#imperial place

[katabay]

james bond! what a concept! lots to discuss about wrt james bond. imperialist anxieties around legacy and decay, the shift in the movies from imagination of the futuristic to luxury branding as identity, etc. etc. endless topics for discussing in there.

and uhhhhh. so You Only Live Twice is a mess, but it's kind of fun talking about why it's such a mess. however. HOWEVER. Benson's Blast From The Past? ohhhhhhhhhhh the hate-hate relationship I have with that one, I've been frustrated with it for ten years and it's not even fun to talk about why it's frustrating lmao.

that said, James Suzuki has all the same pieces that have me obsessed with Metal Gear's Kazuhira Miller. so. well!! this is hell and I'm stuck in it.

anyway, extremely canon divergent AU or something where James Suzuki doesn't get killed off like a cheap plot device and we get really REALLY gnarly about the family stuff and the US gov't. also there's industrial espionage, insider trading, & a briefcase that everyone wants.

[vorbarrsultana]

i finished rereading the first four vorkosigan books (+ "the flowers of vashnoi" because ekaterin!!!), and you really have to feel for piotr vorkosigan because what a nightmare life, truly.

imagine you are born just in time for your world to be unified by dorca vorbarra and rediscovered by people from wider galaxy. things are finally looking good, for the first time in 600 years of isolation there is no more feudal infighting, and the promise of galactic medicine and technologies being available lightens everyone's perspectives. sure, your grandpa is called count pierre "le sanguinaire", but who doesn't have terrible relatives?

then you are 15, and suddenly your planet is attacked by the aggressive eugenecist space empire hell-bent on subjugating your people and turning them into disposable material for unethical genetic experiments. you flee into the mountains, away from your family, and create guerrilla forces from locals sworn to your dad, and it's really terrible for a very long time. you have no high-tech weapons and no food, you sleep in a cave in the dead of winter, and the cetagandans try everything (from carpet bombing to chemical weapons) to murder you.

but hey, at least you now have your bff ezar vorbarra, and (from the bff's words on his deathbed) it sounds like you two had so much fun between unimaginable horrors and despair, and it's not surprising, since no one really believes in death after life at 20. then the emperor makes you a general at the tender age of 22. fortunately for him, you & bff make a frighteningly competent dream-team, and the joke's on cetagandans.

then, several years later, you ask the emperor for weapons, because you still sleep on the bare cave floor, there are little resources, and every ghem on the planet is trying to murder you. he offers you the hand of his granddaughter instead, like it's some sort of twisted fairytale, but you grow to love your olivia more than anything, and the tide of war is finally turning, and you allow yourself to entertain the idea of peaceful life, and then...

the space eugenecist empire nukes your hometown, killing your mom, dad, surviving brothers, and two hundred thousand of your people. plus your bff (ezar) gets a radiation doze large enough for it to cause severe cancer thirty years later. great.

but you win! your district is in shambles, your capital is an irradiated crater, your castle is in ruins, but you win! the old dorca dies, and yuri ascends the throne, but politicking is secondary to the fact that you are alive.

yes, you are probably not entirely sane, and you've long forgotten what the peaceful times look like, but you are alive, just under 35, and your entire life is ahead of you. olivia is alive too, and ezar, and you now have three wonderful children, and the extended vorpatril-vorbarra family that hosts regular get-togethers. sure, your mom-in-law is a betan with all sorts of crazy ideas in her head, but she is not pierre vorrutyer. small mercies.

but then the new emperor goes mad, and decides to murder your entire family overnight. your brothers-in-law are gone, one of your sisters-in-law too, and all your nephews and nieces except little padma. but all of this pales in comparison to the facts that olivia is murdered, and that your heir and daughter lay dead beside her.

all you have left of her, of your house, of the family you've lost in vashnoi not a ten years ago, is aral, whom you keep by your side throughout the bloody civil war to put your bff on the throne.

but you win again. you are 43, and ezar vorbarra is now the emperor. you are responsible for the imperium's entire ground forces. you are also responsible for a severely traumatized boy of 13, and the only children you've interacted with without olivia's genle guidance were little messengers of guerilla companies.

what a mess.

[revindicatedbyhistory]

do anglos know wrt the malvinas situation that argentina was a neocolony of the uk for a good chunk of post independence history

[serpentface]

This was going to be a panel of a little comic but I got too invested in drawing minute background details so, here.

[ludinusdaleth]

with the obligatory precursor statement of "the gods are not based on any earthen pantheon and thus cannot be drawn directly to any of our dieties, but downfall is heavily intentionally pulling from religious imagery": it is insane (in the best way) of nick marini to show up to critical role for his very first time and play pelor as the messiah shepherd giving food & shelter to poor refugees. whilst boarding a ship of regufees. to nuke the city that harbors them

[fatehbaz]

Who gets to be human? On Black geographies, damned people living in inhospitable places, other ways of knowing and being, and racist legacy of European academic epistemologies.

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The idea of the plantation is migratory. [...] Past colonial encounters created material and imaginative geographies that reified global segregations through “damning” the spaces long occupied by Man's human others. Here, damning can be understood in two interlocking ways: as a fencing in and as a condemnation of racial-sexual difference. The uninhabitable - in particular, the landmasses occupied by those who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were unimaginable, both spatially and corporeally - is the geographic (non)location through which the plantation emerged. From Caliban's “uninhabited” island in Shakespeare's The Tempest, to the regions within Africa identified as too hot to be livable, the landmasses deemed uninhabitable presented a geographic predicament upon “discovery.” [...] [A] "new symbolic construct of race," which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, organized much of the world according to a racial logic. [...] The colonial enactment of geographic knowledge mapped “a normal way of life” through measuring different degrees of humanness and attaching different versions of the human to different places. […] [I]n the sites of toxicity, environmental decay, pollution […] inhabited by impoverished communities […] the [current] geographies of the racial other are emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as lands of no one. So in our present moment, some live in the unlivable, and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of marginalized to death over and over again. Life, then, is extracted from particular regions […]. If we believe that the city [the prison, the resort, other "postcolonial spaces"] is the commercial expression of the plantation and its marginalized masses, and that the plantation is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles, Wynter's essay asks that we seek out secretive histories […]. [R]acial violence haunts, [...] the struggles we face, intellectually, are a continuation of plantation narratives that dichotimize geographies into us/them and hide secretive histories that undo the teleological [...] underpinnings of [colonial, imperial, modern] spatiality.

Text by: Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2013 (No. 42), pages 1-15. [Emphasis mine.]

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Registering the marine world as central to the making of modernity - from slave ships and sea-borne empires to container logistics and the industrialized extraction of its resources (from fish to fossil fuels) - we encounter the constant of colonialism in the haunting racism that produces the violent grammar of inhospitality, today etched on the body of the contemporary migrant. [...] This is to interrupt and rework Occidental historiography, sociology, and philosophy, and to puncture their faith in rendering the world transparent to their will. […] Promoting the instability of critical language is to take responsibility for what Achille Mbembe calls the becoming-black of the world: where the production of subjection provokes alternative knowledge, practices, and politics […]. Today the increasing use of drones in the Mediterranean as part of the technology of governance marks the latest abandonment of social responsibility to the bio-surveillance of unwanted bodies and discarded lives. Smart borders take migrants far below the category of “bare life,” [...] and extends the racial profiling written into the historical premises that betray their deep incubation in the refusal to register the languages and limits of the white myths [...]. From the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean: seas of dispossession and unbelonging have constantly demonstrated the political, juridical, and onto-epistemological limits of modernity. They promote a constant critique of the epistemic foundations of Western [colonial "liberalism"]. Those on the water, the wretched of the sea, the damned [...], who cannot source their identity in the territory of the nation-state, are without rights. They have no social [...] validity. [...] Yet they simultaneously [...] exist, persist, and resist. [...] The algorithm sputters in the dark while cut-up, bricolage, collage, and montage work the critical gaps [...]. The archives unwind to expose other computations of time and further folds in space: the promise of foreign cartographies [...].

Text by: Iain Chambers. A section by Chambers in the essay co-authored by Tiziana Terranova and Iain Chambers. “Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean.” e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021. [Emphasis mine.]

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[T]he framing of the inhumanities forces a reckoning with the humanist liberal subject that orders the humanities: an invisible and indivisible white subject position [...]. In Césaire’s (2000 [1972]) Discourse on Colonialism, he suggested that “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism [...]”. In another searing critique of [White, European, liberal/colonial] humanism, Fanon (1961) tied the unrealized figure of a true humanism to the earth, as a wretched counterpoint, whereby the inhuman residues of the colonial project abide as discarded matter […]. Those blackened colonial afterlives in “modernity’s project of unfreedom” (Walcott 2014, 94) are still very much present in the political geologies of climate change vulnerabilities, the wasting effects of racial capitalism, and neo-extractivist economies […]. The narrative arc of humanism, Scott (2000) suggested in conversation with Wynter, is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age humanist script [...]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of man [as universal concept] was underscored by the racial division of life and nonlife. […] In its simplest iteration, there are forms of life on one side and nonlife on the other; nonlife that is constituted through death, and more recently in Mbembe and Povinelli’s writing through forms of social death, exhaustion, and extinguishment, wherein nonlife emerges as a zone of governance. The gravitational pull that centers these divisions between life and nonlife is the human subject as it is conceived through a Western normative frame [...]. As new forms of racialized beings were articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century paleontology in the context of colonialism, geology was also articulating new origins of the earth, as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). [...] Historically, this normative sphere of humanism was racist and specifically antiblack, and without challenging that history, it remains so, every time the universal or human is invoked. Some of the greatest challenges, of course, came from anticolonial thinkers struggling to make sense of their painful histories in their fullest terms, such as Fanon (1959, 1961), Césaire, Glissant, C. L. R. James and Wynter. As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of humanism that underlies it” (154). For Wynter (2000), “what is called the West [...] begins with the founding of post-1492 Caribbean” (152). Wynter challenged the geographical imaginary that the Americas and Caribbean are somehow an epistemological outside to Western knowledge […].

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

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But what becomes of the native-occupied “uninhabitable” zones is a geo-racial reorganization. The “new symbolic construct of race,” which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, was spatially organized according to a new […] logic. […] That is, the uninhabitable […] is underscored by racial and sexual differences. To transform the [land] […], and make this transformation profitable, the land must become a site of racial-sexual regulation, a geography that maps “a normal way of life” […] This is expressed through uneven geographies: spatial arrangements [...]. The inhabitability [...] also produces [...] forms of geographic nonexistence, which differ from what was assumed was "not there." [...] [W]hat Edouard Glissant describes as the "real but long unnoticed" places [...]: cultural sharings, new poetics, new ways of being [...]. Those who occupy the spaces of Otherness are always already encountering space and therefore articulate how genres or modes of humanness are intimately connected to where we/they are ontologically as well as geographically. To return to an earlier discussion, spaces of Otherness are “palpitating with life.” [...]

Text by: Katherine McKittrick. “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter.” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and The Cartographies of Struggle. 2006. [Emphasis mine.]

[lieutenantselnia]

Excuse the poor quality, but Piett's waist in this shot though😩🤲

[daily-fandragon]

Day 4

The End from Minecraft by Zialeska

[grub-karkat-in-strange-places]

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my matesprit gave to me...

Twelve trolls trolling, eleven Dirkers Striding, ten lords a English, nine Jadies dancing, eight maids a miiing, seven drones a culling, six girls a gaying, five fucking rings, four Caliborns, three French-ish girls, two turtle Daves and a grubkat in a pear tree.

[anonymous-ace72]

Do you think that where the triumvirs are geographically would affect what kinds of demigods end up being drafted into their households? Like, Nero might have a higher number of Greek demigods due to his vicinity to Camp Half-Blood, Caligula might have more Roman demigods due to being so close to Camp Jupiter, and Commodus has a mixture of both since he's directly in the middle of both of them.

I know that demigods come from all over the place but it makes sense to me how while they're headed in one direction or the other they might end up getting caught up into them on the way there.

[beep-beepster]

I feel like there is a strong correlation to Frank Hubert’s initial subtext with Dune (its islamic religious themes, a premise setting an empire against local populaces, the attention towards ecological developments in desert environments with a bias towards temperate zones from outsiders wanting to “enrich” the land), and all of the recent developments in Gaza and its history, both with the original influences to Hubert’s novel and the timing of a blockbuster adaptation happening while international focus grows towards Palestine, that is going unmentioned outside of the usual jokes and memes

[supportershy]

Feng Xin - Imperial Bodyguard

Today's rant is of course about Feng Xin.

(Some data + headcanons, of course)

I think we don't talk enough about Feng Xin as the imperial bodyguard. I mean, we just accepted as normal that a bunch of grown ass men chose a child, a teenager, as the one in charge of the security of the Crown Prince himself.

Have we stopped to think about the huge responsibility that matter implied for Feng Xin? Also, the incredible ability he should have had to be selected for such an important job? He should have been really talented to earn it!

But imagine that this boy has over his shoulders the safety of the Crown Prince, one of the jewels of Xianle. It was too much! And he took it with the seriousness and responsibility needed. We don't see him complaining or fooling around with it! It wasn't a game or some temporary position he was set to.

Now, let's say (and I'm already babbling) that it wasn't like he was the only bodyguard but instead he was part of a "guard of bodyguards". It makes more sense in realistic terms, does it take away his merit? No at all, because he was still chosen at 14 (or 15 max) to be the shadow and protector of Xie Lian. He would be next to Xie Lian all the time, not only in training sessions but also in all the prince's duties. He probably learnt a lot about traditions, politics, social affairs, etc. Just by being there. He didn't seem to care about that, at least we don't see that in any part of the book. He had to be alert and paying attention all the time. It wasn't something easy, but it was his duty and he accepted it.

Also, as the imperial bodyguard or as part of an important guard, he needed to train continuously, those perfect shots weren't going to get by themselves, right?. He was probably trained militarily too. So, training and guarding the prince consumed his entire time. That needed discipline and of course, an out of the ordinary teenage years. He wasn't like others.

I just can't stop thinking about the amount of bravery it took him to do this job. We don't know much about Feng Xin's story, but I believe we should take more into account this part of his life.

The years Feng Xin spent as Xie Lian's bodyguard (before his ascension) molded his personality, tastes, ethics, etc.

Being Xie Lian's imperial bodyguard was the most important thing that happened to Feng Xin in his short life, and it changed that life for ever.

[ap0llx]

could never shut my brain off watching my favorite old animated movies bc road to el dorado is one of them

[skyrim-forever]

Thedora Viticius Moodboard

[pearlescentplums]

one absolutely grating thing about mainland chinese spaces is how they co opt orientalism to literally do phrenology on their own fucking people. i didn't realize that having small eyes, tan skin, a broad face, or freckles brought "shame" to the nation. i didn't realize that these features are all inherently racist and orientalist to have.

[cdr2002]

Deep Space Nine forced the mirror universe to evolve as a concept and explore the idea of inverting the characters on a more individualistic level and opening deeper questions of who each of us could have been if our lives turned out differently and I’m tired of that being abandoned and ignored to cling to the familiarity of the Terran Empire.