just endlessly thinking about blue eye samurai.
thinking about how akemi, taigen, and mizu are if a coin had three sides or maybe just the two and mizu is the bridge of metal between them.
akemi being the ideal image for women, for the life they endure. she was simultaneously a princess, a prostitute, and a prisoner. her entire life was men making decisions for her, even the ones that had good intentions, and she believed her deepest desire was freedom. it still is, but she has been revealed to this heinous predicament of her gender, and she’s realized that to reach true freedom as a woman is to be the bird in the cage, to play nice and to earn the love of a man until he buys her a bigger cage and a bigger cage until he trusts her not to fly away. and it'll never be true freedom, but it will come with power. it'll come with the freedom of only one master rather than many.
taigen being the ideal image of a man. not all powerful, but not weak. he had a taste of what it'd be to succeed, and when it was taken from him, that easy success, he mistook it for his honor. he hunted mizu down to kill him, and instead he saved him. he saved him and saved him and he came closer to killing mizu when they were on the cliff's edge, and just when he gets to the point where he may actually fight mizu, he's tortured for information on him. he is tortured. Literally tortured within an inch of his life, enduring such a heinous violence, and he refuses to break. this man was a fight, was the torturer, and the victim of his torturing could've been his salvation from pain but he refused. mizu gave back taigen's honor but not by fighting him.
akemi wanted freedom and learned she would need power to have it.
taigen wanted power and learned that the violence that came with it was infinite and dishonorable.
and then there's mizu. mizu who wants revenge, wants acceptance. arguably the same things as them both. mizu wants acceptance, the freedom of living and the freedom to love and be loved. mizu wants revenge, which follows after violence and power, to get said acceptance. she thinks she must do both, have both, to live peacefully, and she's blatant about how she will not live without either.
she's given acceptance with the blacksmith, her "mother," her husband, but she sees the flecks of avoidance in it.
the blacksmith will not hear of her true gender. her "mother" will not acknowledge the crime of her birth. her husband can't find tolerance for the violence within her, the man of her.
and so she has to balance the woman and man of her, the ronin and the bride. taigen and akemi. and it's meeting mizu that they start to unravel their own identities.
mizu, who is both, and akemi and taigen who thought themselves one but turned out to be neither.
god.
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If I keep seeing people (largely Americans and Canadians, let’s be real) 1:1 compare the Israel-Palestine conflict to the colonialisation of Canada and America I might actually explode. As a First Nations woman with multiple history degrees and a law degree I can tell you with certainty that from every angle it is an utterly asinine and disingenuous comparison that doesn’t work, at all. The fact that people often cast Palestinians in the role of “poor oppressed colonised people” and Israel/Jews as a whole in the role “evil oppressive white coloniser” just makes it even worse, especially since Jews have lived in and occupied Israel before both Islam and Christianity even existed. So if you really want to play the “who was there first game” and boil everything down to that, I promise you, Jewish people will win that game, as they were there for thousands of years before the idea of Islam was even a glimmer in Muhammed’s eye.
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Okay we’re all making jokes about Daemon’s little Oedipal episode but I do think it is a really good way to show just how the Targ incest-superiority-exceptionalism fucks everyone in this family up. You get taught literally from birth to find romantic and sexual intimacy in your familial relationships.
You’re Daemon. You’re a son so you ought to marry your sister. But you have no sister, only an older brother who REALLY ought to have a sister to marry. And this is how things must be. Your parents are brother and sister, THEIR parents are brother and sister. It must be brother and sister but you have no sister. Do you become the sister then? But you can’t, because that’s wrong too. You are a son, you must be a son and act as a son. And you should love your brother as only a brother. And this is how things must be. But how can you when you’ve been taught not to? How can you when you know if you had been a girl, you wouldn’t be allowed to just see him as a brother. He is your brother. You should have been his wife. But you never can be. And this is how things must be. You never knew your mother. But she is a woman and she is related to you. And haven’t you always been taught exactly what that means in this family? You’ve crossed so many boundaries but now suddenly there is a line. You don’t think you really want her in this way. But you never knew her and you don’t know how else to show love in this family. You don’t know how to love her as family in a life where family means lover. Except when it doesn’t. And gods forbid you cross that line and desire your family in a way that is suddenly wrong. This is how things must be.
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Melora: My siblings have an obsession with the humanoids and it’s really weirding me out.
Also Melora: Where’s my favorite halfling? Where’s my bestest boy? There he is! Here’s a treat.
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