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kelseyeroberts · 4 years ago

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Pointless War in Howl’s Moving Castle

How Miyazaki Renegotiates Imperialist Assumptions By Kelsey Roberts When the 75th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was declared to be Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the room erupted into enthusiastic applause for the director and his passionate team at Studio Ghibli. However, neither Miyazaki nor any of his employees stepped forward to receive the award. In fact, his presence, or lack thereof, was quickly and conspicuously glossed over by the Award announcer, Cameron Diaz, who accepted the award on behalf of the Academy before the show continued on. That Miyazaki would miss an invitation to his first nomination, and only win, at the Academy Awards was indicative of something much more powerful than recognition for the arts. Two years prior, on September 20th, 2001, United States President George W. Bush addressed the nation after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. In his impassioned speech, Bush declared that any forces opposed to the United States and their War on Terror, were choosing to side with terrorism. With lines clearly drawn in the sand, Hayao Miyazaki stood back and said “no” to making any decision at all. In fact, he made it very clear on several occasions that he would not visit a country that was dropping bombs on another. At the time of the 75th Academy Awards and the success of his movie Spirited Away, Miyazaki remained resolutely in Japan, working on an emphatically pacifist cinematic reply to the ultimatums presented by the world’s most boisterous military presence.

English poet and novelist Diana Wynne Jones published Howl’s Moving Castle, the first novel in a series of magical children’s books, in April of 1986. The plot centers around a young woman named Sophie Hatter and her dealings with the eponymous Howl Jenkins, a womanizing wizard who travels through time and space via a magically “moving” castle. Ingary, the fictional country in which the story takes place, is full of magic and fairytales, supplying a handy backdrop for deeper questions the character’s face throughout the story. Does a character’s agency matter if fairytales are true and magic supplies near limitless power to some and not others? Sophie, believing a fairytale assumption that she has nothing to achieve other than quiet spinsterhood, resigns herself to this fate, just before being dumped headfirst into an epic romance featuring curses, witches, and kings. Howl, with the might of magic on his side and no earthly consequence to face in result of his endless agency and selfishness, realizes the impressive force of responsibility, though only when it comes to the people in his care. He willingly chooses to lessen his own agency to protect and provide for Sophie and his family. The end finds them reaching an equilibrium of agency and responsibility, of destiny and magic, to live happily in their mystical country. Unfortunately, Wynne Jones’ novel remained unawarded during the original print of the novel, and faded quietly to the shelves of children’s libraries until Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki happened to read it while visiting Strasbourg, France.

Struck by the magical environment of Ingary (no doubt flavored by his recent trip to Strasbourg) and the question of just how a magical castle would move, Miyazaki quickly had Studio Ghibli purchase rights to a feature length film. In 2001, the studio announced that it had begun production of the film with Miyazaki at the helm as director and featuring a musical score created by the equally prolific Joe Hisaishi. Entranced by Wynne Jones’ descriptions of Ingary, Miyazaki chose to return to France, this time to Alsace, to study both architecture and surrounding natural settings to use in his storyboards. The film’s castle designs, and by extension all representations of both technology and magic throughout, were heavily inspired by the French artist and novelist Albert Robida. Robida, a futurist who died in the 1920s, envisioned future technology to be integrated more fully into the everyday, rather than the notions of mad-scientists and scientific abominations that were more popular with his peers. This naturally absorbing technology is reflected in the aliveness of Miyazaki’s interpretation of the moving castle and the visual incorporation of Industrial-era technologies into the practice of Ingarian magic. After spending 3 years in production, and consisting of approximately 1400 storyboards, Howl’s Moving Castle was released to Japanese audiences on November 20th, 2004vi. The film was distributed by Toho in Japan before being dubbed into English by the Walt Disney Company for release in the United States on June 10th, 2005. Howl’s Moving Castle was nominated for Best Animated Film at the 78th Academy Awards and as of 2020, it stands as the fifth most successful film released by the country of Japan.

Methods

By choosing to create a film to critique the war practices of the United States of America, Miyazaki is likewise critiquing the ideologies that lead nations like the United States to interfere politically, economically, and militarily in other countries. These ideologies, also called hegemonic structures, work to perpetuate themselves in the minds of the privileged that enact these ideologies upon the oppressed. In an effort to define the differences between those privileged by Western ideology and those oppressed under it, Albert Memmi suggests that he doubts that an entitled citizen’s “gullibility can rest on a complete illusion.” In other words, those that privilege from Western ideologies are at some level aware of this inequality and choose to deny its existence to preserve their own benefits. While the recent actions of the United States military, including the invasion of the country of Iraq, have been analyzed and critiqued politically, there have been few direct consequences to those that directed the military. In fact, military expenditure in the United States is still the highest of any country in the world. Only by directly confronting the concept of war, without valorizing or propagandizing the actions and reactions of countries or ideologies, can violent hegemonies be broken down and effective discussion can truly begin.

The strength of these hegemonies is aided by the continuous circulation of information and media that reinforces them. Western education and Western art, including cinema, reinforce the economic, moral, political, and militaristic dominance of the Western culture. One of the only ways to actively combat these hegemonic mediascapes is to produce and analyze media from outside Western structures of thought. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam call this active combat “multiculturalism” in their book on Unthinking Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, this continuous domination of Western ideology, “sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West.” By choosing to represent Western cultures as the only morally correct and only forward moving culture, while systematically infantilizing other cultures and ideologies as “developing,” Western education and media pick and choose exactly what histories and lessons deserve legitimacy and which do not. Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941 to a father that manufactured parts for Japanese imperial fighter planes. By the time he was four years old, he had been evacuated from three different homes and had witnessed the fire-bombing of his country. As such, Miyazaki has a significant perspective about Western notions of war, having experienced both sides of an imperialist military force. Imperial Japan provided his father with a job and his family with protection, until United States militarism tore through his home, his family, and his national identity. Eurocentrism, particularly the valorization of the United States’ Pacific campaign during World War II, would not allow for Miyazaki’s unique perspective on imperialist war practices to be critically disseminated. Shohat and Stam’s call for multiculturalism as the solution opens the door for Hayao Miyazaki to provide many varied filmic representations of his unique perspective of both Japanese and United States imperialist hegemonies.

Hayao Miyazaki, in looking to discuss these significant concepts from a safely fictional distance, actively confronts both his own Japanese cultural identity, and the individual identity of the spectator. The encouragement of this feedback loop of dialogue is reminiscent to Stuart Hall’s considerations of cultural identity in his essay, Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation. Singularly important to Hall’s analysis of cinematic representation is a duality of identity that could be similarly identified as a feedback loop. First of these cultural identities is the concept of a “shared culture, a collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other...selves.” This shared culture is rooted deeply into common experiences and social codes that allow society to continue functioning with relative stability. The discovery and expression of this deepest cultural identity is attributed to powerful creative and representative force that allows marginalized peoples and ideas to express themselves outside of the more restrictive hegemonies of cultural identity. The second definition of cultural identity conversely involves strong points of difference and individuality present in each person, which as previously noted, are entirely at the mercy of hegemonic structures looking to reinforce their own supremacy. Hall calls this second definition a “becoming” of identity, that is continuously redefined and negotiated in relation to both recent history and present considerations. Miyazaki, choosing to confront both definitions of cultural identity with his cinema, presents his audiences with the tools to renegotiate their own cultural identities and preconceived notions.

One of the most intense differences between Diana Wynne Jones’ original novel and the filmic adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle is the narrative inclusion of war. The original novel talks about war only tangentially, with Ingary’s King requesting Howl’s help to find his missing war-general of a son. With impending war relegated to a sub-plot, the bulk of the story focuses on how Sophie and Howl grow closer together through prolonged disagreements and magical shenanigans. The narrative of the novel paints a distinctly Western perspective on the valorization and presumed agency of those involved with war, by choosing instead to focus on a relatively privileged wizard who can shirk responsibility in favor of womanizing and magical travel. Memmi likewise considers a colonizer to be a man of this type: “If he preferred to be blind and deaf to the operation of the whole machinery...; he is then the beneficiary of the entire enterprise.” Ignorance of the harmful constructs of war, using war as a subplot as though there are not direct consequences to war, makes the original plot compliant with hegemonic constructs. Conversely, Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle drags the war to the forefront of the narrative. Fear of war and death is the motivation for Howl’s selfishness, and the motivation for him to gain responsibility for the safety of Sophie and his country. By bringing war to the forefront of a children’s narrative about assuming responsibility for power and the abuses of those powers, Miyazaki creates an environment to confront the complex duality of his own cultural identity as a Japanese man, and to confront the similar injustices he saw in the United States occupation of Iraq.

Analysis

Hayao Miyazaki is a master of visual shorthand; every shot does as much heavy lifting as possible to assist the audience towards personal connections. From the first second Sophie’s hometown, a village in Ingary, appears on screen the audience is bombarded with militaristic propaganda, including an ever-present national flag. Featuring unfamiliar and highly visible strips of pink and yellow, hardly a shot of Ingarian civilization is shown without one or many Ingarian flags hidden in plain sight. Miyazaki elevates this level of nationalism to uncomfortable levels early on, highlighting his own experiences with imperialism. Soon after we meet Sophie, we witness her pass by a highly detailed grand parade of troops and war tanks. A crowd of civilians cheers the soldiers’ uniforms and perfectly timed goose-stepping, waving Ingarian flags as heavy brass trumpets play something heroic and distinctly European in style. Throughout the film, as the war causes casualties, Sophie overhears civilians casually discussing the lack of motives for the fighting and their superior military technology. In 2004, this kind of patriotism may have seemed familiar to the population of the United States. After the attack on the World Trade Center, Walmart sold approximately 116,000 American flags, and another 250,000 the next day. Nationalism was pouring through the streets of America, and that nationalism looked like stars and stripes. Concurrently, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States rose by over 800%, and the Patriot Act was implemented, removing safeguards against government surveillance and seizure. Shocked beyond reason, United States citizens overlooked the stripping of their own rights under the guise of national security and patriotism.

While it is quite clear that Miyazaki recognizes the visual affect that is attached to military performance, he does not hide his distaste for the valorization of war. Everything outside of the Castle seems to be focused exclusively on Ingarian nationalism and wartime propaganda, and yet inside there is a distinct absence of hegemonic structures of any sort. When Sophie first enters the Howl’s abode, she immediately learns several seemly disconcerting things; Howl is a terrible housekeeper, and a sarcastic fire demon pilots the whole Castle. A small child named Markl is left alone to watch Howl’s business aliases while the wizard disappears for days on end. Within a few scenes, Sophie’s previously “predetermined” constructs of home, trust, and family are broken almost beyond repair. Two of these hegemonies just happen to be civic duty and citizenship. Howl elects to keep the Castle moving through the untamed Wastes of Ingary, far from military occupation and government control. Rather than the lawless and desolate wasteland that Sophie first believes, the Wastes prove to be glorious mountainsides and lush green lands, reminiscent of Miyazaki’s travels to France. Though extremely capable of leaving his country entirely, Howl chooses to remain in the countryside of Ingary, removing any reminders of the violent constructs which he does not feel represent the natural beauty of his home. In this way, Miyazaki contrasts two drastically different forms of nationalism. One is focused on the outward enforcing of hegemonic constructs on other countries, and the other is focused on the inward appreciation of the natural resources and beauty that a country can provide its citizens.

Unfortunately, Howl is not able to fully escape his own moral imperative to help people. Though he hides from the draft notice issued by the King of Ingary, Howl travels to the frontline to protect civilian homes from the carnage of battle. Scenes showcasing indiscriminate battleships dropping firebombs punctuate Howl’s interactions with his family, providing a clear connection to his reason for fighting. While in battle he confronts several less powerful wizards that are mutated with magic. Later, Howl comments sadly that these wizards readily turned themselves into monsters under the King’s orders, and as such will never regain their humanity. Throughout the film it is implied that Howl’s dedication to Sophie and to his own personal freedom are the only things that prevent the loss of his own fragile humanity. The emotional and physical cost of war is not limited to either side of the confrontation. All individuals that take part in the structures of violence are affected. Clear connections between these wizards and the soldiers that fought in the War on Terror are made, focusing on their difficulty to return to civilian life and their struggles with the atrocities that they commit. A database called the Iraq Body Count has been working diligently to try to document the countless Iraqi civilians that were killed by the United States invasion. Unfortunately, they are only able to provide a rough estimate of between 185,497 – 208,547 deaths from violence. Miyazaki’s urge for victims of war and soldiers to lean on family and nation while under these stressors, while a bit simple in concept, reflects a lack of compassion shown in Western media for both the civilians of foreign nations and soldiers who do not return proud of their accomplishments in war.

Comparisons could be drawn between Howl’s active pacifism and general Japanese cultural identity post-World War II. After the total annihilation of two of their cities by nuclear bomb, and the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians by firebombing, the Japanese Imperial Government surrendered to the United States on August 15th, 1945. After their country brutalized in the name of imperialism, it was likewise brutalized in the name of Western democracy. Soon after, a constitution was put into place to usher in new political constructs, one of which being the intensely debated Article 9. Within this article is the assertion that the Japanese government will never again have a standing military presence, or more specifically: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace...the Japanese forever renounce war as a sovereign of the nation.” In choosing to directly confront the ideological structures that preclude war as a part of politics, Japan opens larger conversations about pacifism that Miyazaki makes great narrative use of. Outwardly expressing his opposition to amending Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, Miyazaki emphatically declared that “Japan is not a country where a war can be fought.” Unlike the boisterous, illogical military might continuously pushed into the audiences’ face, Howl exists as a direct example of the Japanese ideal of active pacifism, to actively choose peace in the face of injustice and violence.

The simplest way to illustrate Miyazaki’s own difficult reckoning with his unique cultural identity is in comparing the depiction of technology in the beginning and ending sequences of the film. Howl’s Moving Castle begins as many Miyazaki films do, with an introduction to a main character. However, the main character portrayed in this first shot is neither Sophie Hatter nor Howl Jenkins, but the infamous Moving Castle, stalking its way through a heavy fog in the Ingarian countryside. Direct attention is paid to the lifelike mechanics of the Castle’s movement, the creaking and groaning of enormous gears and bellows of its anthropomorphic “face,” as four spindly chicken legs hold up the incomprehensible weight of the underbelly and spike-like towers. Each mechanical piece, though entirely disparate and featuring a slap-dash sort of connectivity, works together within the whole of the Castle to provide an astounding feat of both the technology and magic that permeate the narrative’s universe. In these first shots, the audience is introduced to the “human technology” favored by Albert Robida; a living, breathing home for the other protagonists, something that audiences can connect to. Technology of this sort is the technology that Miyazaki experienced as a child; watching his father create flying machines that he envisioned as vehicles to adventure. Quickly, as in life, the peace of these beginning shots faces a violent juxtaposition, and in the next sequence spectators watch as the Castle hefts its girth behind a cloud of fog, just as two small military planes bearing Ingary flags pass by.

The final shots of Howl’s Moving Castle, after Sophie has successfully restored Howl’s heart and the family has both actively and passively saved their country from catastrophic destruction, feature a reversal of the initial sequence. Through a thick blanket of thunderhead clouds, a hole reveals enormous and anonymous battleships flying in formation. Their muted sounds and shiny seamless technology, seen throughout the film in direct contrast to the hodge-podge hominess of the Castle, is rendered soulless. None of the life of the Castle is present in the machines of war. For Miyazaki, technology used for the object of violence and death cannot be alive. Instead, the technology is stripped of all liveness, just as the wizards who submit to Madam Sulliman lose their humanity. With the war ended and yet not won, these violent machines are castrated, and their purpose has ended. They disappear, covered by the blanket of darkness that their purpose has covered them in. Then, from behind a curling tuft of cloud emerges the newly restored Castle, into an endless bright blue sky. This third iteration of the Castle, featuring sweeping wings, is no longer tied to the ground. Instead, Howl and Sophie stand romantically at the helm, watching as Calcifer pilots their home towards a brilliantly sunny horizon.xxv While this ending may seem saccharine in comparison to the more realistic ambiguity of the outcomes of war, Miyazaki seems to favor the notion that those who fight for the safety of their country deserve a measure of peace at the end of their service. Whether or not Miyazaki thinks that measure of peace should be afforded to those in control of these soldiers is decidedly less certain.

Conclusion

Hayao Miyazaki’s distinctive personal history, coupled with his complex cultural identity as a Japanese citizen, makes him uniquely determined to speak on matters of pacifism and war. As an animated film director, his medium allows him a certain distance from distinct hegemonic structures and allow him to confront difficult concepts in a gentler fashion. This is not to say that Miyazaki is in any way ambiguous about his intentions. As depicted in Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki uses visual storytelling to paint the country of Ingary to be a fictional mirror of the nationalism present in the United States in the early 2000s. Ingarian flags hang from every building outside of Howl’s sheltered Castle, reminiscent of the patriotic fervor that gripped the citizens of the United States at the beginning of the War on Terror. Howl himself provides the audience with a character that reflects Miyazaki’s own distaste for this sort of brute nationalism, instead choosing to appreciate his country in more passive, classically romantic ways. Soldiers and wizards that brazenly choose to fight for their King are treated with compassion and pity, lamenting their lost humanity, while Howl’s dedication to his family and his country are the only thing that prevent him from meeting a similar fate. With design cues and philosophy borrowed from Albert Robida, Miyazaki crafts clever shorthand to portray technology in both militaristic and humanistic ways, highlighting the liveness and the hominess of humanist technology, and shunning the militaristic technology as sleek but soulless. Doing so provides Miyazaki an outlet to confront his own disconcerting childhood, having spent his youth connecting the technology of adventure to the machines of imperialism. Though his opinions on war, pacifism, and the United States brand of nationalism are overt in this film, Miyazaki as a single director is unable to completely dismantle the hegemonic structures that he critiques. However, Howl’s Moving Castle does provide a thoughtful and methodical meditation, allowing for the beginning of discussions about the ideologies that power the machine of war. Bibliography

Cavallaro, Dani. Hayao Miyazakis World Picture. McFarland & Co., 2015.

Cavallaro, Dani. The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki. McFarland & Co., 2006.

Hall, Stuart. “CULTURAL IDENTITY AND CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36, 1989, pp. 68–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44111666. Accessed 26 Jan. 2021.

Iraq Body Count, www.iraqbodycount.org/database/.

MacCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation ; Films, Themes, Artistry. Stone Bridge Press, 2010.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized: Introd.by Jean-Paul Sartre. Beacon Press, 1972.

“Miyazaki, Hisaishi, and Their Collaboration.” Joe Hisaishi’s Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro, 2020, doi:10.5040/9781501345159.0008.

“President Bush Addresses the Nation.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 20 Sept. 2001, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html.

“The United States Spends More on Defense than the Next 10 Countries Combined.” Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 15 May 2020, www.pgpf.org/blog/2020/05/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined.

Yazbek, Yara. “Miyazaki Hayao's ‘Howl's Moving Castle’: Environmental, War-Related, and Shojo Discourses.”

#miyazaki #hayao miyazaki #howl's moving castle #essay #graduate seminar paper #seminar paper #research #english research #graduate research #film #imperialism #film analysis

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bigskydreaming · 3 years ago

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#video#important content#aight so fun fact#when I was getting certified to be a Victim Advocate#they dead ass had us watch the Unconscious People Don’t Want Tea video#I am not joking#in a nationally certified course#videos like this matter#a LOT tags via @desperatecheesecubes

Oh I absolutely believe you. Most of the most useful and informative and accurate content about rape culture, consent, victim advocacy and the like IS indie created and produced.....precisely because of how much of society’s entertainment content is produced by literal predators.....who actively gatekeep content that would cast their own in an unfavorable light from being professionally made and circulated.

I mean, its literally the heart of why I stress the importance of having these kinds of conversations in fandom spaces....because the only people actually capable of barring these kinds of discussions are....other fans.

But at pretty much every level of professional media and entertainment, there are predators in positions of power - whether they were already predatory when making their way up the ladder or simply grew to like it once they realized they were in a position to exploit their power predatorily like, literally doesn’t matter.

The point is just that they’re THERE, and we’re talking about the people who play some of the largest roles in actively SHAPING our culture....hence why rape and abuse culture have such large footholds and footprints in our society. Because it was actively shaped to be that way by people who literally have a vested interest in eroding perceptions of consent and victim advocacy and overall just making society in general more vulnerable to BEING preyed upon, whenever it suits predatory culture shapers’ desires.

Its like why I so often go back to the example of the infamous ‘sexually charged’ scene from X2 between Logan and Bobby Drake, one that never actually turns into a kind of teacher/student trope but which hits all the same beats and thus was perceived and received as EXACTLY that by fandoms of the time.....like, this scene was written and directed by a known predator. Bryan Singer has been directly accused of preying upon underage actors on his sets going all the way back to the 90s -

(and I swear to god if any idiot comes into my inbox on anon to try and make this about homophobia when I’ve literally been gaybashed by homophobes and thus am more than aware of how easy it is for homophobes to make USE of something like this to advance their own agendas, but is also equally aware that homophobes don’t actually need SHIT to be homophobic and advance their agendas anyway, and thus I’m actually in no way obligated to defend or distract from an actual predator just because we happen to share a marginalization, like fair warning, try that with me and I will attempt to set you on fire with the power of my wrath)

- but like point being.....this isn’t a coincidence? Singer’s predatory behavior has been a known quantity since even BEFORE the X-Men movies, and that scene in X2 is thus a classic example of someone like I’m describing using their extremely wide-reaching platform to actively shape culture according to his own vested interests. He’s literally using pop culture and entertainment to make the kind of dynamic that HE is interested in perpetrating with underage teens like, seem enticing, harmless and socially accepted all at the same time. This is LITERALLY normalization in action.

And its everywhere in our entertainment, and its the precise reason there’s barely any counter narratives to this in actual widespread media.....because many of the gatekeepers of Hollywood are literal predators themselves. It doesn’t mean that every creative in Hollywood is, just that they exist....and that they also exist in positions of power on the executive or studio side of things, thus making it fairly impossible to get actual counter narratives made on a culture-shaping level of equivalent platform....because they block such narratives from getting produced at all, or else use their influence to dilute or water down the point of such a narrative to the point of being all but useless.

Its like the same thing as why sex work is criminalized in the first place. People can go on all they want about how its to act as a deterrent and to protect people from being exploited, but like....I’m a former sex worker and while I’m a male one, I’ve certainly known tons of female sex workers and even with society’s sexism to factor in, like....no. Every female sex worker I’ve ever known or talked with is someone I’ve known to say the exact same thing as I’m outlining below.

That’s never been the reason for criminalization. Its to make it impossible for sex workers - whether they do sex work simply because they like it or are need-based sex workers, with the very existence of any need-based sex workers thus putting the lie to criminalization of sex work as a deterrent (like if people are going to do sex work anyway because the consequences of not doing it, like homelessness or starvation, are everpresent, then the comparatively lesser risk of being CAUGHT doing sex work renders it utterly useless as a deterrent) -

Like point being, the criminalization of sex work on the whole has absolutely nothing to do with deterring shit....its literally to make it easier to EXPLOIT sex workers. I mean, my ACAB feelings aren’t arbitrary or ideological. Even as a guy, I hate cops for deeply personal reasons that stem from my time as a sex worker and the fact that I can personally attest to just how many fucking cops directly target and exploit sex workers in various ways because they more than anyone know that criminalization means THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT, because a sex worker has literally NO legal recourse against that, other than opening themselves up to potential legal consequences as well, just for admitting to being a sex worker when trying to report a cop or someone else for rape.

Cops ‘frequent’ sex workers more than pretty much any other ‘client group’ I can personally think of, because the ones who only seek out a badge in the first place because they WANT the ability to throw their weight around with the added perks of institutional power backing them up? They are like, first in line to engage with sex workers in various ways, because they know damn well that they can do literally whatever they want to a sex worker, consent be damned, and there’s pretty much nothing that sex worker can do in recourse without running smack into that Big Blue Wall and an arrest warrant for their own crime of solicitation.

And all of THIS in turn stems from the fact that another major source of ‘clients’ for sex workers is.....politicians. The actual literal law makers who ENACT these laws that criminalize sex work, for example, and thus ensure a ready, reliable victim pool ripe for exploitation by virtue of having no legal protections or opportunities for redress.

But yeah. It doesn’t surprise me on any level to hear that indie vids and tiktoks and the like are utilized in the programs you’re talking about - in fact, that more than anything makes me confident that the course actually knew what it was talking about and was making a sincere effort at empowering and educating people to act as advocates for victims and survivors.

Because the way our society was built from the ground up - by people interested in exploiting power in various ways against the many, many groups of people vulnerable to such exploitations - like, literally rewards and empowers people seeking to do the exact same thing. Thus resulting in predators being entrenched in the halls of power and at the table of culture-shapers like, on practically every level.

Which in turn makes the only spaces available for ACTUAL education and countering the narratives that shape and spread rape culture....literal counter-culture spaces like indie environments. And like fandom COULD be, if more fans would just....LET it be that.

*Shrugs* But whatevs.

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aliciameade · 5 years ago

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Desperate Measures - Ch. 2/4

Title: Desperate Measures Author: aliciameade Rating: E for Explicit Pairing: Beca/Chloe Summary: Mid-PP3. They are quarantined. Chloe and Beca have everything they need to weather the mandated period of social distancing and staying home: food, water, shelter, games, entertainment, and each other’s company.

The one thing they don’t have?

Much-needed privacy.

Part 1

Part 2 below / on Ao3

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Beca tries not to think about it.

She tries not to think about how she and Chloe laid in bed side by side touching themselves all the way to an unexpectedly simultaneous orgasm.

She tries not to think how she’d needed to feel connected to Chloe in the moment and what it had done to her to feel Chloe moving her hips and the subtle flexing in her arm as she worked her fingers within herself.

“Earth to Beca?”

She blinks and looks up. “Hmm, what?”

“It’s your turn,” Chloe says, gesturing toward the dice in the middle of the Monopoly board.

Beca’s losing by a lot; she didn’t want to resort to board games but it’s Week 3 of being housebound and anything to pass the time is worthy of consideration. “Oh, sorry,” she says as she scoops them up to roll, hoping she lands on one of Chloe’s hotel-improved properties so she can go bankrupt and end the game.

It’s been a week since that shared moment of intimacy. Neither of them has brought it up, nor any of the private confessions, since that night and Beca’s been grateful that Chloe respected her wishes.

But part of her, a part that is growing increasingly demanding to be heard, kind of wishes it would come up again.

Because Beca kind of really wants to do it again.

She hasn’t touched herself since that night, even though she’s aware that Chloe’s been finding excuses to check the mail (and take her time doing so), to take a walk around the block, or volunteer to do the weekly grocery trip. She knows why Chloe is doing it: it’s plainly obvious in the way she makes a scene gathering her things to leave and telling Beca, “Don’t have too much fun while I’m gone!” while winking at her.

Of course, none of these perfect opportunities had been aligned with any simmering need that Beca had and she’d spent the alone time doing things like tidying up the kitchen and returning phone calls.

When Chloe is home, however...that’s when Beca’s libido seems to enjoy reminding her that it exists.

“You’ve been so spacey lately,” Chloe muses while she collects Beca’s rent (not nearly enough to bankrupt her).

“Yeah, I don’t know.” It’s a spacey answer, Beca knows. “Cabin fever, I guess.”

She watches Chloe pick up the dice and then set them down again. “Do we need to talk about what happened?”

“What?” Beca says quickly, but she already knows what Chloe’s talking about.

Chloe kind of shrugs and offers a shy smile. “I don’t know about you, but I really haven’t been able to stop thinking about what we did.”

The statement makes Beca hold her breath as thoughts race through her mind and all ways she could respond and the consequences (benefits?) that could follow. She holds it until she can’t anymore and exhales. “Me neither. Wait, do you mean you can’t stop thinking about it because you wish we hadn’t?”

“No, Beca,” Chloe laughs. “Calm down. I really liked it. It was fun.” She shrugs again and slides her chair back from the table a few inches, something that makes Beca’s heart skip a beat. “It was nice to share that with you.”

“Oh.” Beca feels a smile tug at her lips. “Cool. Yeah.”

“Is this us talking about it?” Chloe asks.

“I thought we just did.”

Chloe leans forward to put her elbows on the table and prop her chin on her folded hands, a move that feels entirely conspiratorial and it makes Beca slide her own chair backward. “I guess that means you were worried I had some regrets?”

It’s Beca’s turn to shrug and she picks at her nails to avoid having to make eye contact.

“Does that mean you liked it?”

“I mean…yeah,” she mumbles, feeling her face start to heat up.

“Does that mean you’d be open to doing it again?”

That pulls her attention back to Chloe who is looking at her with bright eyes and a bottom lip snared between her teeth, nervous while she awaits Beca’s answer. It takes everything in her to not just dive back into bed and kick off her sweatpants. Instead, she tries to swallow and push her stomach back down in the correct place. “I mean, I guess I wouldn’t be opposed.” She hopes she sounds chill about it. Take or leave it. She’s willing to do it if Chloe wants to do it. Because that’s what friends do for each other.

She watches Chloe sit back at her response, her nails rapping rhythmically on the table.

It’s silent for an ungodly long time.

“Would you maybe want to do it right—”

Beca’s already halfway to the bed. “Turn off the light.”

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

It doesn’t feel like a taboo topic after the second time.

It would be hypocritical if it was; the first time had snuck up out of nowhere fueled by a racy, late-night conversation.

The second time was at 3:00 in the afternoon and turning the light off made little difference in how dark the room was. (It was not dark. At all.) It was a direct proposition that Beca readily agreed to.

She does have to suffer a few minutes of teasing afterward; she came so quickly that she had to lay there with Chloe for several minutes trying not to be obvious about watching while she brought herself to climax.

But after the teasing, they settle into their evening routine of making dinner together while singing along to Beca’s weekly playlist. They eat together at the table and clean the kitchen and collapse their bed back to a couch so they can sit and watch whatever movie Chloe picks to watch on Beca’s laptop propped on a chair in front of them.

It’s a thing that happened. Twice. And it’s fine.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

It happens again the next morning.

Beca doesn’t even know what—or who—started it.

One second, Chloe was stretching and saying good morning and the next, they’re touching themselves beneath the shared blanket.

She can feel Chloe’s foot resting against her own and the way it moves and flexes with the rising and falling of Chloe’s voice.

Beca forgets to try to be quiet.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

It kind of becomes a thing after that. It’s an activity they share like working on a puzzle, a board game, reading time, or going for a walk. It’s something that gets suggested as one suggests checking out a new documentary.

“This isn’t really something friends do,” she says (for some dumb reason) after she suggests it.

“Says who?” Chloe asks, already lying down in bed.

“I don’t know. Society.”

“Society has collapsed.” Chloe says it so ominously Beca can’t help but laugh. Because it’s true. What are social norms anyway?

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

Beca doesn’t let herself think about how normal it’s beginning to feel. When she thinks about the arrangement ending whenever life returns to some version of its former self, it bothers her. She doesn’t like that it bothers her.

So instead, she focuses on the present.

And at present, Chloe’s using Beca’s lap for a pillow while they read on the couch, Beca tucked into one end to give Chloe space to lie down along the rest of it, even though her feet have to perch on the other end of it.

One of her instrumental playlists is going, something mellow and kind of ambient and she’s absentmindedly playing with Chloe’s hair, listening to the way she sighs now and then and the quiet sound of turning pages.

“Bec?”

“Hmm?” She looks down when she feels Chloe’s eyes on her. “Would you mind if I…?” She glances down herself as if Beca couldn’t figure out what she was asking.

It does make Beca hesitate, though. She asked if she could do it. Not if they could do it. It’s never been a solo event. Solo, but mutual.

The very concept turns Beca on.

“Have at it,” she says, knowing Chloe can see right through her dismissive comment by the way she smirks up at her.

She pretends she’s not watching as Chloe drops her book to the floor so her right hand can slip down the front of the shorts she’s wearing while her left arm rests across her middle.

She pretends she’s not watching the way she can see the movement of Chloe’s hand between her legs, slow, subtle movements that are accompanied by quiet sighs. She’s not watching when Chloe’s other hand slips under the edge of her shirt and begins to inch higher, revealing more and more of her stomach to Beca—not that she’s watching—until Beca catches a glimpse of the lower curve of a bare breast just as Chloe’s hand covers it.

She pretends she’s reading fastidiously, still playing with Chloe’s hair, paying no attention to the fact that Chloe is masturbating in plain sight right next to her. No, not next to her: on her. Her head is still on her thigh and if she were to do something like moving it to make room for her own hand, Chloe would feel it. So she can’t.

She pretends that her underwear isn’t already soaked-through when Chloe moans, her hand visibly moving faster. She tries to act like she’s not staring, her own book forgotten and being set aside to watch. Tries not to like how when Chloe opens her eyes to look at her and sees her watching, she smiles and closes her eyes and touches herself more quickly.

She tries not to think about how she has her hand tangled in Chloe’s hair and how she learned that Chloe likes having her hair pulled and how her fingers start to curl into it until they meet resistance, and then she tightens them further until she knows it’s pulling.

Chloe gasps and she looks up at Beca again but this time she doesn’t look away, nor does Beca even as Chloe comes with a broken moan and she tries not to think about how she did something she knew Chloe likes during sex because she knew it would turn her on.

She explicitly did something to help her best friend get off—in a different way than they have been—and she doesn’t know what to do with that information.

She removes her hand once Chloe calms down only to have nowhere to put it that doesn’t feel awkward since Chloe’s head is right where it would rest so she has no choice but to return it to its original resting place where it resumes playing lightly. While Chloe is still working on slowing her breathing and is tugging her shirt back into place.

Beca picks up her book again and flips it open to a page—she has no idea if it’s the page she stopped on—and stares at it, her heart pounding and core aching as she tries to act normal because what happened is a totally normal thing for friends to do.

“Thanks,” Chloe says, interrupting her thoughts with her light, airy voice. “That felt awes.”

Beca has to wet her lips before replying, “Cool.”

“B-R-B!” Chloe says as she rolls off the couch to land on her hands and knees on the floor and she pops up with an unfair amount of energy. She disappears into the bathroom and Beca sets down her book again and closes her eyes to breathe.

She doesn’t understand what just happened. She doesn’t know if it was okay, but Chloe doesn’t seem upset by it. In fact, it seemed very much like she liked it. Enjoyed it, even. What Beca does understand is that she wanted to help Chloe get off, and doing so was a turn on.

She has to decide if she’s going to suffer and let her arousal fade or ask for a moment for her own release.

When Chloe returns, almost skipping back to the couch to hop onto it on her knees to kiss Beca’s cheek as though she’d been gone all day and not three minutes, Beca decides to ignore the demands her body is making.

They’re not supposed to be turned on by each other. Not like that.

“I’m so tight from being cooped up all day. I think I’m gonna do some yoga to stretch out. That okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Beca says, relieved that Chloe is going to be doing her own thing for a while so Beca and work on turning down her thermostat. She pauses the playlist so Chloe can put on one of her yoga videos.

But she’d forgotten two important facts, though: 1) that Chloe would change clothes for this (Well, she doesn’t change clothes. She sheds her shirt, leaving her topless while she tugs a sports bra over her head.), and 2) that Chloe would be doing yoga on the floor right in front of Beca.

Chloe and her body, its strong lines and firm muscle stretching and bending, her back to Beca who had intended to use this time to stop being horny and instead she’s struggling to not touch herself while Chloe does all her sexy, slow bending.

It’s torturous.

She makes it an hour after Chloe rolls up her yoga mat before she breaks and asks to have her own moment. Chloe approves and Beca doesn’t even hide under a blanket.

She touches herself—fully dressed, of course, they’re just friends—while Chloe texts on her phone from the other end of the couch.

She doesn’t dare open her eyes to check, but she knows Chloe isn’t really texting. She can’t hear her thumbs moving over the keys or the messages sending and receiving, and Chloe never turns off that irritating sound that Beca’s learned to tune out over the years.

She can sense Chloe’s eyes on her and she can feel how much wetter that makes her.

She’ll deal with the reasons behind that later.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

She kind of starts to stop caring about whether or not something she does is okay after that.

Chloe seems to have come to a similar decision and Beca actually gawks the first time Chloe takes off her shirt completely during one of their simultaneous sessions.

Chloe winks at her as she does it—she winks at her—and Beca struggles to control how quickly she’s going to come.

She’s learned that coming with Chloe is infinitely better than coming without her.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

“This is so depressing,” Beca says as she crosses off another day on the wall calendar, marking the days since the lockdown began. They’ve reached Week 6 and though there are glimpses of hope of a return to normalcy on the horizon, they still have a long way to go.

“We just have to keep trying to focus on good things and not the bad,” Chloe chirps from the bed. She had yet to get up, having declared it a day of rest because, apparently, it was Sunday.

Beca couldn’t keep track of days anymore if not for her phone or the calendar. “Yeah, I guess,” she says, letting the pen that hangs, affixed to a string on the nail that holds up the calendar, drop to the wall. She knows there are much worse scenarios she could be in. One of them is having their dear roommate Amy present throughout this ordeal.

“Now make me a coffee and then come cuddle,” Chloe says and Beca doesn’t have to look to know she’s making puppy eyes at her.

She can never resist that. Not that she would want to.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

“What are we doing for this day of rest?” she asks once they both have cups of coffee on their respective nightstands, along with buttered toast Beca had decided to make for them.

They’re both propped up in bed in their pajamas, having stolen Amy’s pillows a few weeks ago to cushion them against the metal rails in the structure of the pull-out couch. The new flatscreen television and AppleTV Beca had broken down and ordered online sometime in Week 4 sits somewhat precariously on a stand they fashioned out of overturned chairs and Chloe’s underbed shoe storage container. They haven’t owned a television since they lived in Atlanta; there’s really no room in the apartment for one when three people are there, but with just the two of them they made it work.

“Well, since you’re feeling said—”

Beca feels a little defensive. “I’m not feeling sad.”

“It’s okay to feel down, Bec,” Chloe says with a gentle pat to Beca’s leg. “Let’s do something that you want to do.”

Something about Chloe’s suggestion makes Beca’s mind wander, but she knows Chloe is referring to normal platonic activities.

Not certain other normal platonic activities they’ve been engaging in that result in simultaneous orgasms.

“Well, there are just so many options; I’m overwhelmed with choices,” she says dryly, though she manages a smile when Chloe nudges her shoulder with her own. “I guess let’s watch a movie. You always pick good movies; find something sad. And no mocking me if I cry.”

“I would never,” Chloe says, and Beca knows in her heart that she won’t.

Beca doesn’t cry...well...maybe she tears up a little at the end of The Notebook but no one could blame her for that.

It helps, though. She hasn’t had her usual time alone to get mad or sad about things in life and it’s all been weighing on her. It’s nice to lean into Chloe’s side when she invites her in to cuddle and be sad without having to talk about it. Chloe’s always been that way, intuitive enough to know when to push Beca to talk about her feelings and when to simply be a quiet presence.

Beca knows Chloe is starting to coddle her when she announces she’s making breakfast for dinner. It’s Beca’s favorite. And she indulges in it for the evening; it’s incredibly comforting to feel cared for when everything feels scary and uncertain. It’s nice to have someone she loves set a mug of hot cocoa in front of her, piled high with spiraling whipped cream, and be laughed at when she intentionally gets it on her nose while taking a sip.

It’s soothing to crawl into bed and feel Chloe move in behind her to start playing with her hair.

Chloe never asks Beca to talk about whatever might be on her mind, and Beca knows Chloe is there to listen if she does want to talk.

But for now, she wants to settle heavily into the bed and sigh as Chloe’s fingernails scratch over her scalp and down the back of her neck to make her shiver. She wants to close her eyes and feel the warmth from Chloe’s proximity and listen to her quiet breathing and forget about everything else.

It’s so easy to sink into it. Chloe’s fingertips feel so nice where they trace the shell of her ear and the sensitive skin behind it. Where they swirl in slow patterns down her neck and along the back of her shoulder until they’re lightly dancing down the length of Beca’s arm where they play with her fingers, Beca parting them to let Chloe’s fit in the empty spaces. They stay that way for a moment before the journey reverses.

Beca can feel the way goosebumps rise on her arm and she hears Chloe’s quiet chuckle at Beca’s physical response.

It’s not the only physical response she’s experiencing, however.

For as nonspecifically sad as she’s felt all day, Chloe doting on her to try to lift her spirits or at least comfort her, especially now while Chloe is quite literally petting her, Beca’s finding it all to have the unfortunate side effect of sexual arousal.

Admittedly, they have been sharing several normally private moments. It’s felt a lot like “What Happens in Self-Isolation Stays in Self-Isolation,” and they’ve each prompted such moments multiple times. Not that Beca’s been officially counting or comparing, but she’s fairly certain she’s been masturbating more often in this situation, with Chloe, than she ever did before it by herself.

There’s not much else to do, though. She can only handle so much video entertainment per day and she’s limited on how much work she can do with only having her laptop and a couple of small pieces of equipment at home. It’s a distraction and a fun one that feels good during and after. One that she’s starting to want to experience more and more frequently.

Like now, for example, as Chloe’s fingernails graze over the soft skin below her ear with her body fitting so closely to Beca’s.

She clears her throat. “Chlo?”

“Hmm?”

“I need a moment.”

It’s become their code after too many stuttering, vague hints. It’s non-threatening and otherwise innocuous but they both know what it means.

She hears Chloe hum and her touch disappears, only to return a few seconds later. “Okay.”

Beca’s acutely aware that Chloe is still touching her and not moving away to give her space, something to-date they have almost always done. Except for that one time that Beca pulled Chloe’s hair.

The fact that she’s not retreating after accepting Beca’s request makes Beca’s heart race. Chloe hasn’t touched her while doing it. Not really, not more than the most casual of touches, almost accidental. It’s not like when Beca was playing with her hair; they’re much closer now. Beca can feel Chloe against her back and the way she fits into the bend at Chloe’s waist.

The closeness makes Beca’s face hot and her palms sweat and as desperate as she suddenly finds herself to seek out relief, she’s incredibly nervous. She must be tense because she feels Chloe’s fingers massage the sides of her neck.

“I can move?” Chloe asks quietly.

Beca doesn’t know how to answer.

Then, hesitantly, “...Or I could stay?”

Beca hesitates, too, and then decides that this situation, the entire scenario they’ve found themselves in is an alternate reality and societal rules and norms don’t matter anymore.

She nods and feels more than hears Chloe sigh, warm breath drifting across her bare neck and ear and it makes every hair on Beca’s body stand on-end and makes her heart race.

She has to shift a little and she can feel Chloe behind her with every move she makes. She’s not positive, but she thinks Chloe might have moved closer than she had been because she even feels her knee behind her own as she shifts her legs apart enough to fit her hand between them.

She doesn’t bother with any type of build-up. What had been given to her for relaxation had been all the foreplay she needs and she slips her hand down the front of her shorts and underwear and feels how wet she really is.

Beca must react to her own touch in some way because she hears Chloe sigh behind her and feels the way the massaging of her neck turns lighter, more heavy touching than massaging.

She feels what few boundaries that still exist between them be reduced even further when she starts teasing her clit while Chloe’s fingers dance along her shoulder and arm. It’s the same arm Beca’s using to touch herself and the further Chloe’s hand travels down her arm, the quicker it makes her breathe.

Chloe shifts behind her, hips pressing forward into Beca and it forces the moan she’s been holding back to escape and she hears Chloe echo it in her ear.

It doesn’t happen just once. Chloe does it again, and again until it’s a rhythm that has Beca almost riding her own hand with how their hips are moving together. She knows that Chloe knows what she’s doing. Beca had confessed something to her and she knows Chloe didn’t forget. She’s doing what she’s doing because she knows Beca likes it.

Chloe feels so hot behind her and the hand she has on Beca is restless as it travels up and down her arm and Beca has the distinct thought that it feels like it’s a caged animal pacing to be released, trapped within the boundaries of only touching neutral areas of Beca.

She wants to tell Chloe to touch her.

She wants to twist her shoulders and roll over and drag Chloe’s hand between her legs the way she’s been imagining it for so, so long.

Instead, she digs her fingers into the pillow and works those of her other hand faster against herself.

Chloe’s hand finally breaks away from Beca’s arm and she feels it on her hip, holding her as they move together. Chloe’s moaning, too, and Beca can’t tell if she’s doing anything to touch herself or not; she’s too caught up in the way it feels to have Chloe’s hips rolling into her ass again and again to help Beca fuck herself faster and faster until Beca’s crying out in ecstasy and teeth sink into her bare shoulder as Chloe’s muffled moan rings out behind her, shuddering together.

She doesn’t realize until her breathing begins to slow that Chloe’s hand is no longer on her hip. It’s on her wrist. Which is under her shorts. In her underwear. Any lower and Chloe would be able to feel how wet the experience has made her.

Beca wonders if it had gone on much longer if Chloe would have been the one to push further and cross that final boundary line.

She wonders what that means, that Chloe has pushed so far already. If it’s just the passion of the moment or if it’s something more.

The lips that touch her shoulder over the sore mark make her think that maybe, just maybe, it could be something more.

“God, Beca,” Chloe whispers and Beca feels her hand move with uncertainty, like Chloe’s fighting with herself what to do until it’s retreating and her body scoots back an inch or two to let cool air in between their overheated bodies. “You are so…” She doesn’t finish the sentence but Beca feels her forehead press against the back of her head as she exhales heavily. There’s a hand in her hair, too. It’s not doing anything with purpose, but she feels it.

She wants to ask how Chloe was going to finish her sentence, but instead, she hears a quiet, “I love you.”

Chloe tells her she loves her all the time. Daily. Multiple times per day, even. When Beca refills her water bottle, or brings her her phone that she left on the counter, or cracks an especially good joke.

It sounds different this time. Something about it makes her brain—and heart—respond to it and she feels the beginnings of the panicked need to flee set in until she realizes she has nowhere to flee to. She is home. With Chloe. Where she will be for the foreseeable future. Where time is fake and rules don’t exist and there’s no such thing as “normal” and she gets to play house with the only person she’s ever wanted to play house with.

The panic recedes and she removes her hand from her shorts where it had remained while they cooled off and uses it to reach for Chloe. It’s her only free hand; she’s laying on her right arm. She doesn’t even think about—or maybe she doesn’t care—how her fingers are still wet when she finds and grabs Chloe’s forearm to wrap it around her waist.

Chloe’s breath catches and if it’s from the demanded embrace or from the way Beca’s fingers slip against her skin for a brief moment, there’s no way to know. Chloe doesn’t say anything; she just tucks her own fingers between Beca’s waist and the bed.

“I love you, too,” Beca allows herself to reply.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

“Do you think this is what it’s like in frat houses?”

“What?” Beca asks before biting her lip and moaning.

“Guys jerking off everywhere all the time.”

She feels herself grimace and tries instead to focus on how little of Chloe is concealed by her panties and hand. “Why are you making me think about that right now?”

Chloe laughs and Beca watches her fingers speed up. “Because we’re doing this at the table in the middle of breakfast. Feels like a guy thing. Also, your tits are super great.��

Beca just arches an eyebrow at her. So maybe she is topless at the table because she decided she’d take off her shirt when Chloe said she needed a moment in the middle of pouring syrup on her French toast. Maybe they’re both kicked back in the uncomfortable metal folding chairs they use for eating (because the slightly nicer, sturdier ones are the base for their TV stand) touching themselves. Maybe Chloe hadn’t put on any shorts or pants that morning and her legs are parted and she’s watching Beca watch her.

“That was definitely a guy thing to say.”

Maybe they’re having a normal, platonic conversation while they fuck themselves. There’s a lot of things that have happened in the past seven weeks that Beca would have never thought she would experience. Repeatedly and shamelessly masturbating with her friend ranks high on that list of “will nevers.”

“I’m admiring them in a super gay way, don’t worry,” Chloe says before her breath hitches and her hips start to try to move.

“That’s fine, then,” Beca says.

There’s no more talking after that.

Not until Chloe’s moaning out curse words and Beca’s just moaning.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

“Why don’t we just go for it?”

“Go for what?” Beca looks up from her hand of Uno cards; it’s overstacked thanks to Chloe managing to drop three Draw Fours on her and she’s trying to plot out the best plan of attack to dump the numerous yellow cards she’s collected onto the pile in the middle of the bed between them.

“Need a moment,” Chloe says almost dismissively and gains Beca’s full attention.

“Okay...what do you mean by, ‘Why don’t we just go for it?’”

“I don’t know. Like, we’re always trying to somehow still be modest but we’re literally watching each other.” Chloe shrugs and it shouldn’t look as innocent as it does considering the topic of conversation. “It’s like porn. But still with clothes.”

Beca can’t help but smile; it’s all so absurd. “I was literally topless at the breakfast table yesterday. And you weren’t wearing pants.”

“I know. But like, why were you wearing pants? Why was I still wearing my hoodie?” Chloe tugs at that same hoodie now and Beca fully expects her to remove it, though she does not. “Why are we even pretending that we have any shame at this point?”

“Oh, my God,” Beca laughs. “So you just want to be naked.”

Chloe shrugs. “Well, yeah. If you’re my porn, I want to see you.”

“I’m your porn?!” Beca blurts, in disbelief, really, that this is even a real conversation.

Chloe tilts her head and appears hurt. “Am I not yours?”

She feels her mouth hanging up and snaps it closed. “Yeah, I guess so.” Chloe’s more than her porn. She’s every single fantasy she’s ever had rolled up into one being. “I feel like I should feel guilty about that.”

“Why?” Chloe tosses her entire hand of cards onto the discard pile and Beca knows they’re finished playing Uno. “I told you I like being watched.”

“Yeah, but you’re my friend.” Beca regrets it the moment she says it. They’ve developed an unspoken agreement to stop applying traditional principles to themselves while in the situation we are in.

She sees it on Chloe’s face, the disappointment. Followed by determination. “Take off your shirt. Give me your cards.” She’s already gathering up the game, aligning the cards to stuff them back into the box and Beca surrenders her own.

She surrenders her shirt, too, as requested, and watches as Chloe steals glances at her while she finishes putting away the game until she’s tugging her hoodie over her head to toss it on the floor.

“Well?” Chloe asks, thumbs hooked under the waistband of her flannel pants. “Yes or no?”

Beca can’t believe it’s even a question, but she knows she’s the one who threw in the wrench of hesitation. “Yeah,” she says with a nod as she shifts to remove her own sweatpants.

It’s not that they’ve never seen each other naked before; they see each other naked all the time. But this is different; this time, they’re in bed wearing nothing but underwear because Chloe wants to look at Beca’s nude body while they masturbate together.

Beca’s the first one to start slipping her underwear off her hips and down, and she’s painfully (achingly) aware that Chloe’s watching her do it, so she jokingly spins them around her finger to toss them across the room. It succeeds in making Chloe laugh, which she desperately needed to hear after their tiny hiccup. “Well, if I’m your porn…” she says, finding unexpected confidence under Chloe’s appreciative gaze.

Chloe nods and Beca watches her slip her own underwear down to drop them to the floor.

“What kind of porn are you looking for?”

She truly, genuinely doesn’t know where it’s coming from. It feels like she’s been somehow possessed by an alternate version of herself, but maybe it’s just who she is in this strange alternate reality they’ve found themselves in. She’s sitting in bed, naked, across from her equally naked roommate, hugging her knees to her chest but finding herself wanting to part them to let Chloe see.

But Chloe’s eyes are on Beca’s, and they are suddenly so, so dark. “What do you mean?”

She does part her knees a little, then; the intrigue and excitement of performing in some way creeping up on her like a shot of tequila. “What are your search terms?” she says, arching an eyebrow at Chloe. She lets her own eyes wander a little after the question, at how soft Chloe’s breasts look and how stiff her nipples already are. She doesn’t let herself look lower, though; she can see enough.

She hears Chloe take a breath and hold it and she knows she’s trying to get a read on Beca and what their shared intentions are.

“Vibrators.”

Beca feels her eyebrows shoot up and she sees the surprising but still welcome concern on Chloe’s face that came with her answer. She wants Beca to be okay with it and Beca knows if she’s not, Chloe will let it go.

But Beca is okay with it. She is like, so okay with it. She’s been using her hands for so long because she was too shy to ask Chloe about trying something else. Which might be why she decided to take them down this path. “Okay,” she says, having to turn around and bend down to fetch her personal toy from its drawer next to the bed. She hopes it’s charged; she hasn’t had it plugged in for weeks.

“Okay?” Chloe sounds surprised and is wide-eyed when Beca turns back, purple vibrator in-hand.

“If I’m your entertainment,” she says, “then...consider me on-demand.” It might have sounded corny but just saying the words turned her on. She’s suddenly aroused by the concept of sexually performing to satisfy Chloe’s desires. She’s aroused by the concept that Chloe wants to watch her for sexual gratification.

Chloe seems to deflate, but it’s from the way she’s exhaling and almost closing in on herself before she’s closing her eyes burying her fingers in her own hair and Beca can see the way she’s tugging on it before she flat-out groans. “Lay down,” she says after a few more seconds and looks up as soon as Beca starts moving.

It makes Beca’s pulse race to hear Chloe tell her what to do. It makes her wet, too, and she knows wetness is going to be streaking her thighs soon. “Tell me what you want,” Beca says. She wants Chloe to simply answer, ‘You.’

Instead, Chloe says, “Turn it on and tease yourself,” as she moves onto her knees to crawl over until she’s kneeling at Beca’s feet.

Beca notes that she’s not kneeling primly with her hands folded in her lap; her knees are parted and even though she’s a few feet away, Beca can...yeah, she can look and see the contours between Chloe’s legs, and her hands are resting on her thighs.

Her thumb finds the power button easily and presses it. It buzzes to life and she feels herself grow instantly wetter, both at the sound and the way Chloe’s breasts rise and fall more quickly when her breathing speeds up. And perhaps because Chloe’s telling her what to do.

“Tease myself?” she questions even as she starts to move the toy down, not quite recognizing her own voice.

Chloe nods and Beca can see the way her fingernails are pressing into her thighs. The way there’s already a light pink flush on her chest.

Beca’s not quite ready for how intense the vibration feels after not experiencing it in so long, despite having it on the lowest setting. The tip of it grazes between her legs and she tries to gasp and moan at the same time, resulting in a somewhat embarrassing choked sound and her eyes slamming closed.

She doesn’t have time to deal with being embarrassed, though. Not with the way Chloe sighs, “Oh, wow.”

Beca’s scared her heart might pound right out of her chest. Or give out altogether. “Like this?” she asks as she teases the vibrator against her clit, touching it and removing it, slipping it up and down and taking it away. She suddenly becomes extraordinarily self-aware that Chloe’s eyes are surely fixed between her legs.

It makes Beca want to part her legs further than the little she had when she laid down. So she does. She inches them wider until she bends her left knee to be able to open herself comfortably.

Chloe’s voice makes it to her ears. “Just like that.” The sound of Chloe moaning quietly also makes it to her ears and she forces her eyes open to look.

She wants to see what this is doing for Chloe.

But she’s not ready for it. She’s not ready to see Chloe on her knees, still very, very nude, with one hand between her legs and the other playing with her nipple. She’s not ready to see the way Chloe’s fingers are moving over a visible clit and the way it all glistens in the dim light and how Chloe’s eyes are fixated between Beca’s legs.

It makes her moan and her hips roll, pushing her clit against the vibrator to make her moan again. She watches Chloe’s hips roll, too, in response.

“Keep going,” Chloe says, voice low and unfamiliar like Beca’s own. Her hips don’t stop rolling, though. She sets a slow pace and Beca starts to follow it, holding the lightly vibrating toy against herself.

She doesn’t think she will be able to last very long; she’s not sure she’s ever been as turned on as she is in this exact moment. She can feel how wet she is and how easily the vibrator slides against her. Worse, she’s starting to be able to hear it.

She wonders if Chloe hears it, too, because she says, “Now fuck yourself with it.”

Beca feels like someone threw a bucket of hot coals on her body. Everything is suddenly on fire and all she can do is whimper at the request. She feels as pathetic as she feels powerful, though. She’s ultimately in control, even if she’s allowing Chloe to tell her what to do, and the trust and surrender that encompass that make for a heady experience.

She honestly can’t believe she’s doing it, but she does it. She even manages to open her eyes to keep them fixed on Chloe as she tilts the vibrator and slides it down to her entrance and back up a few times to coat it with wetness before she’s slipping it inside herself, each inch making her have to try harder to not just break into orgasm until it’s fully buried.

Beca already feels like she’s out of her mind, and Chloe doesn’t seem too far behind. She watches as Chloe’s hand dips further between her legs and she knows Chloe’s slipping her fingers into herself like Beca’s doing with the vibrator.

She clenches around the toy and it makes her hips jump.

“Oh, my God, Beca,” Chloe moans and Beca watches her start fully riding her hand, her free hand flailing for a few seconds before it lands on her own knee.

Beca knows she needs something to stabilize herself. She almost tells Chloe to just crawl forward and straddle her face and hold on to the back of the couch.

The thought of it makes her drag the vibrator out and she hears Chloe’s empathetic moan at the sight, which only makes Beca wetter still. She presses back in and Chloe moans again.

Beca moans, too.

It kills her to do it, but she can’t keep her head lifted any longer to watch Chloe. She won’t be able to keep herself from coming if she’s fucking herself and watching Chloe doing the same. Not like this. This is all so raw and visceral. It’s never felt like this. Not with Chloe. Not with anyone.

She doesn’t wait for Chloe’s instruction. Her thumb finds the correct button at the base of the toy and presses it to turn up the vibration strength, immediately groaning at the added stimulation.

“Just like that,” Chloe breathes and Beca feels herself swell with pride at the knowledge that Chloe likes it. “You look so good.”

It makes Beca part her legs wider and her foot bumps Chloe’s knee in the process. It seems to make both of them pause for a brief second and Beca decides to leave it there. She chooses, again, to touch Chloe in some way while they do this. While she pumps her vibrator in and out of herself steadily.

“God, you’re so wet, I can see it,” Chloe groans.

Beca just nods and brings her free hand to herself to tend to her now-neglected clit. She rubs it with precision and the combination draws a particularly sinful moan out of her. She’s going to lose it soon, especially if Chloe keeps moaning the way she is. Beca can feel her, too. She can feel it in the way the bed moves and how her leg shifts against Beca’s foot how fast Chloe’s hips are moving.

It spurs Beca’s on, too, and she works the toy more quickly, thumbing the button to kick it up again, desperate for more of everything. She almost shudders with the new intensity and has to clench against it to hold off once again, just holding it deep inside herself until the urge to come lessens.

“Don’t stop,” Chloe says and she sounds so desperate Beca almost comes just from that.

Instead, she nods and starts thrusting into herself only for—

“Are you fucking kidding me,” she groans, dragging the vibrator out of herself.

“What? What’s wrong?” Chloe asks, sounding so breathless.

Beca looks at her and memorizes it all; Chloe’s never looked so aroused and positively wild and Beca’s pretty sure she probably looks much the same. Then she looks at the toy and clicks the power button, only for it to not respond. No light. No buzz. Nothing.

“It died.”

Chloe’s, “What?” is an airy laugh, almost like she can’t believe it.

“It hasn’t been charged in two months,” she explains. Then feels like there are way too many words being shared. “I can still…” she finishes, moving it back between her legs, intending to use it like a simple dildo instead.

“No,” Chloe says and Beca’s shocked when her hand, the one holding the vibrator, is suddenly in Chloe’s grasp, her hand around Beca’s around the base of the toy. Her other hand is still between her legs but she’s no longer moving her hips.

Beca swallows hard. She knows something is going to happen. It looms with inevitability and has been for weeks. Or months. Years, maybe. She thinks the moment might have finally arrived.

“Lesbians.”

Beca has to shake her head to clear her thoughts. “What?”

“My search terms: lesbians.”

Beca just stares at her. She’s trying to prepare herself but it feels impossible.

“Lesbian sex.”

She hears herself whimper and somehow feels heavier, like she could sink into bed at any moment.

“Lesbian sex best friends.”

Beca’s entire stomach flips. “That’s what you want to watch?” she manages to say.

Chloe’s nod is tentative, almost shy despite what’s been transpiring between them for the last many minutes.

Beca feels herself nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

She watches the way Chloe rushes forward and she drops the toy somewhere in the bed so she can drag her nails down Chloe’s back the second she’s on top of her, hips between Beca’s open legs.

Chloe stops short, though. Her lips are hovering millimeters from Beca’s.

It’s Beca who lifts her head to kiss her.

It feels like fire.

It’s hot and aggressive and Chloe’s hips are already rolling against Beca who worries for a quarter of a second that this might be over way too fast before she stops caring about that. Chloe’s on top of her, hips grinding against Beca while they devour one another’s kiss and it’s all Beca can do to hold on, to wrap her legs around Chloe’s waist and bury her hands in her hair and meet Chloe’s tongue stroke for stroke.

“I want to touch you,” Chloe says against her lips and all Beca can do to respond is nod because Chloe’s sucking on her tongue.

She feels Chloe’s weight shift and she knows why. Chloe needs her hand because she’s going to touch Beca.

Beca also has to drop her legs back to the bed again and she feels Chloe shift until she’s straddling Beca’s thigh, hot wetness pressing against it to make Beca moan. She can’t believe she’s feeling that part of Chloe on her body. She can’t believe that Chloe’s trying to distract Beca with the way she’s kissing her as if Beca won’t notice that her hand is skating down her body, touching but not lingering on her breasts before swiftly moving between her legs.

“Fuck, Chloe,” she whines, on the edge of orgasm once again.

She can feel Chloe working herself against her thigh and it only makes it all the more difficult for Beca to hold on. She digs her nails into Chloe’s shoulders to hold on as Chloe’s fingers move over her with a level of reverence Beca really doesn’t have the patience for right now.

“You’re so wet,” Chloe breathes into her mouth before kissing her again, fingers moving through that wetness until they’re starting to work in circles against her.

Beca doesn’t stand a chance and she knows it.

She just holds on and tries to focus more on how Chloe feels working herself on Beca’s thigh than she does on the way Chloe’s playing with her clit.

She can hear herself but it’s almost drowned out by Chloe’s own desperate moans. Beca wants to hear more of it so she turns her face away, not because she doesn’t want to kiss her anymore but because she wants to hear her. And it’s getting increasingly difficult to breathe.

Chloe moaning her name in her ear is what does it.

Her climax hits her hard and with little warning and she hears a, “Oh, my God, yes,” moaned, too, and she knows Chloe’s coming with her. She knows because she can feel it in how arousal is dripping down the outside of her thigh just like her own is dripping between her legs. She knows because she’s heard Chloe come so many times in the past month she knows every nuance of her voice and breath and the way her body almost shakes with release and she can hear that and feel all of that now.

It lasts for so long Beca’s not sure she’s not coming twice back-to-back. She doesn’t care what it is, though. She just holds on to Chloe and lets the pleasure and ecstasy wash over her again and again until Chloe’s laying heavily against her.

Her face is in Beca’s neck and she can feel her there kissing it tiredly, the occasional graze of a tongue drawing a shiver out of her.

Her hand is still between Beca’s legs. It’s at rest but Beca is acutely aware of its presence until it’s retreating. She feels it dragging up her stomach, can feel the wetness that travels with it, and her breath sticks in her throat when she feels those same wet fingers find her left nipple to start teasing it.

It makes her jaw drop; it’s so sensual and sexual and her back arches into the touch.

Chloe lifts her head at her movement and looks down at her, the first eye contact they’ve made since they kissed. Beca can see there’s a question of some kind in her eyes; she hopes it’s a question that Beca wants to respond to in agreement. But for now, she just wants Chloe to keep touching her.

“That feels…” Her voice cuts off when Chloe’s fingers pinch and then pull until her wet nipple slips from Chloe’s grip. “Oh, my God.”

“Good?” Chloe says with a lazy smile.

Beca nods and melts into the kiss that Chloe presses to her mouth. She’s just settling into the kiss when Chloe ends it and moves away. She’s about to be disappointed when Chloe’s other hand sneaks under her chin to push it up and away so Chloe can kiss her throat. Beca feels a mark being left and she’s thrilled she won’t have to worry about anyone at work seeing it.

Chloe keeps moving, though, and her heart starts to race again as her lips travel over her collarbone until they’re moving up the hill of her breast.

Beca knows what’s coming but no fantasy could prepare her for what it feels like for Chloe to take her nipple into her mouth, tongue moving over it languidly. A moan follows and it’s Chloe’s, not Beca’s. Beca’s is stuck in her throat.

“I can taste you,” Chloe exhales when she lets Beca’s achingly hard nipple slip from her lips. “So good.”

Beca’s moan finally finds its way out at those words and she brings her hand up to push her fingers into Chloe’s hair again. “Don’t stop,” she says, breath already quickening.

She’s certain she’s never been so aroused before. She’s also certain she’s never had sex like this in her life. She hears Chloe’s agreement to not stop, though it’s little more than a hum as her tongue and lips play with Beca’s nipple, teasing and sucking and nipping gently to make Beca gasp.

She’s quickly desperate again and she’s about to ask Chloe for more when she has the stark realization that she hasn’t touched Chloe at all. Not more than her back and shoulders and hair.

If Chloe notices that Beca’s working her arm between their bodies, she doesn’t react to it. Beca knows she’s hyper-focused on what she’s doing; her nipple is so over-stimulated that it’s almost starting to hurt but she never wants Chloe to stop sucking on it. Not for anything. She wants her to do it forever.

She has to push her own hips down into the bed to be able to fit her hand between her leg and Chloe.

It doesn’t allow for fanfare or gradual teasing but Beca doesn’t care. What she cares about is the surprised-sounding moan that comes from Chloe, even with Beca’s nipple still in her mouth, and the way her hips lift to give Beca’s hand more room. What she cares about is how slick and hot Chloe is and that she’s finally touching her, finally hearing what she sounds like because of the way Beca’s fingers brush over her clit.

Chloe’s teeth connect again and it makes Beca hiss. “Other one, maybe?” she says with a gentle tug on Chloe’s hair that generates another moan from Chloe.

She’d almost forgotten Chloe likes her hair being pulled. Almost. She glances down and almost feels faint at the look of ecstasy on Chloe’s face, eyes closed and face flushed and lips parted as she moves. She doesn’t even open her eyes as her hand cups Beca’s other breast to push it up to bring its nipple to her lips.

It’s been so deprived compared to the other that Beca can scarcely breathe from the contact. She can’t take her eyes off it though. Can’t look away from how it looks to have Chloe’s hair between her fingers, to have Chloe’s hand on her breast, to have her nipple in Chloe’s mouth.

It’s so mesmerizing she forgets she’d had other plans until Chloe moans and pushes herself against Beca’s fingers.

Beca can feel her need and she tucks two fingers together and reaches to find Chloe’s entrance and she lets Chloe be the one to move to take them inside, which she does with a moan that makes Beca’s breast slip from her lips but she recaptures it quickly.

Beca probably should have expected it given their position, but feeling Chloe’s hips starting to move, makes Beca feel dizzy. Chloe’s riding Beca’s fingers and worshiping her breasts and Beca’s so turned on she doesn’t know how to ask for what she needs, but she doesn’t have to. Chloe stops holding up Beca’s breast, adjusting her own angle to be able to continue reaching it, and slips that hand between Beca’s legs again, not hesitating to push into Beca’s body.

“Fuck,” she exhales as she drops her head back to the pillow, unable to watch any longer.

She curls her fingers and feels Chloe do the same, the pace picking up again quickly.

“Beca,” Chloe whimpers, her forehead resting against Beca’s chest as they fuck each other, Beca’s hand in her hair to hold on.

Beca can only moan and writhe and try to keep her fingers inside Chloe who is starting to move so hard and fast against her that it’s making it difficult. They slip out a few times but when it happens, Chloe stops and waits for Beca to find her again before she’s riding her again.

Chloe’s hand isn’t very focused, either, but Beca doesn’t need it to be. It’s inside her and Beca can do the rest of the work as she works her hips against it, listening to Chloe moaning her name again and again like it’s a curse word until she feels Chloe quivering from within, and a rush of heat, and Chloe’s hand pushes hard against her so she can grind against it and then they’re coming together. Again.

Beca tries to listen to the way they sound together but it’s hard to think about anything but the pleasure rippling between her legs and the way it feels for Chloe’s cunt to clench around her fingers again and again.

“Oh, my God,” Chloe groans once they’re both still. She’s cautious and courteous about the way she detangles herself from Beca, who is so spent she feels like she could fall asleep in two seconds, until she’s sprawled on her back next to Beca.

“You okay?” Beca manages to ask because Chloe hasn’t stopped making sounds.

“I think I’m still coming,” Chloe says with a weak laugh followed by a quiet moan. “Oh, my God, Beca.” Another sigh. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fucking great,” Beca says after heaving a sigh and letting her head loll to the left to look at her. “God, that was so good.”

She hadn’t really meant to say that out loud. There hasn’t been time to figure out what the afterglow mood was going to be, if it would be okay to acknowledge things a certain way.

“That was the best sex I’ve ever had,” Chloe says, followed by another laugh and a groan that has her bringing her hands up to cover her face.

Beca feels her entire body blush. “Seriously?”

Chloe turns her head and peeks at her from between her fingers. “You’ve had better?”

Beca feels herself smiling. “No,” she says. “But I thought you might have.”

Chloe’s hands fall away; she’s smiling, too, and she shakes her head. “Nothing like that.”

Beca knows she’s smiling way too big but she can’t help it. “Cool.”

“Yeah,” Chloe laughs. “Cool. I can’t feel my legs.”

Beca blushes again but this time it’s accompanied by pride; she likes that she made Chloe feel that good. She lets her eyes roam over Chloe’s body, spent and on display next to her and she drinks it in until something in her periphery catches her eye. She has to tilt her chin to see, and then she laughs.

“Dude, my nipples are like, permanently hard now.” They’re both still standing at firm attention, much more than their normal state of arousal.

Every filter she’s ever put on herself over the years feels absent now and it’s freeing. She feels free.

Chloe nods. “It’s a good look on you.”

Chloe meets her eyes and they both fall quiet. Beca wonders if it’s healthy, or even humanly possible, to become so aroused so quickly so soon after such a hard release but Chloe’s looking at her like she feels the same way.

Chloe even starts to move but Beca puts up her hand to stop her.

“Just...I need a moment.” She needs to finish gathering herself before Chloe destroys her again.

“But we don’t have to do it that way anymore,” Chloe says with a smile, her hand lacing with Beca’s to pull until Beca’s the one turning onto her side and moving until she’s sitting astride Chloe’s hips.

“No?” Beca asks, using her position to arch and stretch her back, something she notices Chloe watching appreciatively.

“This is much better,” Chloe replies, her hands moving lazily over Beca’s thighs and waist until they’re gently cupping her breasts. “But I do still want to watch you fuck yourself with that when you recharge it,” she adds with a nod of her head to the right where Beca’s dead vibrator lays somewhere all but forgotten.

It warms Beca and she smiles as she bends down, intending to kiss her, but she stops short. “Only if I get to fuck you with it, too.”

“Deal,” Chloe whispers against her lips.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~

The next morning, Beca decides to stop crossing dates off the calendar marking the days they’ve been home. She takes the calendar off the wall entirely and shoves it into a drawer.

She’d rather not be reminded of the passage time.

Not when Chloe’s in bed waiting for her to return with their traditional cups of coffee after staying up all night.

Beca’s never been more physically exhausted in her life.

She hopes the feeling never goes away.

The End (probably...yeah, probably.)

#bechloe #beca mitchell #chloe beale #bechloe fic #queerantine #sinday #weeklybechloe #fanfic #desperate measures

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ts4cyberpunk-followtherabbit · 3 years ago

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LEGALLY EMPLOYED

Politician: is active in politics, holding or seeking office in government. Politicians propose, support, and create laws or policies that often include how much Corpo control is involved in the city’s government.

Attorney: There are lawyers for corporate law, international law, space law, entertainment law, warfare and military justice, and federal and local law. Rates vary on the firm.

Collar: Corpo Employees like Clerks, Secretaries, and junior Executives are commonly known as collars. Usually a low-level employee of a megacorp they don’t have much pull in Corpo biz but benefit from Corpo job perks.

Suits: Senior Corpo executives find themselves higher up in the ranks with more lucrative benefits and higher risk responsibilities usually involving shady Corpo deals. A suit’s front-line is still usually in an office.

Netcop: Sometimes they uncover Corporate treachery or deadly secrets. But that’s not why they Netrun. Working for Netwatch makes them equipped with very powerful software to move through the Net, every Netrunners dream.

Corpo Engineer: create profitable weapons, devices, security systems, and cyberware. They often have access to dangerous and expensive equipment that they can work with at their leisure for personal gain.

Consolidated Agriculture: direct ownership or leasing of farmland by major corp industry in order to mass produce the world with high quality food.

Social Worker: A particularly underfunded sector of the government, social workers are in charge of human resources and financial aid, most often in the form of kibble card distribution and foster care services.

Scientist: conducts research mostly funded by Corpo to provide corporations with the latest in Cybernetics, Biotechnology, Systems biology, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Engineering, and Metascience.

Medical Technicians: doctors in a specific field. They could be general practitioners, cardiologists, dentists or more elite members of the Trauma team. Most are impossible to afford without a Corpo insurance plan.

Educators: demonstrate effective learning, teaches, informs, instructs, or inspires about general or specific subjects. Anyone with a marketable skill can educate on it.

Accountant: responsible for keeping Corpo’s or crime rings’ financial records. Most accountants are responsible for a wide range of finance-related tasks, but mostly its about making sure acquired income looks legal.

NCPD Badges: Underfunded police that stretches their authority and use procedural abilities as far as they can to get their job done. Most Badges want to make the city a safer place, others just like having authority to abuse.

MaxTac: sometimes referred NCPD Psycho Squad, they are a specialized sub-group of the Night City Police Department. As a cybersquad, MaxTac specializes in dealing with cyberpsychos.

Private Investigators: law enforcement that works for private clients. They interview people, conduct surveillance, find missing persons, and solve crimes. Wages earned vary by the investigator, some are famous, ergo expensive.

Bounty Hunters: catches criminals and brings them to NCPD badges in return for a reward. Even though they are legally employed with NCPD and Militech corp. BountyHunters are not against working solo gigs to catch criminals.

Firefighters: a rescuer extensively trained to extinguish hazardous fires that threaten life, property, and the city. There is a recruitment drive in the armed forces, suggesting assault-style situations.

Dog Tag: Any individual on active duty with the United States Armed Forces, led by the Department of Defense. The D.o.D consists of four branches: the Army, Aerospace Force, Navy, and Marines. Inactive dog tags are called ex-tags.

Construction Worker: work makes up almost 70% of available work for civilians. Full body conversions like the NovelTech Samson make workers tireless, incredibly strong, and capable of surviving almost any accident.

Janitors: There aren’t enough janitors in Night City to clean the filth off her streets but all the same companies still hire people to clean their office buildings and shops. Its often nasty work for bad pay.

Binman: a worker who collects and hauls away garbage and municipal solid waste and recyclables from residential, commercial, industrial for further processing and waste disposal.

Farmer: raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or gene-buddy livestock.

Owner: a privately owned business with a storefront where legal business is conducted. Many owners are under the protection of gangs depending on their location but some owners are perfectly capable of protecting their own store.

SPIRITUALISTS

Paranormal Investigator: the paranormal is a lucrative business. Most gigs tend to be the work of tech being used to simulate experiences but they are paid to resolve the paranormal activity.

Cultist: A charismatic leader or a follower of an unorthodox cult who generally lives outside of conventional society. Some Cultists are prone to acts of terrorism or unorganized violence for their spiritual or religious cause.

Religious Leader: The duties of a religious leader vary from faith, but usually include encouraging people to make a commitment to their faith and live according to its teachings and explaining the meaning of scripture.

ENTERTAINMENT BIZ

Glitters: Doors open for Glitters that are closed for others because they can bring exposure and popularity. Public icons, fashion gurus, famous investors are all glitters whose only job is to write checks and shine.

Braindance Artist: An actor or actress that works primarily with Diverse Media Systems Braindance Studios. The artist is wired up with the neural feeds and starts recording. The BD artist usually has no script. The art of Braindance recording is spontaneity.

TV Star: From talk shows to “reality shows” TV stars still fill daytime TV channels with drama, action, and comedy. Braindance might be the next best form for the movie cinema and video game industry but TV stars still dazzle the small screen.

Rock stars/Lazrpop Star: Singers that are sponsored by recording companies or other Corp. and are paid to be apolitical so their music creates no discourse, They make beats and lyrics and their income is relative to the size of the audience that idolizes them.

Radio Jockey: A radio jockey hosts a radio show that may take calls from listeners; interview celebrities or gives news, weather, sports, or traffic information.RJ’s can be swayed monetarily to broadcast political leaning content. In between, they play music of preferred genres.

Performative Dancer: From Ballet to Kabuki Theatre, performative dancers are marveled upon in media by more artistic or refined members of society. Many performative dancers utilize cosmetic and athletic cyber to add authenticity to their performance.

Performative Musician: composes, conducts, or performs music on instruments. They are not concerned with conflicts of political interest since their music seldom includes vocals. They are still often sponsored by Corpo though.

Comedian: seek to entertain an audience by making them laugh. This might be through jokes or amusing situations, acting foolish or employing prop comedy. Comedians get the most heat in the industry for crossing apolitical lines.

Writer: Most Corpo employed writers are writing scripts for TV stars, comedians, songs for rockstars, and speeches for politicians but some still work the competitive field of novels, they also compete with AI software in creative writing.

Preem Mannequins: Models that work their way up a brutal and competitive industry to stand out for their physical beauty in some way. Most get featured in advertisement billboards and high fashion magazines and most are obsessed with their physical appearance.

Superstar: do it all, record BDs, release songs, dance,and have had their face on billboards. They are masters of the entertainment industry and produce eddies and audiences where ever they go. Most Superstars are completely entitled.

Professional Athlete: Athletes compete in one or more sports that involve physical strength, speed or endurance Most professional athletes have particularly well-developed physiques obtained by extensive modification, strict training, and dietary regimen.

Celebrity Agent: represent and promote artists, performers, and athletes in dealings with Corpo sponsors. They handle contract negotiation and other business matters for clients. They also headhunt for new talent to bring in.

Fashion Designer: design clothing and fashion ranges. They may work in high fashion or designer ready-to-wear fashion, as well as in high-street fashion. Most fashion designers that achieve recognition for their designs assist Corpo techies in producing more creative code in Fashion Ai’s.

Aesthetic Artist: those in the entertainment biz are concerned about their appearances to the media and public. Aesthetic artists’ job is to make sure they look their best. Focused on make-up, hair, and outfit they keep those in the entertainment biz styling.

Creative Craft Artisan: a very rare breed mostly replaced by 3D design and printing companies, CC Artisans create unique sculptures, woodwork, or pottery made out of the finest materials, and their creations are afforded only by the super-wealthy.

Illustrator Artisan: Illustrators are painters, sketchers, and digital drawers that create original images for a range of printed and digital products. They work closely with marketing teams to turn ideas and printed media into inspiring illustrations.

MEDIA

TV News Reporter: always somehow on the scene in the thickest of action to get first hand news delivered to the citizens before other networks. It can be a high-risk job.

TV News Anchor: Once reporters work up in ranks they can earn opportunities to become a TV news anchor, a lower risk job with higher pay than TV news reporter. Many TV news anchors gain enough popularity to be considered a glitter media.

Journalist: Journalism in night city means gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information via screamsheets, magazines, or the net. Unlike TV news reporters, journalists are freelance, the job is high risk.

Combat Correspondents: provide perspective on what it’s like inside the U.S. armed forces. These soldier media gather information for news and feature articles much as civilian journalists do , often against military protocol.

Sensationalist: sensationalism is a type of editorial gig. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers.

Celebrity Hunter: Journalists that focus on the who’s who are usually found chasing down the hottest glitters for interviews that will produce the best ratings. They have a low-risk job but sometimes find themselves in high-risk situations.

Clicker: a freelance photographer or can be employed by photo agencies, magazines or local newspapers. Their job is to shoot the best photo for the best story. Journalists and clickers work as a duet.

Sport Jockey: to make sure you know every score from all the most important games worldwide. It’s a low-risk job with sports celebrity access perks.

Media Techie:In media, there is equipment like cameras, recorders, Braindance, media techies are hired to maintain, repair or purchase and all equipment for best-produced media in the biz.

Shutterbug: vagrants of media, shutterbugs are out to get any quote, photo, or story that will garnish any eddies for personal gain. They don’t care about truth or ratings, they simply chase whatever sells quickest.

STREET TRASH

Sharks: have eddies to give away, but interest rates are known to be extreme. consequences of defaulting on a loan shark is often a higher price to pay. only desperate people go to sharks, and they capitalize on it.

Bookie: a person whose business is accepting and paying out money risked on a particular result of something, esp. fighting, racing and competitive activities.

Black Marketeer: a person who trades illegally in officially controlled commodities such as illegally obtained Corpo weapons, Illegal cyberware, BDs, and extreme drugs.

Juicers: work for sharks almost exclusively and aren’t hired to kill but instead hired to squeeze eddies owed to the shark from poor s.o.b’s that are overdue on their debts. They are quick to use extreme force and torturous tactics.

Pushers: SynthCoke,Boost,Blue Glass,Smash,Dorph,Black Lace -pushers sell it all.Pushers only care about moving drugs for eddies. They are prone to using the drugs they push some can be dangerous.Ex-tags and joytoys are common customers.

Cookers: SynthCoke,Boost,Blue Glass,Smash,Dorph,Black Lace- Cookers make it all.They have a dangerous job just from being exposed to lethal chemicals during the cooking process to avoiding the ncpd Vice unit.Cookers use pushers to distribute.

Street Punk: Gang posers,dophers,zoomers, and dregs of society are weak nobodies that get themselves or other people killed during careless acts of petty crimes and gigs. They have a low threat level but are still a nuisance, mostly to the NCPD.

Scavengers: known for kidnapping people and forcibly harvesting their cyberware.Despite all of them pursuing the same distasteful trade, scavengers tend to operate in small groups with no official hierarchy to unite them.

Con Man: night city’s cheats and swindlers who cheat or trick someone by gaining their trust and persuading them to believe or buy something that is not true. Con man are responsible for a lot of disappearances and deaths.

Gangbanger: Gangbangers are the ultimate rules of the city streets. From small gangs like Moxes or Divine Dragons to mega gangs like Tyger Claws each gang in Night City is as diverse as the street itself all thrown together in a lethal cocktail.

Street Scribbler: Wannabe street artisans take to scribbling opinions, quotes, and sig tags over public property as a form of protest and vandalism. Scribblers are not extremely creative and don’t respect gangbanger tags.

Street Artisans: create graffiti as form of activism and expression but follow strict code and respect gangbanger territory. This respect of code encourages gangbangers to protect some artisans’ artwork from scribblers defacing their work.

Buskers: the jesters of night city from acrobatics, drawing caricatures, comedy, dance, singing, living statue, poetry, street theatre, these citizens earn gratuities by entertaining the city streets on all corners.

Street Vendor: Offers goods or services for sale to the public with a mobile stall. Goods they sell are often second or even third hand, may or may not be stolen or salvaged.

Disc Jockey: DJs, play off the cuff or pre-recorded mixes at nightclubs and at private and public street events. They engage and entertain their audience and incorporate requests into their music line-up.

Fixer: Well-connected information brokers who apply their trade on the black market. They locate, acquire and sell info about desired persons, places or things within their areas of operation. Most gigs solos do come from Fixers.

Nomads: were once corporate wage-slaves, who got fired from employment, and now they roam the highways in motor-gangs.They maintain strong family bonds and have a hard time trusting anyone outside of the family. They despise Corpo.

Ripperdoc: is a medical practitioner who can install a variety of cybernetic prostheses. There are many that operate legally, but some conduct illicit deals, such as installing military-grade cybernetics for the right price.

Deckjockey: is an expert netrunner, usually a specialist at covertly accessing and stealing from corporate databases, buying, trading and selling their deepest secrets and information to Fixers and other Deckjockeys.

Techie: range from technicians to cybernetic specialists. They are usually introverted and “underground’ who do “off-the-record” work and make their living building, fixing and modifying anything from vending machines to weapons.

Bartender: Night City drags dangerous individuals in pretty much every bar, club and pub so many bartenders tend to be ex-gangbangers, ex-cons, ex-tags, and ex-solos.and are accustomed to violence and high-stress environments and how to handle them.

Bouncer: tend to come from backgrounds of violence but also have the body and modifications to execute more aggressive methods of peacekeeping. A bar’s success can sometimes completely rely on how good the bouncer is at their job.

Smuggler: facilitate entry into a desired location and smuggle a package to be delivered at a predecided destination.They may traffic persons or merchandise and are quick to abandon a package if they suspect they will be caught.

Runners : a driver for hire that has three rules: all deals are final, no names, and never look at the package. Runners don’t abandon packages at the first sight of risk, This makes them more expensive.

Highrider: a pilot for hire who will fly anyone to their destination under any conditions as long as they get half their payment before take-off and the rest when they land. Most highriders die in a flame of glory.

SOLO

Solo Mercenary: is the jack of all trade in the solo biz not particularly a master in one thing a solo merc takes jobs From bodyguard to thief, to assassin. But the point is they get the job done, even if its a bit…messy.

Shinobi: trained shadow solos have finesse. Their proficiency is in katanas, martial arts and stealth so have a great skill-set suited for silent stings and assassinations. They get the job done quietly and you pay extra for it.

Solo Thief: have exceptional skills at stealing and have mastery over all kinds of lock picking and hacking.To the simple pickpocket to the most difficult heist, a solo thief always nabs their target possession.

Solo Assassin: don’t have time for petty thievery and are not in the biz of “protecting’ anybody. Their set of skills is good for one thing: finding and killing a target. Their contracts are usually very expensive.

Solo Bodyguard: are tanks, physically strong and unyielding they use their physical advantage to guard and protect persons or places. solo bodyguards often have contracts with fixers, celebs, politicians, and even Corpos.

Corporate Samurai : Solos that are hired to protect Corporation property and carry out violent and illegal gigs for Mega Corps.The Corporate Samurai will associate and works for or possibly as a Corrupt Corporate Executive.

Ronin: Previously corpo Samurai are now freelance are called Ronin and are seen as untrustworthy in the solo bizz because of their Corpo past however this past gives them an edge in succeeding against Corpo gigs.

Street Samurai: fight against the Megacorps and follow their own personal codes of honor which is to bring down the society in which they live in order to make a better one so they take Any gig that sticks it to Corpo.

Shinobi: are elite trained and have mastery in espionage and deception hired by Corpos executives, celebs, and politicians for protection. Shinobi are usually against using cyberware and prefer to rely on their own strength.

EROTICA WORK

Joytoy: Licensed prostitutes that work the street.Their biz is selling sex.joytoys have a high risk gig so they often seek out pimps for protection which depending on the pimp can help or complicates a joytoys job and life.

Pimp: a joytoy’s manager. They sometimes bring joytoys clients and deal with problematic customers but mostly they hover around their joytoys and berate them for not bringing enough eddies.Most pimps only ‘manage’ a handful of joytoys.

Doll: A step up from street prostitutes Dolls use neural implants to remove themselves from the experience and implant a fantasy for the customer and the doll doesn’t remember the interaction when it’s over.Dolls are employed by dollhouses.

Caretaker: owners of dollhouses. They employ dolls, provide health care as needed as well as protection for dolls . Caretakers can employ dozens of dolls at one time and dolls work hard for them for higher positions in the dollhouse.

Mannequin: are a dancer that perform in a window box, usually wearing a fashion brand they are hired to be still, poised, and perfect like a real mannequin, others are hired to perform lavish dances to sell the brand they are wearing.

Stripper: is a person who earns eddies by stripping their clothes off.However, its not as easy as just standing on a stage naked. They are excellent dancers and masters at visual teasing. Some strippers are also joytoys,but not always.

Erotica: are a dancer that performs for braindances. synaptic acting a-listers. Pure bi-based ecstasy.All eroticas are in a catalog where you ask for their pre-recorded BD. Eroticas don’t generally engage in physical sexual activity.

Black Widow: has a more lucritive and lethal way to use their body .Black widows target Glitters use sex to get closer to the target and murders them before making off with an exceptional score of eddies or merch to sell.

Hooker: an unlicensed sex worker generally wants to avoid STD screenings which would make any sex work they do illegal if they fail the screening.Unlicensed sex workersoffer way cheaper services but with much higher risk of STD spread.

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dropintomanga · 5 years ago

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A Look at “I Sold My Life for 10K Yen Per Year”

We all have kinds of taboo topics that reinforce what’s appropriate to talk about. Religion, money, politics, sex, etc. While these are reasonable topics to avoid addressing in many cases, there’s one taboo topic that really affects everyone. It’s death. In modern urban society, we all avoid any mention of it with good reason. Yet we live our lives to a point where we may feel that death is an appropriate way to escape.

What if you felt that way? What if you realized that life is mostly meaningless and then try to get rid of your future? A manga adaptation of a well-known Japanese novel takes a look at that possibility and how it can lead to an unexpected and profound experience for the better.

This manga, “I Sold My Life for 10,000 Yen Per Year” by Shoichi Taguchi, made me wonder about how much people matter in living a life well lived.

The series, based off a novel called “3 Days of Happiness” by Sugaru Miaki, is about a 30-year man named Kusunoki, whose life hasn’t turned out the way it expected for him. While he was an ace student in his younger days, Kusunoki has no direction in life. He spends his days living off of part-time work. One day, while selling old books and DVDs to a secondhand shop, the owner of the shop tells Kusunoki about a place that buys your lifespan for a set price depending on how much value your life has accumulated. Kusunoki finds the place, gets a quota and sells off the 30 years of his life for 300,000 yen. He only has 3 months to live. Kusunoki is assigned an observer, a girl by the name of Miyagi, whose job is to chronicle the rest of his existence. The two would find a connection through shared experiences and the story becomes a sad and beautiful story about love in the face of certain death.

Death is scary to talk about and it makes us feel alive. When confronted with their own mortality, people tend to live life differently. They may focus more on helping other people as they want to be remembered well by those that love them. Of course, there’s a flip side where people aware of their death start to become more protective of themselves and lash out at anyone different from them. A big key to this is anxiety without any sense of reflection. The more anxious you are, the less reflective you become. Self-reflection isn’t something that’s taught very well to many people (and arguably a major reason why therapy exists).

Kusunoki starts to develop a sense of self-reflection when it comes to his past relationships. A big theme of this manga is relationships and how easy it is to lose them.

In the first chapter, there’s a flashback of Kusunoki and a girl he liked named Himeno. Both got along with each other during elementary school as they were smart and disliked by their classmates. They made a promise to get together as a couple after their ‘20s if they couldn’t find a partner by then. One of Kusunoki’s bucket list wishes was to reunite with Himeno, which Miyagi protests. Kusunoki wants to tell Himeno how he feels and goes through a makeover. The two do reunite out of chance, but their reunion turned out to be sour. It’s later revealed that Himeno was planning to kill herself in front of Kusunoki as she wrote him a letter back in high school asking for his help, but he never responded. This ties to how Kusunoki felt about life after school. He never kept in touch with his friends from those days due to him looking down on others.

However, Kusunoki’s connection to Miyagi becomes something more than observer and subject. They both fall in love with each other. Kusunoki wanted someone to acknowledge him even if the person may not always agree with his way of thinking. Miyagi later reveals that she lost a childhood friend like Kusunoki. She empathizes with Kusunoki because of their desire for closure involving their childhood friends. Plus Miyagi loved that Kusunoki made her feel important by dragging her around to do his activities with him.

When people talk about what it means to live, they think about factors involving only the self. Get a high-paying job, getting a nice house, buying a fancy car, etc. There’s no emphasis on helping someone in need, donating money to a good cause, having an enlightening conversation, and/or making someone’s day better. Stuff that involves being around other human beings that feel insecure as much as you do.

Speaking of human beings, Kusunoki’s connection with Miyagi makes him frowned upon by his local community members. That’s because Miyagi is literally invisible to other people. When he talks to her, other people see him as talking to air. They start to think he’s insane and/or delusional. Kusunoki doesn’t care since he’s accepted his circumstances. The fun part is near the end of the series is that his neighbors start to accept Miyagi is there with him. They start to feel more optimistic and happy because they see how happy Kusunoki is. He’s enjoying life more than they are.

It made me think about someone with a serious mental illness and has delusions. They are avoided because no one understands them. More often than not, they’re labeled as dangerous to talk to. But once you’re able to talk to them and not feed too much into their delusions, you start to find how lonely they are. You realize that they’re trying to live their lives as much as you are. You realize they want some kind of connection (there’s a movie about this which covers how the mentally ill may need some kind of community acceptance to manage life). I see this with Kusunoki finally getting love from his neighbors as he deep down wanted some kind of connection that makes his life meaningful after seeing how hollow he became without the lack of emotional support.

Kusunoki’s desire for meaningful connection can be reflective of how hard it is for adults to make friends/relationships of any kind as they get older. Asking someone to be friends feels “childish” as it doesn’t always lead to external outcomes that mark “success.” I read an article from someone who believes wanting friends in contexts outside of socializing is considered shameful. Kusunoki feels like an all-too-real example of someone who was taught that you can wing it with relationships since materialism will solve all your emotional needs.

The ending to the manga (and the original novel) isn’t exactly a happy one and it teaches some great lessons. Death comes for everyone at some point and all we can do is live life in a way that matters. However, we need acceptance of one another in order to do so. When you see how the relationship between Kusunoki and Miyagi blossomed until the end, it will make you wonder if what we really need in life is someone who’s willing to embrace our emotional vulnerabilities and continue to love us despite them. It may not be the ultimate solution, but it’s an important one to consider as there’s still am alarming amount of people who want to die because no one truly hears them.

If the world realizes how having an accepting person/community can lead to better outcomes, maybe we can go beyond just a few days of happiness into a lifetime of joy.

#Jumyou wo Kaitotte Moratta. Ichinen ni Tsuki Ichimanen de #Miyagi #Kusunoki #psychology of mortality #mental health #death #manga #I Sold My Lifespan for Ten Thousand Yen per Year #community #loneliness #friendship

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jyndor · 4 years ago

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Cop-thing-anon here:

(I don't believe in the blue lives matter thing by the way)

I do get where you're coming from. I guess I see the thing about cops and cop AUs differently because the police is different and not as fucked up in my country. The thing about the fanart is just..I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think the artist really focused on the skin colour of Sokka, I mean, it's a kids show. Skin colour was never really mentioned or important in atla. But Sokka's personality is most likely why the artist was inspired to draw him as a "gangster", with azula (the villain) being a cop. It is kind of insensitive to draw that with the events going on, but I think that a lot of people in the fandom take some things way too seriously, for a kids show back in the late 2000's anyway.

hey anon, I say this with love and I am being sincere. I'm gonna need you to rewatch the show if you think skin color didn't matter. and it doesn't matter where you live because there is no part of the world, no culture, that isn't shaped by colonialism. I don't mean to be condescending so please bear with me, I truly believe in educating people as a part of allyship and anti-racism.

Anon, please know that I am not angry or anything but sincere in what I’m about to say. Just bear with me because I know that unlearning shit is difficult and can be painful, but we’ve gotta do it. I do appreciate you wanting to have this conversation at all. And I’m not writing this just for your benefit - this is for anyone who wants to learn about why A) race is a part of ATLA’s narrative and B) why critical analysis of mass media is actually important. So I’m not assuming you don’t know basic things about this stuff, I’m not trying to be condescending.

Now we’re gonna fix colonialism and imperialism XD wee okay here we go.

No matter where you live in the world you have some awareness of skin color. Your understanding of race might be different than mine, in fact it probably is. Race as we know it today is a social construct that stems from many things (and I wrote several hundred words on it but it was too much and too far removed from the point I’m trying to make so I edited all of that out. Yay.)

You don’t usually see imperialism, one of the major themes in Avatar, without colonialism. Imperialism is slightly different than colonialism - you can think of it like the ideology behind the practice of colonialism.* Imperialism can be used to describe expansionism in general - which has been going on since the bronze age lol humans, I stg - but usually when people today refer to colonialism and imperialism they’re talking about imperialism starting in the 17th century.

Now imperialism is not just a European concept. ATLA is set in a world that we know is supposed to be like a combination of different Asian cultures (with some influences from the Americas). And the Fire Nation is clearly influenced by Imperial Japan. So briefly:

Japan had a policy of sakoku (chained or closed country) which kept it mostly isolated (out of concerns that Japan would fall victim to something like the Opium Wars in China, among other things) from the rest of the world for a couple hundred years until the 1850s when a US Naval commander named Matthew Perry (I am not kidding) forced Japan to open its borders for trade to the United States by gunboat diplomacy, an oxymoron if I have ever seen one before.

Japan ended up signing unequal treaties with a lot of Western countries, and this bred xenophobia and hostility in Japan. The Emperor who signed these treaties died of smallpox, and after some internal conflict his son decided try to renegotiate these treaties. The US and European countries were not interested in renegotiating dick but the mission wasn’t unsuccessful because the diplomats A) exchanged some islands with Russia and B) were inspired by western economic policy and society to “modernize” Japan. Japan began industrialization and it converted to a market economy with the help of the US and other western powers.

So over many years, Japan went to war with China, Korea, Russia (and took back some of the land they exchanged with them), and others. From wikipedia:

Using its superior technological advances in naval aviation and its modern doctrines of amphibious and naval warfare, Japan achieved one of the fastest maritime expansions in history. By 1942 Japan had conquered much of East Asia and the Pacific, including the east of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, part of New Guinea and many islands of the Pacific Ocean.

But ATLA is not a Japanese story. The Fire Nation is not Imperial Japan. The Earth Kingdom is not China or Korea, the Air Nomads are not Tibetan monks, and the Water Tribes are not Inuit. The creators definitely drew heavy inspiration from all of these places and others, but ATLA is a story written by American people in the United States for American kids. It is an American story.

And it was created at a time when the United States was victimizing people in Afghanistan and Iraq (and other places) in many similar ways to how the Fire Nation victimized people. In fact, the show starts in the Southern Water Tribe, which represent Inuit people, indigenous people in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, I think it’s safe to assume that the genocide being referenced here is not one by Japan but rather by European colonizers and later by the United States and Canada.

Imperialism is in the show’s DNA.

And so is racism. In our world they are inherently connected. And visual cues from the show along with things the characters say suggest that we are meant to make the comparison between our world and the ATLA world. Every story has a purpose - it doesn’t have to be political, but for Avatar it is political, it is anti-imperialist.

In this article about how ATLA resonates with us in 2020, Aina Khan of the Guardian interviews Professor Ali A Olomi about using ATLA to teach at Penn State. “One of the things we see with the Fire Nation is the ideological justification for what they’re doing. We are a glorious civilization. We have abundance, we have wealth, we have technological advancement; we need to share it with the rest of the world. That’s almost word for word European colonisation.”

Zuko and Azula both call Katara a peasant. In fact, Azula calls her a dirty peasant. This is one step away from calling her a s*vage I mean come on. While peasant might just be purely classist (lol no) because Zuko and Azula are royalty, um it’s clearly racialized classism because of real life context. There is real history with colonizers calling indigenous people this, dismissing their cultures as primitive and barbaric.

Add into the mix colorism, which is bias against darker skin and privileges fair skin (which is a byproduct of imperialism) and you have clear race shit happening in Avatar.

When I saw that fanart, I was immediately reminded of black lives matter of course, but mainly of the fact that indigenous peoples are also at high risk of being victimized by police. Not just in the US. And how gross it is to depict a colonizer like Azula as an angry cop (representing the state) turning her gun on an indigenous man who is dressed like a gangster which... yike.

Mass media influence everything we do. The messaging we get, our politics, what we want to eat for dinner because we’re hungry and have been writing this stupid essay for three hours LOL. It’s important that people think critically about what they consume. Otherwise you get the goddamn United States with half of our population stanning a racist fraud. You want to know why US Americans are so ignorant? Because our education system sucks, because we don’t have any real media literacy. But apparently the rest of the world has some fucking nerve making fun of Americans** because all of us suck at it. No one is thinking critically about media.

A really terrifying thing about people is our ability to take whatever message we want from stories, even if it is in direct contradiction with the narrative of a story. There’s a movie called American History X which is explicitly anti-fascist, but because it’s a drama and Ed Norton is cut and looks badass and uncucked or whatever LOL, the iconography in that movie is fairly popular with neo-nazis. Yike. This is not at that level of course, this is some random niche fanart for a rare pairing.

For better or for worse, US media and entertainment gets a lot of attention and people around the world eat it up. Maybe you don’t need to know every little detail about US American shit, and I know we tend to dominate media, but black lives matter is not just a 2020 thing. People have known about it for years, since it started. If that fanart was created in 2019, which I think it was, the BLM movement had already existed for six years. If you’re watching an American show like Avatar and you’re making fanart on social media but you don’t know what BLM is in 2019... well educate yourself lmao.

Considering that Black fans have expressed frustration and discomfort in fandoms over and over again, and I am sure indigenous fans have too because fandoms are racist sometimes, it’s important that white fans help make fandoms better. And I am a white fan, and I consider myself an anti-racist. Which means I have to be active about racism when I see it.

btw I found this great essay by @cobra-diamond which you should read if you want more details about the similarities between Japan and the Fire Nation.

* that is very reductive but it’s fine lol

** I am kidding, unless you are english feel free to make fun of americans for non-gun, non-trauma related things pls

#anons #asks #racism tw #colonialism tw #atla #fandom racism #acab #police violence #indigenous right #nazism tw #oh lord shitty discourse tw #imperialism tw #anyway now i'm gonna eat

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galactichoneybee92 · 5 years ago

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Thoughts on Isaac and Representation

I don’t have a point- let me just say that now. This also stands to be perhaps my most controversial post, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take in order to get my thoughts out. This will be long and rambling. You have been warned.

With the release of Sex Education Season 2, fans have been introduced to a character named Isaac, to mixed response. He is Maeve’s new neighbor, a barrier to her relationship with Otis and potentially a new love interest.

It’s not unusual to introduce a new love interest into a show to prolong the drama and keep the tension will-they-won’t-they romance alive. In season one we Otis in love with Maeve, thwarted by the fact that Maeve was dating Jackson, and that Otis never really believed that Maeve could like him anyway. Resigned with this fact, Otis attempted to move on with Ola who had appeared conviniently around the time that Maeve had realized her feelings for Otis and ended her own relationship. It was all very ships in the night.

In season two we get a sort of role reversal: This time it’s Otis in the relationship and Maeve left pining, thinking that he could never love her. It makes sense that this would be the time to introduce a new love interest for Maeve, sort of HER Ola, if you will. The difference here is that Ola is sweet and wonderful and Isaac is sketchy AF.

I hate him, and I’ve made no secret of hating him, because personally I find him sketchy and manipulative. There are other fans who like them though and ship the two of them. That’s fine; it’s a perfectly valid opinion, and shipping wars have been around as long as fandom. That’s nothing new. There is another issue though...

Isaac is in a wheelchair.

While that isn’t necessarily a problem in GENERAL, it is something that effects the way his character is handeled, as well as viewer interpretation. It’s my experience that in media, certain characters are usually gifted a sort of “plot armor.” While that term is most commonly directed towards characters who play too pivotal a role in the story to be written off, I find it often also applies to characters who fit into the role of “representation.”

But wait, you might say, that doesn’t sound right. POC and queer characters get killed off all the time. It’s practically a horror movie trope, and “Kill your gays” didn’t come from nowhere. To which I would reply: Exactly. We have all seen it a million times, have raised it as an issue, and I would like to think that as a society we are attempting to move past it. That gay characters are less likely to die because of the attention brought to the “kill your gays” trope.

It’s my understanding that these common minority tropes originally stem from their initial introduction into media. At first they didn’t have any representation at all, and then gradually they were allowed to be incorporated in media in small ways that didn’t offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. A very famous example would be the inclusion of African Americans: At first they weren’t in movies at all. Then they were(sort of?) but they were represented by white actors in blackface. Then when black actors were allowed to play their own roles, those roles were harmful stereotypes; You wouldn’t get a black actor playing a heroic lead, but he would be the brutish savage, or the “mammy” character. They were either relegated to minor side charactes, comic relief, or the villain- roles that didn’t challange the views of society.

There was a similar experience in regards to homosexuality in films, where once gay characters started appearing they were portrayed as sexless comic relief or villinous. The general idea behind it seemed to be that there could be homosexuality in films, but it had to be shows as wrong and corrupt, or destined to end in tragedy. After all, how could anybody in such a relationship possibly be happy? Ridiculous.

While media (and society) are still making strides towards diversity and inclusivity, you can’t say that media isn’t in a better place now than it was even ten or twenty years ago. I was born in the 90′s and the amount of difference I see even in the twenty-seven years I’ve been alive is actually a little astounding. I can’t even imagine the difference for people who are older than I. Even just since I graduated highschool (2010) I’ve seen such a huge difference in regards to representation across the board and while we still have a ways to go we are certainly far from where we started.

But what does any of this have to do with Isaac? He isn’t a POC, he isn’t in any way queer. No, but he is disabled which is another sort of representation and one that doesn’t get as much publicity. As such it is admittedly one that I don’t know as much about, but If I had to guess it’s probably because theres never (to my knowledge) been a big court case about whether or not disabled people deserve rights. It’s never been a hot button issue in a political debate the way that race politics or gay rights have and so I feel like it hasn’t gotten as much attention. Still disability representation is still a topic that comes up in conversation when discussing media.

So what does that have to do with anything? Why was I talking about plot armor? I had a reason, I promise. I’ve found that due to the problematic history of representation, shows (at least the socially aware ones) have been taking strides to try to avoid falling into the same harmful patterns as their predecessors. Since there was a long history of POC characters being cast as villains, evil characters to be defeated by the white protagonists, there was a stretch of time there where you wouldn’t see a single POC villain at all. It wasn’t quite true equality, but it was an effort to combat the harmful stereotypes that the media had perpetuated for so long.

Eventually we got to a place where it was generally acknowledged that you could have a POC villain as long as they weren’t the ONLY POC in your entire movie. The same goes for people of various gender and sexual identies. You can have a gay antagonist, but it’s impportant to include other gay people who ARENT evil to show that it’s the character that is evil, indepent of his sexuality. This isn’t seen as often however, probably due to the relative novelty of the inclusion of queer characters, which is why my examples for these points are POC characters who have a comparitively longer history of inclusion. That’s not to say that the history has always been positive, just that queer inclusion is a newer development and active disability rep seems even more recent.

I apologize if I’m phrsasing any of this poorly, but I’m hoping that you’re tracking the main points. Now. I repeat: What does ANY of this have to do with Isaac?

Isaac is, as of now, the only disabled character in Sex Education. As such, I feel like it’s kind of expected for him to be given “plot armor”, not in regards to being killed off but in his depiction. As the show’s only example of disabled representation, as well as his introduction as a love interest for Maeve, I feel like the expectation is that he would be a protagonist. At the very least he would be a good guy. And maybe some people think he is? I don’t know, he has his fans, but I’m not one of them.

This is the part of my post where I stop having a point and just start listing my thoughts.

When I met Isaac I expected to like him and I wonder how much of that stemmed from the fact that he was in a wheelchair and as such I expected that the show wouldn’t possibly portray him in a negative light. Even when he was rude to Maeve in the beginning I was willing to forgive it- I don’t mind my characters being prickly and Lord knows no other character on this show is perfect. And he was handsome, and snarky, which are usually traits that I love and I really REALLY expected to love him. However as the show progressed he just gave me bad vibes. I find him manipulative and untrustworthy.

I’m not going to go into my feelings about Isaac because I’ve already made one very long post duscussing his character, but instead I’d like to discuss his role in the show and how his disability factors into that role.

As I said before, it makes sense that this season would introduce a new love interest for Maeve. It’s not a terribly uncommon formula in shows like these. Considering that Maeve is considered the “bad girl” (even though we all know she’s a cinnamon role that just deserves ALL the love) who has self esteem issues and an inaccurate view of herself, I was honestly surprised that the show gave her such a cute, healthy relationship with Jackson. Were they perfect for each other? I don’t personally think so, but there wasn’t anything inherently problematic in their relationship. Jackson is a legitimately nice guy, I wish him the best and he was a pretty good boyfriend.

It wouldn’t be unheard of though to see her fall into a more toxic relationship, and while that’s a very strong term that even I am hesitant to use toward Isaac at this point, it does look as if the groundwork might be there for that kind of subplot. It could really go either way at this point- maybe Isaac’s actions are influenced by his own personal insecurity and he would be much nicer once they were in a relationship. Or maybe he would be scared of losing her and things would get worse. It’s not just the fact that he deleted her message in the last episode, but that he’s seemed very manipulative throughout the entire season.

It seems to me that Isaac fits the stereotype of the abusive boyfriend- He’s handsome and charming, but also very skilled at manipulation. If you watch their relationship, it also falls into a lot of the same patterns as romantic comedies. That’s not meant as a compliment however, a lot of romantic comedy relationships are built on very questionable foundations. The leading men do a variety of unethical things, but are forgiven on behalf of being handsome and funny and those actions are forgiven and even romanticized for the sake of the love story. This also reminds me of Maeve and Isaac. How often does he push himself uninvited into her life? How often does he managed to get out of facing the consequences of his actions?

It’s a fairly common trope tbh, and the only thing that isn’t common is that he’s also physically disabled. Which honestly lead me to doubt whether or not he was being sketchy or not. Like, could I be wrong? I eventually concluded that I don’t think I was, but it leads me to consider the fact of his disability on viewer perception.

Are viewers more likely to forgive his behavior because his wheelchair paints him in a more sympathetic light? That isn’t to say that everyone who likes him only does so because of the wheelchair - I’m sure some people just legitimately like him- but I wonder how many do? And why? Is it because you feel bad for the character? Or is it because, as our only disabled character, we are programmed to view him as a protagonist? Is his disability part of an effort to be more inclusive, or to subtly subvert our expectations regarding his character? Neither? Both?

If he is indeed going to be an antagonist then that raises further questions in regards to Isaac as disability representation. On the one hand, it’s not like being in a wheelchair automatically makes someone a good person- as with any other demographic of people there are going to be nice guys and assholes.

Is it better that they’re treating him like they would anyone else? Like, he’s just a regular guy who happens to be in a wheelchair, and the guy that he is, is prone to questionable behavior. Is it better that they’re treating him the same as they would any other able bodied character in this role? Or, as their only depiction of a disabled character, should they be portraying him in a more positive light? I personally find him to be very manipulative, and often he uses his disability as a part of his manipulation. Is that just an example of Isaac being opportunistic and using the resources available to him, or is it indicitive of a larger problem with his depiction?

Have physically disabled people faced the same issues in media as other groups, in that their depictions were historically negative? I’m going to be honest with you here, that’s not a question I know the answer to. I haven’t seen them largely portrayed as villains, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened.

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and I won’t until I see where season 3 plans on taking this, but these are the thoughts that have been circling my mind since I finished season 2. Do you agree? Disagree? Did any of this even make sense?

#sex education #isaac #maeve #sex education season 2 #sex education spoilers

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emma-what-son · 4 years ago

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Exclusive: Emma Watson On Why She’s Joining Kering’s Board Of Directors

Vogue June 2020: The actor tells Vogue her hopes to create a more sustainable future for the fashion industry — and how the pandemic has given her a chance to reflect on how she can create meaningful change away from the screen.

Here, we caught up with Watson to find out more about her new role at Kering and what sustainable fashion means to her.

Why did you decide to take up this new role at Kering?

“As the Covid-19 crisis has shown, sustainability is an urgent issue which closely aligns to questions of justice and equality for women, black, indigenous and people of colour, and the environment. The work Kering is doing [in advancing sustainability in fashion] feels more vital than ever and I am extremely grateful to be able to join these efforts, putting my support behind a group who are demonstrating they take this responsibility seriously.

“I look forward to helping Kering further accelerate the pace [of its] work, building upon what it’s already doing. I am also extremely excited to collaborate with Kering’s women’s rights foundation. I’m always just excited to learn.”

Why is sustainability in fashion so important to you?

“I’ve been interested in sustainability in fashion ever since I had to properly engage with it during my time of junkets and promotional tours for Harry Potter. That started as early as 12. At school, I took a specific interest in Fair Trade fashion and renewable energy sources under the supervision of a really inspiring geography teacher. This eventually led to a trip to Bangladesh in 2010 with sustainable brand People Tree.

“It became clear to me then that sustainability in fashion is a critical issue given how the industry can have damaging impacts on the environment, on workers’ rights, and on animal welfare. It is also a feminist issue. It’s estimated around 80 per cent of the world’s garment workers are women aged between 18 and 35.

“At this unprecedented time in history, we have big decisions to make and actions to take in how we positively reinvent and reconfigure what we do and how we do it. It genuinely feels like an exciting time to have this opportunity when things might shift. So, for example, when I saw last year that Kering announced the group would become carbon neutral within its own operations and across its entire supply chain, with a priority of first avoiding, then reducing, then offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, I noticed!”

There are lots of different ideas about what sustainability actually means. What does it mean to you?

“I understand sustainability as the interrelationship between society and community, the economy and the environment. Issues of justice, fairness, and equality are key to what sustainability means — whether we’re talking about environmental justice and the fashion industry’s impact on our planet, or workers’ rights and the impact on families’ abilities to support themselves.”

How does this new role at Kering connect with other work you’ve been doing?

“During this pandemic, like many of us, I have had time to reflect on the work I want to be involved with and what is meaningful to me moving forward. Having been so public in making films and being so active on social platforms in my activism, I am curious to embrace a role where I work to amplify more voices, to continue to learn from those with different experiences (from garment workers to designers to company directors), and to ensure a broader range of perspectives are considered. Behind the scenes now, I hope I can be helpful in making a difference.

“If people notice a new quietness from me, it does not mean I am no longer there or do not care! I will just be doing my work in a different way (fewer red carpets and more conference meetings!) This is a unique moment in time and I intend to embrace the opportunity it presents for change. As my friend [artist and scholar] Dr Fahamu Pecou says — this work is a relay marathon, not a sprint, and I know I want to be in this for the long run and in the right place when it’s time to run my relay.

“Last year, I was part of the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council convened by President Macron, and while our recommendations were directed at states, without question, businesses play a hugely important role in driving change. So I hope to find ways to ensure that fashion companies can use their power to help create a more just and equal society for people of all genders.

“As part of the TIME’S UP movement, we’ve campaigned hard to ensure that all workplaces are safe places for women. Having heard horrific stories of abuse and intimidation from within many industries, I’m keen to ensure that workers across the fashion supply chain can do their jobs free from fear and intimidation, and that new policy developments like the International Labour Organisation’s Violence and Harassment Convention are felt on the ground in factories and on shop floors. Many of the organisations I’ve supported over the years work with garment workers, women farmers, and others in the textile trade, and I hope to share what I’ve learnt from these voices in my new role.

“I’ve worked a lot with domestic violence charities here in the UK and beyond, and during the Covid-19 lockdown, calls to these services in many countries have seen a sharp increase. So I’m also really keen to work with Kering’s foundation to see how we can meet the challenges that organisations working on gender-based violence are facing in these difficult times.”

Are there particular issues within the fashion industry that concern you?

“There are so many, from the ways that fashion marketing can affect body image issues in young girls to levels of water pollution by denim brands.

“Covid-19 has obviously had a huge impact on the demand for clothing and it concerns me that not all companies are acting responsibly towards factories and workers in these challenging times, with many cancelling orders or demanding price reductions for clothes that are already being made. Happily, Kering has honoured all of its commitments during the pandemic.

“In the present moment, brands have rushed to show their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, but we need to ensure that this is not rhetoric and that the industry gets its house in order with regard to representation and inclusion. There are still huge issues with employment discrimination, issues with how black talent is represented in leadership and creative roles, how black people are depicted in marketing materials and the fashion media and so on.

“So yes, there are lots of concerning issues, but it feels like there is a real opportunity for uncomfortable conversations, radical decision-making and lasting systemic change — whether that’s in relation to environmental sustainability or racial justice. 2020 has been tough so far for so many people, and there’s a lot of talk about ‘going back to normal’. But it’s increasingly clear that ‘normal’ wasn’t working for so many people in our society.”

Do you have any tips on how to shop more sustainably?

“I’m a supporter of the Good On You app which makes it very easy for consumers to see what impact individual brands are having. I have committed to only purchasing and wearing brands that are rated ‘It’s A Start’ or above, as I want to be able to support brands moving in the right direction.

“I’m also a big fan of TRAID [in the UK] who provide door-step collections of clothes you no longer wear and then reuse and resell them in their shops. They then use the money raised to fund projects to end abuse in fashion supply chains.

“Really learning about yourself, who you are, and what you actually wear enables you to be a smarter buyer. Tailoring, modifying and being creative with clothes gives them a longer life, more meaning and personality. I recently wore a dress for a [pre-lockdown] photoshoot that I originally wore to a premiere when I was 15. I carefully archive and catalogue everything special I wear in my wardrobe and keep everything!

“The best-dressed people I know have figured out their formula and know they tend to wear a few favourite things over and over again. Invest in those and don’t buy fashion you’ll throw away. Never buy anything unless it’s perfect. I’ve convinced myself to buy some strange things because I said I’d alter them or I’d grow etc. And I don’t!

“My friend Emily used to say that everything has a ‘cost per wear’. Meaning every time she wore it, it reduced its overall cost of purchase in her mind and the cost to make it. A bargain isn’t a bargain if you never wear it or it falls apart! I often leave a shop and if I don’t go back for the item, it’s a sign I didn’t really want it.”

What are some of your favourite sustainable and ethical brands?

“Anything vintage! Reusing and recycling and rewearing clothing that already exists is the most sustainable thing you can do as a consumer. I highlighted some really awesome black-owned vintage shops on my Instagram recently. If you do need to buy something new, I am loving Christy Dawn’s summer dresses and jumpsuits. The brand’s designer and founder Christy is wonderful.”

---

Is it just me or did she say a lot without actually saying much? Oh well. I feel like this really was a way to tell people that she’s still a good activist even though she isn’t quick to comment on something lol. And I believe that she won’t do many red carpets since there won’t be many events anytime soon and she has no movies coming out. Notice how she mentioned the Good On You app again.

And was she really involved with fair trade fashion at 12? I feel like we would’ve heard about that long ago.

#kering #fashion

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insideanairport · 4 years ago

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Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographies

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The first part of the book is about his upbringing during slavery. (1) Prior to his escape, he attempted to run away many times which resulted in severe punishments. In the book, he places the reader in the psychological condition of slavery and the brutality of white people towards the black folks. In part one, around chapter twelve, he talks about the story of his escape. It was common at that time for white people to encourage slaves to escape only to go after them to send them back to slavery to make a profit. Sometimes the wealthier slave owners would go around the country and ask the slaves if they were content with their life just to find out who is complaining about their masters.

There is an instance in the book where Frederick Douglass was on the verge of being captured. He describes for the reader (assuming white readers) that as a fugitive slave when they were returned to slavery it would make the conditions worse not only for the person who was attempting to scape but also for the rest of the black folks. Similar to military punishment in concentration camps, the white masters would make the conditions harsher for everyone rather than just the individual escaping. That would result in harsher treatments not only by the masters but also by all other folks on the plantation.

The second half of the "Life and Times” which is the bulk of the autobiography, focuses on his political activism and socio-political conditions of his time, not just in the United States but also in other countries where he had visited. He often goes in-depth to give details about his meetings with people such as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although the majority of his writings are focused on the horrors of slavery and brutality of white folks in the South, there are few instances in which we hear about racism in the North. He mentions that it was common in the North for white folks to read his newspaper and automatically assume that he’s white or there is a white person behind his success. The bloody draft riots of July 1863 is another historical example of racist brutality in the North, where for three days in New York white mob killed black people for no reason other than them being black.

One of my favorites parts of the book is the chapter on John Brown. He talks about some other radicals such as Samuel R. Ward and the “Free Soil Party”. Douglass was impressed by Ward’s brilliance in speech. He also admired the bravery of John Brown and his men among which there have been many black folks. (2) On page 755, he talks about Brown creating a constitution for his men to avoid anarchy, and he also hid information from them for the sake of security of his missions. Another great account of John Brown's militancy was given by W.E.B. Du Bois in a book with the same title published in 1909. Douglass also criticizes the bible scholars of the south, many of whom tried to justify slavery using anecdotes from the bible.

“In this the preachers were not much behind the press and the politicians, especially that class of preachers known as Doctors of Divinity. A long list of these came forward with their Bibles to show that neither Christ nor his holy apostles objected to returning fugitives to slavery. Now that that evil day is past, a sight of those sermons would, I doubt not, bring the red blush of shame to the cheeks of many.”

In chapter 9, he talks about the newly arrived immigrants that their hunger and light skin prioritizes them against the interests of the black people. In the same chapter, Douglass describes the "nameless and shapeless ‘party' of slavery”. An invisible party that white people from different geographies and socio-political status are believing in.

“Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly-arrived emigrant from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and color entitle him to special favor.”

Later towards the end of the book, he elucidates the importance of “slave narrative” for the struggle to freedom. Douglass’s mission was to tell the story of black folks. And he mentions that philosophy and theology have come to aid the master’s story. Reading Douglass, it might appear that he’s simply praising Lincoln (especially in the appendix), however, with further excavation we can see that his criticism of whiteness is been planted in his writings with an extremely subtle tone.

“My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master never wanted for narrators. The masters, to tell their story, had at call all the talent and genius that wealth could command. They have had their full day in court. Literature, theology, philosophy, law, and learning have come willingly to their service, and, if condemned, they have not been condemned unheard.”

The Importance of Douglass For the New Generation of PoC Immigrants

Reading these historical texts is necessary for our new generation of POC in the West where the myth persists that Western democracy gradually fixes itself throughout its lifetime [audience laughter]. The first page of this book is better than the whole history of Western Philosophy. Reading these accounts of slavery and racism proves that social change under these seemingly democratic and equal societies only can be achieved when the white majority along with the forces of capital don’t have any other choice but to grant certain limited freedoms to the people. And that only gets achieved after a series of systematic state-sponsored terrors and tortures. At the lecture during the release of his book “The Water Dancer”, Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Dr. Charles Johnson talks about the fact that Slavery is not ended in the United States and simply has changed form.

“Liberty came to the freedmen of the United States not in mercy, but in wrath – not by moral choice but by military necessity – not by the generous action of the people among whom they were to live, and whose good will was essential to the success of the measure, but by strangers, foreigners, invaders, trespassers, aliens, and enemies.”

BLM protest: Now Frederick Douglas replaces Tubman, beneath: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” ZACH JOACHIM/TIMES-DISPATCH

Douglass has been hijacked by white folks from left and right. The right-wing people regard him as a minor republican hero that symbolizes the end of slavery and complete freedom of all races in America (as if we are there). They see Lincoln as the wise republican president who generously granted the freedom to Black folks. We can point to the recent speech by Ted Cruz on the destruction of colonial statues as well as the racist Spielberg movie “Lincoln (2012)” as evidence of these types of right-wing mentality. From the center democrats, which at the time of Douglass where the major force behind the continuation of slavery, we hear the common myths about his involvement with GOP. The white liberals always try to further elucidate the difference between 1850′s democrats to today's democrats. (3) A quick search on Medium (or any other platform), shows that most people who write about Douglass are actually white liberals. Although white people like to keep talking about classical Bipoc activists, they are also very good at discarding the current Bipoc activists and organizers. Most books published on Douglass are by white experts. From John Stauffer (professor of African American Studies at Harvard) who talks about unrelated things such as how many times Douglass was photographed to David W. Blight (professor of African American Studies at Yale).

Even in the contemporary art scene (same as the current political scene), Douglass is a safe bet by the centrist white people. Good examples of this can be seen in the last year's exhibition: “Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom” by SCAD Museum of Art and Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company (Higher Ground Productions) that is planning a film based on David W. Blight’s biography of Douglass.

Joseph Douglass playing violin for his grandfather Frederick Douglass

It seems like Douglass was a radical political activist, but in fact, his methodology was pretty much mainstream and conventional with today’s standards. He was a great speaker and orator, very eloquent in using words and creating sentences both in writing and speech. His ability to move average citizens was beyond impressive. The fact that made him radical at the time might have been his position as a black man within the all-white governmental machinery of the United Stets of America. *Before reading the book*, I thought to myself that Douglass was a radical activist. However, *after finishing the book*, I realized that politically he was a centrist who talked about the horrors of slavery. The direct criticism of white-supremacy, white civilization, Manifest Destiny, and colonialism did not make itself to the forefront of his activism. Probably, due to the constraints of his time, and the existence of the American civil war, Douglass took a centrist abolitionist position rather than a militant one.

“What is true in this respect of individual men is equally true of nations. Both impart good or ill to their age and generation. But putting aside this consideration, so worthy of thought, we have special reasons for claiming the first of August as the birthday of Negro emancipation, not only in the West Indies, but in the United States. Spite of our national independence, a common language, a common literature, a common history, and a common civilization makes us and keeps us still a part of the British nation, if not a part of the British Empire. England can take no step forward in the pathway of a higher civilization without drawing us in the same direction. She is still the mother country, and the mother, too, of our abolition movement. Though her emancipation came in peace, and ours in war – though hers cost treasure, and ours blood – though hers was the result of a sacred preference, and ours resulted in part from necessity – the motive and mainspring of the respective measures were the same in both."

Bib

1. Douglass, Frederick and Louis Gates, Henry Jr. . Douglass: Autobiographies. s.l. : Library of America, 1996. 2. Boyd, Herb. Five Black men who rode with John Brown. amsterdamnews. [Online] 10 17, 2013. http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2013/oct/17/five-black-men-who-rode-john-brown/. 3. Jr., Henry Louis Gates and Stauffer, John. Five myths about Frederick Douglass. Washington Post. [Online] February 10, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-frederick-douglass/2017/02/10/0aaeb592-ea3b-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html.

❦❦❦ *Currently we have a media studio with a lot of expenses. We are independently critical without any state funding, and your support allows us to continue. If you like the content and want to become part of our community, please consider supporting us on Patreon or make a one-time donation through Paypal. 🙏 ❦❦❦

#reading #FrederickDouglass

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blockwarden · 5 years ago

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A Modern Approach to an Age-Old Issue: Epidemics and Emergency Management

So, long time no see, y’all! I know I promised I’d queue up some stuff after surgery, but life got very complicated very quickly. But I wanted to post something due to the growing concern of COVID-19 from an emergency management standpoint.

The agency that I work for thankfully has not seen any cases, rumored or otherwise, of COVID-19, but we are expecting a portion of our served population to be returning from Florence, Italy in the next week, so with that comes a heightened sense of alarm within the community. Of course, I have the upmost faith in all agencies and parties involved to ensure complete and total safety, but planning for the worst is kind of the name of the game.

To begin, I’d like to clear up some confusion I’ve seen online, and to set some ground rules. First (and this is the ugliest topic I’ll talk about tonight, I promise!) is the rampant, casual racism I’ve seen on social media and in person since the discovery of COVID-19 in late December. I won’t get into the details of things said, but, as with all epidemics originating outside of the United States, some incredibly sickening and bigoted things have been said, which is anathema to emergency management and public health and safety. When there is an emergency--be it a tornado, landslide, nuclear bomb, or epidemic--race should never be a part of the conversation, and emergency managers and responders alike should never take it into account. When people are hurt, sick, or dying, when buildings are crumbling, streets are flooding, or bullets are flying, there is no room nor justification for racism. COVID-19 honestly could have started anywhere. The next epidemic could start in Canada, or the UK, or the US. It just so happens that COVID-19 started in China and is largely impacting that area.

Secondly, there is a lot of talk about the influenza versus COVID-19, and a lot of it is very misguided. While the flu is a dangerous virus, it only has a mortality rate between 0.1 and 0.5%. This mortality rate is measured over a year’s time. COVID-19, meanwhile, has between a 2-4% mortality rate measured between three to four months. For every 100 persons to get the flu, one with die. For every 100 persons to get COVID-19, 2-4 will die. The flu has vaccines, over-the-counter treatments like Theraflu, and is a very heavily-studied family of viruses. COVID-19, on the other hand, is extremely new. There is no vaccine, and we barely understand how it transmits, let alone if any mutations have happened with it. The CDC, The World Health Organization, Medicines Sans Frontieres, and etc agencies would not be responding to COVID-19 as strongly as they are if it was “harmless” compared to the common flu. It also should be noted that if the flu were new like COVID-19, these agencies would be responding much the same. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk emergency management.

Every single emergency management agency has plans in place for nearly every situation imaginable. Mine even has a plan for if a train on a nearby line derails while carrying hazardous waste. These plans follow (roughly) the Prepare, Respond, Recover, and Mitigate template.

First, an agency must have proper planning in place. This including training, logistics, and equipment management. In the case of public health with something like COVID-19, this includes plans for dispersing at risk populations, providing temporary shelter to displaced people, maintaining the integrity of medicines and medical supplies, and transportation. The CDC has placed preparedness staff across the country to assist local EMAs in this, however, there are none of these Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) staff members in the states of South Carolina, Missouri, and Kansas. When a state activates assistance from a PHEP, a stockpile of medications, vaccines, personal protective equipment, and other medically necessary items are deployed, along with federal medical centers that act as temporary hospitals and are staffed by experts who continuously travel between areas to assist when and as necessary.

This PHEP program has been activated for hurricanes, Ebola, the Zika virus, 9/11, and the H1N1 epidemic, and has proven to be an effective organization for emergency management.

Response isn’t just the CDC hearing about an epidemic and running out to investigate; response also includes laboratories around the country who mobilize to research the data of an emergency: be it water levels from a flood or a virus. Laboratories work to identity, diagnose, treat, and prevent chemical and biological emergencies as a part of the Lab Response Network partnership with the CDC.

Response also falls on the shoulders of the emergency leaders, who face an extensive and rigorous criteria for the role as coordinator, director, and mentor. They are taught to “speak the same language” as the rest of the EMA and responding agencies in order to ensure clear and concise communication at all times.

Recovery is the point after which the dust settles and focuses on the “return to normalcy” in population. It’s a joint effort between the CDC, FEMA, the Red Cross, and federal, state, and local assistance agencies, while mitigation is the “lesson learned” from it all. It’s the “what could we have done better” and “what can we take away from this”. Mitigation is the part of emergency management that really builds the planning, as no simulation or textbook will ever yield the kind of data an actual real-life situation could.

So what would it look like if COVID-19 became a serious threat in the United States?

It’s actually kind of hard to tell right now, with there being so many unknowns when it comes to the virus itself. Person-to-person transmission is handled very differently than community spread, and as we learn more about the virus and how to treat it, things will change. This is an incredibly fluid situation. But the tenants of public health, safety, and emergency management and preparedness stay the same. The plans in place will be deployed, but will change as the threat changes. Will people be dying on the street, will there be rioting, will there be martial law and a complete breakdown of society? No. But some things may change. We may see further travel restrictions. We may see mandatory curfews. We may see more and more public events cancelled, and more screenings done when travelling or entering a public space. My agency’s emergency guideline for pandemic response looks like this:

You’ll note that there’s no “WE WILL DECLARE MARTIAL LAW AND SHOOT ANYONE THAT LOOKS SICK” clause because that’s not what emergency management is, despite what the movies want you to think. But, you should note, that that good old “two weeks supply” standard that the Federal Civil Defense Administration started in 1951 still stands today, and really, preparing for a pandemic is much the same as preparing for any other emergency. You don’t need to be wearing a mask in public unless directed to by a medical professional, you don’t need to be locking yourself in a bunker, and you certainly don’t need to be avoiding drinking Corona beer (which is the best next to Blue Moon, if I should say so myself). You don’t need to disinfect your packages from China, and you don’t need to go out and buy everything CVS/your local drugstore carries.

As of right now, the only concerns to the American public with COVID-19 are shipping delays and a potential shortage of prescription medications, as many pills and ingredients come from the affected countries.

If you are still incredibly worried about COVID-19, the best things you can do are:

Wash your hands.

Avoid touching your face.

Stay home if you don’t feel well.

The second best thing you can do is donate.

These numbers you see on TV, the pictures of hospitals beds, the man that died on the streets of Wuhan, the old couple detained on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, these are all people. People like you and me. And while our agencies both domestic and foreign and international are doing all they can, there may come a time when they cannot do it all.

In the spirit of this blog and civil defense--the homegrown, neighborly helping hand--I’m asking you to think with your heart in the case of COVID-19 and do what you can. To think before you say hurtful, bigoted things. To research the things you post lest you cause panic. To reach out to your neighbors of the world and stand with them.

#articles #coronavirus #covid-19 #emergency management #public health #public safety

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witch-priestess · 4 years ago

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TO BE A WICCAN YOU MUST FIGHT AGAINST RACIAL INJUSTICE

Earlier I posted a tweet from Witch Cake that said: “If you call yourself a Witch you are taking on the mantle of hundreds of years of oppression and ostracism. It is your duty to stand beside those who suffer injustice. If you do not, your “spirituality” is aesthetic only.”

This statement is true. Being a Witch is Political. It Always has been. Our spirituality has been to throw off oppression in the form of monotheism, patriarchy, and racism.

In Wicca, we have the wrede. Most people look at the last two lines “An it Harm None, do as thou wilt”. You can find the long versions “The Witches Creed” by Doreen Valiente, and “The Rede of the Wiccae” by Lady Gwyn Thompson, both of these have lines that can speak to our duty to social justice as much as it speaks to our duty in magick and the Circle.

In the latter, the line “Speak Ye Little, but listen much, be soft of eye and light of touch” has been coming back to me over and over again as the demand for Justice for the Black Lives lost to police brutality and armed civilians has become ever louder since the 2020 Deaths of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmud Arbrey. I see white people demanding peaceful protesting, demanding the end to rioting, holding property damage above the lives of innocent people. They are demanding civility in the face of incivility. And on the surface this demand for civility is something that can be seen in the end lines, and in the quoted above.

However, that goes against everything we as witches, pagans, and wiccans stand for. The line “Speak ye little, listen much, be soft of eye and light of touch” should be applied to how we follow Black Leadership in these protests. In our desire to stand with our brothers and sisters in the face of oppression and tyranny, we must let them speak and lead, often white people trample over the voices that we are trying to hear. Our speaking should be done to amplify their voices, not change the message. This is not limited to just talking, but how we post on social media, our actions at protests, and our conversations with those that are close to us. Recording yourself or taking selfies at the protest is not amplifying black voices. Put your phone down, listen. Witness the speeches. Be silent as you hear the pain, stand in your discomfort. Stand in solidarity. Use your words carefully to uphold Black folx. Use them to call out white folx in their racism. When we shut up and listen, we can then be open to change and compassion. “Soft of eye” is about how we interpret things. People are quick to judge violence and anger. Black people have a Righteous Anger. Stop judging and get to the work of compassion and change. We need to absorb what we witness, and let go of all judgement. Let what you see and hear rock you to your very soul. Eyes are said to be the “windows of the soul”, let the suffering you see soften you, and change you. It is uncomfortable at times but this change is what allows us to confront our own racism rooted within us, and allows us to do the necessary and important work of dismantling injustice from within and without. Being “soft of touch” goes with “speaking little”. White people are not the leaders in this movement, therefore we must follow the lead of those we want to help, and our work is something that is imperative. We do not demand thanks, we do not demand leadership. To do so is to stick our hands where they don’t belong. Holding space through physically surrounding people so they can speak their pain, offering physical comfort to your Black friends, attending the protest and Following the directions of the Leaders, joining and volunteering with BLM and community groups dedicated to justice, patronizing black business, and donating to Bail Funds are all ways of softly touching. Ways to help and donate are in links below.

The next thing to address are the last two lines of the Rede. “An it harm none, do what thou will.” Harm is an act of malice applied to another person or yourself. Wiccans are demanded that we do not act with enmity. Some people only apply this to our relationships with others, and they really only think in terms of curses or hexes. It is a way of life. It is an order to act with responsibility and compassion. It is how we treat ourselves, other people, our environment, and animals, and how we interact with our Political Sphere. When we vow to uphold the rede we are not only vowing not to cause harm, but also to uproot it anywhere we find it. Harming None, requires us to see injustice and work against it. Because injustice anywhere harms people everywhere. In the case of the blatant systemic racism killing Black people, to be silent, to not witness, to do nothing is an act of insidious malice and harm. Racism hurts everyone who comes into contact with it. You cannot be a racist and call yourself a Wiccan, it is anathema to what it means to be a Wiccan, and it breaks your vow.

“Do what thou will.” If you have the will to make the changes necessary, and you want to see change, you need to do it. Having intention and desire will not have any effect unless you actively DO the work. When it comes to racism it is not enough to be not-racist, it is not enough to say that you would like the world to be better, you must act to make it so. Our spirituality calls us to action. Our actions require us to constantly demand better from ourselves and from the rest of society. Be that through protest, your vote, volunteering or other actions. The only way things will change is if we actively do the work to make the changes necessary.

In conclusion: BLACK LIVES MATTER. Listen to Black Leadership, and get to work. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is demanded by our vows and a part of our sacred duty. You can’t be a witch and a racist.

Here are links that can help you get started on doing the work:

https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/george-floyd-protests-bail-funds-police-brutality-black-lives-matter-1008259/

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/beyond-the-hashtag-how-to-take-anti-racist-action

https://www.welcometostratagem.com/post/10-habits-of-someone-who-doesn-t-know-they-re-anti-black?fbclid=IwAR22FDTHsOQzqMbOkn20ouAQJEN8wGz0wcANC218l7tvIE-8sqaYHt4q4wQ

https://content.redvoice.news/black_radical_ecology_and_the_anthropogenic_question/?fbclid=IwAR0ShOItV-Cphm1xR0bIlvWe9PAw4k_P3i9xqS9Djb9AU4oUWQv4TQjoHrI

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism?fbclid=IwAR13QxT07nh5fQdec-xEmg4jnNyaVS5eTIoQG9LyJodTEcgI8VQM0OKMiTs

https://bookriot.com/2020/05/22/books-about-racism/

https://www.bustle.com/p/19-movies-about-race-every-white-person-needs-to-watch-from-fruitvale-station-to-do-the-right-thing-8605651

https://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.Cointelpro-Booklet.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0DYOnNi3t-CLAPu-6XI168xX57SjPYRc1phHampvNebQ2Sd399XAPncC0

https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/fred-hampton?fbclid=IwAR0HJuIfvfloC3Hq2012BXbL7VQ_vVmw3kDTDnk82pse4mWYC9TkN8Zq9iw

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/was-fred-hampton-executed/tnamp/?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR1oiD-cRlF3bmCzg7twDI4QA6cEhgYVwA9t0UfmHl3vexWESV9QkG6vDFw

https://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/4/the_assassination_of_fred_hampton_how?fbclid=IwAR0GXNjtDHuYsDLkawK19684NcexayJhdI8P2W4tsJjXPAc-a6KV4ijNBAk

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summerlouisecooke · 5 years ago

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Inside the deceitful mind of a fake book review fraudster

“Chaos and Grime” author accused of making dozens of sockpuppet accounts on Amazon and Goodreads to write glowing reviews of his own book.

On January 1, 2020, a foreign exchange student based in Xiaogan, a suburb of Wuhan China, using the alias Jacob Acerbi published a new book on Amazon titled Chaos and Grime: A Year in the Life of a Chinese City.

It claims to be a memoir about his year in China, but the synopsis paints it more as a fictionalized romance/thriller:

“Jim and a local peasant girl meet and fall in love. Yet their relationship must remain secret, for reasons that put both of their lives in jeopardy. Their story leads to devastating revelations about what really happens to China’s “leftover women” and how the authorities stop at nothing to try to prevent such knowledge from getting out.”

The synopsis is also laced with every cliched China-book buzzword lifted right out of a Peter Hessler press release:

“a window into the lives of Chinese peasants...takes you where no memoir has dared to go...a complex portrait of contemporary China....in the midst of this rapid and chaotic transformation...a society in flux...”

Most audaciously, the book claims to be “OFFICIALLY BANNED IN CHINA BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY'S MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS (on March 9, 2020)”:

However, since there was no statement made by the General Administration of Press and Publication (新闻出版总署) about this book, and since publishing and censorship do not fall under the purview of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国外交部), we can reasonably deduce that this claim is exaggerated if not outright fabricated.

The Amazon reviews are (so far) all positive, albeit SO glowing that one can’t help but wonder if they were purchased on one of those Buy Amazon Review sites based out of Bangladesh or Russia (you write the review yourself and pay them a fee to post it).

This 5-star review by Warrior Lodge (who also reviews office chairs and windshield wipers) seems particularly suspect:

“The author's attention to detail is total, resulting in world-building quite unlike anything I have ever read. I admit that I read it in one sitting; such is the level of immersion. This book should be required reading in Asian studies classes in colleges all over the United States.”

###

SO…let’s hop on over to GoodReads, where users are more discerning and critical, but where fraud and manipulation by self-published authors desperate for attention are also rampant.

Uh oh! Several 1-star reviews, from real, regular GoodReads users who recently participated in the author’s free giveaway:

“This author is vindictive. Like his reviews, and you're all good! Dislike them, and he's rude!” and “The subtitle should have been: A Bunch of College Kids Get Drunk A Lot and Have Indiscriminate Sex. It just happens to take place in Wuhan.”

Along with more exalting reviews:

“I cried at the very end (and a couple of times before that).” and “The attention to detail is stunning. I, as others have said before me, have never seen anything like it. Jacob Acerbi is some kind of mad genius.”

Some GoodReads users also participated in a discussion on the book’s page about if Chaos and Grime would be a good choice for a woman’s book club.

The asking user, named Jasmine, a black women in Missouri, has only reviewed 1 other book. The rest of her GoodReads profile is activity exclusively about Chaos and Grime.

A quick reverse-image search on TinEye reveals that “Jasmine” is actually the photo of the late Jazmond Dixon of St. Louis, who died on March 24, 2020, from Coronavirus. But perhaps Jasmine is Jazmond’s twin sister who really, really loves obscure China expat memoirs, so we will give her the benefit of the doubt for now.

Jasmine is new to GoodReads, but just three days after opening her account she started a group called Missouri Ladies' Reading Group which instantaneously attracted 4 other women (all also brand-new GoodReads members; only one of them, an elderly woman named Helen Lim, has her account set to public, so we can view her activity. Just like Jasmine, her activity is also exclusively dedicated to Chaos and Grime. According to TinEye, her avatar is a stock photo.

Reading “their” discussion about Chaos and Grime is a thing of cringey beauty. Presuming that these are all sockpuppet accounts, the conversation that ensues on the Missouri Ladies' Reading Group is essentially Jacob Acerbi talking to himself over the course of 114 (and counting) posts! I’m talking VERY in-depth and lengthy analysis. That’s an autistic-level of focus and obsession (unmatched only by my own autistic-ish determination to document all this):

Glenda (also an elderly black woman): “I was talking to my pastor about this book today. He's gonna read it.”

Vanessa: “The underlying point that he was attempting to illustrate through these evasions and equivocations was the significance of the common law precept of...”

Jasmine: “With the amount of content condensed in this book it could easily be 1000 pages long if each item was expanded into a more thorough discussion like the beginning of the chapter and the other romances. It is very unusual. I like this book a lot!”

Helen: “Jacob Acerbi has a story to tell and important related cultural phenomena to communicate, and so I think that the narrative voice is there to convey things as objectively as possible. Having this story coming from the voice of "Jim" would make it too subjective. Having it the way it is means that the author is making authoritative statements as a historian, which I believe he is.”

I’ve archived “their” entire discussion here:

1) https://archive.is/H8jhN

2) https://archive.vn/LxfU8

3) https://archive.vn/ADFs7

I encourage you to read it for an embarrassed, sad-cringe laugh, but also for a chilling glimpse into the mind of someone who might be suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder - or both. It’s as if Kevin Crumb (played by James McAvoy in the horror movies Split and Glass) had access to Chaos and Grime and GoodReads while locked up in his mental asylum):

But let’s go back to all those glowing reviewers (including Jasmine and Vanessa and Helen) on Chaos and Grime’s main GoodReads page. Click on any two reviewers’ accounts concurrently (for example Nelson and Olivia); provided they are set to public, what do you notice? Yes – THEY ARE ALL FRIENDS WITH EACH OTHER! They each have the exact same 10 or 11 friends (no other real GoodReads users), all whom are rabid fans exclusively of Chaos and Grime – no other books!

Someone also went through the trouble of creating dozens of new GoodReads Listopia reading lists with bombastic titles like “Most Anticipated Releases of 2020” and then voting up Chaos and Grime to the very top of each. And who were those 10 voters? You guessed it! Jasmine, Olivia, Helen, BH and the rest of the Chaos and Grime sockpuppet gang.

###

We’ve established that Jacob Acerbi is obviously very desperate for reviews of his new book, but can we really fault him? I mean, there was absolutely nothing in the newspapers about Chaos and Grime (very unusual for a book “officially banned by China”; the Global Times and the South China Morning Post definitely should have covered the big news), which leads us to believe that his publisher doesn’t have a very effective marketing department. So who is this publisher?

According to Amazon, Chaos and Grime was published by LSI Holdings. Strange name for a publishing house. Let’s have a look at their website.

According to ICANN the site was created on 12/28/19 – just three days before Chaos and Grime was published.

And yet, in their About Us section, they claim to “publish a large number of books each year.”

Okay, but in their Books section, they only show 4 titles : Waited. Long Enough, Looking for Nini, You’re Not A Hoarder, and Chaos and Grime. And among those titles, ONLY Chaos and Grime is listed on Amazon/GoodReads. None of the other books are found anywhere.

But that’s forgivable, because Wow! Check this out! All 4 books won multiple “literary awards”. No need to even name the awards, they were that good! And you wouldn’t believe which title won “Best Book”. Wait for it...Chaos and Grime!

LSI Holdings LLC must be some kind of indie publishing powerhouse! Who is this amazing team? Taylor Quill!!! And, oh cool, Melanie Boykins! And, yes!!!, the lovely Margaret Jiang in HR! She’s really great. In fact, they are all so legendary that none of them have need for LinkedIn or social media. Their sole online presence is on LSI Holdings:

###

But now I’m really inspired to read LSI Holdings’ award-winning literature, so I google Anish Rajmani, author of Waited Long Enough, which sounds like an epic read. Hmmm, seems she has TWO publishers – the other named Beadle Books.

What the…??? The EXACT same books as LSI Holdings (except for Chaos and Grime) and the exact same authors (minus Jacob Acerbi). And now I’m even more confused, because author Ash Marcus is suddenly black, and Charlie McMann is white...and a w-w-woman!

Something funny is going on around here.

Could it be that, on top of making fake Amazon and GoodReads shill accounts, Jacob Acerbi also set up a website for a fake publisher, to hide the humiliating fact that he’s, GASP!, a self-published author? After all, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (formerly CreateSpace) allows paying authors the option to mask that they published via KDP simply by providing a “publisher” website.

Rounding out the elaborate ruse are:

1) Jacob Acerbi’s (very crappy) Twitter feed (with just 16 followers at present, though he is adding dozens of bot-followers by the day) with spammy posts composed only of hashtags:

2) Inserting Chaos and Grime on the Wikipedia page for Xiaogan:

3) A faux-foreword in his book written by one Afsana Sheeftahova, a “distinguished professor of humanities at the Tajik University of Geosciences” who is also an online ghost that doesn’t exist in this world:

###

So what’s Jacob Acerbi’s endgame? If it’s to make money selling his book, his long-con tactics are deceitful if not downright dishonest. Fake reviews and claiming fake literary awards are the equivalent of putting misleading labels on food; some suckers are going to pay their hard-earned money on something that’s just not as tasty as the slippery salesman said it was. That’s kinda lame, bro.

On the other hand, what if Jacob Acerbi is just trolling us? Having a good laugh while taking notes on how gullible the sheeple on GoodReads (which is largely a popularity contest) are, and how easily he can manipulate the site (which is owned by Amazon) before admin get wise and shut down his account.

He also seems to be purposely making a mockery of the tired and passe China expat memoir genre (Peter Hessler, Michael Meyer, etc.). Perhaps once upon a time Acerbi did really want to write a legitimate book about his experiences in China, failed to find an agent or publisher, then said ‘f*ck this and f*ck you’ and turned it all into a satirical social experiment. After all, the author’s bio is clearly taking the piss on all those self-important China Watchers and self-proclaimed Sino Specialists with their self-aggrandizing bios:

“Jacob Acerbi (Russian: Иаков Иаковевич терпкеницын; Chinese: 晉智明) is an American memoirist, historian, and philosopher known for his acute psychological, historical, and philosophical analyses, as well as his prescience as a "China watcher." His best-known work is the 2020 memoir about his life in the city of Wuhan, Chaos and Grime: A Year in the Life of a Chinese City. Widely regarded for its unique style and thriller-like dramatization of complex, controversial, and true subject matter, Chaos and Grime was banned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China almost immediately upon its release.”

And how can anyone take this slightly racist, slightly homophobic announcement on his publisher’s website seriously?

“LSI HOLDINGS PROMOTES CHILDHOOD LITERACY WITH SCHOOL BOOK PROGRAM - Shawneekwa Williams, only in the fourth grade, won an LSI Holdings Diversity Scholarship to attend the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in lieu of fifth grade. There she will study police brutality and trans activism for college credit. Great work!”

In conclusion, I admittedly have not read Chaos and Grime and don’t have any desire to (at this point I have read enough China expat memoirs to last me a lifetime). But I was very interested in uncovering just how low Jacob Acerbi is willing to go to promote his book (or troll us).

Now that I have tracked down his sloppy digital footprints and connected all the dots, I am left wondering: if he had put this much effort into his storytelling and writing craft, he might have actually found a real publisher, in which case, Jacob Acerbi would not have had to stoop to such shameless depths. It’s a little slimy, a little pathetic; but also a little funny.

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hilarymp · 5 years ago

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BOOKSMART (2019) Review

While I watched Booksmart, one thought kept running through my head - “I wish this movie existed when I was in high school.” I identified with Amy and Molly, our two main characters, in more ways than almost every teen comedy character I’ve ever seen before combined. Amy’s queerness, Molly’s curves, both of their brains, both of their flaws. Booksmart was the epitome of hashtag relatable. For those who may be unfamiliar, Booksmart tells the story of two best friends on the night before their high school graduation. Having spent their entire high school careers being perfectly well behaved and focused on their grades and ambitions, the two set out to make up for lost time by attending a huge party but are met with several obstacles along the way. It’s a familiar premise but presented in a whole new way.

What really sets Booksmart apart from other teen films isn’t the fact that one protagonist is gay or that the other is probably considered “plus size” (which is another conversation altogether as Beanie Feldstein is only “plus sized” by hollywood standards. In reality she’s basically the size of most average American women, but I digress.) Such underdog archetypes aren’t entirely foreign to the cinematic landscape, but unlike other similar characters, Amy’s sexuality or Molly’s physique in no way fuel or inform the story being told. Amy has never kissed a girl, not because she’s closeted (the character has been out of the closet two years by the time the movie takes place) or because she encounters any homophobia (in a school with unisex bathrooms it’s safe to say that isn’t an issue), but because Amy’s main character flaw is her inability to put herself out there and challenge herself socially. Meanwhile Molly is mocked by her classmates, not for her bookishness (her intelligence and responsibility must be somewhat appreciated, as Molly is elected class president) or because of her appearance (in fact when Molly overhears her classmates make fun of her they make a point to say that she’s in fact very attractive.) Molly is the butt of their jokes because her hyper fixation on academic success has made her judgmental and standoffish. A typical teen comedy would be about the virgin or the geek overcoming the bullies and their misconceptions. But in Booksmart, our heroines only need to overcome themselves.

Though I saw myself reflected in these characters, one moment I identified with the most actually came from the girls’ favorite teacher, Miss Fine. She tells the girls that she is glad to see them finally let their hair down and have some fun, because she was much like them when she was younger. In fact she said her uptight teen years lead to her acting out so much in her 20s that shit took a dark turn there for a while. In that moment I had to fight the urge to scream “ME!” to the screen. Had Booksmart existed in the early aughts while I was still in high school, not only would I have been thrilled to see myself reflected in these characters, the film could also have functioned as a cautionary tale.

Growing up I was super uptight. I was a straight A student, active in clubs, honor society, volunteer work, the works. I let my entire self worth be dictated by my academic accomplishments, and it was exhausting. I even let these high standards dictate who I befriended, and I found out way too late that just because someone was popular or well behaved or top of their class didn’t necessarily mean they were good people. By graduation I was so burnt out on trying to be perfect that by college I had lost my goddamn mind, and ultimately I have no doubt that my whole life would be better today if I hadn’t been so hard on myself back then. I relate to Amy and Molly but I also envy them. I wish I had had that one big crazy night that put everything in perspective. But I found so much joy in seeing these characters experience it instead, and relief that the next generation isn’t completely doomed, as long as more films like Booksmart come along.

With all that said, I can reassure you, reader, that Booksmart is super entertaining even if you don’t necessarily relate to it. As a matter of fact, when I saw the film in the middle of a weekday, one of the only 3 other people in attendance was a single older gentleman, who, though he had resting bitch face, I was thrilled to see there. There’s a lot to love in Booksmart; the dialogue is quippy and hilarious, kind of like Diablo Cody meets John Hughes. And in contrast to our relatable protagonists there are also amazing over the top characters who are absolutely hypnotizing, namely Billie Lourde as the enigmatic (and possibly insane) Gigi. I’m always a sucker for physical comedy and there’s plenty on display here. The marriage of topical, smart dialogue and the occasional pratfall is *chef kiss* exquisite.

Booksmart isn’t perfect but it’s damn near, especially if you’re in the need of some unbridled fun. Even moments that I didn’t care for at the time, upon reflection, were fully redeemable. I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but a good example is the romantic pairing of a character with someone who had up until that point been kind of an asshole to them. At the time I was totally turned off by the implication, but later thought back to moments like Claire kissing Bender in The Breakfast Club. He was a huge dickhead to her the entire movie, and yet their hooking up still made sense. If I can accept such a dichotomy in this 80’s heteronormative example, I could definitely excuse it here.

Over all Booksmart is an utter delight. We don’t see female stories like this very often, especially not ones directed by women as well. (Sidebar: A huge congratulations to Olivia Wilde for her first outing as a director by the way. Needless to say, she slayed it.) One could write an entire essay just about the myriad of shitty reasons why movies like this are so rare, but that’s a conversation for another day. In the meantime I can only pray to see more in the near future. So go see Booksmart asap, and maybe the powers that be will answer all our prayers.

#booksmart #movie review #olivia wilde #beanie feldstein #kaitlyn dever #billie lourde #film #film criticism #lgbtq #plus size

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spaztique · 3 years ago

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Pill Overdosed - An Essay On the Devolution of the Incel Community, From a Recovered “Love Shy.”

This was inspired by plunging down the rabbitholes of the incel community, the manosphere, and everywhere in-between.

Not long before writing this, there was a mass shooting incident in Plymouth, Devon. The shooter was a self-identified involuntary celibate, or incel for short: somebody who struggles with social skills to the point where they suffer depression from the fact they cannot develop a relationship to the point of romance. You’d think that merely not having the skills to attain a romance wouldn’t be much of an excuse to go postal, or maybe think he was an isolated case, but sadly, this isn’t: there was yet another mass murder not long prior at a sorority at UC Santa Barbara. Same motivation, same background. What gives?

I think I have a little authortiy to speak on the subject because, as I’ve said in my prior self-help writings, I also grew up without social skills. The only difference, of course, is I trained like crazy to fix that. Prior to 2010, I was a self-identified “love shy”: the pro-incel, back when the community was all about self-improvement and learning social skills to escape. After tons of hard work, I eventually got my first girlfriend in college, albeit we weren’t a very good match, seperated after it was clear we couldn’t work out, became a serial dater, and quietly graduated from the “love shy” label in 2011. I only bring this up now because, as I’ve noticed, things have changed a LOT in ten years.

Without diving deep into the histories of these concepts, there are three basic ideologies the modern incel falls into. Shorthand, they are known as the bluepill philosophy, the redpill philosophy, and the blackpill philosophy. They exist on a continuum, and the further you go down the spectrum, the more insane and nihilistic it becomes, eventually descending into despair, rage, misogyny, conspiracy thinking, and finding homicide and self-destruction.

The Bluepill Incel - The “Nice Guy”

Ah, the “nice guy.” The classic dogged friend-to-everyone who believes if they’re simply nice enough, he’ll eventually find love (and of course, sex). He’s too shy to voice his intentions, too pure to even hint at anything sexual (unless he’s in private with pornographic materials), and his primary love language is favors and gifts. This is your vanilla garden-variety incel, and he’ll need a couple heartbreaks and losing his crushes to more direct, forward men (known infamously as being “friend-zoned”) before he either wakes up to reality, or descend deeper down the spiral.

The basic nice guy merely has trouble with boundaries, self-disclosure, and empathy: the basic skills of building and deepening relationships. Favors and kind acts are the only way he knows to gain peoples favor: especially with women. He’s terrified of rejection and fears the maintenance part of relationships: getting into disagreements and making up, because he thinks he won’t get a second chance. Low self-esteem plagues the nice guy, and his biggest belief is that a relationship, especially a physical relationship, will solve his problems.

Hoo boy, he cannot be any more wrong.

Bhuddist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach coined this obsession “the trance of unworthiness”: where we believe our lack of something (in this case, a relationship) means we are unworthy, worthless, flawed, different from others. Incels use their single status to beat themselves up daily, not realizing this is the “trance of unworthiness” in action. Not having a relationship is a catalyst for this trance: they see the relationship and physical touch as the ultimate sign of acceptance, of being worthy, of being part of the human race and not “rejected.” Perhaps this is another reason they fear rejection: it reinforces the trance of unworthiness they wish to escape through physical contact.

It’s a misnomer to believe the nice guy is “entitled” to sex. This isn’t true: they simply believe they did everything they could to deepen the relationship, and it should’ve happened as naturally as if they had, say, flirted, voiced their intent, escalate the relationship, deepen their emotional intimacy, and so on. From their perspective, they’re not thinking, “I did all this stuff for you, so I DEMAND you sleep with me!,” but rather, “I did all these things for you and showered you in gifts and attention, so why don’t you love me as much as I love you?! What else am I supposed to do?!” But everything the nice guy does is surface-level, transactional, unemotional from a relationship standpoint. Sure, it can build friendships (albeit shallow friendships which resemble partnerships more than best buds), but not romance. Maybe we shouldn’t call it the “friend zone” and more the “you-didn’t-even-bother-building-the-relationship-correctly zone.”

Besides, it’s not the sex that incels want: it’s the validation. As I said before, physical intimacy is the ultimate form of acceptance, of escaping the trance of unworthiness, and the more physical, the more loving, the more closer, the more “points” it earns. If a hug is worth 10 points, and a kiss is worth 100, and a cuddle is 500, then sex is like 10,000+. But why not just pay an escort or “go solo”? To them, that’s cheating. To an incel, having to pay somebody to like you isn’t unconditional: that’s maybe worth 5 points, or maybe even negative points. Of course, sex is a cooperative activity, not a validation sink. Nothing will wake you up from this reality faster than that awkward conversation after your first few times of, “So, um… How was it?”

Where does this come from? Some blame romance movies and their grand romantic gestures, others blame love songs, and others blame just society’s sentimental view of romance. I’m sure if I mention flowers (especially roses), chocolate, plush bears, bubble baths, candlelit dinners, or slow dancing, you think romance. The images and ideas are burred into our collective unconscious. We’re bombarded with all of these images telling us three things: this is what love looks like, love is the ultimate cure for loneliness and sadness, and if you don’t want this, there’s something wrong with you. But the thing about the artistic representation of love is that it only depicts the end product, or at least the fantasy of somebody wanting us and loving us unconditionally. Perhaps the popularity of the Japanese archetypes of the tsundere come from the struggles of building a relationship, while the yandere shows us how creepy it is when somebody wants us way, waaay more than we want them back.

Either way, it paints an unrealistic portrait of how romance works.

Just as you can’t learn driving from action movie chase scenes, or sex from hardcore pornography, or how to become an Olympic-level runner playing Sonic, the simplified artistic portrayals of love and romance do not provide adequate education for how to interact with people. Actual relationships run on a model of probing (first contact, asking surface-level questions), deepening (asking and revealing more personal things mutually), and maintenence (handling misunderstandings, rebuilding familiarity, or even breaking off the relationship if there can be no reconciliation). Another popular modern concept is breaking down communications into different “love languages”: gifts and favors are only two, but there are also words of affirmation and reassurance, touch, and time together. This is the boring work of building everyone relationship from a friendship to a romance, but it is the basic skill incels ignore until they receive enough pain when they normal methods fail.

And with that, they begin searching for answers…

The Redpill Incel - The Modern Incel, Between Two Choices…

In The Matrix, Neo is given the choice between taking a blue pill to stay in his safe little world as an office drone, or take the red pill, disconnect from The Matrix, and realize the horrifying truth: the world is enslaved by machines, and he’s going to join a resistance to save humanity.

In the early 2010s, the idea of the red pill vs. blue pill was to describe the choice between the idealized romantic world I described above for the nice guy incel, and the cold hard facts about dating: that dating is a skill, and you need confidence, influence, leadership skills, a decent wardrobe, and good self-maintenance skills to increase your odds of success. Even in the mid 2000s, this spawned the pickup artist community, which are really just social skills gurus who market common-sense advice to single men.

However, something changed in the mid 2010s…

Eventually, the redpill ideology morphed into this idea that women, despite having their own corner of dating advice and entire magazines for how to attract men, secretly control not just dating, but society as a whole, and feminism has utterly wrecked dating. This corner has other bizarre, frankly misogynist ideas about how women operate, and some go even further as to saying all dating is rigged towards women and men should just avoid it all together. They also posit that women, by their nature, cannot be involuntary celibates, even though it was a woman who coined the original term. (And I also find it kinda funny how supposed “men’s rights” activists unironically use the term “red pill,” despite being coined by two writers who later came out as trans women.)

Obviously, this creates a problem for the modern incel: in their moment of pain, they’re desperately searching for answers, and they’ll latch onto the first source of hope they can find. Now, I got lucky: we didn’t have “men’s rights” folks in power back when I was searching for answers. We didn’t have those weird-ass theories, and those who did were laughed out of the community. (Neil Strauss even documents this in his book The Game, where he talks about some of the more questionable gurus trying and failing to get a foothold.) But these days? Imagine an incel in a moment of weakness, and they suddenly come across a post saying, “It’s not you! It’s feminism! Feminism is the reason you can’t find love! And love means validation, so therefore, feminism is the reason you can’t find validation!” Suddenly, there’s hope: the incel thinks if he can “game the system,” he’ll get that coveted physical contact, and with it, the validation he yearns for. But all this does is add another catalyst for his trance of unworthiness: lack of love AND feminism make him feel like his life is nothing but pain.

Now, let me put on my own Morpheus glasses and leather trenchcoat and ask you: what if I were to tell you there were three pills? A blue pill, a red pill, and a black pill? You take the blue pill, your journey to discover how relationships work ends: you wake up in your bed and you can believe whatever you want to believe about romance. You take the red pill, and you’ll see how far the rabbit hole goes…

… but if you take the black pill, you’ll wake up somewhere far worse.

A world of infinite loneliness, where what you want is forever out of your reach, in a world that sees you as a mistake. Where arbitrary rules apply to you that apply to nobody else. Where there is no hope for those who enter.

Why would anybody choose this pill?

I offer you one blue pill, and two red pills. One is the true red pill, and the other is the black pill.

Back in my day, there was only one red pill. Now, there are two, and one is poisoned.

Now, just as Morpheus showed Neo the desolate Desert of the Real, let me show the Desert of the Loveless…

The Black Pill - The Radical Extremist Incels

First, the incel starts as a “nice guy”: naive, but still relatively hopeful.

Then, after realizing their ways don’t work, they are given two choices:

One path leads to a life of self-improvement, hard study of social skills, practice, and eventually escape…

… but the other leads here. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

The black pill ideology has given up on self-improvement, with the motto “it’s over,” any any notion of hope is considered “blue pill propaganda.” After years of being told, “Just go to the gym!,” “Just groom better!,” “Just get a good job and better education,” and so on, but NOT being told the most basic social skills, they’ve decided all of that just doesn’t work and it must be something else.

According to black pill incels…

Women are only interested in “Chads”: men who are a 8-10 out of 10 on the looks scale and blessed with perfect genetics and no personality. Any evidence to the contrary will be explained away. (Is the guy ugly? Then he must have money. No money? Then he must have status. No status? Then she must be cheating. Not cheating? Well, this example must be made up because it’s probably not true.)

Genes determine everything: if you were born any shorter than 6”0, you’re screwed. Women apparently only prefer white men (despite, y’know, other cultures and countries existing), and if you were born anything other than white, you’re screwed. (And if you somehow “ascend” inceldome? Then you are a fakecel: you were never truly an incel in the first place, because true incels are permanent.)

Feminism has destroyed modern dating and only a return traditional values like some kinda Handmaid’s Tale-esque patriarchal dystopia will solve everything. Because they see sex as the ultimate fuel for validation, sex needs to be considered a human right equal to food and water. Expect plenty of talk of sex slaves, lowering the age of consent, and sex robots.

Despite accusing everyone else who disagrees with them of “coping from cold, hard facts,” their misogyny and bizarre ideas are the ultimate coping mechanism: they’ve effectively shut themselves off from anyone who disagrees with them, and they stew in their anger with fellow blackpill incels in an echo chamber of despair and self-loathing, celebrating when women (or as they derisively call them, femoids) face hardships or when there’s a mass killing of any kind. If this seems like an exaggeration, I’d welcome you to look for yourself, if I wasn’t scared some normal incel would fall prey to their toxic influence.

These are the incels that give the poor unfortunate socially awkward incels a bad name. It’s why people fear “nice guys” may turn out to be future serial killers. If you wanna know why people want to label incels as a whole as a “hate group,” despite being a subset of only the most extreme ones, it’s because of these folks right here.

So, what now?

What’s an involuntary celibate to do? None of the options are good: continue being a “nice guy,” or look for advice elsewhere, even though there’s a 50/50 chance you could get suckered in to the extremists?

To put on my Morpheus glasses again, what if I were to tell you there’s a fourth choice? To take none of the pills?

Being a “nice guy” who does everything for others in hopes of earning friendship or romance doesn’t work.

Relying solely on hard science may be informative, but when you rely on that alone with no heart, still only shooting for validation, that doesn’t work either.

And obviously, giving up and isolating yourself with other angry virgins doesn’t work, either.

What if the solution was simpler? Waaay simpler?

It all boils down to such basic things:

Self-validation: learning to not rely on external things like love or physical connection as your own means to escape the “trance of unworthiness.” Everyone who’s walked this path says that once you realize that sex isn’t everything, you’ve truly escaped inceldome: then it simply becomes something that’s nice to have, like going to an amusement park or eating a deluxe sundae.

Basic communication and relationship skills: You can learn a lot more from looking up social penetration theory and the stages of a relationship than reading about facial ratios and social darwinism. Read the most basic guides on empathy and how to start conversations, then work into books on how intimacy works (you’ll notice an overlap with social penetration theory.)

Learn to network. Just as friends can get you jobs, they can also hook you up with fellow singles. Join groups, talk to co-workers (and no, you don’t have to date co-workers, I mean they can find people outside of work), get a hobby. Once you learn the above two skills, get out there and build connections until you find someone who can find someone.

Notice how I didn’t say “go to the gym” or “just be confident” or “take a shower.” I’ve seen plenty of incels do all three and have no luck, and I’ve seen guys without confidence get equally unconfident girlfriends, as well as guys who are unhealthy and never bathe. These are non-factors: self-validation, social skills, and networking is all you need.

Of course, there are still lessons from both the blue pill and red pill (which some folks call the purple pill philosophy): you need the romantic creativity and heart of the blue pill, but the hard skills and pragmatism of the red pill. And you need everything to overcome the dark side that is the black pill, the shadow we avoid where infinite horrors lurk within.

Coming back to the incident that sparked this post, there have been some modern incels who were jarred by the recent killings. Some are starting to question what happened to the incel community, just as I have. How did it devolve from folks wondering how to escape their loneliness, into the hellhole of conspiracy theories and hatred it has become now? Perhaps this may be the beginning of the incel community returning to its roots, where the romantically impaired seeked advice that actually worked, rather than wallow in self-pity and cheer on mankind’s destruction. As an old recovered “love shy,” I pray others find the same path I and many others like me had walked, and avoid the one that leads to self-destruction others have stumbled upon.

With this post, I’m making my vow to do my part to make sure more people avoid this terrible fate and find happiness, whether they pursue love or not.

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