's own magazines and conveyed to the army via transport. Forage is heavily dependent upon local population density, which is a rabbit hole I have no intention of going down in the context of ASOIAF; suffice it to say that gathering forage locally in this setting might be possible for a small and/or dispersed host, but larger armies would need to rely on requisitions and magazines for their needs. Requisition involves receiving stores directly from the local authorities, population, and markets, potentially by force but most often through purchase, while magazines involve stockpiling stores from one's own supplies along the army's lines of communication and transporting them where needed. A quote from Part Two of the Dornish Analysis should put in perspective the quantities of supplies needed:

Some idea of what these sources would have to yield for the Dornish can be gleaned from Jonathan Roth's excellent book The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 BC-AD 235), which analyzes the supply of the Roman Army from the early Republic until the Crisis of the Third Century. The Roman soldier's daily ration consisted of 1 to 1.3 kilograms (2-3 lbs) of grain and non-grain rations, and a minimum fluid requirement of 4 liters, half of which would be consumed via breathing and eating and the other half by drinking water, with another 4 liters or more required for daily operations in the form of water and alcohol (combat demands would certainly exceed 8 liters per day). Horses called for a 9.5 kg daily ration of hard and dry/green fodder, or 14 kg of pasturage, with 30 liters of water; pack animals like donkeys and mules required 7.5 kg, 11 kg and 20 liters respectively while oxen required 18 kg, 22 kg and 30 liters. To put those numbers into perspective, 1000 Dornish soldiers would need 1 tonne of food and 8 or more tonnes of water per day, with more needing to be stockpiled to support marches and combat. 100 Dornish knights with perhaps 2 horses each would need to furnish their mounts collectively with 2 tonnes of fodder and 6 tonnes of water daily.

This brings us to the third 'point' of the triangle, transport, without which an army's demand cannot be met and it's supplies are inaccessible. Despite being a fantasy setting, Westeros is in the same boat as our own world prior to the steam and internal combustion engines: moving people, goods, and services from one place to another requires some combination of water, wind, and muscle power. The former two involve seaborne and riverine transport, although oars were also utilized by watercraft in these situations as were poles and towing by draft animals for inland waterways. Land transport was entirely dependent on muscle power, with soldiers and/or porters carrying what they could manage or else depending on wagons, carts, and pack animals.

We'll discuss shipping in greater detail when covering naval warfare in Part Four, but suffice it to say that both factions have ample capacity for sealift within the setting. Oared and pure sailing vessels are utilized regularly in the books for moving goods and people throughout Westeros, while the ample coastlines of the Narrow and Sunset Seas possess numerous ports capable of serving both factions needs, weather permitting. An excellent example of what sealift could achieve comes from the Cretan Expedition of AD 911, launched by the Byzantine Empire against Muslim pirates stationed on that island; to meet this threat and that of other Arab pirates in the Levant, 15600 ground troops with equipment, supplies, and animals were provided transport by a fleet of 112 Dromons and 75 Pamphyloi (Dromons used for cargo transport) (Pryor and Jeffries, Age of the Dromon, 548-550). Westeros has access to larger ships than these for transport, so the main limits to what could be moved would be the availability of ships and port capacity. That being said, sealift would likely play more of a strategic role in war, moving troops and materiel around the periphery, with inland water and land transport being necessary to connect these to the interior.

I addressed inland water transport throughout the original analysis, but it warrants detailed discussion here for it's potential to connect armies in the field with supply centers that would be too distant to draw supplies from overland. Making effective use of riverine supply lines depends upon the navigability of the rivers themselves, ie the depth of the river, prevalence of debris and man-made obstacles such as mills, dams, and bridges, the strength of the current, etc. Fortunately for the setting, the regions where the bulk of the fighting takes place are home to three highly navigable rivers: the Trident, the Mander, and the Blackwater. Jaime I of ASOS states outright that the forks of the Trident are the easiest way to move goods and people throughout the Riverlands and TWOIAF confirms this, saying they "stimulate trade and travel during peace time, and serve as both roads and barriers in time of war."

The Mander's navigability is similarly high: although Victarion's AFFC POV "The Reaver" calls the Mander "wide and slow and treacherous with snags and sandbars," this mainly limits sea-going vessels to sailing no further than Highgarden, whereas Ironborn longboats can navigate as far as Bitterbridge and utilized all the vassal streams for raiding the Reach long ago. TWOIAF confirms this image, offering anecdotes of the Ironborn raiding up the Mander and of John Gardener "the Tall" who sailed his barge to the headwaters of the Mander and won the fealty of the local lords and petty kings of the region. The Blackfish's account of the Battle of the Blackwater in Catelyn II of ASOS provides further evidence of the Mander's navigability, as Tywin, Mathis Rowan, and Randyll Tarly travel to the battle from Tumbler's Falls on the Blackwater thanks to barges provided by Mace Tyrell. We know that Petyr Baelish negotiated the Tyrell-Baratheon alliance with Mace at Highgarden, so those barges would had to have come up the Mander with most if not all the troops that may have joined Mace, before they travelled overland to the Blackwater.

Our information on the Blackwater is much more scattered but indicates that it is also highly navigable; it certainly had to be for Tywin and Mace's forces to travel down river on those barges! The Blackwater is consistently described as deep and swift in the books with it's current being strongest where the river empties into Blackwater Bay; despite this, Imry Florent's ships were able to move upriver against the current when Stannis attacked King's Landing, and Cersei VI of AFFC notes that Margaery Tyrell is fond of sailing up and down the Blackwater Rush. We even hear from Sallador Saan in Davos II of ASOS that the galleys Ragged Jenna and Laughing Lord are said to be playing pirate on the Blackwater after having been far enough upriver to avoid the wildfire during Stannis' attack, suggesting even seafaring warships could venture far upriver to some extent. The river's high navigability is further indicated by the fact that ferries are the only means of crossing to King's Landing from the south based on Sansa IV of ACOK and Sansa II of ASOS, while Borros Baratheon's men fell trees to make rafts when they arrive at the Rush following the Moon of the Three Kings. The absence of a bridge over the lower Blackwater suggests that large vessels are expected to travel some ways up the lower river at least, as it's unlikely a bridge would be an obstacle if river traffic consisted only of smaller vessels capable of lowering their masts or those lacking one.

Regarding the capabilities of riverine transport, Jonathan Roth notes that the Romans possessed riverboats with a capacity of 34 tonnes, though most were smaller capacity craft of c. 9 tonnes. Even a 9 tonne boat could carry as much as 18 wagons or 72 pack animals, and with greater speed than land transport (Roth, 197). River transport also has the advantage of requiring less effort than land transport to move heavy loads, with a barge towed by a horse able to move 250 times the load the horse could carry on land. When the Roman Emperor Julian invaded the Sassanid Persian Empire in AD 363, he used a fleet of 1100 river vessels to carry siege engines, bridging equipment, and 6 months supplies for the bulk of his 65000 strong invasion force on its march from Callinicum (Raqqa) to Ctesiphon (Al-Mada'in), about 600 km (c.373 miles) as the crow flies. The main challenge facing this method is the rivers themselves, as the water level can rise or fall depending on the weather and render navigation difficult if not impossible.

This brings to land transport, the evidence for which in the books and which is in keeping with our knowledge of premodern methods. These include pack animals such as horses, donkeys, and mules, and wheeled transport in the form of two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons (for goods) and carriages (for passengers), pulled most often by oxen and horses though donkeys and mules could also be used. The question of how important land transport was economically and it's efficiency compared to waterborne transport is complicated. The books tend to overestimate it: Catelyn II and III of ACOK provide us observations of Renly's host which imply the entire force of perhaps 100000 is moving by land, including "mangonels and trebuchets and rolling rams moved on wheels taller than a man on horseback." Upon learning of Stannis besieging Storm's End, Renly leaves behind "his wagons, carts, draft animals, and all his cumbersome siege machinery" with his foot soldiers and races to Storm's End. Catelyn notes that "he had outdistanced his supply lines, left food and forage days behind with all his wagons and mules and oxen. He must come to battle soon, or starve."

In reality, siege engines would be built on site of the siege as they were far too large to haul on the march, while such a large host should be relying on the Mander as a supply artery and drawing stores from friendly towns and holdfasts rather than foraging directly from the local region. That being said, if Renly's movements paint too rosy a picture of land transport in a premodern setting, it is also true that it is often discounted as too expensive and slow for anything beyond shortrange hauling. Reality was more complicated however, as Jonathan Roth notes that we have evidence of long distance land transport in Roman sources, such as pack trains carrying British tin through Gaul to the Mediterranean, a 640 km (c. 400 mile) journey which too over a month (Roth, 198). A common misconception was that Roman horse collars were inefficient and even harmful and that this limited the potential of land transport prior to the High Middle Ages; as Gail Brownigg notes in her article "The Origin of the Horse Collar," this misconception was based on faulty fitting of Roman collars to horses in modern experiments, and the fact that these were intended for pulling chariots and other light vehicles at speed while oxen were used for heavy hauling well into the Medieval era.

The limitations pre-modern and especially Medieval land transport faced were not technological but distance and infrastructure-based, as traveling great distances required providing rest and sustenance for the animals and their drivers, and depended on routes being able to support traffic since wheeled vehicles could be damaged if the state of the roads was poor. Cost was certainly a factor but it was far from insurmountable, as James Masschaele demonstrated using royal purveyance accounts in 1993; these record goods moved on behalf of the English crown for military purposes in the 13th and 14th century, and suggest that the ratio of land to river to sea transport in terms of cost was 8:4:1. Clearly there was an incentive to use waterborne over land transport, but on average the selling price of grain increased by only 4% for each mile it travelled, doubling for every 250 miles carried by land (Masschaele, "Transport Costs," 273-274). Although England is far smaller than most of the Seven Kingdoms, Masschaele notes that a ten mile trip would give most producers access to several markets, while the price of grain would be halved if the cargo could reach a river port and travel that way (Masschaele, 274). This last point is important for enabling land transport to meet army demand, since I pointed out in Part Three of the Dornish Analysis that land transport alone can only get one so far:

In Firearms: A Global History to 1700, Kenneth Chase gives some numbers for the transport requirements of a pre-modern army: An army of soldiers carrying 80 pounds of equipment and rations with no additional transport might march 12 miles a day for 10 days before running out; adding pack horses, carrying 250 pounds and consuming 10 pounds of fodder per day, might allow that army to make the round trip if supplies of grass, water and forage could be ensured. Supply wagons with a driver and two horses consuming 23 pounds per day and carrying 1400 pounds of supplies could each support 30 infantrymen enough for an army to march 200 miles, assuming 1 day of rest in 6 for the horses and favourable terrain. To double this range and allow the army to make a round trip of 400 miles, would require the number of wagons to increase from 1 per 30 men to 1 per 5 men, while removing abundant water and grass from the equation would cut the distance fivefold (400 miles to 80) (Firearms, pg. 17-18).

If the armies in this setting can establish magazines and hold markets at towns and holdfasts along their marching routes, and make use of the rivers to the greatest possible extent, their range of movement and thus mobility will be greatly extended. Larger teams of horses and oxen can be used to move heavier loads over shorter distances to these depots or river ports, allowing large stocks to be accumulated and moved via relays at the former or simply shipped greater distances via the latter. Moving armies and their supplies great distances would present issues, but these are manageable provided that land based supply chains and waterborne transport are combined effectively.

The question for the Dance is whether any of this actually matters in the plot, or if logistics is ignored like the environment in pursuit of predetermined outcomes. Fortunately the Blacks and the Greens each offer us an example of major operations being conducted, where at least 2 of the three transport methods we discussed could be used: the Riverlord armies and the Hightower army. The Riverlords conduct four major campaigns during the Dance: the first is led by Daemon against the Greens supporters in the Riverlands in 129 AC; the second begins after Daemon leaves for King's Landing in 130 AC, and sees them defeat the Lannister host and Ser Criston Cole before their army is annihilated at Tumbleton; the third is Second Tumbleton, which sees a newly raised host defeat the Hightower Army under Addam Velaryon; and the fourth and final campaign is in 131 AC when the Lads defeat Borros Baratheon at the Kingsroad.

In none of these campaigns do we get a sense that logistics affects the Blacks in any meaningful way, starting with how Daemon raises his army. Harrenhal is captured soon after Rhaenyra's coronation or c. March 13th, 129 AC, with Daemon securing the ruined castle and its wealth. We know that the initial supporters of Rhaenyra included the Freys, Mootons, Pipers, Darrys, Mallisters, the Rootes of Harroway, and the Vances of Wayfarer's Rest, with thousands of supporters supposedly flocking to Harrenhal in the days that followed. The only houses that we know supported Aegon II are the Brackens and the Vances of Atranta; when Stone Hedge surrenders, we're told that Aegon's supporters laid down their arms, suggesting there were other houses besides these two that supported him though none are ever mentioned. This is significant as Daemon's plan relies on amassing an army and presumably the supplies to maintain it at Harrenhal, a dilapidated half-ruin in the east of the Riverlands. The Trident, the God's Eye, and the roads would certainly facilitate these movements, but all the same I think HOTD actually got something right with the subplot of repairing Harrenhal, as the large quantities of men, animals and supplies would need to be kept safe from the elements (if the environment mattered that is).

Despite this, we have no indication of any Green houses interfering with this build up, either in the 'war of ravens' that followed Aegon and Rhaenyra's coronations or in the Stone Hedge campaign that began sometime after the murder of Prince Jaehaerys. We know from Jaehaerys' royal progress in 52 AC that Atranta is somewhere between Pinkmaiden and Stoney Sept, since the King travelled Harrenhal-Riverrun-Acorn Hall-Pinkmaiden-Atranta-Stoney Sept; despite this, neither the Pipers nor the Vances of Wayfarer's Rest are prevented from answering the call and the Pipers are even counted among Daemon's forces at Stone Hedge. Daemon manages to march his host, largely comprised of houses from the eastern Riverlands, from Harrenhal to Stone Hedge or c. 200 miles based on Atlas' map; this distance is entirely achievable for Daemon's host of unknown size, but it also relies on Daemon facing no interference on his march and arriving at Stone Hedge when the Brackens are absent.

When Daemon departs Harrenhal for King's Landing, the Riverlords abandon also the castle that was their primary base and depot for more than a year but there is no indication of any supplies be left behind sabotaged or otherwise that Aemond and Cole find, while rain only impedes the Green advance on Harrenhal and has no such affect on the larger Riverlord host. At almost 10000 strong including the Winterwolves, the Riverlord host has no apparent difficulties finding supplies nor is this an issue when the c.7000 strong army occupies Tumbleton in the lead up to the first battle. Even when this host is destroyed, Addam Velaryon raises another one in short order; this new 4000 strong host is raised from House Frey, Blackwood, Vypren, Piper, Smallwood, Deddings, Vance, and Darry, and allegedly includes forces of House Tully as well. Addam also manages this despite our knowing that all these houses save Tully, Vypren, and Deddings have suffered heavy losses in the past months, with the Darrys having seen their castle and lands burned by Vhagar. Distance seems not to be an issue either, even though Harrenhal alone is c.500 miles (c.805 km) from Tumbleton as the crow flies, and we know that Addam's forces attacked from the north and west. Unless they could move men and supplies down the Blackwater or draw upon local stores as they marched, even if they force marched for a time Addam's army would have collapsed before it ever reached Tumbleton. The same issues present themselves with the Lads march on King's Landing in 131 AC, where c.6000 men are raised at Riverrun by the Tullys, Freys, Blackwoods, Vances, Darrys, Mallisters, and Brackens. Between the Trident and the Riverroad the Lads should have had no issue reaching the Kingsroad at Harroway Town, but from there to King's Landing is a 375 mile (c.600 km) march; since they would be marching through hostile territory and could not count on requisitioning stores from towns and holdfasts along the way, the Lads would need to stick close to the God's Eye and the Blackwater in order to be supplied by watercraft, otherwise they're on a one-way trip.

It's often remarked upon especially by fans of the Greens that the Riverlords have infinite manpower, but as a Green fan myself I think this impression results from their logistics being ignored. Aegon's host at the Field of Fire was 11000 strong and drawn mainly from the Riverlands, while Edmure Tully's forces at the Battle of the Fords was some 12000 strong; I estimated in Part Four of the original analysis that the Riverlord host at the Fish Feed was c.7000 strong excluding the Winterwolves while the Lads army was c.6000 strong. Over 13000 men is in line with what we've seen elsewhere in the books, the problem is that the weather never affects their movements, the need for harvest labour never impedes their raising armies, and their armies never struggle with supplies and seem capable of appearing out of nowhere.

By contrast, the Hightower army runs into logistical problems even when it ought not to and largely at the convenience of the plot. Following Rook's Rest, Ormund Hightower sets out with a host of 1000 knights, 1000 archers, and 3000 men-at-arms, along with thousands of sellswords, freeriders, and camp followers, to subdue Rhaenyra's supporters in the Reach. I tried my hand in the previous analysis to estimate the size of this army but I think it's better to stick with the numbers we're given; even if the total host was 10000 strong with over half combatants, this would still require substantial land and riverine transport based on the Roseroad and Honeywine to support the initial march. Of the five houses that are bannermen to the Hightowers per the AFFC appendix, Costayne, Beesbury, and Mullendore all support Rhaenyra while Bulwer and Cuy never appear in the Dance, ensuring that maintaining secure supply lines would be difficult. Although we're told that the Caswells and Rowans raised a host similar to Ormund's in size, as with the Riverlords the Blacks in the Reach have no issues with Green supporters impeding their advance or threatening their supplies, since the Hightowers and Redwynes are the only houses we know of that support Aegon from the outset.

Ormund does have to contend with his supply lines being attacked, as the Costaynes fall upon his baggage train while the Beesburys and Tarlys burn fields and harass his forces. They manage this despite Three Towers being just under 150 miles (c.240 km) south of Oldtown, Honeyholt being just under 100 miles (c.160 km) to the north, and Horn Hill being 100 leagues/300 miles (c.483 km) to the northeast. No assistance or warning against these attacks is given from any of the other surrounding houses or the Hightower's own demenses, nor do Ormund's assailants have to worry about their own supplies. Under these circumstances, it's unclear why the Caswells and Rowans even needed to attack Ormund when the Tarlys, Beesburys, Costaynes, and Mullendores should have been able to keep Ormund bottled up in the Honeywine valley, leaving the Blacks in the Reach proper to attack the Greens elsewhere (more on this when we get to strategy in the Dance). Even if Ormund broke out of the valley, the Oakhearts and the Shield Islands are also supporters of Rhaenyra and are well placed to cut off the mouth of the Mander from the Sunset Sea, and Ormund cannot sustain an advance to King's Landing without the Hightower and Redwyne fleets moving supplies from the south up the Mander.

Following the defeat of the Black armies at the Honeywine on January 20th, 130 AC, the Hightower army sets it's sights on King's Landing. By the time of the 'Fish Feed' in March, Goldengrove, Old Oak, and the Shield Islands have submitted and the army lays siege to Longtable, eventually sacking Bitterbridge and taking Tumbleton by c. April 28th. The distance from Tumbleton to Brightwater Keep at the source of the Honeywine is just under 800 miles (c.1290 km), meaning the Hightower army covered that distance in almost 100 days between the Battle of the Honeywine and the First Battle of Tumbleton. That's a marching rate of c.8 miles per day, but when we consider the delays likely caused by the siege of Longtable, the sack of Bitterbridge, and the submission of the Oakhearts, Rowans, and Shield Islands, it's likely the marching rate was closer to the ideal 10-12 miles per day. This is significant, as according to Maester Munkun by the time the Hightower army crossed the Mander at Bitterbridge it numbered more than 20000 strong, with a tenth of them mounted knights.

If we take 20000 as our figure, this means the soldiers alone would have required 20 tonnes of rations and 160 tonnes of water each day; as for animals, if we assume each knight had two horses then we have 4000 warhorses in total, while giving the army one 2-horse wagon per five men would mean a total of 12000 horses. Excluding non-combatants, the Hightower army's total demand would be 20 tonnes of rations, 114 tonnes of fodder, and 520 tonnes of water per day. The amount of wagons and draft horses could be greatly reduced, as we suggested already, if the army utilized riverine transport and a magazine system for their supply chain. Establishing small garrisons at towns and holdfasts like Cider Hall, Longtable, and Bitterbridge to oversee the accumulation of stocks and allowing riverine and land transport to move stores up in relays should allow the army to maintain the over 8 mile per day pace we've calculated, by keeping the army's baggage to a minimum and allowing soldiers and pack animals to carry what supplies are needed on hand.

Unfortunately, the evidence F&B provides us suggests this is not at all how the Hightower army operates: when Longtable surrenders to Ormund, we're told he stripped the castle of it's wealth and every scrap of food, feeding his thousands on Lady Merryweather's grain; after the First Battle of Tumbleton, the man charged with the army's "baggage train", Ser Hobert Hightower, wishes to "fall back to the Reach to replenish their fast-dwindling supplies." Both anecdotes imply that the Hightower army supplies itself from forage on the move and carries with it what supplies it can, a remarkably ad hoc supply system that could not support a host of this size. Not only would it be impossible to meet the army's demand through foraging and carrying supplies via baggage train, we've already shown that this is unnecessary provided the army utilized riverine transport and established magazines as it advanced. With 5 men per wagon, the Hightower army could cover 400 miles before it ran out of supplies and was unable to turn back; adding the forces of local lords to his army as F&B claims Ormund did would only increase the logistical burden and offset any supplies obtained by plunder or forage. If the Hightower army functions as the narrative suggests, then it doesn't matter that Addam could not reach Tumbleton with his army, as Ormund's forces would never have made it past Bitterbridge.

Analyzing the Riverlords and the Hightower army shows that neither the environment nor logistics have more than a momentary effect on the plot of the Dance, influencing events here and there when it's convenient for the plot but otherwise being completely ignored. This negatively affects the story by removing stakes from the plot and making suspension of disbelief impossible. The worst part is that none of this was necessary, as there are fairly simple 'fix-its' that could be employed; for starters, have summer continue in 129 AC and autumn begin in 130 AC, with winter arriving in 131 AC. The fairer weather in summer and the earlier part of autumn would allow the armies of both sides to operate more freely, while allowing for more growing and harvesting of crops with which to feed said armies. As for logistics, having the armies operate more dispersed and/or stressing the importance of shipping, food storage, and magazines would show the armies are taking logistics seriously and place the writing on a better footing in that regard. I'll discuss this more and in greater detail when we cover strategy in the Dance, but these simple fix-its would go a long way to making the Dance better mechanically.

That wraps things up for Part Two; thank you for bearing with me through this fairly dry subject matter! Now that the 'board' is set up in terms of the Dance's political origins and the environment in which it was fought, we can start setting up the 'pieces' so-to-speak and look at how the Dance was fought on land, in the air, and at sea. Stay tuned for "Land Warfare in the Dance!"

[britneyshakespeare]

You versus the guy she tells you not to worry about

[mermaidsirennikita]

Sadly, the Wuthering Heights furor has also led to people (many of whom, let us be real, simply dislike the book or otherwise only think of it when it's brought up) to discourse about the content of the novel versus the wrongness of Emerald Fennell's choices with regards to the movie, which of course, has opened up the classic "IT'S NOT A ROMANCE! IT'S NOT A LOVE STORY! BAD PEOPLE! HATE STORY!"

... Which is... also a bad take.

First off, to be very clear, "Romance" is not inherently "genre romance", which is the thing I blog a lot about that was solidified in the latter half of the twentieth century (and which, no doubt, was influenced on some level by WH as much as Jane Eyre, Austen novels and so on). Wuthering Heights is a romance, it's just not a genre romance/romance novel. And indisputably, Wuthering Heights is a love story.

It may not be a love story you like. It may not be a love story with a happily ever after (though I will say—this is one of the few books where I think it's pretty debatable, as "wandering the moors as ghosts", if that is what happened, is kind of... what Cathy and Heathcliff would've wanted... and their ultimate desire was to be TOGETHER, regardless of whether or not it damned them, so is it an HEA in their freaky minds? Maybe so lol). It may ALSO be an abuse story in which the lovers act horribly to each other.... though, I gotta say, MUCH WORSE to literally everyone else in their lives than they do to each other...

But it's a love story. That is one of several things it happens to be. The entire novel is driven by this central love story between Heathcliff and Cathy—a love that is, contrary to what a surface-level reading or reading by word of mouth would imply... very much mutual. I've already gone on about how Cathy Earnshaw is not Heathcliff's victim the way Isabella Linton is, and how Cathy is very much as involved in the love affair as he is. But truly, while their individual internal struggles are the framework and what keeps them apart in many ways—Heathcliff being a man of color and subject to racist abuse, Cathy conforming to society and classist pressures when her natural temperament is very much not of society—what propels the story is this romance.

Because they are supposed to be read as extremely similar, and as two people who do not truly identify with anyone but one another. They're supposed to be read as like minds. They're supposed to be read as thwarted. Some of the things those two say about each other and to each other are legitimately some of the most romantic lines I've ever read.

I mean, are they also kind of sick and wrong? Sure! But I do find it kind of rich to see people who are totally fine with reading dark romance wring their hands over the public at large interpreting Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship as an epic romance. I don't have an issue with anyone enjoying either! But. Let us be real. Part of why y'all are even enjoying work like that is the standard that books like WH set, and the fact that WH does speak to the lure of the dark and the tragedy of people who are super imperfect... and also super in love... continuously fucking up their own lives (and the lives of basically everyone around them) in this push-pull of denial and desire.

When people say "HOW COULD ANYONE EVER INTERPRET THIS AS ROMANTIC?" I just have to question... did you read the book? Because even if it's not for YOU, if it's not romantic TO YOU, surely you can see why other people (me and mine lol) read lines like these and go, "Wow, romantic":

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

(fun fact: I do have a part of the above quote tattooed on my body and I'm very happy about it)

"My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it."

"Hush, my darling! Hush, hush, Catherine! I'll stay. If he shot me so, I'd expire with a blessing on my lips."

[said when her damn husband is almost at the door lol]

"I’m not wishing you greater torment than I have, Heathcliff. I only wish us never to be parted: and should a word of mine distress you hereafter, think I feel the same distress underground, and for my own sake, forgive me!"

"'Heathcliff, dear! you should not be sullen now. Do come to me, Heathcliff.’

In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive..."

"Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?"

[Read: she is the murderer he is talking about. He's saying she doomed herself to death a long time ago, and he hates her for it. While also crying and kissing her lmao]

They're sickos! Nobody can argue otherwise. But that does not mean they're not in love, and it doesn't mean this isn't a love story, and wagging your fingers at people who read this as the obviously destructive love story this is and find it romantic... doesn't change that.

And the thing is that the book makes it pretttyyyy clear that even if Heathcliff and Cathy has assholery programed into their personalities, WITHOUT the contexts of how they were raised and the society that expects them both to conform to prescribed roles, they would probably just... be together. Like, they victimize people, especially Heathcliff. But they are also victims. The book isn't about a critique of two people Emily Bronte dreamed up; it's a critique of the CIRCUMSTANCES by way of Gothic, subversive melodrama. At the end of the day, their feelings, however passionate they are, are not inherently subversive. Their feelings are NATURAL. But they're twisted and contorted into something ugly through circumstance and the characters' responses to those circumstances.

For Heathcliff, A LOT of those circumstances that did twist him are in fact out of his control. Which is why we hate that casting, right?

But all that said, a love story being dirtybadwrong and about Bad People doesn't mean it isn't a love story, lol. Again—we don't even expect genre romance to be about good people.

Like. Yeah. We know Heathcliff and Cathy are assholes. You're not breaking new ground with that take. The book is still, in many ways, about those assholes being in love.

[enchanting-chit-chat]

Beetlejuice's Backstory and the Black Plague 💚🕷️🥀💀 PART 1

I went and watched the new Beetlejuice movie twice already, can’t wait to share my thoughts! I’ve decided to make a series of posts mainly dedicated to people that are curious about the Black Plague era and BJ's past life. Join me for a historical dive that might make you appreciate Tim Burton’s work even more!

Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for the 2024 movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Premise

In European countries, we often study the Black Plague in schools. In Italy specifically, the disease spread multiple times throughout the Middle Ages, with the two worst pandemics occurring around 1350 and 1630. The first one alone spread in many countries and caused a total of 20 million deaths - a THIRD of the population of the whole European continent at the time.

However, the 1630 outbreak is the one we know about the most, thanks to author Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), who described it meticulously in his masterpiece, ‘I promessi sposi' (The Betrothed): This book is one of the most important works in Italian literature. Although it is a novel, it is often treated as historical evidence because Manzoni actually shaped the story referring to archival documents and chronicles of the time.

Introducing: Monatti, the corpse carriers

In his book, Manzoni recalls a group of people called 'monatti' - the only ones allowed to practice public services such as collecting the dead and washing roads during those hellish times. This concession was motivated by the fact that monatti were considered immune to the disease.

However, they were feared and hated by the rest of the population, because they often misused their ‘privileged’ position: they were untouchable. They often extorted money from the living and stole the belongings of the dead and the sick alike, without repercussions. What made them special was the fact that monatti typically gained immunity after surviving the disease themselves.

“Farewell to Cecilia,” one of the most heart-wrenching moments in Manzoni’s novel, beautifully captured by Francesco Gonin.

In fact, the Black Plague typically spread in three ways: through skin contact (bubonic plague), lungs (pneumonic plague) or blood infection (septicemic plague). The Bubonic form was, and still is, the most common and had the highest survival rate, though it was still quite low. It was easily identifiable because it caused the lymph nodes to swell and become infected, forming characteristic 'buboes'.

It was believed that if a plague victim survived five days, the fever would subside, and they would recover within two weeks. This is what usually happened to the monatti. Similarly, Renzo, the protagonist in Manzoni’s book, recovers, though he never becomes a public worker.

Now, let’s dive back into Beetlejuice’s backstory.

Amidst the eerie glow of moonlight, he's depicted among corpses, at night, behind a wagon, stealing from the dead that were just thrown into a communal pit by plague doctors.

Notice how he’s directly touching the bodies with his bare hands, without any protection: usually, that was considered a death sentence.

In Manzoni’s book, there is a character that meets their end in a similar way, simply by touching the clothes of an infected person. During that era, the danger was so great that people used to burn the bodies of the plague victims along with their clothes, beds, and other possessions.

It is also worth mentioning that, during plague outbreaks, some city governments (particularly in Italy and Poland) imposed strict limitations on the movement of people and goods. In some areas, a nighttime curfew was also enforced (Yes, we invented the lockdown centuries ago!). Under those circumstances, being caught outside your own house at the wrong hour could mean instant death. But guess who had the freedom to roam as they pleased? Yes, monatti and plague doctors (and those with special permits).

Conclusion: Beetlejuice wasn’t just 'a humble grave robber', as he claims. He was definitely a plague survivor and, most likely, a monatto.

The fact that this scene was unveiled and narrated in Italian during the Venice Film Festival further convinces me that this is the correct interpretation of the sequence.

So, what do we think? Have you ever heard or read about The Betrothed before? Anyways, if you liked this analysis, make sure to check out PART 2, in which we can delve even deeper into Beetlejuice’s mysterious past!

Until then, have a fantastic week! ✨

[yikes-kachowski]

A piggy back off your last ask! Your AU has me all excited. I'm curious about Zuko and Katara's tenure as monarchs? How did the people receive her as their fire lady?

Also your art is amazing!! Can't wait to see more 🥰❤️

This au is very detailed lol, so if you have questions feel free to ask. Just understand that @shalheretical and I have named lots of places in the atla world.

We’re going to break this into three parts: one on notable events in Zuko’s tenure as Fire Lord; one on Katara’s accomplishments that relate specifically to duties she performed in relation to being the Fire Lady (she did other things outside of it); and a final note on the reception of an outside minority woman as the Fire Lady.

PART I

Immediately after the complete and unconditional surrender of the Fire Nation, all military personnel who are not directly involved in civil administration are recalled back to the Fire Nation—though they must find suitable local replacements and return as soon as possible. The Gaoling Agreement of 101 AG saw the repatriation of 1.3m Fire Nation occupiers from everywhere in the Earth Kingdom but the northwestern Gansai region. Because of this, and a late Azulon policy of Development First, Industry Now, which had 75% of all Fire Nation agriculture halted in favor of industrial development and had most food being imported by way of colonial extraction, the sudden population growth and the fact that they had to move factories and warehouses to start farming again, saw that 53 percent of the Fire Nation was experiencing starvation, and that 16 percent was experiencing acute starvation—5 percent experienced famine. This would be at its worst for the first four years of Zuko’s reign—known as the Rice-Rations Years—but it would only truly stabilize in 110 AG.

A near-complete shutdown of the archipelago’s ports until 103 AG exacerbated this problem. However, this was to prevent, as much as possible, the 3.5m individuals identified as war criminals/accomplices to war crimes from escaping to “safe havens” such as Jinyala, the Si Wong, or Whale Tale Island. No one was allowed to leave the ports without a written order by the Fire Lord. The nascent Earth Kingdom Navy helped patrol Fire Nation waters; these sailors, along with some Kyoshi Warriors, also helped inspect ships leaving Fire Nation docks for potential stowaways. The Earth Navy would stay until 104 AG.

The Boiling Rock was used to hold Tier 1 and 2 war criminals until the Omashu Trials began. After this, the Boiling Rock would be shut down. Non-political Fire Nation prisoners would be moved to more humane prisons; non Fire Nationals would be extradited back to their home nations. Captives—such as Hama, Tyro or the Boulder—were repatriated from the work camps they were imprisoned in.

Shrine consolidation was a Sozin policy of putting all shrines under direct monarchical control and turned over for use of the state religion—Agniyo, the religion of the ethnic majority (Shiboshi) Fire Nationals. Zuko begins a policy of Great Reversal, where these shrines are returned to their traditional stewards. The Intranational Sovereign Rights policies is the parent policy of the Great Reversal. The Fire Nation is home to 98 ethnic minority/indigenous groups (including the Sun Warriors and the Bhanti), with 106 recognized languages and dialects apart from Hokugo (the state language). These are all put under Special Status, where extra government protections and provisions are made to protect traditional Fire Nation diversity. Specifically, local councils are approved to use state funds to protect Status minority religions, languages, ecology/land, food, dance, and arts. The Sun Warriors in particular are given greater autonomy and sovereignty over their ancestral lands.

In 107 AG Zuko made an official declaration to renounce the millenia-old belief that the Liufeng dynasty is in any way divine, or descended from Agni. In apology for these centuries of disrespect towards Mother Agni, a new shrine in the capital of Kazanshi is announced; it is officially completed in 125 AG, and dedicated in 126.

Zaibatsu, vertically integrated business conglomerates, are dissolved; the businesses are put under monarchical control, and their assets are partially used for reparations paid towards the Water Tribes and Earth Kingdom. (Aang turned down reparations outside of help rebuilding Air Temples/shrines, and protections on sacred Air Nomad land, such as areas in Gansai and Whale Tale Island.) Land was seized from landlords and nobles, and sold to their serfs and tenets for extremely cheap prices. This is open to anyway once all serfs and tenant farmers have their share, which leads to some immigration from especially the southern Earth Kingdom.

Starting in 103, all war criminals are prosecuted under Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe officials at Omashu, which only ends in 119 AG, due to the thoroughness of the prosecution. Some critics from the Fire Nation claim that no Fire Nation representatives presented an unfair bias, and Why can’t it be held in the Royal High Courts? Zuko maintains that the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribe are a lot more merciful than he would be. Note: Iroh volunteered to be tried for the Siege of Ba Sing Se and his March on the Si Wong, even though King Kuei offered him immunity. He was given a postponed sentence of ten years; during this time, he would stay in his tea shop, and most of the money he made would go to helping Go Shi Wai, one of the worst-affected places of the war.

Gansai, later the United Republic, holds the largest number of Fire Nation settlers. This is due to an early Azulon resettlement policy, wherein ethnic minorities in the Fire Nation were resettled in Gansai and away from the imperial core, for Azulon’s All-Shiboshi Empire dream (the officials that ruled them were still Shiboshi, though). There are nearly 4m settlers living there; and since they’ve been outside of the Fire Nation for at least a generation, they are the least willing to move. Gansai was made independent in 115 AG through a referendum that went through every village, town, city, settlement in the region. Many Earth Kingdom citizens still consider this a humiliating capitulation to the Fire Nation, and resent King Kuei for allowing this.

Serfdom and slavery were abolished in the Fire Nation by 105 AG. Looted wealth is confiscated from the noble class, and repatriated to their home countries. The royal coffers do the same. Since the power of the noble class was severely weakened by these moves—and the removal of the zaibatsu system—many enraged nobles would attempt government takeovers—whether through the legals means of an Agni Kai, or through nine different assassination attempts from 105 AG to 127 AG. These, by the way, would only lead to legislation that weakened the noble class even more.

The Fire Nation educational system was technically reformed, though specifically. Zuko was looking to return the institution to its prewar systems, with some amendments. He took a lot of care for educational reforms, because he considered it ground zero for deradicalization policies. Teachers were screened and replaced when necessary; there was a national recall on textbooks, and Zuko commissioned a completely new curriculum. The military education of children from 11 to 16 stayed in place. The national examinations that gave people opportunities to work in government positions were opened up to the merchant and former self classes.

Protections and rights for same-sex couples are restored. Abortion is made legal. Funding goes back to the arts. Overall, Zuko’s policies mark a return to the cultural pursuits from before the war—especially in the arts, education and religion.

PART II

Once again: these are her activities that relate to her acting (somewhat) in capacity to traditional Fire Lady duties. However, a lot of her actions—even when acting as Fire Lady—are outside of traditional royal involvement, which is noteworthy. It should also be noted that she is not a part of the legislative body of the Fire Nation in any capacity, nor is she in any way given any sort of powers of making policies at an official capacity. To me, this doesn’t really matter, because I personally don’t think she’d be incredibly interested in dealing with Fire Nation legislative proceedings anyway, and it’s way more straight forward for her to just tell Zuko what she thinks would be a good idea since he can just enact it immediately. Not that she never influences policies through cooperation with Parliament, just that she normally chooses not to.

She specifically is known for her deep involvement with charity and patronages. She tends to focus on issues involving the homeless, youth, drug addictions, the elderly, environmental protections, illness and minority rights advocacy. It’s due to her nearly weekly visits to hospitals and health clinics across the Fire Nation (and sometimes abroad) that Katara gets very specifically interested in serious and terminal illnesses—the care of their patients, prevention and destigmatization. She’s especially famous for initiating physical contact towards patients with leprosy, to prove that leprosy could not be easily transmitted through casual touch—such as hugs and handholding.

She is president of the Taiyang-jie Childrens’ Clinic in the capital. She is a patroness of the Natural & Geologic Historical Society in Lopyang. She is president of the Royal Academies of Healthcare, Sociology & Philosophy, and Music & Theatre. She is president of the Gojiki Child Association, a charity to care for vulnerable tribal youth. She also works with the National Leprosy Trust, the Fire Nation Centre of Minority Dance and Theatre, and the Imperial Phoenix Hospital.

She was integral to the founding of Taqqittiavak, an international medical association, inspired by witnessing the calamity of war, and how there’s often not enough medics for the wounded, who are often left to suffer and die. She is a patron of the Three Nations’ Doctors League, a similar organization, though Taqqitiavak works in conflict zones, and 3ND in humanitarian crisis zones. She specifically works with them in an anti personnel landmine campaign. Her work directly leads to the signing of the Qiue Treaty to create an international ban on the use of landmines.

She makes regular lengthy visits to the Ruzuro-yeiji Hospital in Kemkami, where she specifically helps in the care and comfort for patients who are seriously or terminally ill—something royalty had never done before. She is a patronesses to the Imrani Cancer Fund, an international charity dedicated to cancer research.

She is the founder of Tunnganiq, an association dedicated to research and care for mental disabilities, especially those acquired in war or in accidents. She regularly supports efforts in the advancement of mental healthcare, institutional reform, and the stigmatization of all psychotic and neurotic disorders. She (and Toph) opened the Centre for Disability and the Arts in Republic City.

She is the patron of the Fire Nation branch of the Nutaraq Appeal, an international organization dedicated to helping pregnant women and new mothers in need around the world.

Katara (and Sokka) launch the International Child Bereavement charity, which seeks to support the children of: military families, children orphaned by war and conflict, children of suicide victims and children of the terminally ill. She and Sokka are also patrons of the Southern Water Tribe Cultural Center in Republic City.

She supports the Laiyi Fund, which is a parent fund to several smaller charity organizations that give accommodations and social assistance to the homeless, and campaigns to destigmatize homelessness worldwide. In general, Katara is very vocal and active in her support of homeless populations, and to end the conception of homelessness being a moral failing in the Fire Nation, especially by regularly working with the homeless directly, without any official means of protection. She supports the Just Homes Initiative in the United Republic, which seeks to “just house them” with no strings attached.

She was awarded the Freedom of Omashu Award, the highest honor in the Southern Earth Kingdom for her humanitarian efforts—as well as the Ba Sing Se Citizens’ Award and being awarded a gold medal in a healthcare conference in Piriyakheri.

PART III

To be honest, her marriage to Zuko really wasn’t a huge deal to most peasants in the Fire Nation—they were so far removed from royal life, that who the current Fire Lord is hardly mattered, let alone who the Fire Lady is. The middle class, especially in major cities like Kazanshi, Kenkami, Lopyang and Kimosaki, and the noble class (especially, much to her embarrassment, Mai’s family, the Keohsos—where the brides for the Fire Lord are traditionally found) were the most vocal in their disapproval of the idea of there being a foreign bride. What if the Fire Lord abandons them (a population that’s starving and struggling) for the South Pole? What if she roadblocks courtly promotions only to Water Tribe immigrants that will surely be used to replace the ethnic Fire Nation population? What if their heir is a waterbender, of all things? Most ire was reserved for Zuko, either way. The Fire Lady is hardly a consideration, at this point in time—the role is prestigious solely because she is the wife of the Fire Lord, who actually matters. Katara is who gives the position prestige and reverence beyond that, through her compassion, altruism and humanitarian efforts, which kind of gave the role of Fire Lady an entirely new role in greater Fire Nation society, outside of just running the household and being the head of the royal family, which doesn’t really affect regular citizens.

Besides, nobles who didn’t know better than to keep it to themselves were pretty readily dismissed from the court and removed from the Caldera—a hugely humiliating experience.

Their wedding is a big deal. Some agitators try to say that they’re wedding, in 106, is a flagrant extravagance when the whole nation is suffering—this is still more of an attack on Zuko, than Katara. The wedding, though a big royal wedding, is mostly used to help lighten the air for the population—it’s an excuse to be off of work for a week, to have fun celebrations, to be with family, to keep up with royal fashion, etc. It’s a reprivement.

Katara becomes somewhat of a fashion icon—not the biggest, by far, but especially her jewelry, accessories and hairstyles take the country by storm. It’s big enough that she’s able to auction off her old clothing and her own beadwork projects for thousands, which she would then donate to places she felt needed the most help. She alone is responsible for making smiling—especially smiling with your teeth—popular in the Fire Nation.

A lot of people really idealized her as a mother, with the way she was regularly seen walking her kids to and from school, and around the capital. She would participate in parent-student events in school, and was known to very rarely use nannies. Unlike other Fire Nation noblewomen, she never once used a nursemaid. She very regularly took her kids on holidays to the Southern Water Tribe. Non-racists in the Fire Nation really admire her dedication and loyalty to her origins and native land/practices. Racists thought she would teach her kids to look down on the Fire Nation and only care for the preservation of her homeland and culture.

A lot of people—especially older, more traditional folks—also thought she acted unbecomingly for a Fire Lady. She dresses casually in deels when not working in an official capacity, regularly goes off to do things without following royal protocol, smiles and waves to crowds and in photos. A lot of people criticize her speeches as being emotional and, occasionally, even hysterical. Her willingness to act outside of capacity and to do things that should be beneath her—in public—was especially condemned.

But overall, she’s been pretty popular from the beginning, and definitely went down as at least one of the most beloved Fire Ladies in history. If not the most.

[mello0cat]

Himmel x Herbalist elf reader

➳ Afab reader A little angst, Little fluff, Himmel is a little ooc, feminine pronouns (sorry!), Not proofread! Timeline: shortly after defeating the demon king Maybe a little inaccurate as I'm only on the beginning of the 6th episode

➳ *little A/N*

Reader is a elf who is proficient in identifying plants and had learnt some magic to enhance or modify plant growth.

Sorry if the grammer or writing is bad, I'm a little new to fanfic writing,it may feel a little rushed and short, feel free to give me advice, Enjoy <3

Credits to @strangergraphics-archive for the line divider and @mochikofi for the idea to write a fic

A silent Meadow, filled with colorful flowers, the ruins of some ancient fort sits in the center lost to time... The rest of the party had run off somewhere....

The elf was sitting on a piece of fallen rubble, examining a small blue flower and various other plants she picked up on the way

Himmel walked up to the elf, taking a deep breath. After much time debating with himself he had made up his mind, he coughed to get her attention. she was caught off guard and stood up turning to him

"Hm? Is something wrong, Himmel?"

"Nothing... I wanted to give you something"

He placed a flower crown on her head. She tilted her head in confusion, letting out a small "Huh?", She looked at the flower crown on her head and smiled, reaching out her hand to his hair with the blue flower...

As soon as the flower came in contact with his hair, small vines grew from it, intertwined with eachother and more of the flower sprouted all tangled into a small flower crown

He was quite suprised and in awe, the flower looked like blue-moon weed, his favourite flower which used to grow in his hometown, before he could reply, she spoke with a soft smile

"Thank you, for the flowers, they're quite beautiful"

"your welcome, afterall the flowers I pick are the most beautiful"

His voice was smug, but inside he was a mess, he wanted to confess all that he felt for her through the years but he still hesitated, he could feel his face turn hot everytime he looked into her eyes....She noticed something was wrong with him, she reached up to touch his forehead to check for a fever

"Are you feeling okay? your forehead is warm..."

"I-I'm fine!.... really...."

He grew red at the contact, she tilted her head in concern, removing her hand

"Are you sure?... Did you touch any poisonous plants?"

"Wha- No!! I'm fine... look I want to confess something...."

He hesitated before looking at her, holding eye contact, she looked concerned about him

"You do know you can tell me anything... "

He sighed, placing a hand on her shoulder

"Look,..... I... I may have come to develop feelings for you... I love you, okay? For a few years now, More than a friend, a party member, Anything!"

She froze as if all time had stopped, her face faltered, no response...

"Hey!... Please just give me a answer, I'll take it no matter what..."

his tone was desperate, almost pleading her just for a single word, his heart filled with anticipation

She simply looked at the ground and took a deep breath

"....Himmel... you know how this will go right?.... "

"I don't understand... What do you mean?..."

He was confused, looking at her for an explanation, he couldn't help but feel a sense of.... Dread

"Himmel... you're a human, I'm a elf... Time passes way differently for the both of us... I live for thousands of decades if not centuries, while you get a couple more decades, and I'm on the constant move, you wouldn't be able to keep up with me as you grow old while I still stay the same...."

He felt a pang of hurt in his chest as you say those words. he had never thought about that before, the fact that elves lived so much longer than humans, and that he had such a short life in comparison...

"....if we get together... It's going to be full of hardships...."

He listened to her words, he was determined...he knew of the hardships that would come with being in a relationship with you, but he couldn't help but to be selfish... Afterall he loved her, truly

"But... I know, I know it's going to be tough... but I dont care... l dont care about the hardship..

He took a step closer to her

I just... I just want to be with you, no matter what..."

He stepped forward holding her hand, looking at her in the eye, his tone sincere

"...even though it's going to be quite a hard time?"

"I dont care how hard it's going to be...I would go through any hardship, just to be with you..."

He nodded his head, his determination evident in his eyes. he spoke firmly and surely

She considered it for a moment

"If you are truly ready for it... I'm willing to give this a try.... I'll love you as much as it hurts me to watch you wither away with time...."

"It doesn't matter... as long as I get to spend whatever time I have left with you… I'll live happily knowing you love me...."

he could hear the sorrow in your voice, and his heart ached at the thought of the time that you would have to live without him

She looked up at him with a smile

"It may be a small time for me, to you it's a life time..."

He held her hand against his chest

"every moment I spend with you, no matter how short it is, it’s worth everything to me…"

[thevalleyisjolly]

Thinking about how many of the main characters in Andor Season 1 are, from their perspective, living in different stories and genres. Syril is the classic disgraced detective obsessing over the failure of his last case. Dedra is the brilliant lone career woman in a high-pressure male-dominated workplace. Skeen, Nemik, Taramyn, Gorn are the unlikely band of misfits attempting to pull off the heist of the century; Vel and Cinta are embroiled in espionage intrigue with Luthen. Mon Mothma's deep in the midst of a political thriller, complete with the trope of a troubled home life. Kino and all the prisoners of Narkina 5 are caught up in a grim prison drama.

Part of the brilliance of the show is that it embraces each of these characters as the protagonist of their own narratives. Dedra is very clearly an antagonist to most of the other characters, but in her interactions with her colleagues and Syril, you can sympathize with how she is dismissed and put down and harassed. Syril's scenes wouldn't be out of place in a detective show - the lone officer, demoted from his position, waking up every morning to a depressing house and a mindnumbing job yet continuing to pursue his self-identified duty with a relentless sense of righteousness and persecution. Mon Mothma's story tangentially intersects with Cassian's, but both enriches and is enriched by the contrast in perspective - the broader context of galaxy-wide politics with the immediate realities that people live with, including for Mon herself through the impact on her family life.

And then we come back to Ferrix. Maarva, Bix, Brasso, Bee, Wilmon, the Daughters, the Time Grappler, the whole community. Where the season starts and where the season ends, with a call to fight the Empire and a community that answers. A community full of different people with different motivations and methods and views and yet maybe that's the point of the whole story. Even though on an individual level, characters might seem like they're in different stories or genres, facing their own challenges and seeking their own goals, everything occurs under the context of Imperial fascism. No one can escape it, no matter what story they think they're in or how big or small their role in it.

Syril and Dedra aren't just lone agents dismissed by their superiors, they're people embracing a fascist system and doing everything they can to uphold it despite how they themselves have been treated by that system. The Aldhani team, Mon Mothma, Luthen, their enemies aren't really the garrison at the dam or the ISB's surveillance or the endless rebel infighting; they're only the immediate faces of the Empire's oppression and division. The Narkina 5 prisoners aren't just trying to live. If all they wanted was to stay alive, they could have continued working until they died. It's the Empire who is responsible for how they're being treated, and they'd rather die trying to take them down.

The uprising on Rix Road brings it all home. After all the places that the season has taken us, all the challenges and arcs that these characters have faced, it comes back full circle to where we started - with ordinary people living under fascist rule. Some work with it, some against it, most try to keep their heads down and survive it. All alone in their personal stories and obstacles...except they aren't, not really. The Empire's rot is in all their lives. There is no escaping the reach of fascism, no matter what kind of life they try to lead or what decisions they make. Individualism won't save anyone - in fact, it's what the Empire wants. For everyone to feel alone, either singular and insignificant against an insurmountable force or otherwise striving endlessly to be the exception above the masses, the heroic underdog who overcomes massive obstacles (and everyone else) to save the day and get what they want.

Ferrix wakes up and in doing so they wake everyone up. None of them exist alone. Everyone is part of this, whether they are for or against the Empire. And when all these people and their stories come together, meeting, clashing, struggling, harmonizing... that's when a revolution starts coming into its own.

[jewish-vents]

i am SO sick and tired of the usage of zionism amongst goyim. the obsession around this word in general makes me lose my mind because i don’t think goyim should be even using it, since they don’t get it and they probably never will. all they did was twist this word and turn into a fucking slur, as if it’s an insult. even people who are pro-peace and aren’t into the idea that israelis deserve to die avoid being associated with zionism like the plague, which is fine. you should identify in whatever way you like, but i feel like zionism has been taken out of context by goyim to an extent that the only definition this word carries is negative and evil. and while zionism does have different types, like the political one that people in the israeli government take advantage of, the core of zionism means no harm. all it means throughout my life in israel as a jew is supporting the existence of israel and that we have a right to live in our ancestral homeland. that’s literally it. nothing about violence, nothing about persecution, nothing about fascism, and nothing about palestine to begin with. goyim always assume for some reason that zionism = kahanism which just. isn’t exactly correct. like you should definitely oppose kahanism because it really is bad but ffs stop being so obsessed about a jewish movement (i’m talking about zionism not kahanism obviously) that has been around for more than a century. it traces back to our history and culture, you cannot separate it from our roots. not to mention the fact that this word is in hebrew, and this all just feels like cultural appropriation to me. they took zionism and destroyed the values it held, the struggle and the pain jews had to face during their years in the diaspora, they’ll never get it. we belong to zion, and nobody can take the connection that we have to this land away from us. no gaslighting, no propaganda, and no hatred will help these crybabies.

zionists are just regular human beings and aren’t monsters, they don’t want to kill children, and the majority stands against the fascists who sit in the israeli government. i wish everyone could just shut up already and normalize the fact that most people who identify as zionist want peace and two state solution as much as the next person does. extremists don’t represent us and for some reason goyim can’t distinguish that. it angers me so much

also seeing zionism on goyim’s dni criteria while they put it next to antisemitism will never fail to make me laugh. they think supporting the existence of the only jewish state is as evil as nazism, what the heck. like it’s okay to criticize israel but how come wanting israel to be destroyed into oblivion is cool and heroic exactly? or dehumanizing an entire group of people cuz idk… somebody on tiktok or twitter told you. i know it’s debatable, but antizionism = antisemitism and nobody can convince me otherwise. they will always treat us like scum of the earth

.

[cripplecharacters]

This is a bit of a generalized question, but I often find that the most difficult aspect of doing research for disabled characters is finding resources that don't just operate on the assumption that of course you will be getting modern treatments/surgeries/medications. This isn't always applicable in every setting, and isn't especially helpful when I'm trying to get information on chronic or progressive conditions that modern science tends to handwave away. (Specific examples I've struggled with are epilepsy, which most places just go "of course you'll go on an anti-seizure medication and just Be Fine Forever" and information about paralyzed hands from nerve damage that all the resources I found assumed the individual would just have surgery and Be Fine Forever.) How would you suggest finding resources for conditions that explain what having that condition is actually like?

Hi,

For historical fiction and fantasy fiction with a similar technology level alike, I tend to find resources by looking up “history of [condition],” as well as “history of [condition] treatment” as well as being more specific like “[condition] in the 19th century” or even the specific year. This won’t always or even often turn up a bunch of resources, but it can help get a good starting point.

This is often more effective along with looking up something more general, like “hospitals in the 19th century” to see what things they would vs wouldn’t be able to do or treat, and looking up specific symptoms and perhaps if you don’t want them to be treated because it’s not something possible in your world.

So if you’re researching the nerve damage you could look up “hand surgery in [time period],” as well as “permanent hand paralysis,” even if it gives you results that have a different cause from your character. It’ll give you another look into how someone would live with a particular disability.

Epilepsy in particular is one of the oldest conditions we know about; we even have descriptions of what can help us describe and identify epilepsy from as early as 1700 BCE. Hippocrates in the 400s BCE was one of the first to theorize it was a brain condition and non-contagious, but this didn’t pick up steam until about much, much later in the 1600s. Here is a research paper where I got much of this information on. (It’s not paywalled as of me writing this answer.)

On that note, research papers can be your friend, too, on how things have historically been seen and treated.

Usually you’re trying to find not only medical resources, but historian-based resources as well. Sometimes I find info in blogs that I then have to double check, but these can be really valuable once you do your fact-checking. And I will admit, it is not easy and you will have to sift through a lot of information and even some misinformation.

But I hope this can help point you in the direction you want!

— Mod sparrow

[merrybloomwrites]

I Hear Them Calling (Prologue)

Story Summary: Alpha Harry Styles and omega Y/N Y/L/N meet under less than ideal circumstances. Overtime their paths will cross and they will be drawn to one another in ways they never expected.

Chapter Summary: This first chapter is a quick prologue that sets the scene for the rest of the story. It gives some info on omegaverse so if you haven't read a lot of those stories before hopefully this acts as a good introduction.

Word Count: 750

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The history books all talk of a time when nearly everyone was an Alpha or Omega. Each gender had their expected roles in society. Each individual had their own scent, which they could be identified by. They would release pheromones that could affect others around them. They would mate, experience heats and ruts together, and create new pups.

Occasionally, people would reach their mid-20s without presenting as either Alpha or Omega. At first, these individuals would be outcasts, but over time they started to become a larger percentage of the population. That was when they earned the designation of Betas. They didn’t have scents, didn’t produce pheromones, and didn’t experience mating cycles.

As time went on, the number of betas grew until they were the majority. And now, in the 21st century, most individuals are betas. It’s rare that someone presents as an alpha, and ever rarer to be an omega.

This created new problems, since alphas and omegas were dependent upon one another. Or more accurately, omegas depended on alphas. An alpha could live a completely normal life without an omega. This doesn’t mean they were all happy to do so. A lot of the old-fashioned views and stereotypes had become obsolete, but many knothead alphas still felt entitled to an omega. These are the same people who still think omegas are subservient to everyone else and incapable of holding the same status as themselves.

Meanwhile, omegas have proven themselves to be just as capable at betas and alphas in all aspects of life. And while those societal expectations of them are no longer relevant, unfortunately, the needs of their bodies have never changed. Omegas require the touch, scent, and pheromones of an alpha. Lacking any of those can lead to a number of different ailments, the worst being touch deprivation.

There are many stages of touch deprivation, the most severe being nearly irreversible and potentially fatal. Luckily, there are a number of medications that help omegas live perfectly healthy and normal lives.

Most omegas will have a pill regimen that includes suppressants, soothers, and scent blockers. Suppressants ensure that the omega will not experience a heat cycle. Soothers are taken to prevent touch deprivation. They trick the body into thinking they’ve been in contact with an alpha. Finally, scent blockers prevent others from being able to smell them. This is especially important for omega safety since it allows them to blend in with the betas around them and not get unwanted attention from alphas.

Scent blockers are also frequently used by alphas, but some choose not to take them. They would rather broadcast their scent, letting everyone around them know their alpha status. Many also take rut suppressants, not wanting to experience a rut without a partner, or wanting to have more control over when their ruts occur.

This is the world that Harry Styles, alpha and famous musician, as well as Y/N, omega and virtual data analyst find themselves living in. They both hide their secondary genders from all around them, but that’s where the similarities end. He’s known by all for his music, movies, and modeling. Y/N, however, is content being known only by her family and her friend group.

Harry hides his alpha status from most people, deeming it inappropriate for his fans, and the whole world, to know such a personal piece of information. He also knows people will judge him based on this fact about him, and so only those in his closest circle are aware.

Y/N also hides her omega status from everyone except her closest family members and her two best friends. She does this for her safety, knowing that there are alphas out there that would harm her simply because she’s an omega. She’s heard plenty of horror stories of omegas being trapped or forced to do things because someone used their alpha voice against them, and they have no choice but to listen. She’s heard of omegas being forcibly mated by alphas and are now stuck with them.

Through some trial and error after she first presented, her doctor found a perfect medicine regimen. This allows her to live a completely normal and happy life, ruled only by her desires and goals, rather than ruled by expectations of her as an omega.

A completely normal life until her suppressants start to lose their potency, she attends a Harry Styles concert, and a knothead alpha in the audience sets in motion a series of events she could never have predicted.

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A/N: Thank you so much for reading this! I've very excited to start writing the first chapter of this story. It's been living in my head for awhile and I can't wait to share it!

I'm using my taglist from my other series (which I am still also writing for), so if you don't want to be tagged in this one please let me know! Also please let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!

Taglist: @akkatz @pandeebearstyles @walkingintheheartbreaksatellite@theekyliepage@numafarawayglxy @booberry019-blog @hillzrry@ssareidbby @gem1712 @acesofspadess@houseofdilfs@shaquille-0atmeal-1@kissitnhekitchen @amateurduck @poguestyleskye@n0vaj3an@snwells@drunk-teens-doing-drugs ; @fdl305

[spacelazarwolf]

Saying that you come off as a zionist 'because of the way you frame Jews and Israelis' is kind of creepy when the primary thing you've been saying throughout is that violence against them by a terrorist group is bad. Saying Jewish lives are important and that Israelis don't deserve to die just for existing in Israel is zionism now apparently.

it’s bc she’s using “zionist” as a dogwhistle for “jew i don’t like” and “zionism” as a dogwhistle for “opinion about israel palestine that i don’t agree with.” which is unfortunately what’s happening with most discourse.

and the problem is, if you don’t know what the fuck zionism is, you cannot be antizionist. you cannot be anti something you do not understand. that’s why so much antizionism falls into antisemitism, because so much antisemitism relies on ignorance. if you truly want to be an antizionist, that requires doing your due diligence, reading zionist literature and educating yourself on the ideology and history, or at least just educating yourself on the basics using sources that aren’t just social media. to be an effective antizionist, you need to understand exactly what it is you’re opposing and why you oppose it.

i don’t personally identify myself as an antizionist for reasons i’d rather not go into, but i’ll give an example i’ve talked about before. political zionism is the desire for a jewish state governed by jewish people, sometimes with the added assumption of the state being under jewish law. i oppose this because 1. i don’t believe in the concept of states, 2. there are other people who live in the area besides jews who need political representation, and 3. jewish law only applies to jews, so trying to have a state that functions under jewish law essentially makes it a theocracy which i oppose.

the same applies to a lot of the buzzwords often used in this conversation: colonialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, apartheid.

what makes what israel is doing colonialism? how is that complicated by the fact it was preceded, if not directly caused by, british colonialism? how is it further complicated by the fact the jewish people originated in that area and that there are populations of jews who have been there for centuries? do you know what the settlements are and what makes them a problem?

what makes what israel is doing ethnic cleansing? what do you know about the nakba? how much do you know about israel’s practice of denying permits and demolishing palestinian homes? how does the dramatic decrease in the number of palestinians allowed to work in israel contribute to this?

do you know what genocide means? do you know how it is different and similar to ethnic cleansing? are you familiar with the history or displays of palestinian identity being illegal in israel? are you aware of how palestinians living in israel are legally identified and how that affects their connection to palestinian peoplehood? despite the fact israel does not control gaza, hamas does, what tactics is israel using to worsen the conditions there?

can you define apartheid? can you describe the policies instituted by the israeli government that fall under the definition of apartheid?

and most importantly, can you find all the answers to these questions somewhere besides social media?

you cannot just use these words because you saw others using them. you have to know exactly what they mean and exactly how they apply to what palestinians are experiencing, otherwise your antizionism and your activism are worthless.

if you want to be an effective activist, you MUST be able to answer these questions, because if you can’t even describe the problem you will be a hindrance to the solution.

[tani-b-art]

Black American folks, especially Black American women, we should have BEEN on this indifference tip since 2 administrations ago. We should have been on this “care for self” and “care for our community” only stance many years ago. Everyone else does, so let’s follow suit too. We’re looking out for ourselves and we are not worrying about anyone else just like everyone else has been. Keep us out of it.

The Democrats have the Democrats to blame in not securing the election! You had a candidate who said they’d never do anything just for Black people years ago and that’s why most Black people stayed home on Election Day and didn’t exercise their vote. The Dems lost a huge number of Black support that they had just prior years before (in Biden and in Clinton and in Obama). And once again, Black people STILL overwhelmingly voted BLUE even with all the odds still factored but the Dems definitely took a major hit with their lack of any specific Black agenda. By in large, many Black people this election cycle simply didn’t participate in voting. Or many who did vote, voted against the establishment of the Democratic Party or voted outside both parties and voted green or whoever else was an option. Lessons best be learned.

First go-round with Trump, we shouldn’t have still touted solidarity with anybody. Not non-white/non-Black groups, not even solidarity with other women. POC solidarity was never really a thing. It’s always been a myth. Because many non-Black people who are not white definitely identify as white because whiteness is about status, people. I’m certain those very people that were insulted on his campaign trail by the comedian still secretly voted for him while standing on the stage next to Harris the next day. Don’t be fooled.

And what I can’t get is just how seemingly surprised some still are with those exit poll figures. Georgia was the litmus this year. Which attests to how much power Black people have in swaying an election. We can capitalize on that fact going into future election cycles on all levels.

To reiterate, there is no Black and brown coalition. There’s no Black and brown solidarity. Everyone looks out for themselves (and so we are finally beginning to, too…we should’ve been on that). Those who immigrate to the US who cannot visually identify as white (melanated people) also aspire to whiteness and the idea determines how they’ll vote too. So unfortunately practicing and being antiBlack and holding antiBlack American sentiments and views is what some will exude and exercise.

These quotes are from decades ago but they reflect modern sentiment towards us.

Y’all gotta learn and remember this. We have centuries of proof with the suffrage movement, daughters of the confederacy and more. White women, in more modern times, have shown us not once, not twice but thrice when given an opportunity to be in favor of uniting with all women (Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump, during the midterms when Roe vs Wade was on the line and now Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump), that they will surrender and turn their backs on the whole “feminism” and back who they are extensions of. Their white male counterparts. Their whiteness comes above their gender. Liberal, progressive, conservative…it don’t matter, they all in huge numbers gave a huge middle finger to us.

And one thing white women will consistently do, is align themselves with their white male counterparts. They are extensions of their husbands/partners or fathers AND, they will place the white male patriarchy above their own feminism. Non-Black/non-white women will do the same in private. Squash the feminism, Black women and keep a conscious reminder that we are alone when it comes to other women. The interests of white women is white men. So no, they aren’t voting against their interests. They’ll allow their matriarchy to take a backseat because the overall of what gives them advantage over any other woman is their race and their proxy to the white patriarchy. They have proxy power by way of their white male partners and their white husbands, white fathers and white grandfathers and eventually, their white sons who will hold all the power so of course, voting as they do is their interests. Trump and what he represents literally is it. They actually aren’t voting against their interests because their main interests is the white men they are either associated with and by way. That will take precedent over their “feminism” and who they are as women even at the collective detriment of women’s rights (which they intersect with). They are operating just as they have. So nope, they did not vote against their own interests—this is their interests. Don’t forget this.

And to say misogyny was the sole reason for a lot of Black men not voting for Harris is pretty ridiculous. If anything, misogyny (misogynoir) is an outlier to the bigger problem of the Dems’ loss. Like STOP IT! Y’all won’t be attempting to inject this imaginary strife and gender war between us over this election. Absolutely not!

As Black American women, we can’t afford to get swindled into ideologies and movements of other women who voted in the very interests that they now want to pretend to disparage. We are not them. They are not us. Handle your own business and we’ll do the same.

So y’all will be seeing more of us really and truly minding our Black American community business. Don’t nobody call on us at all. We absolutely will be fighting our OWN battles and everyone else, y’all fight y’all’s own.

LEAVE US ALONE!

[evidence-based-activism]

Sex Differences in Serial/Mass Murder

I recently received an ask about a specific female serial killer, which I will be answering soon, but I wanted to make a separate post about serial/mass murder statistics for those who'd like a more generic discussion (rather than about a specific person).

For terminology: serial murder refers to the killings of multiple people over separate events while mass murder refers to the killing of many people within a single event. The line between these can be blurred in some cases (e.g., if a man shoots and kills his family before going on a "rampage" and killing many unrelated individuals is that serial or mass murder?), but that this the rough delineation between the two.

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Serial Murder

Professionals working at Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) have developed an incredibly interesting Serial Killer Database [1]. It is likely the most (although not completely) comprehensive database of serial killers in existence. They have defined serial murder as "the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offenders in separate event".

There is an important note to their research: it can only identify known serial killers for which some record has been kept. (I'll explicate why this is important to keep in mind later. But, first some stats:)

They found:

Women make up only ~10% of all (identified) serial killers in history

The percentage of (identified) female serial killers has decreased over time and is lower in the USA compared to other countries

"Financial gain is the primary motive for women serial killers whereas enjoyment is the primary motive for men" (Also discussed in [2]).

"Male serial killers are much more likely that female serial killers to torture victims, mutilate the body after death, and engage in overkill ... [and] more likely to engage in necrophilia"

However, this data is likely skewed towards an over-estimation of female serial killers. As mentioned before, this data base includes only serial killers that have been identified and recorded. As a result:

The number of identified serial killers is much higher for recent modern times (i.e., 20th and 21st centuries) than for all the rest of history combined. (Specifically, there are only 250 recorded serial killers, out of 5752, before 1900). It is unlikely that serial killers are simply a modern phenomenon. Instead, it's most likely that (1) detection methods have been improved over time, such as the advent of modern forensics, (2) record keeping has been improved over time, or (3) both detection and record keep have improved over time.

The above supposition is supported by the difference in serial killer frequency between the USA and other countries. According to the report, ~64% of all serial killers are in the USA. They note, however, that "caution should be taken in reviewing this table as the number of serial killers by country is a function of the number of actual killers, the number caught, and the number reported by police or the media". It is again unlikely that the USA truly houses 64% of the world's serial killers, and more likely that better detection methods and record keeping has skewed the results towards the USA.

As a result of this, however, the percentage of female serial killers is likely inflated by this report. Female serial killers are less likely to kill strangers (a type of serial killing that is often detected and the killer often identified by modern forensics). They are also more likely to have visible benefits (i.e., the financial gain) than male serial killers, potentially providing a clearer link to their crimes prior to modern forensic methods.

In fact, the raw number of female serial killers has remained relatively stable over the recorded time periods (excepting a spike in frequency that was mirrored in the male serial killer statistics). This suggests that, rather than fewer/a smaller proportion of female serial killers being identified over time, the number/proportion of male serial killers identified has been increasing. This is reflected in the decreasing percentage of female serial killers over time.

To obtain a better estimate of the true proportion prevalence of female serial killers I calculated the proportion within restricted frames. Women make up:

~9% of all identified serial killers after 1900

~7.5% of all identified serial killers after 1900 in the USA

~7% of all identified serial killers over the last 50 years (since 1970)

~6% of all identified serial killers over the last 50 years (since 1970) in the USA

Given this, it's likely that the true proportion of female serial killers is closer to 6-7%.

For the interested, this review [2] and this article [3] elucidate the differences between female and male serial killers.

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Mass Murder

I have previously made a few posts about the connection between domestic violence and mass shootings, but I'll expand on mass shooting statistics here with some interesting new sources.

First, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recently released a first of its kind report on "Mass Attacks in Public Spaces" [4]. The inclusion criteria they used was somewhat restrictive (only for 2016-2020, in the USA, harmed three or more people, in public locations). Despite this, the data is high quality, and carefully analyzed. Importantly, they found that 96% of the attackers were male.

Further, they found "nearly half of the attackers were found to have had a history of domestic violence, misogynistic behaviors, or both." (It is also possible -- even likely -- that, given the minimal attention paid to misogynistic biases by mass violence task forces, that other attackers had an undocumented history of domestic violence/misogynistic behaviors.)

Other studies with slightly different inclusion criteria find similar results:

Looking at public shootings with four or more victims in the USA between 1966 and 2017, found men were the attackers in 96% of shootings. [5] (Importantly, this analysis excludes familicides and mass shootings connected to organized crime/gang violence. Both of these types of crimes are also male dominated.)

"Familicide is almost exclusively a crime perpetrated by men." [6] (A hard statistic for this crime is difficult to pin down, it's certainly >95%, but many sources put it either at or extremely close to 100%.)

Another analysis looking at public shootings with four or more victims in the USA between 1976 and 2018, found 98% of shooters were male. [7] This source demonstrates the issue with restricting analysis to only public shootings, as over 80% of mass shootings during this time period were not public.

A final source [8] documents various tools attempting to track mass shootings and the differences between them. In summary, they find men were the shooter in 98% of incidents.

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Ultimately, this indicates that in addition to accounting for at least 90% of all "normal" homicide perpetrators (post with data and [9] which indicates that the global proportion is closer to 95%), men also make up >90% of serial killers and >95% of mass murderers.

References below the cut:

Aamodt, M. G., Leary, T., & Girimurugan, S. (2023). Radford/FGCU Annual Report on Serial Killer Statistics: 2023 Radford, VA: Radford University.

Miller, L. (2014). Serial killers: I. Subtypes, patterns, and motives. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 19(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2013.11.002

Gurian, E. A. (2017). Reframing serial murder within empirical research: Offending and adjudication patterns of male, female, and partnered serial killers. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 61(5), 544–560. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X15598572

National Threat Assessment Center. (2023). Mass Attacks in Public Spaces: 2016 - 2020. U.S. Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security.

Capellan, J. A., Johnson, J., Porter, J. R., & Martin, C. (2019). Disaggregating mass public shootings: A comparative analysis of disgruntled employee, school, ideologically motivated, and rampage shooters. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 64(3), 814–823. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.13985

Karlsson, L. C., Antfolk, J., Putkonen, H., Amon, S., Da Silva Guerreiro, J., De Vogel, V., Flynn, S., & Weizmann-Henelius, G. (2021). Familicide: A systematic literature review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 22(1), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838018821955

Duwe, G. (2020). Patterns and prevalence of lethal mass violence. Criminology & Public Policy, 19(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12478

Smart, R., & Schell, T. L. (2021). Mass shootings in the united states. Mass Shootings in the United States. https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/mass-shootings.html

Homicide and Gender. (2015). UNODC United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Melanie Phillips

Jews — grotesquely designated in “victim culture” as an oppressor class — are the most victimised people on earth. Jew-hatred through the centuries has led to the persecution, attack and murder of millions. Today it continues at epidemic levels which are out of control throughout the west as well as in the Islamic world. 

Antisemites deny this victimisation. They claim that the Jews invent it, “playing the victim card” to conceal their assumed misdeeds and exploitation of others. They believe that Jews use the claim of antisemitism to enable them to “get away with it”. And what exactly do they believe Jews thus “get away with”? Why, that the Jews are a powerful and sinister cabal with global power which they use to further their own interests and harm others — in other words, all the antisemitic canards about the Jews that are a vicious lie but which antisemites believe to be true. 

Such people also resent any evidence of antisemitism because they want to hate the Jews without being prevented from doing so by social opprobrium. They cannot tolerate the truth about Jewish victimisation because that would reveal themselves to be the disgusting people they are. They want to be able to hate the Jews while continuing to drape themselves in the mantle of moral virtue.

Proponents of “victim culture” have a further problem with the victimisation of the Jews. Using their own “victim” status as a social and cultural weapon, they can’t tolerate the fact that the Jews never play the victim card. 

Despite the ever-ending persecution the Jews have suffered, they have always picked themselves up and sought to transcend their pain and distress by making the best out of their lives and the lives of others. 

The only reparations they sought after the Holocaust were to secure the return of what was rightfully theirs and had been stolen from them. They have never demanded that the Catholic church, the British ruling class or the continent of Europe pay reparations for the centuries of persecution they inflicted upon the Jews. They have never assumed that the appalling way the world has treated them means that the world owes them a living. 

They just got on with building positive and productive lives. From the ashes of the Holocaust, they created the spectacularly thriving, life-affirming State of Israel. And in the war that has followed the barbaric atrocities of last year’s October 7 pogrom in Israel, where a terrible toll has been taken of the best and bravest who are still steadily falling in battle, a grieving and traumatised people under constant attack is continuing to display astounding levels of heroism, steadfastness and resilience.

Despite the fact that they have been so badly victimised, Jews choose never to “be” victims, never to live or behave as victims. Stating this fact drives antisemites mad. “But they play the victim card all the time!” they scream. To them, Jew-hatred is a self-serving fiction. They can’t acknowledge the moral necessity of identifying its unique and all-too-real characteristics. They can’t recognise the difference between truth and lies. They can’t stand Jewish resilience. All that matters is maintaining their own warped and malevolent narrative about a world they choose not to understand. And that, of course, is why such people hate the Jews, who show these haters up for what they truly are.  

[velvetvexations]

Even putting aside what a ridiculous comparison that is, I need it understood that the primary way transradfems engage with "material reality" is through movies from the previous century.

It's hypervisibility vs. invisibility. Trans women were openly mocked and trans men were ignored or just subsumed into a range of experiences for cis women. That's changing now that trans men are getting more spotlight than they had before, although it's still tilted in those directions.

But there was genuinely nothing transphobic about Chihiro's story and to say there was you have to prove his model was trans women and transitioning children when there is an extremely well-established category of AMAB people who present as girls in Japanese culture that is infinitely more talked about in pop culture over there. You have to insist upon the fact that he was ever connected to people who sincerely identify as girls in the first place. If this was America, it'd make more sense, but it is actually just genuinely racist to be told all that and still be like "well, but it makes me think of trans women."

This is why transradfems hate me, too. A trans woman disagreeing with them breaks their rules.

Especially the person who cannot stop fucking bypassing my block to screenshot my blog and then justifying it by claiming I do it, even though I fucking deleted those posts after she complained and have not mentioned her a single time since unless she did first.

Here's the thing: I DON'T THINK NOT WANTING TO ASSOCIATE WITH AGAB LANGUAGE IS UNREASONABLE AT ALL! But it's fucking projecting as fuck to say that people who don't like TMA/TME language must simply want to cling to AGAB. I mean, holy fuck, right? That's not what's being argued dumbass - but she can't think of any other way to divide trans people based on AGAB without referencing it in some way, so her ideal replacement is TMA/TME, that's the two kinds of trans people that exist, you're not AMAB or AFAB you're TMA or TME, this is so fucking masks off it's wild that other transradfems aren't mortified by her saying the quiet part out loud. This should just completely obliterate every trace of protest when someone points out TME is in practice exclusively used to refer to AFAB trans people and no one else ever, unless what she's actually saying is that AFAB trans people are so close to cis women that they might as well just by default be called the same thing and have no other way of identifying themselves when you talk about categories of trans people and their experiences.

But it's so intensely psychologically revealing. I don't think she's ever been misgendered a single time in her life. I don't think she's ever had even the slightest actual barrier to hop in her quest to live as a woman, because this oversensitivity where someone acknowledging transphobes see us as our assigned sex counts as them misgendering you? That's just not the behavior of someone who actually deals with these things in the real world. Or even online. Again, I get pedojacketed and threatened with actual cancelation from my actual career because I engage with actual TERFs. These people never do anything but moan about tee-em-ees misgendering them by discussing how the enemy perceives us. And she in particular is the most desperate to shut that out, because that is the only reminder there could ever possibly be a hypothetical obstacle to her claiming her girl card. I have zero doubt she lives in the queerest city on the planet and if she didn't have internet she would literally be unable to even conceive of transphobia as a concept. And she fucking hates me for not just being a trans woman who agrees with the transandrobros, but also personally identifies with my AGAB. The implication that it's possible for a trans woman to be okay with the term "male" shatters her self-esteem. That is the extent of "misgendering" she has ever faced and ever will face. Me identifying the way I do terrifies her, I have to be objectively wrong about claiming identification with my AGAB because she copes with insecurity by imagining a world where TERFs are right but instead of biology everyone's soul is either Male and Female and you can only be one or the other. Gender can't just be people figuring out who they are and the ways they want to express themselves and live their lives, that's not real enough for her, she has to be Trve Fymyle the way TERFs go on about, except instead of centering around wombs it's this weird vaguely spiritual concept that she forces everyone else to fit into because if they don't it implies her framework isn't the tangible reality she so desperately needs to feel valid.

And that's why she "needs" TMA/TME, because she reasonably wants to talk about the experiences of people who share her category but doesn't want to identify as anything that references what those experiences fucking are (e.g. having been assigned male at birth). And again, that's FINE. I GET THAT. THAT'S UNDERSTANDABLE. I CAN SEE HOW THAT MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE. But that doesn't mean TMA/TME doesn't also have issues and I'm sorry if she's having a hard time coming up with something else because it's difficult to navigate the inherent paradox of wanting to associate with something that unfortunately makes her feel bad to associate with it, but she needs to pick something else, and not say "weh the TMEs are making us change our language" as though (a) transradfems aren't telling trans men what language they can use for themselves and (b) it's impossible to come up with terms that don't explicitly make claims about the experiences of others and 100% defines them by suffering less.

And isn't it strange how other transradfems are insisting they have to call themselves CAMAB and CAFAB, but THEY aren't clinging to AGAB language? Weird, right? I mean there is a group of people insistently arguing that it is simply paramount that we use AGAB language, but they're perisex trans women stealing it from intersex people so I guess it's fine?

But I don't CARE. I don't like her and I don't want to look at her stupid blog and I sure as fuck don't want to report on it. I just wish she'd stop talking about me. I literally just want her to stop block evading me and telling people my identity revolves around wanting to suck up to TERFs*. I do not talk about her except when she talks about me. AND I'M STILL NOT EVEN NAMING HER.

When she complained about me screenshotting her posts, I deleted them. They got zero notes. Her screenshots of me have hundreds and she keeps taking them because she's fucking obsessed because she can't feel like a girl if someone else identifies a little differently than she does. I don't even screenshot other people if they have me blocked but I see other people debating their takes, I make a post that references no one with unspecified prompting. And I've never done even done that with her, not only because she keeps baselessly accusing me of harassment, but because she infuriates me on a level where I just sincerely do not like seeing her fucking content in any way for any reason.

God I fucking hate radfems.

*which she happily admits to knowing is a lie but is like "yeah well I say she's mean so I'm going to keep deliberately fabricating falsehoods about her"

Thank you. <3

I have enlightened another soul!

If you asked these people, ten times out of ten they would say detransition and rape are the worst things that can possibly happen to someone and murder is no comparison, but they'll see trans men talking about their sexual abuse to be like "wow so lucky you guys just have to LARP The Handmaid's Tale, but we get KILLED."

And it's like. Okay. But fuck off, though? It's fine to personally see murder as worse and to grieve more over that, ig, it's like, whatever, but to openly state that it's a PRIVILEGE to be raped and detransitioned makes my brain melt. It's like they are physically incapable of not putting down other trans people. It is the one single area of activism they engage in. That is the war they are waging. They don't give a fuck about trans rights because they live in privileged areas with supportive families. Their battle is with the TME trans people on social media.

lolllll

"I hate how misogynistic Velvet is, she's everyone's cumrag"

^actual thing actually said and believed by the TMA/TME tankies

Before anyone accuses this anon of saying transradfems are engaging in male behavior or whatever, I'll note as I always have that they're just as sexually predatory and entitled to the bodies of others as TERFs are. That is the actual comparison being made. The worst trans women are identical to the worst cis women. Diversity win.

[thealogie]

Gotta preface it with ‘I’m not from the US, so obviously don’t understand lots about how election results affect everyday life of people living there’. Also, if I suddenly, still being myself, became a US citizen with a right to vote, I can’t imagine voting for Trump. Saying all that, I don’t think labelling half of the country, tens of millions of people, genuinely evil is very productive or even mentally honest.

I am from the part of the world, which suffered from both republican and democrat US administrations, and lately most of the geopolitical games resulting in tons of blood, have been played, obviously, by democrats. I have to say that I find their utter hypocrisy deeply disgusting. At least your republicans, how I see it, don’t even mask being monsters, they say it like it is. When two negotiating sides state their goals outright, it is possible to come to an agreement at least marginally better than when one side is always being two(3,4,5)-faced, making a point to wrap their actual goals (if they even know them) in pretty words about democracy while double-crossing their negotiation partner even before the ink has dried.

I know that you’re from Iran and are aware of how deeply destructive US foreign policies can be, increasingly so since the start of this century. With one caveat that Trump seems to be especially hostile to Iran, and a democrat would’ve been marginally better when it comes to the US policy regarding Iran. It’s not the same for all parts of the world though, so we might not all be unbiased observers here.

I know that foreign policy doesn’t decide US elections, I only wrote this longwinded nonsense to say that maybe there are solid reasons for half of the US to prefer Trump and reject the democrats, like for the rest of the world there are reasons for either. Economic, political, whatever. Maybe liberals should look into these reasons before dismissing millions of people as genuinely evil, like Hillary did in her time. Idk about you, but when she called half of the country ‘deplorables’ or whatever, no one I know and no one I read (not from US) felt sympathetic. It just sounded incredibly entitled and delusional, and plain dumb. And it looks like since Hillary democrats haven’t learned or even attempted to learn anything, it’s still ‘half of our nation is broken and evil and we can’t do anything about it’. But it’s not how people work, in my opinion. Yes, they might not care about minorities first, they might care about themselves first, but doesn’t it mean that politicians should identify their problems and offer solutions? Isn’t it how it works? Dehumanazing Trump supporters will only radicalize them more, isn’t it what in fact happened, and how it always works with people in general?

Idk about life inside the US, like I said, but how I see it, the only ones to blame here are democrats and liberals in general. If people in the world, and I’m sure inside the US, will see that they finally start addressing the problems instead of hiding behind empty rhetoric, if the level of hypocrisy and delusional entitlement decreases at least to some degree, the support for right-wing populists will also decrease, I’m sure of it. Because most people are not ‘genuinely evil’, but they become embittered and cruel when their concerns are continuously dismissed, things start to fester resulting in ugly political outcomes. I mean, I know you know all this, sorry for being so boring and longwinded. It’s just that I usually like your takes (I came for MASH and stayed for the neighbors as well), including political ones, but here I got a bit of a whiplash, sorry.

I appreciate this thoughtful note. You don’t have to like my takes for us to be on friendly terms. And to be clear I do forever and always blame democrats and liberals for not energizing the people who agree with them.

But as you say you don’t live here and so there’s no way for me to convey to you without asking you to spend months reading right wing political accounts here and talking to people here that a sizable number of the people who support this man are genuinely bad people and want me and people like me out of this country.

This comes from hundreds of personal encounters over the past 8 years and spending the past three months reading dozens and dozens of pieces of reporting that are like “I went to talk to voters in a small town, here’s what they had to say.” And the things you hear are: purge this country of immigrants, make America a dominating force in the world again, get us back to traditional values where women are popping out babies…oh yeah and also the economy would be better under him.

Like idk what you want me to call sexist, homophobic, white supremacists but I think they are evil. And I think it used to be that the Republican Party was more polite about all of these beliefs so I could understand people being disaffected and voting for them for reasons other than hating other humans but now we’re just saying the quiet part out loud and there’s no plausible deniability