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stirringwinds · 11 months ago

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i know people talk a lot about the us and UK special relationship but it kind of fell after the Suez and France kind of sneakily stole it didn't he? I mean did the same before the wars

thanks for the ask! ngl, as a londoner, i've always personally felt the representation of the "Special Relationship" as this mega-close and affectionate dynamic is kind of...an un-holistic understanding of the UK or England, as well as of the United States. don't get me wrong, it's one of their most important relationships and there's a lot of deep history there—my issue is mostly with rose-tinted interpretations underpinning it and what biases they showcase. these were heavily biased by Churchill's (imperialist) gaze of envisioning Anglo-American affinity and leadership on the world stage. this interpretation quite significantly downplayed the rivalry, power struggles, conflicts and differences that historians existed between the US and the British Empire, or how US presidents tended to see it in far less majestic terms. like, Churchill rather downplays FDR's vehement disagreements with him over the issue of Indian independence lol or decolonisation (because the US was eyeing the world as a chessboard, re: new markets and also whether or not support for the old colonial power would be a bulwark against or risk soviet or other communist influence).

so, while you're right that Suez was a pretty low moment in US-Britain relations due to the US being pissed at Britain and France jeopardising its ostensible goal of swaying Egypt away from the Soviet sphere of influence (sidenote: Egypt itself was trying to navigate the mess of the Cold War rivalry to secure its interests), i don't really see it as "falling" after Suez or stolen by France simply because that dynamic Churchill painted a picture of never really existed in that way. plus, Europe (France included) and the ex-colonies of the British Empire (like the dominions and India) weighed heavily on British foreign policy/its national outlook too; i tend to find an overemphasis on a rose-tinted view of the "Special Relationship" leads to a lot of US-centrism that shuts out this understanding. to me, Arthur and Alfred's relationship is most interesting when we situate them properly amidst all these other imperial and geopolitical cross-currents. of which Francis is an important one, from the time he helped Alfred during the Revolutionary War, to the Entente Cordial, WWI and the post-WWII world of NATO, the EU and so on.

in hetalia-verse, it's one of the reasons I personally headcanon Arthur and Alfred as father and son. their bond is lasting, forged by the blood, steel and saltwater of empire, and all the familial, deep and troubling implications that implies. they are "stuck" with each other in some ways, because post 1945, it's a familial dynamic of the old king and the young, ambitious crown prince who thinks his father is out of time—and out of line. francis never really "steals" anything because he and arthur's relationship is on a very different axes: francis is the neighbour who has been by arthur's side as his enemy, friend, lover, rival in imperial douchebaggery, ally (for better and also for worse, like in suez...)—and everything in between. whereas arthur and alfred have some real patricidal/regicidal, titanomachy-level father-son power struggles going on, mixed in with this dysfunctional level of understanding and them also colluding together shadily (you are different from him in many ways, there are many things he'll never understand about you—but you are your father's son, alfred; to be powerful is to be tainted).

so in conclusion, i see alfred-arthur and arthur-francis as both very important foundational dynamics crucial to arthur's character, but conceptualised differently from that understanding of the "special relationship" because they're two different kinds of relationships, even if there is the overlapping dynamic of power, rivalry and empire. ✌��

#lord father and the crown prince #hetalia #hws england #hws america #hws france #hetalia headcanons

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strawberryblondebutch · 1 day ago

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Back by unpopular demand, it's my top albums of 2024! Same rules as always: everything on this list is a full-length album (no EPs) of generally previously unreleased material (no reissues, no cover albums, no Taylor's Versions) arranged in an intentional manner (no B-sides, no rarities, no mixtapes).

10. Bayside, There Are Worse Things Than Being Alive

I have the least to say about Bayside’s effort here than anything else in my top ten, and yet I couldn’t find a reason to replace it with another. Not even Foxing’s self-titled (more on that below). The New York scene veterans are the definition of a blue collar pop punk band: they tour constantly, and every few years they see fit to release a perfect melodic album. It’s the kind of album where you can’t ask me to pick a favorite – it will change with every track.

9. Full of Hell, Coagulated Bliss

I don’t like grindcore. There, I said it – as if that’s even a remotely controversial position to take. It’s a genre that exists as a joke, from the microsongs to the gross-out lyrics. It’s easier for me to argue that Coagulated Bliss is a hardcore album than it is to swallow my pride and admit that I actually enjoyed a grindcore record. This was the last album added to my top-ten, supplanting Foxing’s self-titled (which is also a masterpiece in genre redirection, going from twinkly emo to full-tilt rowdiness), but Full of Hell accomplished what no one else could: they made a (albeit very, very begrudging) grindcore fan out of me.

8. Sleater-Kinney, Little Rope

Longtime readers of this column will take S-K’s position here for the surprise that it is. Path of Wellness was my worst album of 2021, and I was terrified that the collapse in songwriting ability that had followed drummer Janet Weiss’s departure from the band would continue unabated. This year’s follow-up record proved me wrong in all the right ways. Carrie and Corin sound sharper and more in sync with each other, and more than anything, the record has a point. It needed to be released. Thank God for that.

7. Les Savy Fav, Oui, LSF

Les Savy Fav had a difficult task in releasing their sixth studio album. Their last release, Root for Ruin, came out in 2010. In that time, the band was better known for their live antics than their music. Those antics haven’t stopped (at the Union Transfer in June, vocalist Tim Harrington handed me the microphone to carry the chorus of “World Got Great” while he drank from my beer), but they can’t carry a studio album. Oui, LSF is an art-punk masterpiece from a band who wants you to hear them as much as they want you to watch out for their goblinesque frontman.

6. Kneecap, Fine Art

On the subject of difficult tasks, Kneecap is the unlikeliest story of the last few years. How does a rap trio, whose music is almost entirely in the Irish language, accumulate such a cult following? Part of it is spite – their rage against the British occupation of their Belfast home speaks to anti-imperialist sentiment across the globe – but the rest is talent. You don’t have to know the language to nod your head along to the beats and flow.

5. Leprous, Melodies of Atonement

Some artists have a place on this list penciled in the moment that they announce an album. Leprous is one of them, their specific brand of symphonic progressive metal filling an underserved niche in my listening. It would be easy to file them in somewhere between 10 and 6 just for releasing a full-length, but Melodies of Atonement vaulted itself by breaking through with a raw edge to it that Leprous’s last two LPs lacked. Einar et al. are more confident in their abilities, surer that they have something to say – and that people will listen.

4. Better Lovers, Highly Irresponsible

Every Time I Die and The Dillinger Escape Plan: two bands often imitated and never surpassed. Although the circumstances leading to the marriage between these two bands are less than ideal (Keith Buckley’s sudden hostile departure from ETID forced his brother Jordan to seek out the talents of longtime Dillinger vocalist Greg Puciato), the members of Better Lovers made the best out of a bad situation, pushing forward with the chaotic precision both predecessor bands did so well.

3. Kendrick Lamar, GNX

Can I tell you a secret? Before this year, I would not have called myself a Kendrick Lamar fan. I enjoyed individual songs of his, but I largely found his talent at the mic undercut by his pen and his devotion to overwrought conscious rap, exemplified by the laughably drivelous “BLOOD.” in 2017. I grew up on the feuds of the 90s, Biggie and Tupac firing barbs from coast to coast. It’s one of the reasons I praise Meg so highly – you can tell she cut her teeth in battle rap. Well, K.Dot went to therapy and became more spiteful, and GNX made a fan out of me.

2. Amigo the Devil, Yours Until the War Is Over

I discover bands in a few ways: playlists, recommendations from friends, opening acts, and entirely by accident. Amigo the Devil is the latter – while enjoying a lunch break at Riot Fest some years prior, I was captivated by Danny Kiranos’s storytelling and sense of humor on tracks like “Murder at the Bingo Hall” and “I Hope Your Husband Dies.” His most recent effort has those in spades, with tracks like “I’m Going to Heaven” and “Once Upon a Time at Texaco, Pt. 1” weaving darkly humorous narratives. But what Yours Until the War Is Over has over his previous works is heart. Pathos. “Cannibal Within” has an earnestness to it that I couldn’t imagine him employing before, and “Stray Dog” is a love song with no wink or nudge.

1. Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties, In Lieu of Flowers

Every five years, Dan “Soupy” Campbell of The Wonder Years adds to a story of his – Aaron West. Ten years ago, Aaron’s father died, his wife asked for a divorce, and things got worse from there. It’s tempting to torture Aaron further, and the last decade has not been kind to him. In Lieu of Flowers covers the years 2019 to 2024, as he struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic anxiety of being a touring artist, and a descent into the family trade of alcoholism. But Campbell – and Aaron, by extension – never lose hope, and if this is the last chapter of his story, it ends as it should: with him looking up and letting go.

#music tag #bayside #full of hell #sleater kinney #les savy fav #kneecap #leprous #better lovers #kendrick lamar #amigo the devil #aaron west and the roaring twenties

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the1975attheirverybest · 4 months ago

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Free Palestine + BLM movements

Touched on this briefly before, but apparently it’s a persistent issue in online spaces so I’ll say it more fully this time. To online advocates and activists, on both the black side and the Palestinian side. PLEASE DO NOT LOSE SIGHT OF THE GOAL. white supremacy thrives when we are pitted against each other. Our struggles are inherently intertwined. AND HAVE HISTORICALLY INTERSECTED. Below is a fact-checked and verified list of examples.

Malcolm X has written an essay on Zionism in which he rightly stated The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians.”

As seen here and here. Palestinians in Gaza and The West Bank have protested for black people against police brutality in the US, including during the George Floyd protests.

VERY IMPORTANT: the IDF trains American police forces to treat black folks with the same cruelty that they treat Palestinians.

So, this is why I always say “context matters.” If all you’ve ever known is TikTok activism, if you haven’t looked into the history and understood the way that systemic oppression operates, then it’s of course easy to get sucked into taking sides. WE ARE ON THE SAME SIDE. Stop fighting. The enemy is racism. White supremacy.

if one or ten or 1526272 black people shitting on you as an Arab makes you less supportive of their rights, or likewise if one or ten or 15627282 Palestinians using anti black rhetoric makes you suddenly feel that they don’t deserve human rights, then with all due respect you were never with the cause to begin with.

#free palestine #gaza resources

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mariacallous · 25 days ago

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We live in a strange time marked by widespread and ongoing depopulation. The entire world is grappling with a crisis of childlessness. By 2015, the global fertility rate had dropped to half of what it was in 1965, and most people now lives in societies with fertility rates below replacement levels. Populations are shrinking across rich and poor nations, secular and religious societies, democracies and autocracies alike.

As the eminent American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt recently observed in Foreign Affairs, “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation.” The last major episode of large-scale depopulation resulted from the bubonic plague that devastated Eurasia 700 years ago. But what history clearly shows is that depopulation always has political effects. These include a potential increase in warfare—fighting motivated by the desire to compensate, directly or indirectly, for population loss.

Historians have documented the so-called “mourning wars” among Native American tribes during the 17th and 18th centuries. They would raid each other’s communities, kidnapping women and children to compensate for widespread losses of their own people to contagious diseases and warfare. Women and children were absorbed into the raiding tribe, while adult males were usually killed, because they were seen as impossible to integrate. These wars, if they were genocidal, were wars of genocidal inclusion.

Which brings us to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. How different is it from the mourning wars of the past? In many ways, it resembles an updated version of such a war, a desperate attempt to replenish a dwindling population by forcibly incorporating a neighboring people into Russia’s own.

While the invasion was undoubtedly sparked by imperialist ambitions, anti-Western resentment, and a desire for Great Power recognition, it may also have been conditioned by Russia’s rapidly shrinking, aging, and emigrating population. Russia’s 2100 population is currently projected to shrink to a median of 126 million, an astonishing drop from its current population of roughly 145 million.

Putin’s interpretation of Russia’s dismaying demographic decline through the lens of a cultural war that the West is allegedly waging against Russia, its people, and its civilization, may even have played a decisive role in his decision to launch this cruel and devastating war. And for both sides, the war feels increasingly like a futile struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of a looming demographic abyss. The brutal nature of the fighting and the unwavering determination of the combatants speak to a profound identity crisis, one that reverberates well beyond the areas of active combat.

A speech Putin delivered to schoolchildren in Vladivostok in 2021, half a year before the invasion, offers a telling glimpse at his obsession with demographics. The Russian president told a story about an imaginary Russia that might have been but sadly never came to be. If not for the massive geopolitical shocks of the 20th century, he explained to the students, the population of Russia would have been around 500 million, three or four times larger than it currently is. Russia’s failure to achieve its demographic promise—not the end of communism—was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. After reiterating the need to investigate why the country’s natural and predicted population explosion had failed to materialize, he exhorted: “In no case should we allow anything like this in the future.”

Listening to the Russian president talk about the downstream consequences of the 26 to 27 million Soviets who died in World War II, one might have expected him to pray that Russia would manage to avoid future wars. That, however, was the opposite of the lesson he wished to impart. What Russia’s history teaches, Putin explained, is the obligation to do everything possible to reverse the country’s ongoing population decline. Russia’s future depends on its successfully increasing its population; for Putin, population decline reads like a death sentence for Russian civilization.

Traditionally, Russia has defined its security vulnerability in spatial terms. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, the Russian Empire managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years. During the last years of the Soviet Union, it covered one-sixth of the habitable globe. But Moscow’s obsession with overland expansion and its thinking about security in terms of strategic depth is now a thing of the past.

Today, Russia defines its national security by the size of its population, not the extent of its landmass. Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s. For Putin, this population decline translates into an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”

In a way, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was an admission of the failure of his various pro-natalist policies designed to increase the country’s population, particularly the Slavic core of its population. After a series of attempts to increase the country’s fertility rate (including exemption from military service for any man with four children and generous financial incentives for larger families) and to extend the life expectancy of the Russian population, the Russian president seems to have concluded that the only way to achieve a sizable increase in his population is by annexing and subordinating ethnically and culturally related neighbors, by force if necessary. As Eberstadt told the Wall Street Journal: “The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories, not increasing the birthrate.” By incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation in 2014, Putin added around 2.4 million (mostly) ethnic Russians to his country’s population.

Putin’s alleged fear of democracy in neighboring Ukraine may have been a much less decisive motivation for the invasion than his fear of demography—the precipitous decline of the size of Russia’s population and the percentage of ethnic Slavs within it.

Demographic anxiety is not the only cause of Putin’s war. But it is arguably the most consequential and illuminating because it helps us relate the devastating war in Ukraine to simultaneous, parallel outbreaks of violent identity politics in many other countries subject to the same existential trauma of rapid depopulation. The fear of shrinking numbers, a shortage of young people, mass emigration, and growing cultural insecurity are becoming the defining characteristics of the new geopolitical environment.

Plummeting fertility rates and the resulting demographic anxieties are not a uniquely Russian trauma. The trend is observable across the globe. According to a study published in May in The Lancet, by 2021 the fertility rate in more than half of the world’s countries and territories had already fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, which is necessary for generational replacement assuming no migration. The study also projected that by 2050, 76 percent of countries and territories will have fertility rates below replacement level, and by 2100, this number will rise to 97 percent. An article published around the same time in Science asserted that the global fertility rate may drop below the replacement level as soon as 2030, indicating a faster decline than previously expected.

The fall in birth rates is a profoundly destabilizing development with complex causes and ramifying consequences. It is almost as if whole societies were deciding to commit collective suicide. Whatever mix of factors explains this extraordinary development, most countries in the world will now have to deal with aging and shrinking populations. They will also have to face popular backlash at the massive migration that has to compensate for the shrinking working-age population and the shocked realization that even the strongest cultural identities are destined to vanish or be transformed beyond recognition within a few generations.

In the 21st century, demographic imagination has supplanted ideological imagination as the driving force shaping humanity’s collective vision of the future. This demographic imagination conjures up a society vastly different culturally from the one we currently inhabit, breeding fear rather than hope. And while demographic projections are often fallible, they nevertheless profoundly shape our expectations and perceptions, putting in question our collective sense of self.

The imperialist wars of the past were often motivated by Malthusian fears of growing populations outstripping the availability of natural resources, and European empires were mesmerized by Ukraine’s fertile “black earth” as the “breadbasket of Europe.” But Putin’s new “imperialistic” war in Ukraine appears to be fueled by a different set of demographic anxieties. He is right that dramatically changing demographics will profoundly affect the foundations of his power. Shrinking populations are rarely a sign of victory and success. The growing need for migrants, with the vast majority coming from Central Asia, is likely to provoke nativist backlash similar to what we witness in Europe.

At the heart of the Kremlin’s calculus seems to be the concern that Russia contains too few people to effectively capitalize on the new opportunities for mineral exploration and extraction in the Arctic region, which are emerging due to the thawing of the permafrost. In this sense, Putin’s territorial ambitions are no longer driven by a desire to secure vital natural resources for a burgeoning population, but rather by a fear that Russia’s shrinking and aging demographic cannot adequately harness the potential of its own vast geographic expanse. In the population wars of the 21st century, the struggle for supremacy is less about controlling territory than about maintaining the demographic strength to exploit it.

But on a more profound level, Russia’s demographic decline goes against the traditionalist turn in Putin’s politics. It breaks the intergenerational contract and challenges the Kremlin’s identity-building project. Understood in this context, Russia’s war in Ukraine is an especially brutal version of what is sometimes called “extinction rebellion.” Like radical environmental activists who glue themselves to the sidewalk, the Russian leader has embraced shockingly disruptive tactics to stave off the ultimate catastrophe, the sweeping away of his people and their culture.

It is emblematic that Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved the large-scale abduction of children, particularly orphans, who have been forcibly transported to Russia and adopted by Russian parents. These newly minted Russians were central to the way Putin defined the objectives of his “special operations.” Ukrainians were to be treated as a reserve army of future Russians destined to increase not simply the Russian Federation’s population but also to reverse the expected decline of the Slavic majority inside Russia, keeping in mind that any future immigration to Russia will mostly come from non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union and that some minority groups have higher birth rates than Russians.

We should understand Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine not only as a futile effort to reverse Russia’s population decline, but also as his way of combating what he sees as a Western conspiracy to make Russia “childless.” As he made clear in his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, Putin is convinced that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction. It is his firm conviction that liberal policies are weapons that the West is deploying to wipe Russia off the map.

Given that fertility rates are dropping across the world, we might have expected Putin to view population decline as a rather neutral process—a natural demographic transition resulting from improved material conditions and increased educational levels, especially among women. However, the Kremlin, in a fashion similar to its right-wing allies around the world, prefers to portray low birth rates as a consequence of Western feminism and LGBTQ-friendly policies that are purportedly designed to reduce the Russian population. It is no accident that the Russian Duma has recently adopted special legislation criminalizing the “propaganda of child-free life,” with the speaker of the house, Vyacheslav Volodin, stating, “It is important to protect people, primarily the younger generation, from having the ideology of childlessness imposed on them on the internet, in the media, in movies, and in advertising.”

In the political imagination of the Kremlin, Western civilization has fallen into irreversible decline, having lost its energy and vitality. Europe, in its view, resembles an “old folks home” managed by migrants. To preserve its power, the West, it believes, is seeking to weaken potentially more energetic civilizations, including Russia’s, by arresting their demographic potential.

In this context, the war in Ukraine is, for Putin, a war to allegedly liberate Ukrainian children from the West’s entrancement by bringing them to Russia. American efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine, seen from Putin’s perspective, amounted to a genocidal campaign against Russia and Russian culture. Brainwashing Ukrainians to hate Russia was allegedly part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to drive a wedge between two sides of a single historical civilization, between two countries “united by a shared history and culture, spiritual values, and millions of familial and human connections,” as Putin put it in a speech in June. By standing its ground against American cultural imperialism, Moscow is not only defending its own identity but also that of all non-Western cultures around the world from “intrusive external interference” by the United States. Russia is even, indirectly, defending Europe, as its current leaders fail to “think in historical categories,” and lose autonomy and cultural specificity under American “military, political, technological, ideological, and informational” domination.

Unlike some of his political allies in the West, Putin has never explicitly quoted the French philosopher René Girard. However, he would likely agree with Girard’s assertion that the world is threatened by apocalyptic “mimetic desire.” In the Kremlin’s view, Russian women are not rejecting motherhood because they distrust the future offered by the Russian state, but rather because they have imitated the decadent choices and behaviors of their Western counterparts. For Putin, it is only by breaking this “mimetic circuit” that Russia can hope to survive and reverse its demographic decline. That explains his battle to reassert Russia’s distinct cultural identity and insulate its citizens from the perceived corrosive effects of Western liberal modernity.

Russia’s demographic decline, viewed from Putin’s perspective, was not some natural process but the result of the West’s war against Russia and the new gender norms advocated by the West and deployed as weapons of cultural extermination. It is telling in this regard that other authoritarian regimes, too, have claimed that decadent western influences are responsible for the decline of the population in their countries. For example, religious authorities in Iran commonly blame “westoxification” for the lifestyle changes that have drastically reduced the country’s birth rate.

Fear of population decline and particularly the diminishing number of young people also resonates with a popular tradition of thinking about societies and civilizations in organic terms and analogizing their development to the life cycle of individuals.

If demographic anxiety was one of the major reasons for Russia to start the war, and if Putin’s decisions are largely shaped by catastrophic demographic imaginings, then Kyiv’s choices are increasingly dictated by the grim realities of Ukraine’s own demographic landscape. For Ukraine, the fear of population decline will likely be among the primary factors pushing its leadership to opt for a swift end to the war, even at the cost of losing a significant chunk of its territory. It is these demographic fears, rather than the unfavorable situation on the frontlines, that may prove to be the most decisive factor in determining when Ukraine chooses to seek a ceasefire.

Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world whose demographic prospects are worse than Russia’s. In 1991, when the country gained independence, its population was around 52 million people. However, a combination of low birth rates, early deaths, and massive out-migration has dramatically reduced this figure. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, there were roughly 41 million people living in Ukraine. The years since the beginning of the war have only exacerbated this demographic crisis, turning it into a catastrophe. According to the United Nations, over 6 million Ukrainians have left the country since the start of the war. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reports that the total population in Ukraine-controlled territory is now as low as 25 million. Alongside military deaths and mass emigration, Ukraine’s birth rate has also collapsed to its lowest recorded levels, with three times as many people dying as being born in the first half of 2024, according to state data.

The painful question now facing President Volodymyr Zelensky is: How many people can Ukraine lose in this war before losing its future? The answer to this question will define Kyiv’s definition of victory and defeat in the conflict. Initially, the Ukrainian leadership was focused on retrieving all of its occupied territories. There has now been a notable shift towards accepting a settlement that would guarantee Ukraine’s integration into NATO and the European Union, at the cost of losing a considerable amount of land—a scenario akin to how West Germany was created after World War II. Kyiv is acutely aware that a prolonged war will devastate Ukraine. A long war means not only more people killed and wounded, but also fewer babies born and fewer Ukrainians returning home from abroad. It was because of these demographic fears that, in the first two years of the war, Kyiv decided not to mobilize young men aged 18-24, dramatically reducing the quality of the Ukrainian armed forces but preserving the country’s demographic potential.

Russia’s war has brought it territories that are now depopulated and devastated, but not the influx of Russians that the Kremlin was hoping for. In the process, the conflict has demonstrated to the world that, contrary to Putin’s claims, Ukrainians are not “bewitched Russians.” The war is also forcing Ukrainian leaders to face the painful need to choose between preserving their people and preserving their territories.

The Russia-Ukraine war may portend the shape of violent conflicts to come, both domestic and international. That is because the rest of the world, too, is grappling with frightening demographic pressures and anxieties. Everywhere, it seems, the survival of collective identities hangs in the balance. The population loss experienced by historically dominant groups seems to be preparing the way for an upheaval of end-times aggression, enflamed by a primal fear of national extinction.

The war between Russia and Ukraine is sometimes described as a war of the past, a typical war of attrition. But it is much more radical and terrifying than that. It is the first modern “mourning war.” It is unlikely to be the last.

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stardust948 · 29 days ago

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To keep on theme with the recent Urzai week:

Do you have any headcanons for them? Either canon atla of your own au

I have some for both!

Canon:

It was always an arranged marriage whether Ursa was a noble's daughter or if we're following the comics and she grew up as a peasant. She and Ozai had a bit of an awkward start, but they learned to get along mainly out of survival. (The Fire Nation Courts are brutal especially when you're the Firelord's least favorite).

Ozai is lowkey a simp. Ursa said one genuine nice thing to him, and he nearly went into an angst coma.

Ursa reigned Ozai in a lot which is why things immediately went down the drain after she left.

PDA is frown upon for Fire Nation royalty, so Ozai would make up for it by buying a lot of gifts for Ursa.

Ozai always planned for Ursa to return and rule by his side which is why he never remarried. She eventually fell of radar and presumed dead.

Once Ursa returned after the war and sided with Zuko's anti-imperialism, Ozai saw it as a betrayal and personal rejection much like how Azula viewed Mai and Ty Lee after the Boiling Rock. (Yes, Ursa was previously an imperialist like the rest of the Fire Nation Royal family).

Brave is the heart that loves / Dragon AU:

Ozai and Ursa did shortly break up after they ran away together. Both were very stressed from trying to survive on the streets and got into a huge fight.

They spent a couple of days apart before tracking down each other. They both apologized and promised to support one another from then on.

Zuko was conceived that night.

Frenemies / High School AU:

They got together freshman year when Ozai filled as the Dragon King when the original actor Ikem got sick. It was Ozai's first real play in the Performing Arts high school he fought his father tooth and nail to enroll in, so of course he was nervous. But Ursa helped him through it.

They had an impromptu kiss on stage during opening night. The director liked it so much he added it to the script permanently. Ikem was highly pissed because he was going to use the play to confess to Ursa, but Ozai beat him to it.

They had an on again off again relationship throughout high school. It was either a lot of PDA or screaming matches. Sometimes both at the same time.

The relationship became toxic senior year, so Ursa broke up with Ozai for good. But by graduation, they were on friendly terms after some personal growth.

A few years later, they reunited at Hakoda and Kya's wedding and decided to give their relationship another chance. Since they're more mature this go round, it worked out and they get married sometime later.

Their friends, the rest of the Gaang's parents, NEVER let them live down their cringy high school years.

Apothecary AU:

Ozai set out to make Ursa his pawn, but he ended up becoming hers'.

He becomes legit depressed after Ursa was fired from her apothecary job to the point Iroh convinced Azulon to let her return.

Ursa loves it when Ozai drops his stern prince act and goofs around with her.

The whole palace knows they're courting before they do.

Ursa's a little unhinged in this AU and often experiments on herself to test the medicines. Ozai had learned the hard way not to eat her food or tea.

That said, Ursa was way too eager to help Ozai assassin Azulon. She had the poisons already picked out and ready to go. Ozai should be concern, but he's too far gone at this point.

Very match my freak energy.

Rivers in the desert AU:

Ozai and Ursa's relationship was really more of a partnership with benefits before they were forced to flee. After being separated, romantic feelings began to develop.

There is an inversion appearance wise. Ursa's darker skin tones, which made her stand out like a sore thumb in the royal courts, allowed her to pass for Earth Kingdom with the right clothes. Ozai is the exact opposite.

~Going into spoiler territory~

Ursa cannot, for the life of her, believe Ozai knows how to use a stove now. (Ursa: "Who are you and what have you've done with my husband???") Ozai took Ursa's airbending pretty well. (It was a long day and he's tired.)

Both had changed a lot once they reunite but Ozai a bit more self-conscious. He did not have access to his expensive beauty products for years and body type had changed. He's still fit but HIS abs are gone. (Nearly starving to death will do that). Ursa assures him it's alright and she likes that his body is softer now.

They both have gray hair strands (The Gaang is great, but we all know what they're like.)

Once the Fire Nation is defeated, they swear to not have any more kids. Kiyi was a pure accident.

@urzaiweekblog

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zvtara-was-never-canon · 1 year ago

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thoughts on ppl (not necessarily zutarians) saying that killing yon rah would've been good/relieving for katara?

Simple: these people don't understand Katara. At all.

Katara's Trauma

The attack on her village changed Katara's life forever. She was forced to face the ugly side of humanity, lost her mother, her dad left to fight the war, and she had to step up and basically raise her older brother. All of it because the Southern Raiders need to kill HER, not Kya.

War, grief, growing up too fast, survivor's guilt... all of it was throw at Katara at once, and even though she seems to be well-adjusted enough, episodes like The Swamp, in which we see just how desperately she wants her mom, or even the first episode itself, when she immediately gets emotionally attached to Aang because he gave her the chance to be a kid and have fun, show us that she's still struggling to process it all.

She 100% needs some form of closure. But what exactly can give her that, and at what cost?

Righteous Fury VS Blind Rage

Katara hates Yon Rha and wants him to pay for what he did to her mother, and by consequence to everyone who loved her. That is not a problem. In fact, it is the way anyone in her position would feel. Aang himself says that's how he felt towards the Fire Nation when he found out about the genocide of his people, and towards the sandbenders when they stole Appa - both times, that anger caused him to get into the Avatar state.

And Katara could not stand to see Aang like that. When he tried to weaponize it, she tried to talk him out of it. Why? Because that kind of reaction of violently lashing out, like nothing else matters ALWAYS leads to problems. That has been a consistent theme through the show.

Whenever Aang's grief triggers the Avatar state, everyone around him is terrified, and he got dangerously close to accidentally hurting people during it - and just the emotional distress of it all was so intense, he was having nightmares about it later.

Zuko had the awful habit of verbally attacking people who had done literally nothing to him whenever he got too upset about anything, and he even got the point of started a physical fight because a guy dared to talk to his girlfriend, who looked very bored listening to it. Not only did this kind of behavior push people away from him, but it also made Zuko miserable. Even his bending was affected by it, as his impatience and pride made him refuse to master the basics before moving onto the advanced set.

During the whole episode of "The Southern Raiders" Katara is taking out her anger at Yon Rha on the wrong people. She tells Sokka that he didn't love their mom as much as she did, does NOT give Zuko a much needed telling off when he mocks the culture of Aang's people - ya know, the one his family commited genocide against - which she 100% would have done at any other time, is pushing herself too hard and looking exhausted as she flies on Appa, and even uses bloodbending willingly for the first time ever... on the wrong guy.

Sure, he was still an imperialist scumbag, but considering Katara was horrified after using it on Hama, who had literally been using it to capture and torture innocent people and tried to force Sokka and Aang to kill each other right in front of her, it's safe to say Katara would not see that as enough to excuse her own actions.

Katara is not being "empowered" in her quest for revenge. She is spiralling out of control and basically crying out for help without even realizing it. She has every right to be angry, but she's letting it take over her.

(Note: Her being angry at/not trusting Zuko even after everyone else befriended him is NOT misplaced anger like the episode claims. Zuko might not be as bad as Yon Rha, but he gave Katara plenty of reason to dislike him).

Action, Inaction & Guilt

Kya's death, and the attack against their tribe, was the definition of injustice, and Katara wants that to be corrected. Obviously it is impossible to undo it all, but there's still time to punish the people who caused it.

However, we cannot forget that Katara is 14-years-old. She's a child fighting the adults' war, like her friends. A child that had to hear her older brother say that when he heard the word "mom" he thought of her now. Not only is that unfair, it is also one of the main things that Katara had been trying to escape for a long time: not being allowed to be a kid.

Obviously, neither her nor the rest of the Gaang have the option of just not trying to stop Ozai - especially not after the failed invasion on the day of the eclipse, that had a ton of the adults on their side imprisoned.

But for a long time, she also did not have the option to go after Yon Rha directly. She didn't know his name, didn't know what position he held, had no idea how to track him. He was completely out of reach until Zuko gave her a lead to follow. Katara now had the option to confront her mother's killer and punish him for what he had done - even though that was not her obligation, since she was just a child.

But did she really see it that way? Like I said, Yon Rha had been after HER, not Kya - who only died because she lied to protect her child. Survivor's guilt could have very easily played a part on Katara's decision, and honestly I think some of the dialogue sugests that it did. She does not argue when Zuko says that forgiving is the same as doing nothing, and even her "Then you didn't love her like I did" to Sokka after he objected to her mission could be seen as her letting slip that, deep down, she believes that if she doesn't avenge her mom, doesn't "make up to her" for "causing" her death, then it means she did not really love her. And she deliberately mentions Kya's lie saving her life both to Zuko and to Yon Rha.

Katara isn't going after him just out of anger - she feels this is her responsibility. Her burden. Once again, this is not her being "empowered" enough to punish a wicked man. This is her falling into the trap of thinking she's not allowed to not want that weight on her shoulders.

A Forgotten Man

When Katara finally confronts her mother's murder, he is very different from the terrifying man she remembered. Sure, he can still use his bending a bit, but he clearly has not fought in a while, is easily overpowered, and is the definition of cowardly. He doesn't have any allies with him anymore, just his elderly mother that seems to hate him as much as he hates her. The cruel, oppressive system he was once a part of has chewed him up and spat him out. Nobody gives a damn what happens to this miserable bastard.

Now, obviously he doesn't want to die, especially not if the person who will take him out has EVERY REASON to make it slow and painful, but considering what we saw of his life, I wouldn't be surprised if he was the type that would just lay his head on a pillow at night and think "Wouldn't it be nice if I just never woke up again?"

THIS is the man Katara sees before her. Like she said, someone that is pathetic, sad and empty. Someone that would not be missed by literally anyone - not his mother, not his community, not the Fire Lord. Someone that offered her the head of the one family he still has left.

Kya meanwhile had a happy life before the Southern Raiders came to her tribe. She was a brave, loving mother that sacrificed her very life to protect her child, and left behind a family that is still grieving her.

This would not be "an eye for an eye" Yon Rha's death could NEVER come even close to be enough to "pay his debt" because it was absolutely worthless.

But does that mean that Katara confronting him at all was pointless?

Healing

By the end of the episode, after deciding to spare that bastard,Katara is being comforted by Aang, her best friend - like she had always done for him after he'd get into the Avatar state - and giving a second chance to her former enemy. She has also made it very clear that she will not forgive her mother's killer. Not now, not ever.

But this does not mean that she's back on square one. She faced her biggest trauma, confronted the monster that had been haunting her all her life, and acknowledged her anger and accepted that it will ALWAYS be there, but without allowing it to turn her into something she's not.

It is simmilar to her fight with her dad at the start of Book 3. After suppressing all the resement she felt after he left them to go fight against the Fire Nation, then taking her anger out on him, she broke down and accepted her pain, her vulnerability. She admited that, at the end of the day, she's just a child that wanted her dad with her, and now that Hakoda is there again, she CAN have that.

Naturally, there's nothing Yon Rha could say or do to make things better. But by facing him, giving him a taste of his own medicine, leaving him to rot, and then helping take down the very system that allowed people like him to commit attrocities everywhere, Katara finally got some closure. The grief will always be with her, but it won't define her anymore. She no longer has to be the adult figure of her family, she no longer has to wonder where that evil monster that took her mom from her is hiding and if he's making new victims.

Conclusion

Yon Rha was a horrible person, and if Katara had killed him, nobody could have judged her, and it sure as hell would NOT have made her just as bad or worse than him.

She needed to face him. She needed to let her anger out, to show him all the pain he had put her and her family through, to make him feel as powerless and scared as she and her mother had been.

But she did not need to stoop to his level. He did not deserve her forgiveness, but she did not need to sacrifice what was left of her innocence to put him out of his misery. He was just not worth it. Killing him would have been just violence for the sake of violence, and that is not in Katara's nature, and would have NOT helped her with literally anything. Quite the contrary.

She didn't spare his life for his sake, but for her own.

#anti zutara #katara meta #southern raiders

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hussyknee · 2 years ago

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Regular reminder that if you don't live in the Global North, nothing they have to say applies to the rest of us. Actually most things they say have little value anyway since the Global South and Eastern folks are afterthoughts to them, much less center us in their social justice.

- The USAmerican cultural hegemony has fuck all to do with us. Be aware of what they're trying to peddle you, but they have more power to harm and radicalise you than you have ever could to harm them. This applies to both the Western left and right wing. They are both equally racist, colonial and imperialist.

- Global North issues around capitalism, exploitation and piracy have nothing to do with us. Consumer activism might work to some extent over there idk, but if anyone brings it up over in the lands of the Black and brown people, you can laugh them out of the country.

- Their queer history is not ours. Congrats to Stonewall and all but that's just some shit that happened in the US. We need to dig past 18 different strata of cultural genocide and colonial garbage to mine our queer histories back into the light, and designing microlabel flags and fighting over colonizer language acronyms have fuck all to do with that either.

- Always pirate everything within reach. Save up and buy from authors and creators you really like (that's what I do – esp when it's a BIPOC creator), but people who can't afford to buy shit in the first place ain't stealing food out of anybody's mouths. Pirating is praxis and always has been since the days of the East India Company.

- Don't buy into the USAmerican theories of race. They aren't universal. "BIPOC" especially is a USAmerican specific term, it is not used in the UK or other settler colonies. Constructs of race and the tribal Other far predated European colonization; race as a colour system that exists today is simply one variation of it. The global apartheid against the mellanated takes many forms, histories and terminology. There are especially no "people of colour" in Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Polynesia. There are only people who live there, and "people of white".

Race is a fake, made-up conceptualization imposed by whoever has power within each region. It's ethnic, cultural and casteist, with no biological basis whatsoever. There is no uniformity, no universalism, no rhyme nor reason to any of it; the only people who know exactly who doesn't belong are the oppressors. I'm seeing concepts like "unambiguously black" floating around the terminally online Western left; any dark-skinned person of the Global South should split their sides laughing at it. Whites have no ambiguity on who the darkies are.

- Read, watch, listen to, play whatever the hell you want, just have the sense to pirate it, and to be very conscious about the narratives they try to smuggle.

- When the US and UK speak, listen with compassionate interest, offer what solidarity you can spare for their downtrodden, and then go back to reading and following your own fucking news. Focus on our own women's and reproductive rights, trans rights, queer histories, rise of fascism, militarisation, anti-blackness, class warfare, nationalist violence, imperialism etc. That is decolonization, that is emancipation from the Western cultural hegemony. Everything else is the bread and circuses of empire, in which both the left and right wing of the West are complicit.

We owe the Global North nothing more than we can each individually afford to extend to them on grounds of common human decency and compassion. Which is a lot more than they will ever reciprocate.

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apollos-olives · 1 year ago

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Hi, I appreciate your effort on spreading the words about Palestine on this website that's been suppressing Palestine content so much these days. I've been posting about Palestine and got shadowbanned on my other account. I just want to say something.

Regarding the last ask about white queers, I as an Asian (Vietnamese) queer can definitely tell that the queer liberals are very unproductive. I can tell from many people even my friends, who are staunchly against the West, lumping queerness with Western value (despite our culture is rich of drag queens and homosexuality has always been there) and therefore very queerphobic. Queer liberals cannot and must not stand with the oppressor bc the oppressed are homophobic, which yes so many times the homophobia from the oppressed comes from the oppressor. A lot of queer spaces being this reactionary makes me don't want to join a lot of queer spaces.

I also feel like the conversation around why people support Palestine has been very strange. People using various amounts of idealistic reasoning, but the number one reason that I and pretty much 80% of the world would agree on is that it's the fight of the oppressed against the oppressor, and 80% of the world had been in the place of the oppressed. I was lucky to not live in those times in history, but I was taught and told to never forget our oppressed history, of more than 127 years fighting the colonialists and imperialists. Our hospital was also bombed, our cities destroyed, villagers massacred. When I saw the Palestinian doctors said they will stay here for Palestine, it reminds me of my grandma who said the exact same about Vietnam. Palestinians arguably had it significantly worse than us Vietnamese during our war time with that total blockade, so I as a Vietnamese wants to share the struggle with them too.

Also Idk why an one-state Palestine solution is so hard to imagine to people. We Vietnamese also had been subjected to a two-state solution as well, and what happened after reunification is very simple. Most of the people just stayed and became citizens of the new united Vietnam, some fleed to other countries. If Palestine unification happens it would be similar imo. A lot of arguments against the one-state solution comes from just pure projection bc Israel afraid of what they're doing to Palestinians will be done to them

Anyway that's just my two cent about Palestine from a Vietnamese perspective. Free Palestine now and forever.

hi and yes i'm doing as much as i can to try to spread what's going on. i'm not typically afraid of getting shadowbanned right now, but i understand how much that hurts and affects other people who are also trying to spread awareness.

you're right about the way that queerness is often grouped up with the concept of the west and white majority countries. and that (white lib) queers would happily side with the oppressor out of the fear that they would be further oppressed by the other group that is being oppressed itself. this is just one of the many ways that propaganda twist the narrative and tries to split up minorities, and this entire belief of "us and them" is only going to hurt everyone in the end. we, as oppressed minorities, need to stand together against the oppressor, not be against each other.

i'm not gonna add much onto what you said about vietnam, since you already said pretty much everything, but it is saddening to see how so many people can relate to what's going on in palestine because of how much colonization has impacted their life and own culture and country. it genuinely is so unfortunate, and no one deserves to go through the horrors of colonization and being horrifically oppressed. i wouldn't wish that on even the zionists (and i fucking HATE those guys).

you're right about the one state solution thing. the only reason people fear it is because they are scared that the palestinians will do to them the same thing they did to us. it's a sad delusion.

thank you for speaking up though, free palestine 🇵🇸

#palestine #free palestine

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mandalorianchronicles · 2 years ago

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Did Bo-Katan ever believe in Mandalorians being Mandalorian by "blood"?

So one thing I keep on seeing Bo-Katan accused of is this idea that she believes the Mandalorians are Mandalorians by blood. I believe this started when the Armorer said she took the title of Mand'alor by right of blood and the Darksaber, which anyone who watched Rebels would know was not the case. She has never said or done anything to make me believe that she held that view. If ever she did, she certainly doesn't now, as the writers have made exceedingly clear. But did she before?

It was Satine and the New Mandalorians who held the view that Mandalorians could be a race of people or, at the very least, a nationality. Those who held to the old ways, The Faithful, always believed that Mandalorians were Mandalorian by creed, not by blood. When Death Watch formed as a sect of the Faithful, they also held that view. They wanted to return to the ancient ways of Mandalorians when they were conquerors, and they certainly taught their followers that anyone could become Mandalorian as long as they followed the creed. This was canon in The Clone Wars, by the way.

Now, I've heard people argue that Bo-Katan also believes in right of bloodlines because she said things like "My family once ruled all of Mandalore". That in no way means that her family believed they had the right to rule because of "royal blood". Mandalorians are a religion of warriors. Warriors require an enemy in order to be warriors. They fought each other for dominance.

In the old days, the Tuang conquered those who lived on neighboring worlds and subjugated them. They were imperialists who presided over the mass genocide of many races. Eventually, when their race began to die, they started teaching their slaves and vassals to follow the resol'nare too - that's how humans and other species first became Mandalorian. In the present, most Mandalorians are human. In centuries past, when their expansionist efforts were repeatedly thwarted by the Jedi and the Republic, they were forced to stop trying to colonize. But a warrior society still needs an enemy to fight. So the clans turned on each other and began jockeying for power. This isn't to say that the clans didn't struggle for power before, only that it became all out civil war when they didn't have a common enemy to unite them. Those wars wrought terrible destruction on their planets, evident on the surface of Mandalore and the ruins of Concord Dawn. Rebels really delves into the cold, hard facts of Mandalorian culture and their self destructive nature.

Over the centuries, certain clans rose to power and stayed in power. Clans that held the fealty of lesser clans became Houses. House Vizsla and House Kryze were two such families. They ruled because they were strong. Those houses were comprised of family members who were born into the clan and some who were adopted into the clan. Whether you were born into it, or adopted into it, you were raised to become a Mandalorian. Their children were (mostly) taught to be warriors. I say mostly because the old canon when TCW was being written tells us that the New Mandalorians had been around for centuries, and that there were family members of even the great houses who had people on both sides. There's some disagreement on when the ideals of the New Mandalorians came about in the current canon. The Mandalorian concurred with the old canon that Bo (and probably her older sister, Satine) had been taught the warrior ways by their father, who was a powerful warlord and the head of House Kryze. We don't know if Satine ever took the creed like Bo-Katan did, but it's implied that she did not when Bo says that "she [Bo] didn't embarrass her father". I don't know how opposed to fighting Satine was in her youth, but when she was sent to Coruscant to protect her during the conflict, she became an all out pacifist. Honestly, though I think pacifism is flawed to its core, I can understand her desire to remake Mandalore into a more traditional society, since years of civil war had driven Mandalorians to the brink of extinction. But to rebuild a civilization, one must break the old one - so all traditional Mandalorians who believed in the creed and followed the warrior ways were banished to Mandalore's moon, Concordia. Adonai Kryze was killed in the Great Clan Wars, and so began the downfall of House Kryze. Bo's nephew, Korkie, was raised in a society where Mandalorians were Mandalorian by blood. Bo would have also also raised in this society until she was old enough to be on her own and she left her remaining family to join Death Watch.

Death Watch was fighting against the ideas of a Mandalorian race or nation, but the tactics they used to achieve their goal of removing Satine and her government from power were brutal and dishonorable. However, it's important to note that their brutality was in keeping with the ancient culture of the original Mandalorians - the Tuang. Yes, they were terrorists. Yes, they were brutal and they treated weaker people terribly. But, that's actually in keeping with the old ways. Since they are also followers of ancient tradition, I'm extremely curious what the Armorer and the Children of the Watch will want to do with their strength and power once they do retake Mandalore, but that's another matter.

We see the subject of bloodlines come up as a very serious matter in Chapter 22, Guns for Hire. Axe Woves is young enough that he was probably introduced to the ideas of Mandalorians by blood when he was small, as Bo-Katan was. We don't know when he became a part of Bo-Katan's Nite Owls. He may not have been with her during her time with Death Watch, joining her sometime in the years that followed, after the Empire rose to power. In any case, just because he carried over those beliefs into adulthood doesn't mean that she did. There were people in Death Watch who believed different things, obviously; that's why they split when Maul gained the Darksaber, even if it was by creed.

As of yet, there is no evidence that Bo-Katan ever believed that Mandalorians were Mandalorian by blood instead of creed. She believed in the greatness of her family, but she never insinuated they ruled because it was their right by blood, as opposed to the honor they had earned as capable and powerful warriors. Mandalorians are supposed to be loyal to their clan, always fighting to put their family first. Whether you're born into it or adopted into it, your family is everything. When Satine rejected everything they had been taught, Bo considered their family ties severed, and she sought her own sister's death. But when Maul murdered Satine and took the Darksaber, she saw the wrongness of it all. She has been walking the line of retaining their warrior culture while also uniting their people and stopping the endless bloodshed (that she was once a part of) ever since the end of the Clone Wars.

Personally, I don't believe Bo-Katan's belief in Mandalorians by creed instead of blood began with her introduction to the CoTW. She's been with them for too short a time for there to be that much change in deeply held beliefs. Her conviction that Din was just as much a Mandalorian as the rest of them was heartfelt and passionately spoken. I think this is something she has believed for a long time. But, even if it isn't, we are seeing that this is a woman who believes in the resol'nare, even if she doesn't believe in the "add-ons" (ancient tradition or otherwise) that the CoTW have adopted. And if there's one thing that we (and Bo-Katan) learned in TCW and Rebels, it's that neither old ways nor new ways are necessarily good ways. They have a chance to make Mandalore into a truly good society, and I think that Bo-Katan is the perfect person to lead them into that because she's seen both extremes and rejected both. She can forge a better way forward for their people...Din certainly believes so.

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #bo-katan kryze #axe woves #din djarin #the armorer #the children of the watch #death watch #the new mandalorians #duchess satine kryze #satine kryze #adonai kryze

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rawliverandgoronspice · 2 years ago

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Hello.

You and gay-jesus-probably have successfully made me question everything with your view that Tears of the Kingdom is imperialist propaganda, so that's been fun.

Anyway, I decided to share this discussion with the Zelda fans on reddit, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them disagreed. Here is what they said (I'm Alarming_Afternoon44):

So what do you think? Have I and all these other people just been duped by the game's manipulative framing? Or do they actually have a point?

And if you'd rather not answer this, or would prefer if I censored the usernames, just tell me and I'll delete this.

Hey! Thanks a lot for reaching out, and I'm glad it made you think stuff through!!

Honestly, as I mentioned in this post, I am not super interested about in-world conversations about who oppresses who, because what can be assessed from the game is super vague and more vibes-based than evidence-based. Within the text, of course that the Good Zonais are good and the Bad Ganondorf is bad! But that's my whole point! The narrative has been deliberately crafted so that the zonais and Rauru (and Hyrule) are as blameless as possible (and it's not doing a great job at it overall to be frank; we would not be having these conversations about how offputting it all feels for a non-zero number of people if it did do a great job). More importantly, I want to focus on what sort of real-life narrative it all parallels. Because people make stories, and people live in the real world.

Not going after everyone's throat here, gamedev is hard and the hydras that are AAA game production do end up doing super weird stuff, especially since the thematic ramifications are absolutely never prioritized (and it's also always the same kind of people who make the final calls and push out what can and can't be talked about also). And as fans, we tend to have trouble stepping outside the lens of lore and take a look at the bigger picture sometimes; not as an attack on any individual part of that decision-making process but to just pause, stop, and question our standards, our priorities and the kind of reality (or skewing of reality) the stories we tell each other reflect.

Again: do we want to take videogames seriously or not? If we do, then we need to accept they are a vehicle for ideology, just like any other artform. And sometimes, you push out questionable ideology, sometimes without meaning to, because you didn't unpack your own biases as you did. And it's even fine to do it, nobody is perfect, a 300+ people team spread over 6 years certainly will not be that. But that it wasn't prioritized is, in my opinion, a problem. As a narrative designer, I want games (at least the narrative side) to be held to a higher standard than this. It's literally my job to work with the industry so it can hold itself to higher standards of quality --so the whole TotK situation is quite frustrating to witness from a very pragmatic, work perspective where I already spend my days trying to convince people that things mean things. I have a vested interest here in not having the companies I work for being given a free pass by gamers to do literally whatever as long as it's fun, especially when we're talking about a billion-dollars company suing its own fans left and right for any perceived slight. Nintendo are not underdogs here. It's fine to point out they cut corners and maybe promoted messy ideologies, voluntarily or not.

So long story short: no I don't believe anyone here has a point in regards to what I think is actually important, which is why these choices were made in the first place. If you look at an imperialist text expecting the text to tell you that it's imperialist instead of recognizing a framing used for propaganda by yourself, you're never gonna find any imperialist text ever, obviously not!! I'm sorry if I sound a little gngngn here, but I don't know why audiences have, at large, this feeling that lore and story beat decisions materialize themselves already formed and without any human bias, meddling, intervention, internal politics or approximations (it seems that people can only conceptualize this part if they have actual names to attach to the story, but without clear authors it's like there are no authors and so no bias, which is... a very strange bias in itself). I can promise you that it does not work that way in practice: every narrative department on every big game is a battlefield --some nicer than others, but all of them very emotionally draining either way.

So yeah, I guess that on these grounds, I disagree with every point raised here. Sorry Reddit :/

But thank you for the ask and sorry if I didn't go more into details as to why. The big Why I Dislike Rauru Post and the Gerudo Post might have some more specific rebuttals, but I am not super interested in debating small detail stuff tbh. I feel like it's no use if the frame of reference isn't being understood in the first place.

#totk spoilers #totk #totk critical #thoughts #asks #yeah I just disagree with a lot of these in general but I just don't feel like going through them one by one sorry ;_;#feel like I'm starting to repeat myself #especially for a game I liked okay but will definitively not revisit in the long run #tho @ the last redditor: yes thank you for proving my point because do you actually know about afghanistan's recent history :))#like... who funded the mujahideens' war not so long ago :))))) and for what purpose :)))))))))#everything said by that redditor is 100% far right propaganda it's not even a little bit anything else it's textbook applied imperialism #it's.... yeah how do you want to have these sorts of conversations when the real life parallels are unackowledged #I don't know it's just.... so frustrating to me that so many people have such a hard time to unpack external influences in media #or do not know how to pull apart thematic framings from in-world fluff #sorry if I sound a little dry but it's just... it's all a bit tiring honestly #I'm glad this made you reconsider things! or that you took the time to read stuff through even!! thank you!!!#and thanks for compiling the whole thing!!#I feel like it's a good way of showcasing well... the narrative doing a good job at defending itself #but not disputing that the entire framing is deeply flawed #at least in my opinion

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researchgate · 1 year ago

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radblr would rather side with a terrorist group that wants to put women under sharia law and throws gay ppl from rooftops over supporting Jewish people. it's sick. also something I've noticed is how both on radblr and the left in general were always walking on eggshells when it comes to criticizing anything/anyone muslim and the pattern is lowkey similar both w misogyny and antisemitism. for instance it's ok to talk about white men's violence used as a colonial tool (and that should be the case of course btw!). but somehow european women (of all races) expressing concern and fear about Muslim migrants extreme levels of misogyny are privileged bitches (mind you eastern european/balkan radfems have had our people subjugated by muslim imperialists and our foremothers were raped and sex trafficked but hey we're privileged white women so we should shut up ig). Similarly when it comes to antisemitism, it's apparently ok for Muslim countries to pretend hatred of Jewish people is a European only issue and deny the pogroms and ethnic cleansing of MENA Jews. all while antisemitism is on the rise on the left, including by (though of course not limited to) muslim people.

This is so real. And then they say you basically just said reverse racism is a thing when it was never said. When you just said "hey, white women are also victims of misogyny" , they'll come at you like starving vultures come at a carcass of an animal. Like chill gyns. I think some people took the axis of oppression concept way too literally and decided that unless your axes intersect you can't truly be oppressed. At the same time they'll (correctly) say female pets are less likely to be adopted or something like that, because females are viewed as inferior regardless of species, but then treat Jewish women as inferior or subhuman when they were raped and brutalized.

Also, whenever a non-poc woman dared speaking about non-white men being misogynistic towards women of any ethnicity/race, she'd be labeled a racist, and one could only make a point of these men being misogynistic if their misogyny was against other women of color. The oppressed can violate too, and if we take the axes of oppression concept and apply it, one can oppress another on one axis, but the other can oppress the first on another axis. But that's too complex for them. If the rape is done by the Oppressed, then it's okay, especially if the victim passes as white (in their personal standards). They're no different than the leftist men who use "cis white women" before going on misogynistic rants.

And god the amount of genocide denial when it comes to Jewish people's victimhood is fucking annoying. True ethnic cleansing happened in the Arab countries in the 1940's and Muslim countries in general since the 1920s. The reason that nowadays Jewish genetic makeup is diverse is because Jewish people were forced to flee from each place they stayed at, not before several generations of Jewish women were raped by locals. It's honestly laughable to see how people don't give a flying fuck about Jewish history when they make claims about Jews. Well, it would have been laughable if it weren't a clear sign of antisemitism (also, maybe we should start just saying Jew-hatred, so that the "Arabs are semite too" folks will not have any way to sway the conversation lol. Because regardless of how many times you tell them it replaced Judenhass, they keep using their dumb mantra).

also don't get me STARTED about the Balkans and (especially) the ottoman imperialists. People around can see through Erdogan's actions well that he wants a second ottoman empire but fail to realize just how TERRIBLE it was! How kids were taken from their parents into the army, or how parents were encouraged to sell their sons to the army so they know he gets food and education, how women were sold as slaves into harems for either sexual or other forms of servitude. But what about the Sultanate of Women?? They'll ask, not knowing it's a term given by male historians to describe a century they viewed as failed and bad in terms of success. even though this sultanate of women was only possible because the Valide Sultan was the closest adult to the sultans who wer children. That they spoke from behind a curtain as to not be seen at any cost. This was the "sultanate of women". Glorious, feminist, and stunning, isn't it?

I'm so sick of the pandering to non-white men as if they're some precious fragile figurines and not while men who are capable of misogyny just as much as a white man. If we agree Islam is a misogynistic religion, surely we can agree that its male followers are misogynistic and terrible, regardless of their skin color, right? Apparently not! Apparently if they commit a misogynistic hate crime against a white woman it's okay because they're the oppwessed and she's the vile terrible oppressor. So fucking stupid.

honestly idek if Muslims can be considered as included in the Left because Islamic values are certainly different than leftist ones. Had the right wing been less racist and more accepting of the other, even just a little bit, they'd find many similarities between them and islam lol. But the left is far more "open minded" (unless it's Jews) and less racist (unless it's Jews), so they find their allies in the liberals they hate and whom will have next to no rights if not none at all under shari'ah law.

It's absolutely infuriating, isnt it?

Sorry for the rant, btw. Thank you for your ask!

#anonymous #asks #ipc #antisemitism #antisemitism on the left #antisemitism on radblr #f: other

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