#made a point of emphasizing why and educating about the real history?

[adorabledaylilly]

So angry at a white man on Twitter I want him crushed and ground up by a train

[traumxrei-archive]

【 book 6 thoughts ! (2) 】

hello, back at it again w/ more thoughts on book 6 ^^ (this one's a lot longer than the first one so oops)

part : one, two, three, four / ??

[ warning !! spoilers from 6-16 till 6-35 under the cut ]

[ about : ...acting director idia.... ]

i'm sorry. i laughed when he said "i'm the BOSS". like he was doing so good on the intimidating with the "don't you guys know where you are? don't you know who i am?" and then he just HAD to say the cringiest line in all of humankind.

but tbh, it's interesting to see idia's more cynical side pop out. usually he's very self-serving, but that's bc his goals don't involve other people, his goals are usually stuff he does for himself, but after being named acting director, you can see how callous he's acting toward the other dormleaders. usually he would mind his own business in the corner, but now he's holding his ground bc he was given the authority.

DESPITE THAT. the one thing i appreciate is that he keeps on emphasizing not using unnecessary violence. one of the charons was about to blast riddle again, and he was the one who stopped that. idk it was just a gesture that stuck out to me.

[ about : the history lesson ]

it's interesting to hear that idia's family came from such...rich history. i mean, being one of the pillars of enforcement basically ? punishing those who abandoned principals ? that's a heavy cross to bear. especially with the fact that society basically abandoned/forgot them after magic became more well introduced into the world.

also malleus added that they used to lock up overbloters in the island of woe and that it was idia's ancestor who watched over the island. it begs the question, how many overbloters are kept in captivity ? like i'm sure that the old old ones died, but are there those that are alive ? or even the blot monsters of those who have died ? (since, iirc, crowley mentioned that the blot monster can outlast the overbloter if they run out of magic n die)

also. floyd brings up a good point. for an organization that works in secrecy, they sure made a really big ruckus coming in to take the overbloters. he brings up the fact that they probably have a good way of covering up all of this, which begs the question, what kind of cover up will they do ? since this is a magic world, could it be they'll wipe everyone's memories ? of styx and of the people that were taken, so people don't try searching for them ?

[ about : crewel's concern ]

crewel scanned jack n yuu for injuries before leading them to where epel + adeuce were. and how he offered to patch up yuu's minor injuries sniffs,,,, he talks tough, about how he's going to teach them a lesson n stuff, but i think it's bc he as an educator feels like he failed. he feels partly responsible for not teaching them how to fight safely ++ that they didn't try to call him for help. and the way he's so protective of them.....dad crewel agenda is actually happening everyoneeee

[ about : rook's escape ]

NOT ROOK. NOT HIM BEING WORRIED ABOUT VIL NOT HAVING SKINCARE I'M ACTUALLY WHEEZINGGG—

tbh i think he's using it as a cover up. ofc he cares about vil deeply. as a person. not just his skin. but like,,,,i do wonder why he's emphasizing the skincare so much. i think he's trying to deflect from the fact that vil could actually be in a dire situation by using the shoot and skincare as a distraction. but. rook honey.....just say you're worried about vil man.....

i do think that rook's plan is. stupid. bc why would he go alone ? he clearly has the means to find the isle of woe, but how is he going to bust through styx security without any back up ? i'm 90% sure he's acting mostly based on emotion, and that's why he's in such a rush to head over there w/o any real plan,,,,,, (sob, i was right,,,in 2-23 he talks abt how he's worried about vil and angry at the styx dudes)

[ about : yuu's plight ]

i feel. really bad for yuu bc of all they went through. first, they lose grim to the blot crystals,,,,they haven't seen him in weeks bc crowley was doing who knows what with him. and then when they do see him, he's in a cage and being taken away w/ the rest of the ob gang.

then, their home gets completely destroyed. that's only the tip of the iceberg, because they watch as their friends fight against this mysterious organization that slowly takes them away, and they can't do anything because...they don't have magic.

they arrive at the infirmary with minimal wounds while their friends are bedridden, and they can't do anything to help them. they're torn between staying and going with rook bc they're afraid they'll just be dead weight,,,,,but going anyway bc of their determination to find grim and get him back. like if you didn't think yuu was resilient before, think again.

[ about : map of the world ]

when you hit 6-23, you can see a map of a portion of twisted wonderland and :000 it's really cool to see ^^ so the closest country to sage island is the "land of dawning". there are names that i recognize n names i don't. obv we know about shaftlands, queendom of roses, and the briar valley. but we don't know anything about the kingdom of heroes, sunshine lands, or the land of dawning. i do wonder if we'll ever get to go there in future events, or if they'll forever remain unexplored.

[ about : rook's UM !!! ]

!! i think his UM is really cool !!! rook calls it weak, but i see it as a very persistent spell, and it fits well with his skillset + personality. and as epel says, it's pretty intimidating. if he has it cast on you, you wouldn't be able to lose him. like ever. and the line he says ?? "come, see if you can flee from me. arrow afar!" that's so rook ? see if you can flee from me, i mean c'mon. the arrow leaving its quiver sound as he casts it, and his confidence is so damn cool >:DD (also we are welcoming rook hunt into the rich boys club. immediately.)

[ about : STYX welcome movie ]

first off. "safe use" of technomantic technology my ASS, y'all walked into a MF SCHOOL and started zapping everyone who retaliated with stunning spells all while wearing anti-magic suits that were wwwayy too much defense for going against teens.

n the phantom database. does that mean they have a database on all the phantoms that they've been able to capture alive ? or do they...keep phantoms from before too ? magical disaster prediction, does that mean predicting overblots ? a lot of questions indeed

[ about : phantoms ]

all the talk about phantoms has me thinking back to the mines. bc that CLEARLY was a phantom that adeugrimyuu encountered at the beginning of their NRC careers. the question is, who's phantom was it, and why didn't STYX take that phantom in for research if they have eyes and ears everywhere ?

and the fact that even creating phantoms is a rare thing ? on top of overblotting being a rare thing ? i can see why STYX just had to get their hands on our ob gang, given that each of them weren't consumed + manifested phantoms + recovered fine, there might be a link between their obs that even they didn't see.

[ about : utilizing blot safely ]

ok it makes a ton of sense. now hear me out. blot is seen as this unnecessary byproduct to doing magic, and it's also harmful to the mage + those around them. the fact that STYX wants to turn this around and try to figure out a way to use blot is a natural thing. it's the same thing w/ humans in our world turning plastic bottles into ecobricks or animal manure into biofuels, attempting to turn something harmful into something useful is like. mankind's thing.

[ about : SSR Troublemakers ]

yk that's a pretty catchy name for the overblot gang. maybe i should start calling them that instead of overblot gang jskfjsdf

[ about : trials w/ riddle, vil, azul ]

okay so the first trial was in a vr space that looked like a virtual space + they were fighting ortho n the charons. they said everything was pretty normal.

they mention a lachesis system,,,,lachesis is the second of the three fates, the one who measures the length of the thread n decides how much time a human has left.

second trial, they're in the cafeteria ? oH GOD they're gonna have them fight the vice housewardens ??? isn't that playing dirty ?? ofc they wouldn't wanna fight against the people they care about. and framing it as them wanting to wrest the dormleader seat from them by dueling just adds to the betrayal !! it's natural that there's an increase in blot production, probably bc of the negative emotions they were feeling in combination w/ having to fight their friends

[ about : trials w/ jamil n leona]

trial one, vr space once more. since the results are likely the same, i won't go into details about it, but like...how are they measuring blot when they aren't using magic irl ? technically, they're only using magic in the VR world, so how come their blot levels are rising in the real world too ?

trial two, oughhh not ruggie n kalim,,,, ofc leona kingscholar and his sexy brain can see through the illusion that they wove. he starts attacking ruggie right away instead of waiting. (also i'm. his laugh. guys his laugh. ok bye) like whew the amount of levelheadedness and quick thinking this guy has in unknown situations is so ?? cool ??? and then ofc, jamil being very quick on the uptake as well, we are looking at two big brained ppl rn. (not idia getting annoyed at jamileo figuring out the system in one go—)

[ about : analysis time ! ]

imma summarize the results down below, just bc it'd be interesting to see everyone's results side by side

riddle:

pros; very quick casting, magic pool larger than avg (might be due to receiving special training when younger; magic pool built up from hard work)

cons; when he's indecisive he uses brute-force to overwhelm the enemy (an inefficient use of power), blot accumulation spikes dangerously with output, mental state is heavily impacted by surroundings (more stressed in trial two, therefore more blot accumulated)

result; high offense, very low defense -> glass canon ranged DPS (ok not idia saying riddle's a glass canon *insert moyai emoji*)

azul:

pros; good grasp over precision and control, takes in surroundings to play support, calm and efficient (could also be using others as shields), utilizes a wide range of spells

cons; slow caster, magic pool insufficient to sustain his range of spells (makes him careful with his spells)

result; cautious fighting style with precision and control -> healer that observes the field from the back

vil:

pros; the icon of stability, high manifestation speed, potency aND his magic pool is substantial, solid in both offense and defense (w/o specialized training), physically and mentally resilient (stress doesn't affect his blot much), unique magic lasts a long time

cons; nothing ??? (they legit did not have anything to say abt vil.)

result; being the icon of stability and consistency -> a tank that calls that shots for the rest of the party

leona:

pros; superior casting speeds, superior magic pool (received extensive magic instruction as a kid), efficient in using magic (tailors spells to enemy output; reduces accumulation of blot), stress didn't have much affect on blot, great mental fortitude

cons; when he does experience intense emotions, it could cause a drastic spike in blot accumulation

result; would be suited for tank but isn't a leader

jamil:

pros; efficiency over speed (similar to azul), quick and precise with defensive magic (due to guarding kalim ?)

cons; constantly worried about his reserves

result; could probably handle being in any position -> melee DPS that supports tank OR healer class

[ about : river lethe ]

HELLO. what do you mean. by "everyone who's had a run in with STYX goes down the River Lethe" ????? "that system can erase us from anyone's memory and from any data" ??? SO THIS WAS THE. so this was the countermeasure that STYX had built up. which is why they were so ballsy with their invasion of NRC.... (it's sad to think that idia doesn't even want to try making friends, bc in the end, when he becomes a researcher at STYX, all traces of him will get erased in the river lethe, so he sees no point)

[ about : grim TT^TT ]

omg GRIM beloved omg grim— oh god it's so cruel that he remembered hurting yuu and the first years all fighting for him,,,,the fact that he thinks that he got captured just bc he hurt yuu SNIFFS i swear i am not crying. i swear. i swear i am nOt sad bc he started crying and his voice sounded teary

"am i never goin' back home to ramshackle ?" HHHHHHHH im not built for this please stop my heart is literally going to break huhuhuuuuu

okAY i think this is a good enough stopping point for now, bc the next chapter is back to the rescue gang ! even though i just received the most hEARTBREAKING CLIFFHANGER IN THE HISTORY OF EVER !! stay tuned for uh. more heartbreak tomorrow *finger guns* (o yea, feel free to send stuff about book 6 to my inbox if you wanna chat ^^ i'd love to share theories n opinionsss)

[ladyblueberrymuffin]

"A product of it's time" is absolutely used as justification as a piece of media, and you know what? People who use it as a condemnation are super attractive and awesome.

Want to talk about functionally conservative arguments?

This is from kirkcenter.org, a website dedicated to Russel T. Kirk, one of the fathers of modern conservatism:

Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary.

Glorification of the past is a conservative ideal. To put the past on a pedestal, to make it unspeakable to ridicule it, lest you be branded an ignorant, a boor, a kid who slept through English class, is in line with conservative ideals. It's also elitist. Putting yourself above your fellow people due to your education.

It's gross. And it's hypocritical, because while preaching about engaging with a work of media on a deeper level, you are refusing to engage with their grievances on a deeper level. It's also hypocritical because we all laughed at the "We both laughed at our son's big balls" book. Because it is trash. I could absolutely sit here and find things that could be good about it, and I could empathize with the plight of a creator just trying to do their best to tell a story, but at a certain point it would be disingenuous of me to pretend I don't think it's trashy. I think a lot of this dispassionate media analysis they teach in lit class is disingenuous, and hypocritical, because your opinion will slip into it whether you like it or not.

I don't like centrist media analysts. People who can look at Steve Ditko's Ayn Randian Objectivist political cartoons without gagging, if anything they might give a hearty chuckle at the audacity and the artistry with which the shitty message was delivered.

Please don't fall for this false dichotomy.

I see you, I know you are not stupid, I know you have considered the context, the history, the different ideas that the work presents, and what effect these ideas have on the world at large, because you know stories don't exist in a vacuum, and a repeated idea prevalent across multiple works of fiction all saying the same thing will shape the way society thinks of people, or groups, or ideas, and so you've made an informed decision that maybe you should discourage X trope from being used. You can analyze a racist piece of work, AND condemn it. Part of why we analyze it is so that we are able to see how those ideas shaped our pop culture, and how we can remedy it.

You should, because stories don't just exist in a vacuum, and it's a privilege of yours that you can watch it without feeling uncomfortable, because it is not about you.

We are not machines, we are not literature professors, you are allowed to just say you think something is bad. And making fun of something and discouraging something is not censorship, you know this, you've dealt with edgy right-wing comedians.

There are works of media that I think get way more hate and way more accusations of being problematic than they deserve. But I also do want to engage with the criticisms, because while some are plain wrong, or misunderstanding the text, a lot of the criticisms carry a lot of truth in them, and recognizing that keeps me humble, and understand that we are all capable of writing something tone deaf or gross, without even realizing it. But I also still disagree, because there are a lot of positive things that those criticisms ignore, and a lot of them also are at odds with my personal belief that there are things in books that are hot that would be gross in real life. And there is a lot of cultural and social context as to why women might be drawn to like a hundred year-old vampire. Does that make the trope good? Do the younger generations 'not get it'? Or are they just better at communicating the need we didn't know how to communicate, so we communicated it in a messy way with the hundred year-old vampire? Does mocking this trope show a blatant lack of empathy of women suffering under the patriarchy, who deal with their trauma in ways that are not clean and perfect?

I don't know! I'm giving you the coward's answer today. I don't fucking know. But I'm upset whenever someone tells you you are being childish and not a real critic for just being honest and in touch with your feelings. You should engage with other opinions, but also please keep in mind not all of those opinions are harmless. If they were, we would be welcoming bigots with open arms here.

Likewise, I don't think every form of criticism is valid. There's a lot of really snarky, self-congratulatory, angry people out there, and this doesn't just apply to The Last Jedi haters, you can be capable of this tunnel vision too. I can be.

It's important to remember that we are not flawless, and that means you should be patient and forgiving with yourself, and just let yourself be human, but it also means that you should be weary you don't become unfair and don't fall into traps many people have fallen into before you.

You're not a bad person for liking a problematic piece of media, while recognizing it's problematic... but that also depends on HOW problematic that piece of media is, and what are your reasons for liking it, and how you defend it.

"this work is problematic because of how it handles [subject]": reasonable premise for media criticism

"this work is problematic because it depicts [subject]": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument

[bookofmirth]

Can you please elaborate why it is considered problematic that SJM wrote that elain is uncomfortable around lucien? You mentioned in a previous response that it was not a good move for her to write elain being uncomfortable by a disabled POC but I’m not quite sure why that is a problem because she is not uncomfortable because of his disability or race- her discomfort has nothing to do with that.

Also, racism is not an issue in prythian the way it is in real life. You have high lords such as helion and tarquin (among others) that are explicitly POC and there has never been mention of any hostility towards them because of the color of their skin. The only discrimination I can recall is between high and lesser fae which is classist not racist.

I’m just confused why it is considered ableist or racist when SJM decided to write how elain is uncomfortable around lucien when it has nothing to do with his skin color or disability.

On another note- would it have been racist if amarantha (a known rapist) was written as a WOC rather than white? I’m just trying to understand your point of view and I’m a little lost. To me, acotar is a diverse world with characters of all races and some are good, some are evil but pretty much every character has done something morally grey at at least one point in the series. And none of that is not specific to one race vs another. There are white characters that are good, morally grey and downright evil. And the same can be said for other races.

I appreciate any further elaboration you can supply!

Hello! I will try my best. I don't mind answering questions like this! I recognize that I have had a lot of education about these topics and I have learned A Lot from Black women on Twitter over the years. I hope to share it in a way that is useful. I can maybe make a reading list if anyone is interested, but people should definitely ask around so that it's not getting filtered through just one person (aka me).

So the whole thing with talking about race in the fandom is that race does not function the same way in the acotar world as it does in ours. You are correct about that. You may have seen my post that attempted to break down various ways that characters access privilege in Prythian? Either way, yes. It is not a one-to-one correspondence with our world and the book world.

However, there are issues within the acotar world that mirror issues in ours, and the way that fans engage with those issues can reveal underlying prejudices. I mentioned in this post that we don't have to intend to do these things. (Also, intent versus impact is like diversity, inclusivity, and equity training 101. It's one of the first, and most important things you will learn. Even if you didn't mean to harm someone, they still feel hurt, and it's important to acknowledge that.)

The issue with the way people talk about Lucien - and I mentioned in another post that this is perhaps just as much on Sarah for creating this scenario as it is on the fandom for hopping on that horse and riding - is that there is a history of white women being painted as the victims of Black men specifically.

I'm going to put the rest of this under the cut because I want to show you some examples.

I hope that I don't have to explain why this is disgusting. There is a real-life example of this ^^^ if you google Emmett Till and read his story. This is by far not the only example of a white woman claiming that a Black man (or boy, in his case) was harassing her in some way, and often, that has resulted in lynching.

These are clearly older examples, and also really good examples of how people of color can be dehumanized, but these problems persist. The methods are just more subtle. More recently, it could result in police brutality. When that women called the police on a Black man in NYC last summer, it played into the long history of a woman claiming that she was being threatened or victimized by a Black man. As @gimme-mor explained in her post, the concept of white womanhood is often used as a way to uphold racism and white supremacy because it shows people of color as being violent threats, giving white men (and white women) a reason to retain their privilege.

You're probably wondering now what the fuckity fuck this has to do with Acotar and Lucien. I am getting there!

Because of this historical context, there are many slurs and stereotypes used against POC that on the surface, seem innocent. However, they have a deep, dark history of oppression and violence. It's not about the "one time" that someone said one racist thing, but generational trauma. I can't speak to what this is like as a lived experience, and so I would really appreciate anyone who does want to add on!!!

For example, just to take us away from acotar for a minute, there is a problematic, sexist and often racist trope in which characters get fridged. This is a term used to refer to the way that women, women of color, or characters of color (this could include queer and disabled people as well) are killed off to further a white person's story. This happens SO OFTEN. Nehemia was killed in ToG to motivate Aelin. Sorscha was killed in HoF to hurt Dorian. In a multitude of super hero and action movies, the wife or girlfriend of the main character is killed off in order to provide either pain or motivation to the white male hero.

Individually, these events are whatever. Taken as a whole, though... it shows a trend that the girlfriend of the hero is disposable. It shows that people who are not white, straight, able-bodied males are worthless, and only function to further someone else’s plot.

So that's what is sort-of happening here. After a long, long history of white women positioning themselves (or being positioned) as the innocent victims of brutish, violent, barely-even-human men of color, there are some disturbing parallels when people try to say that Elain is a shrinking violet next to Lucien's insistent attentions.

The context is everything. It's not about this one event, but that there is a history in the real world of this trope playing out over and over, and it has even been an explicit tactic used to perpetuate white supremacy.

This context influences the way that we interact with one another in fandom. The point of that post was not to critique the acotar series itself, but to expose some problematic aspects of the fandom.

I am not going to speak for anyone else, but I think that the original intent of pointing out this parallel between Elain/Lucien and white feminism was not that we want people to stop saying that Elain feels this, or Elain feels that, or Lucien is doing this or that, etc. The reason why this has been mentioned in the past is because there are some very uncomfortable, violent historical precedents set, and while people may not realize that those exist, they may be unintentionally furthering that stereotype.

There were many, many other points made in that post that I think bear repeating and further attention. I hope that this made sense. It's hard to condense literal centuries of racism like this, and of course I am only talking about the context in the U.S. I'm sure it's different elsewhere.

The main takeaway from that post, though, is that it wasn't about the world itself. It was about the way that the fandom engages with the world, and how they utilize some problematic tools to do so. Critiquing the world itself is a completely different issue, which... I will sorta touch on now!

One last point, since you brought up Amarantha and the potential of her being a WOC and a rapist - it could be viewed as problematic and racist, due to the oversexualization of Black women in particular (again, the context throughout history supports this). However, that would not be a fandom problem! That would be an sjm problem.

BTW - I do have serious problems with the way that Illyrians are portrayed in acotar, again because of the history of POC being portrayed as uncivilized, brutish, violent, and... that word that means someone isn't religious. I am getting tired and forgot the word. When sjm says that Illyrians are that way, and when she emphasizes the fact that they are a race... yikes. It's not racist of us to point that out, but it was highly questionable that she created them to be that way in the first place.

Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense, please! To anyone reading this to the end, first off RIP! But also let me know if I've gotten something wrong or if you see something differently.

[maybedefinitely404]

Day 26: Parental Moxiety

@tsshipmonth2020

Day 26 - You can’t see shades of your soulmate’s eye color a certain color until you meet [your soulmate] and look into each other’s eyes for the first time. (I misread the prompt! Whoops!)

Content warnings: mentions of lousy foster system, orphanage, implied past abuse/neglect, social workers, aro/ace character, past minor injuries (pet inflicted), mentions of anxiety and PTSD.

Word count: 2.8k

Note: Not beta-read

Patton never doubted the fact that he was lucky.

His heart always went out to those who were missing colors like green, and blue. It must be horrible, he thought, to be missing out on the hue of a grassy field or the sky forever being grey, even on clear days. But then again, meeting your soulmate after seeing nature as dismal shades for years must be amazing; trees suddenly lighting up in brilliant emerald and water becoming as crystal blue as a diamond. So he was grateful, because he was missing a color that was surprisingly rare to find in nature, if the shocking lack of grey was enough of an indicator. Grateful, because that meant he wouldn’t be missing out. Grateful, because Patton didn’t want a soulmate.

It had taken him years to realize why he was so adamant about actually finding his soulmate. Everyone, from his middle school class to his university study group to his coworkers now, had frequent conversations about the topic. Common ice breakers amongst groups were “what color are you missing?” and “tell us about the first time you saw ‘insert color name here’” and just anything else that reminded Patton of how little he wanted all of that. He was happy with his friends, happy with his family-- both blood and chosen-- and the idea of… romantic relationships just made him uncomfortable. He hated that it seemed to be the rest of the world’s main drive in life. Every time he explained his ‘predicament’, had to explain to someone that he was aro/ace and just didn’t want all that, he was met with pity looks. No one believed him when he insisted that it didn’t make him sad, he wasn’t just waiting for the right person, he just didn’t want it and that was okay. 

That didn’t explain why he was missing a color, though. If it were up to him, he’d spend the rest of his life content with the way it was going, not searching for a so-called “better half”. He wished that soulmates weren’t a thing, in full honesty. Because then he wouldn’t be reminded every time he looked at a dull lilac bush that no, the universe had paired him up with someone and it was only a matter of time until he was subject to meeting them. It was the thing he dreaded more than anything else.

These were the thoughts going through his mind as he fiddled with a pen between his fingers that appeared as grey to him, absently wondering what ‘purple’ actually looked like. The door to his right opened and he looked up, a bright smile spreading across his face.

“Hi, Mr. Sanders. My name is Deborah, I’m one of the social workers here.”

“Nice to meet you,” Patton said, his heart almost beating out of it’s chest. She took a seat across the desk from him, placing the file in her hands onto the pristine wood. He laid the pen back on the desk where he’d taken it from. 

“So,” Her tone was all business, but her eyes held a distinct sparkle that could only be taken as a good sign, “I’m the social worker of one of the children’s profiles you flagged on the adoption website. Do you remember a ‘Virgil Storm’?”

“Absolutely!” Patton remembered the picture of the kid well. A small boy sitting cross legged in a sandbox, looking at the camera with an expression that could only be described as disdain, hands buried in the sand. He was noticeably separated from the group, the hood of his black jacket pulled over his eyes despite the shining sun. After reading the small blurb about him, and immediately growing attached to the toddler that had been tossed around four foster homes in the single year he’d been orphaned, he’d clicked the small smiley face in the top right corner with no hesitation. 

“I was given your file, and after discussing it with your social worker, we’ve decided you two might be a match.”

Patton nearly dropped on the spot, trying in vain to hold back his huge grin, “I thought they said that could take up to a year!”

“That is our usual estimate. While, unfortunately, the adoption rate is a lot lower for single men, you were put through faster due to your profession. You being a therapist definitely pushed you forward in the right direction.” 

Opening the file, she pulled out a stack of papers and a single picture, handing them to him. The picture was the same as the one on the adoption website, so his eyes turned to scan the printed profile.

“This is all his current information. Known family history, allergies, education level, etcetera,” The social worker continued, gesturing to the file, “That picture’s a bit old. He just turned three. He’s had a… pretty rough go of it so far. The information about his parent’s passing are in his file, if you want to give the whole thing a read when you have the chance.”

Patton tore his eyes away from the photo, “And he’s a possible match?”

“Yes, he is. He needs a stable home environment with no pets and no other children, and due to the trauma he experienced, has severe anxiety. Him developing PTSD as he ages is a large possibility. He’s a bit of a tough nut to crack, but we believe he’ll thrive with you.”

He took a deep breath, nodding mutely along with her words. He didn’t trust himself to speak right now, not with the odd mix of pure heartbreak and elation flowing through him. The poor kid…

“You can take the file home, take some time to think about it-”

“No,” He said quickly, “I mean… I don’t need to think about it. How do you determine if we match well?”

Deborah blinked a couple times, taken back by his abruptness. “Well… chemistry after a first meeting, judging if the child’s uncomfortable with the other, and meeting with the child and parent weekly for the first three months, then bi-weekly for the next three. After a six month residency, we can get the adoption legalized by the court. Both your social worker and I will be there every step of the way to answer any questions, help with the adjustment process, and just support you both.” She looked to Patton with a raised eyebrow, “Are you sure you don’t want to take some time?”

“I’m very sure.” He’d flagged many profiles on the website, feeling an unexplainable amount of guilt every time he didn’t, but Virgil’s had stuck with him more than any other. The idea of a kid already riddled with social anxiety and trauma had hit him hard, and he wanted nothing more than to be able to help him through it. 

“Would you like to meet him?”

“Yes please,” He said before she had even finished speaking. She gave him a small smile and headed to the door, warning him it might be a while to convince the boy to come with her, so to just sit tight. 

When she’d closed the door behind her, Patton turned his attention back to the file on his lap. He might as well read it while she was gone, anyways. It didn’t take long for him to read the few pages of information, committing Virgil’s birthday to memory. A small part of his brain advised that that might not be the smartest thing to do, already getting attached to a child he hadn’t even met, but his heart broke reading over the history of someone so young, still a toddler, undergoing trauma that no one should ever have to go through. The poor kid watched his parents die, and they were pretty awful people to begin with. 

He’d read the file twice over when the door reopened. At first he thought she’d come back alone and his heart sunk, until she shifted to the side and revealed the small boy who’d tucked himself behind her. He wasn’t touching her, not holding the hand she had offered to him, just following steps behind, like he was equally scared of her as he was of everything else. Pulled over his head was the same black hoodie as in the picture, looking a size too small now. It took a lot of tugging for him to hide his hands in the short sleeves, an anxious sign that Patton recognized immediately. Though, it wasn’t hard to narrow down, not with the way he was absolutely shaking. 

Patton slid off his chair with no hesitation, smoothly lowering himself to the ground so he was closer to eye level with Virgil. Still, the young child pulled his chin even closer to his chest, adamant on not meeting the man’s eyes.

“Hey kiddo,” Patton cooed gently, “My name’s Patton. You can call me Pat if that’s easier, okay? What’s your name?” He already knew everything about him, obviously, but it seemed a smart choice to let the kid introduce himself; avoid spooking him.

“Virgil,” he whispered back, mouth half covered by the collar of his hoodie. 

“That’s a real nice name, kiddo.”

Finally, the small boy looked up, dark brown eyes barely peeking through his equally dark bangs. His head tilted to the side, not unlike a curious puppy, as he studied the man in front of him, the man who was willingly sitting on the floor for him. None of his foster parents had done that before, and he highly doubted his parents would have ever considered it. Thinking of his birth parents caused him to shrink in on himself slightly.

“How would you feel about living with me, Virgil?” 

He looked down, wrestling his hands free of the dirty sleeves to fiddle with his zipper. “Like a foster home? I don’ like foster homes.” His speech was slow and fumbly, like he was working with new words.

“No, not like a foster home. For good.”

“With other kids?” Hands flat, he pushed his bangs out of his face and ended up letting his hood flop back. “In my last foster home, there were four kids.” He held up four fingers to emphasize his point.

“Nope,” Patton chuckled, leaning over to reattach the velcro on Virgil’s sneakers, “It would just be you and me. But I live really close to a park, so we can go play with other kids any time you want. And I have some friends with kids your age, and whenever you feel ready, you can meet them.”

This seemed to send a flurry of mixed emotions across the toddlers face. He glanced at the social worker, who had taken her seat and was watching the meeting with rapt attention. 

“Do you have pets?”

“Nope. Why, do you like pets?”

He shook his head with clear fear, ruining all his hard work of pushing his bangs away as they fell right back into his eyes, “No pets.”

“Well, then it’s good I don’t have any.”

Virgil gave him a hard look and Patton was silent, letting the child scrutinize him with all the intensity of a rocket scientist. Watching the elder’s hands carefully, the kid dropped to the ground in front of him, slowly meeting his eyes again. Patton couldn’t help the wide grin that stretched across his face. 

“Welcome to the floor, kiddo.” And oh, it was a blessed day, because the tiny smile he got in return was enough to make his heart melt. “Tell me, Virgil, what’s your favorite show?”

“Paw Patrol.”

“Ah, a classic! Do you have a favorite pup?”

“Rubble,” He mumbled after a moment of consideration, scratching at the rip in his jeans, right over his knee, “He’s funny. He falls in the elevator, and he says ‘Rubble ooon the double!’”  

“You don’t like pets, but you like Paw Patrol? Why’s that?” He couldn’t help his own inner therapist coming out.

Virgil shrugged, “They don’t bark loud, and they’re little. And they don’t make big messes or bite. Dogs are cute but I don’t like them. Dogs are too loud and they leave a mess.”

He felt there was probably a lot to unpack there, but that could definitely wait for another day. Deep inside, he knew there must be some trauma buried with that sentiment. “Do you like cats?”

“No. They scratch and bite and hiss too much,” He held up his hand to Patton, showing him the light scars on the backs of them, “We had a cat named Whiskers and he did that. He’d come in my room at night and bite me.” 

“Just as well. I’m allergic to cats anyways.”

“I’m allergic to peanuts.”

Patton giggled, and a relieved expression crossed the younger’s face. “What about fish? They’re pretty quiet, and they for sure don’t bite. Do you like fish?”

He seemed to ponder this for a moment, before shrugging again, “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. Maybe if you like fish, we can get some. How does that sound?”

Virgil perked up, his leg starting to bounce from where it was crossed under him, “Really?”

“Yeah, kiddo. We can also get you a new hoodie, since that one seems a bit small.” Of course, he meant to buy him more than just a hoodie, but he might as well start small. The very idea of getting a fish seemed to almost overwhelm him.

“I like my hoodie,” Virgil’s voice dropped and he curled in on himself, wrestling to pull the sleeves over his fingers again.

“Oh, that’s okay! You can keep that one, but we’ll get more, just so you can wear them when this one is in the wash.”

His eyebrows scrunched together adorably, his back relaxing. It hurt Patton, to think that having such basic needs met was a shock for him.

“If you two don’t mind, I’m going to talk to just Virgil for a little bit,” Deborah spoke up, causing Virgil to flinch. “Is that okay with you, sweetie?”

He nodded reluctantly, and Patton took his leave, sending Virgil one final supportive smile before closing the office door behind him. He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, before taking a seat in the waiting room. It would be a lie to admit he wasn’t already enamoured with the little kid, but the final decision wasn’t up to him. Ultimately, it would be Virgil and the social worker who would deem it a match or not. Knowing that’s what was happening on the other side of the door was enough to make his leg bounce nervously. 

He passed the time by pulling out his phone and sending a vague update to his friends. The onslaught of messages he got in return, mostly ecstatic, was enough to distract him as he waited to be called back in. Of course, not all the responses were enthusiastic, mainly from his parents and sister, asking if he was sure he was ready for this. Those, he just left on read. Because yes, he was ready. He had been for a long time. 

When he was called back into the room, Virgil was sitting in the much too large chair in front of the desk, his feet pulled up under him again and looking between him and the social worker. His hood was back on his head, sleeves covering his hands once more. 

“From what Virgil and I discussed, it seems we are ready to begin the process of moving him into your house, and beginning your residency period.”

Patton tried not to whoop at the news, grinning wider than he had all day. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this utterly elated, so light on his feet. 

They agreed to show Virgil the home, just to get him used to the layout before finally moving there, and he would come visit during the days for the next few weeks, still spending his nights in the orphanage. It was a gradual transition, one that Patton hoped went smoothly, because oh gosh he couldn’t believe this was happening. 

As he led Virgil out of the building, the small boy hesitantly reached up and took his hand, head tucked to his chest. He was so scared. Patton squeezed his hand a little, heart equally shattered and melted, as he walked to the social worker’s car and let her buckle him into her carseat. They agreed to meet at the house, and Patton pulled onto the main road, music blasting to try and drown out the indescribable joy bubbling in his chest.

If he hadn’t been so distracted, he might have noticed the pen he’d placed on the desk back in the office, would now have been a shimmering purple in his eyes.

[champagne-bucky]

The Undoing: Five

Summary: The truth about a past life is unveiled.

Warnings: THIS IS A DARK STORY!! dark! Steve Rogers x reader, kidnapping, non con and dub con (or at least mentions of), dark! Bucky Barnes, Stockholm syndrome, grooming, mentions of pregnancy termination and suicide mentions (for one chapter), possibly more tags to be added!

Notes: Hey, hey!! enjoy Chapter 5 and let me know what you guys think!! Enjoy :)

Please Read Warnings!!

Ahh, first day of senior year. The last year before Sasha heads off into college, one step closer to the real world. Sasha has been dreaming of this day for so long.

As a child, she was always an ambitious little genius (as her father would refer to her as). Always got good grades, never missed a day of school (one time she threw a tantrum over a head cold that her mother insisted she stayed home for), and never once skipped a class. Her homework was never late and she was well over prepared when it came to tests in class. She even did well on the PSATs! Needless to say her father and mother were both proud of the little genius.

“You remember the rules right?” Her father said.

“Yes, dad,” Sasha rolled her eyes which produced a scolding from her father.

“I’ll be outside at 3:15 to pick you up. Don’t take the bus, don’t go home with anyone, don’t walk home-”

“Dad, I know, you’ve been telling me these rules for, like, 100 years now. I think I understand,” Sasha grabbed her bag and got out of the car.

“I know, honey. I just want to make sure you're safe. This world has gotten too crazy and I just want to protect you,” Steve put his hand on her shoulder.

“I get it, dad, you’re doing all you can to make sure nothing happens to us, but I promise you I’ll be okay here. It’s my last year here anyways, what are you gonna do when I go away to college?” Steve gulped. He isn’t ready for that conversation yet.

“Remember 3:15 and not a minute late,” Steve ushers Sasha out of the car.

“Okay, by love you,” Sasha jumps out of the car.

“Love you too.”

__

Sasha took a deep breath as she exited the bathroom at school. She needed a way to calm herself down before she had an anxiety attack. Yeah, she was a smart girl, almost top of her class, but she was very lonely. Every high school has a “clique” like she’d seen on TV, but television never thought to teach her about the lonely outcast who had no friends.

That was her. Sasha didn’t have friends here. She tried to make them, but what was the point if she was only allowed to see them in school. Her father didn’t trust anybody he hadn’t met first.

“Friends” came and went and overtime Sasha earned the reputation of “the nobody”. She was just a forgettable face to the other kids here. No one really bothered to talk with her and she didn’t bother to talk to them. However, she often found herself daydreaming what it would be like to have a group of friends… or just one friend she wasn’t picky.

“Hey, hey, Rogers!”

Oh God

“Hello, Ned,” Sasha held back her groan as the cheery student made his way to her.

“So just thought I’d let you know that Decathlon is meeting every Wednesday after school for meetings. You gonna join this year?”

Every. Fucking. Year.

It’s either Ned or Mr. Garber that’s been on Sasha’s ass since the freshman PSATs results came back and she scored extremely high. Both were too persistent and Sasha always ended up telling them no. She would always make up some lie or promise to join and just never show up. Secretly she wanted to join, but she knew her father. Steve would say no before she even thought about asking him.

“Ned, what has my answer been for the last three years?”

“No, but-”

“And what do you think my answer will be for this year?”

Ned looked at Sasha for a moment. He knew the answer, but he made a promise to Mr. Garber that this year would finally be the year they get her to join the team. If Sasha joined then that meant they could finally win the National Decathlon for the first time in the school’s history.

“Okay, okay, I know it’ll be a no, but can’t you just come to one meeting. If you just got to know us and know the club I'm sure you’d really like it.”

“Ned, I’m sorry but I can’t! I-uh I work now. Gotta save up some money for college,” Sasha bit her lip.

“You’re lying,” Ned pointed at her lip, “you always bite your lip when you’re trying to lie!”

“How can you-”

“I’m very observant,” Ned’s eyes went wide.

The bell rang and Sasha let out a breath and relief. At least she got a break from him now.

“I’ll see you in AP Physics! Don’t forget we meet every Wednesday after school!” How did he know they had class together?

__

The day had droned on as Sasha made her way to all her classes. She had a majority with Ned, who wouldn’t stop badgering her about decathlon, and she had a few alone. Physics was her last class of the day and she couldn’t have been more relieved. This day was so boring considering they were just going over the syllabi for each class.

For lunch, Sasha went to her usual spot which was located behind the curtains of the auditorium. No one ever came back there and there was no one that would ever look for her. It was a nice getaway from all the students. The auditorium was quiet and dark, she felt almost at peace in her little safe space.

“Ms. Rogers, how was your summer?” Sasha groaned internally as Mr. Garber greeted her. He was already drumming up a pitch to sell her on decathlon.

“It was good Mr. Garber, got a job that keeps me pretty busy,” she tried to emphasize, but she knew it would go right over his head.

“Well that’s nice, please take your seat behind Mr. Parker and we can get started.”

Sasha made her way to her seat and sat down. She was surprised that Peter, Ned’s friend, didn’t abruptly turn around and talk to her. He had also been an instigator alongside Ned, just not as annoying though.

The bell rang and class had begun. Of course, Mr. Garber wanted to do icebreakers which resulted in Sasha getting paired with this girl, MJ. MJ was just like Sasha, but only a little more brazen. MJ got involved in decathlon and had a small group of friends as a result of it, but before she joined MJ was an outcast just like her.

As soon as class began it ended. Mr. Garber liked to let his students go a little earlier so that they could beat the hallway traffic. However, before Sasha could make her way out the door she was stopped by the call of her name. She turned around and approached Mr. Garber’s desk.

“Sash, I really would like it if you thought decathlon through,” he began.

“Listen Mr. Garber, I appreciate your reaching out to me over these past couple of years, but I just can’t join.”

“Sasha, you have one of the best test scores at this school. You are so close to being Valedictorian for graduation too. Every teacher that I’ve talked to that you’ve had in the past says that you are so bright. Why won’t you just consider it,” he pleaded with her.

“Mr. Garber, I’m sorry but it’s not up to me. If I could join I would, but I can’t! I have a lot on my plate with stuff at home and a job to help me out for college. The timing just isn’t right,” Sasha blurted is all out to Mr. Garber. Both were in shock at Sasha’s tone, but before Mr. Garber could respond, Sasha ran out.  

__

Sasha walked out of the building and past her locker towards the front of the school where her dad was parked. He always showed up early to beat out the traffic coming into the school. Steve was surprised to see his daughter outside before 3:15, but didn’t question her as she got in the car.

“How was the first day back?” Steve asked as he drove off.

“It went great. Um, I’m in all AP and honors classes again this year, I have a good lunch break, I like all my teachers. So, things at school are pretty much how they always are,” Sasha told him.

The ride home was just a bunch of school related conversations. Steve and Sasha didn’t really talk about anything else besides education. Steve was proud of Sasha and how great she was doing academically. His daughter would make a great addition to the world with her brain, but he knew that he couldn’t risk letting her go.

Back at home Sasha’s mother was already putting dinner on the table. Since Sasha went off the school, Gwenyd stepped up to help out. She didn’t mind being homeschooled because she actually liked to cook, clean, and help out around the house. However, she often did wish she could've followed in her older sister's footsteps.

“Sasha, Sasha! How was school? You have to tell me all about it,” Gweynd left her mother’s side and came up to her sister.

“You girls can talk about it while you help your mother out with setting the table,” Steve said to them as he went to greet his wife.

Dinner was always early and followed by a delicious dessert. Sasha’s mother didn’t go out that much so she prepped dinner early and then helped the other children with homework. Sasha admired her mother and all the hard work that she does for the family. Sasha feels guilty sometimes though, she wishes that she could also help her out, but her father insisted that she stopped playing house and go to school. She never understood that.

During dinner, Steve kept getting an annoying amount of phone calls. They weren’t from Bucky seeing as he would be at work until later, so Steve was just letting them go to voicemail. Around the 5th time however, Steve decided to answer the phone.

“Who is this?” He said annoyed.

“Hi, um, Mr. Rogers I presume? This is Philip Garber from Fair County High School. I wanted to talk to you privately with regards to your daughter, Sasha?” Steve was confused and quickly excused himself to his office.

“I was wondering if we could-”

“Why have you called me?” Steve cut him off.

“Oh, well you see I was wondering if you could help me in convincing Sasha to join one of our most prestigious clubs at the high school,” Steve was confused. Sasha knew the rules, why did she think he would even make an exception.

“I’m sorry but-” Mr. Garber cut him off.

“I understand that Sasha has a lot on her plate, but you don’t understand how much academic decathlon could help her! Sasha is one of the most brightest children we have at the school and we would be so honored if she joined the team,” Mr. Garber was noticeably nervous on the other end of the line. He was trying his best to convince Steve.

“I really don’t appreciate you calling me while I’m in the middle of a family dinner,” Mr. Garber stuttered out his next words as Steve’s voice cut through the line.

“I apologize, Mr. Rogers.”

“Sasha will have no time for after school clubs. She has to focus her attention on more important things,” Steve spoke.

“Yes,” Mr. Garber cleared his throat, “I too was in a predicament as well as your daughter. I was working two jobs in high school so that I could save up for college. I feel her pain, I really do. However, if you could convince her to join the club think of the amazing opportunities she’d have! Colleges from all across the country watch these decathlon competitions. This could mean scholarships, recruitments-,” Mr. Garber was abruptly cut off.

“Sasha isn’t going to college,” Steve had to think of his next words very carefully.

“That’s not-,” Mr. Garber was cut off again.

“Sasha and I had made an agreement that she would take a year off of school and accept a well paying job with a family friend of ours. It would be a waste of time for her to join a team that could promise her something that she won’t need to use. Thank you for your time, Philip was it? But I need to go now,” Steve hung up the phone before Mr. Garber could get another word out.

Mr. Garber didn’t want to say anything, but Sasha had mentioned not only to him, but to Ned as well that she had a job for college. Was that all a lie? Did she not want to join because she didn’t want to get her hopes up? Does her father not know that she has a job?

So many unanswered thoughts popped into the teacher’s head as he rubbed his temples. He needed Sasha for this team. Mr. Garber wanted her to join more than anything. Even if they didn’t win Nationals, at least Sasha would have the opportunity to make some friends. Mr. Garber knew that she didn’t talk to many people. He also knew she ate lunch alone, but wouldn’t tell anybody. He knew how hard it was to be alone.

He had to do something. Something that could help Sasha out. He could leave her out to dry.

__

The next day Sasha was called into the main office. She’s never gotten into any trouble before so she was confused as to why she needed to be in the office.

“Here,” the secretary handed her a piece of paper.

“What’s this?”

“Your new schedule,” the secretary went back to popping her gum and typing on her keyboard.

“I didn’t request a change,” Sasha looked down and saw that her one class had dropped and turned into a free period.

“I know you didn’t, but this was a special request.”

“By who?”

“Mr. Garber, he has requested you and other students for something during free period,” Sasha was beginning to seeth. How did this man not take no for an answer?

“Is there any way I can change my schedule back?” The secretary shook her head and Sasha stomped off.

She couldn’t believe that her teacher had the audacity to change her schedule without her permission. This man was nuts, Sasha was convinced. She’d probably freak out on someone if this schedule change had anything to do with decathlon.

“Hey, hey, Sasha Rogers,” Ned pointed finger guns her way as he and Peter walked up to her.

“Did you do this,” Sasha took her anger out on the poor kid.

“I assume you’re talking about our new schedules. Nah, I didn’t have the skills to hack into the new system. I had chemistry homework to do so I couldn’t. Don’t worry though, Peter and I will be seeing you in class shortly,” Ned did a weird diabolical laugh as he walked away.

Peter remained and decided to speak to you. “I’m sure Mr. Garber isn’t gonna waste our time with whatever he needs our help for. He did the same thing to me one year too. Don’t worry it’ll be fine,” he gave Sasha a reassuring smile as he walked away.

A few periods had gone by and it was time for Mr. Garber’s free period. Sasha had entered the room and saw Peter, Ned, and MJ along with a few other faces. Flash Thompson was one of the few who picked out Sasha’s presence.

“Holy shit, never thought I’d see the way when Miss-too-smart-for-anybody decided to join us. I gotta say I was questioning why Garber did this, but now I think I know why. What, did princess not like staying after hours? Afraid that the big bad kids would rough you up?” Flash taunted Sasha as she turned red with embarrassment. Mr. Garber did all this for her?

“Fuck off, Flash. You only pick on Sasha cause you know she’ll be Valedictorian by the end of the year. What, did “big bad” Flash’s masculinity get compromised now that a woman might overthrow you?” MJ got up and right into Flash’s face.

Flash quickly backed off and sat himself down again. Sasha and him have been in an unspoken (and one sided) competition. He always got mad when Sasha got higher grades on tests than him. One time, after the freshman PSATs he had to be sent to anger management because Sasha got the highest grade in the class.

“Don’t let him bother you, he's a dick,” MJ shot Sasha a smile.

“Sasha, right? We have English and Physics together?”

“Yeah, how are you?” Sasha always had some trouble making conversation with people.

The girls chatted for a moment before they sat with Ned and Peter. To say Ned was more than happy was an understatement. There wasn’t a word in the English language that could describe how thrilled he was that Sasha had joined.

“Welcome to the dark side, Sasha Rogers,” Ned said in a kind of creepy way. Sasha laughed as Peter elbowed him.

“Really, welcome Sasha, I really hope you’ll like decathlon,” Peter smiled as he hooked his arm around MJ.

“Did Mr. Garber really do this for me?” The three shrugged their shoulders and Sasha’s question. As far as everybody knew, Mr. Garber didn’t have time anymore after school to host decathlon meetings. So, instead of handing it over to someone else he just asked the school to do a schedule change.

“Alright everybody,” My. Garber walked in, a smile on his face as he saw Sasha with Peter, Ned, and MJ. “Let’s get started!”

__

Two weeks had gone by since Sasha joined decathlon. Even though she would never admit it to Ned and Mr. Garber, she was so happy she got to be a part of it. She never ended up telling her father anything. Her father always tried to keep her sheltered and she did understand why, but these people that she’s met, they make her so happy.

“Now I know I usually wait until after our first competition, but I have some exciting news!” Mr. Garber announced. “I would like to tell you all where Nationals are being held this year!” The class began to stomp their feet in a drumroll-esque way.

“Pack your bags, kids, because we are heading to….. Washington D.C.!” The kids cheered as Sasha joined in.

“Now, I’m passing out permission slips and I need them back ASAP. There’s a long weekend this time around so we will leave Thursday after school and be back Sunday evening,” Sasha frowned and raised her hand.

“Mr. Garber, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it,” the kids started to groan.

“Of course you can’t. I figured as much that you wouldn’t. What’s this excuse now? Daddy needs to get a new leash for you,” Flash snapped and MJ whacked him on the back of the head.

“Flash, don’t make me suspend you like Sophomore year,” Mr. Garber snapped.

“Sash, let’s talk more about that after shall we?”

Sasha explained that her father wouldn’t approve of her going away for such a long time. Steve never really let any of the kids go anywhere. God forbid it he found out Sasha wanted to sleep out somewhere.

“Do you want me to talk to your dad? I can tell him they’ll be a female teacher coming along with us. You can also bunk with MJ if that makes you feel comfortable,” Sasha appreciated the sentiment, but it didn’t matter.

“Mr. Garber, I really don’t want to let you or this team down, but I know my dad, he’ll say no,” Sasha was sad and Mr. Garber really felt bad for her.

“How about this, why don’t you talk to your father first. Try and butter him up to the idea, then we can worry about later,” Sasha walked out of the room and tried not to cry. She really wanted to go.

Her phone began to buzz a few times on her way to her next class. Since she’s gotten it, Sasha figured out how to silence it and stop it from vibrating. However, she liked to keep it on during school for emergencies.

Hey, dad can’t get you today so I’ll pick you up. xBucky

Sounds good. xSasha

__

“Hey, there’s my favorite girl,” Sasha smiled as she saw Bucky’s car parked out front.

“Hey, Buck,” Sasha was still sad as she got into the car.

“What’s got you all glum,” Bucky started the car, but did not move.

“It’s nothing, just school.”

“Well, it can’t be “just school” that’s got you so sad. What’s the real problem,” he knew her like a book.

“My class is holding this weekend trip, Thursday night to Sunday night to Washington D.C. and I really want to go,” Bucky sighed.

“And you want to go, but you know dad won’t let you,” he finished and Sasha shook her head.

“I have to think of a way to convince him, but I know he’ll say no. God, I just wish for once he would let me do my own thing. I’m 18 for crying out loud!” Sasha got upset again.

“Hey, there’s no need to get upset. I got an idea,” Bucky knew this plan probably would take a lot of convincing to Steve, but he had to do whatever he could to keep Sasha happy. “I tell dad you’ll be staying over to help out with work and things around the house, but really you’ll be in Washington,” Sasha’s ears perked up at this.

“It’ll never work.”

“Trust me, it will,” Bucky would damn sure make it work.

“He needs to sign my permission slip,” she held out the folded paper.

“Oh give me that,” Bucky took the paper and grabbed a pen and scribbled Steve’s name on it, “See, problem solved. You get your trip and all I have to do is convince daddio you’ll be with me for the weekend.

Sasha couldn’t believe it. Could this actually work? It would take a miracle for her father to agree with Bucky, but she could only hold on for hope. She quickly prayed on the ride back home. Steve has to believe them. Bucky has to make sure of it.

Bucky will make sure of it, he thought. Bucky can’t let her down, they still have so far to go. He’ll be damned if Steve says no. He trusts Bucky enough to have all his children go with him for the summer, so it has to work.

Sasha needed this, she needed to experience a little bit of freedom before graduation. She needs to experience a little bit of life before Steve takes another one’s away.

Tags to be added in comments!!

[daebelly]

i have a theory as to Why this sort of thing happens. it's a long post and i don't want to make out like this post is addressed to me, so it'll be under the cut.

shaun (the skull guy on youtube) made an excellent point in his video "The Fate of the Frog Men" where white men in the us, especially cis, straight, christian white men, sort of lack a 'narrative' for lack of a better word. oppression has a sort of "allure" to them because it casts them as the righteous underdog fighting the system, where they are the system more often than not, in reality. so they seek out a group to give themselves a narrative.

in the video, shaun uses this as a segue into gamergate, but i think this "search for a narrative," i'll call it, applies outside of that.

(and if you'd like to watch the video, it's here. it's a good watch)

my parents tried to raise me to be a straight, cis, white, chistian man (the only thing that ends up applying out of that is 'white' btw), and my family is of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh descent, so i have a bit of insight into this phenomenon(i do not speak for Irish, Scottish, or Welsh people). my family has almost no cultural practices beyond the most bare-bones holidays, going to church on rare occasions (usually when it was least convenient for me), and a tradition of an annual week-long vacation, so there wasn't a whole lot for me to feel attached to or much to base my self-perception off of(so, basically, i've lived the 'lack of a narrative' that shaun proposed). this is, i suspect, because generally, us american whiteness tries its best to be a monolith, so to speak--to erase anything different within itself to become homogeneous. and, because so much has to be removed to make everyone the same, you end up with the bare minimum(and, asking my grandmother, her grandmother actively went out of her way to not discuss the family's history. the culture vacuum runs deep in the us).

i know for a fact that i was not the only person in the entire united states to be in that same situation, and that many people in that situation were not so fortunate to have met incredibly kind, patient and willing-to-educate friends like i was. i was extraordinarily lucky. so you have a rather large population of people of Irish descent in a highly conservative and white environment without a "narrative" or really much of anything to anchor themselves to.

and in come republicans and, especially, nazis.

one thing that unites people of Irish descent in the us is, of course, being of Irish descent. and nazis are all about being 'racially superior,' co-opting imagery and cultural symbols, and emphasizing that the person they're trying to recruit is, has been, or could become a victim. introduce a vaguely conservative cishet straight white christian man to the idea that, because he is of Irish descent, he is superior, and he might just latch onto it as a facet of his identity. without having any connection to the culture, politics or history of Ireland besides that his great-great-great-grandmother that he never met had parents from Ireland. hell, if his recruiter is particularly savvy, he might walk away believing himself truly disenfranchised because of his race. in the us. while being white.

his idea of Irishness might even be entirely founded in stereotype, especially English anti-Irish propaganda that wormed its way into the states("Irish people get drunk all the time and they're all alcoholics" is not an uncommon sentiment, unfortunately). he's probably never even met an Irish person, or even really considered Irish people to be... yknow, real people, who are more than just stereotypes and cultural symbols divorced from their original context and meaning. and he won't care, either, because why should he? it fulfills a base need to feel a sense of belonging to an ingroup, especially one populated with victims rather than oppressors.

so you get shirts like this. they're a wearable monuments to the desolation and apathy of white culture with another country's flag crudely painted on.

Irish people, I NEED to know: What do you think of these weird shirts that rednecks in my home town wear?

[mzenvs3000]

So does this make me an interpreter now?

If I am honest, I feel I have had a love hate relationship with this course over this semester. Coming from a more scientific background, I have found it slightly difficult to find the motivation to write and put together “my thoughts” on the topics we discuss in class. I am so used to having explicit facts and having to write about those from a scientific approach, so trying to put together a post about my thoughts with such freedom has been a challenge. I have appreciated though throughout the semester how writing got a bit easier, and that we were able to talk on subjects that were interesting to us. I will definitely be taking some skills away from my time in this course.

One of many photos taken of water and rocks (Lake Ontario) as it is another huge love of mine. Photo taken by myself.

Like many who are taking part in this class have a love for nature, and are probably coming from a major with some type of nature encompassed in it. This is true in my case, as I am a wildlife biology and conservation student. Wildlife biology and conservation is just one side of my love for nature. Others include marine studies, geology, and  geography/landforms. This would open up so many doors in the nature interpretation field for me. I also have passion for the care and protection of animals, species at risk, climate change, plastic pollution, and how humans interact with nature in their everyday lives, similar to Jacob Rodenburg who wrote the article, “Why Environmental Educators Shouldn’t Give up Hope.”

A shell fossil found in a rock at the Elora Gorge while on a field trip with my geography class in third year. We were trying to interpret the history of the area, guessing it was a marine environment from all of the marine fossils found in the rocks. Photo taken by myself. 

As an interpreter, I feel there is a certain responsibility I have when working with an audience. The first responsibility being the need to deliver creditable information that your audience can trust. This struck me as important when we were learning about nature interpretation in history. This is something I always seek out when learning about different things because I want to make sure what I’m learning is true and has some merit behind it.

I took my Alberta friend on a Hamilton waterfall tour as she did not believe me when I told her Hamilton was the waterfall capital of the world. An example of one of my first “interpretation tours.” (She was impressed). Photo taken by Jenna Stetz.

Another important responsibility is for the interpreter to put their own spin on their presentation and make it personal. I have lost count of the number of presentations I’ve had to listen to when someone is just reading off of a slide or a card. I don’t know about you, but I feel like when I hear these kinds of presentations, the presenter doesn’t really care too much and doesn’t seem to care if their audience gets a good experience or not. I always learn better and pay attention the most if someone shares a personal story that relates to the content. An example of this was recently I was in a course that was preparing me to apply to be a fire ranger this summer. I could instantly tell that my instructor was passionate about his job as a fire ranger with the number of stories he would tell. One story was to emphasize the importance of safety. He told the story about him and two other crew members messing around while chopping down some small trees to kill time, and they made a competition around it. His crew leader decided to take part and wasn’t paying attention and ended up getting an axe in his shin. He made this boring 2 hour long safety module more interesting and engaging by telling this story. When putting your own spin on it, it allows the audience to engage much more, as well as being relatable.

One last responsibility I feel is of importance is that as interpreters we have almost like a duty to pass on knowledge of certain things, not allowing them to be forgotten about. I take great pride in this, knowing that I might have an influence on the future “me’s” one day to share this information with others. We have to remember we are not just passing on knowledge of the environment and nature, but also cultural beliefs and practices too. I mentioned in a previous post about how it is important to learn from the past, and we cannot do this unless we actually know what happened in the past. I personally love just even sharing my scientific and nature knowledge with my friends and family who do not have this as a background, and take pride in the fact that I am able to help educate them on this subject.

Photo of my mom and I at the cottage, as she is making sure I was exposed to the outdoors as early as possible. Photo taken by my dad, Dave Zarnke.

An approach that I would make sure to include in my interpretation is to be able to share with a diverse audience. This would include different age categories, different cultural backgrounds, different knowledge backgrounds and understanding on the subject, as well as learning styles that people possess. This is important to consider because knowing these different factors would affect how you would conduct the presentation to make it the most effective. With different ages there is a different level of understanding so when I would present something to a younger audience, I would make sure to use lots of examples and simple terms they could easily understand, compared to an older audience where I could potentially use more complex terms and concepts. Knowing the cultural and knowledge backgrounds may also determine the content you wish to speak on and the approach you take.

Personally I am a visual and tactile learner, and find it easiest to teach and interpret in this way. During an interpretation I would probably include many visual aids such as photos, videos, and live models to share with the audience. I would encourage the audience to take part in demonstrations and actively participate throughout the presentation. I have also found that through my school life I learn best when examples are given, or thought provoking questions are asked. When information is presented in this way it helps me to compare an example to real life and make those connections, and the thought provoking questions challenge me to take time to digest and organize all that I have learned to put it all together.

Something I think that may set me a part from many interpreters is what I believe and my faith. I am a christian (and like to think of myself as a christian scientist) which can be quite difficult at some times trying to study my major in a secular setting due to different beliefs. The main one would be how the world was created. I believe that there is one true God who created this world, everything in it, and the species we see today are the same and looked the same when the world was created 6000 years ago. This belief and faith of mine plays a huge role in my life, influencing most and if not all of my decisions, so it would be important to me to include this in my interpretations. I would not share or teach others something that I don’t believe in. This would probably lead to me interpreting to a different audience or have a different approach in my interpretations as these beliefs are not the same as what secular science believes and teaches, as well as most organizations. If this were to be a career of mine I would have to work for an organization whose beliefs are the same.

Photo of the Oakville waterfront taken from a walk with friends one afternoon after church. Photo taken by myself. 

I believe that as an interpreter, I would ensure to create programs specifically directed towards kids because I have experienced the benefits of taking part in these programs personally. We have learned a bit about how technology is a double edged sword. On one hand, it can be a great tool for nature interpretation, playing sounds, videos, or even in our case currently creating podcasts we can share over the internet. The downfall is that they are also causing people and especially kids to be very disconnected these days. I have lost count the number of times I will see kids with their parents just out and about, completely ignoring their parents just fully consumed in what is on their screen, and these kids are as young as even four years old. I didn’t know what a computer was til I was way older than that, and never received one myself until even later. I think it is so important to raise awareness of these environmental issues to kids and get them involved so they gain interest early in life and can be a part of the solution for their generation.

Before this course I really never pictured myself ever leading an interpretation or even writing about nature as I am more of a research oriented person and not so much as a writer. Taking the time I have to write this post and reflect on what this could look like for me really opened my eyes and allowed me to picture myself actually do this. I reflected back to many memories when I was growing up and took part in nature interpretations as a kid (and honestly never made the connection that I was taking part in an interpretation), just emphasizing one of my points about the importance of getting kids involved. I think nature interpretation can be for anyone to take part in, either leading or listening as we all see things differently with a different lens. This has been a great opportunity and I will definitely be taking these skills I’ve learned with me as I continue in my own nature interpretation.

[aromagni]

Change Through the Aro Renaissance (Carnival of Aros, September 2020)

I have both witnessed and participated in many changes of the aro community.  I remember being a baby aroace in 2015 and mostly lurking as I followed many aro and ace blogs.  Back then, it seemed the aro community was mostly the aroace community, more linked to ace, not yet having developed its own identity.  I remember trying to find more ways to engage in the aro community and stumbling upon aroplane, which was an aro forum before arocalypse, but I think it was inactive and I’d looked for forums during the absence between the two.  After lurking and solidifying my confidence in my identity, I’d kinda drifted away from actively participating in the community at all for a little while, so I’m not particularly aware what happened in between; I’m vaguely aware the arocalypse forums were created in 2016, but it seems in my absence from the community in 2016-2017, much of what had been there had become lost, presumably decimated by the tolls of exclusionary discourse.

In 2018, I was in college where I could be more outwardly queer, and I started seeking out community more.  On one hand, engaging with college queer organization made me want to bring more visibility to ace and aro things, especially aro….during this time, I met many alloro aces who I couldn’t relate to, which started pushing me towards centering my aro identity more.  I remember wanting aro-spec awareness week recognized at my college and in trying to do so, realized the arospecawarenessweek tumblr had become inactive, for they had not updated the date that year.  I started following more aro tumblr blogs and joined the forums and then joined an aro discord server that spring, and that was when I started to truly engage in the aro community.

It was exhilarating interacting with other aros, both on discord and then how we carried that over to tumblr.  I fondly remember the coining of arogender and subsequently developing the flag for it.  We all followed and reblogged from eachother and it made it energizing to engage in the community because we could feel confident that the effort we put forth to create things would not be wasted, because our content was shared amongst ourselves in our tiny community.  Many of us blogging starting then had not really participated in the aro community before; many of us were my age, late high school to early college student aged, treading into actively participating in community for the first time, and thus our knowledge of our history and our terminology was distorted by time and viewed by the remaining crumb trails on the internet.

This was the time when our community was reborn, reborn from the ashes of the discourse and created into something new, a more independent aro community brighter than we’d ever been before: This was the aro renaissance.  In fact, “aro renaissance” is part of the blog title we used when we made aromantic-official in May 2018.  I’d had the idea because I noticed most of the older modded aro blogs of old had become dormant, and it would be good to have some sort of group ensuring the continuation of events like Aro-spec awareness week and maintaining resources like a glossary.  At the time, we were thinking small in the context of a tumblr blog, but it was a start.

I remember around December 2018, many flags were made.  There was the blue-orange aroace flag and shortly after I made an aroace flag of my own, and then an a-spec flag, and then there were other a-spec flags too I think; we were wanting to differentiate between a-spec, an umbrella term encompassing both aro-spec and ace-spec, from aroace, a specific identity indicating being both aro and ace at the same time...though there’s still some confusion between the two in terms of flag usage still.  Shortly after, there was also an aro allo flag made, and the allosexual aro community grew as a more distinct established component of the aro community; no longer was the aro community solely an aroace community, we had become an independent aro community.

In late January 2019 I’d went to the Creating Change conference, where there was the first ever aro & ace hospitality suite and I interacted with other a-spec activists, including people from the fairly newly named TAAAP (The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project).  It was refreshing seeing the advancement of aro activism as more than just a subset of ace, and interesting to see the development of activism out in more the “real” world rather than just on my corner of the internet.  I remember then hearing how they were planning to host the first carnival of aros (inspired by the longer-running carnival of aces), and since then it has been nice having carnival of aros to foster discussion of many aro topics.

I remember that first carnival of aros coinciding with a lot of clashing between the aro and ace communities, sparked even more by the specific topic of the month relating aro and ace communities.  I think we, the aro community, were frustrated at being ignored.  The ace community had continued to grow and gain recognition and visibility, while claiming to represent us as well but in a way that was more a misrepresentation, depicting aro as a subset of ace, thus further erasing the reality of our experiences.  We were frustrated and bitter, often justifiably so; even I as an aroace was frustrated with the ace communities treatment of aros at that point, and I know many aro allos were even more upset.  I think we were also still less sure footed, with our community still establishing-itself, so as a result were more defensive and scrambling for anything we could claim as our own, often misguided by the often incomplete or misinformed scraps of posts around different words and such.  (In hindsight I think there were some inaccuracies in my first carnival of aros post that february, but it was an accurate look at what we were frustrated and upset about at the time).

I remember also that February more was done to celebrate ASAW than had been in years previous, though it was still small.  I also remember some divisiveness between the aroace and aro allo sides of the aro community, which caused an unfortunate binary which subsequently emphasized the need for terminology of aros who were neither asexual nor allosexual, thus many discussions about “non-SAM” aros, and other words for that concept.  I think that continued well into that summer.

Speaking of that summer, in June 2019 AUREA was launched!  This one wasn’t started by me, but naturally I ended up pulled into doing more aro activism stuff.  AUREA (Aromantic-spectrum Union for Recognition, Education, and Advocacy) has wonderful resources including a comprehensive glossary with links (both original and archived) to sources and some flags, and also has various research and lists of other aro-inclusive orgs, including local ones.  We also publish multiple articles a month, including a “What’s Going On” article at the start of each month covering what’s going on in the aro community, and then other articles about various topics.  AUREA is everything I’d wanted when originally making the aromantic-official blog, but is so much more than I thought to hope for.  We collaborated with other activists and made ASAW 2020 even bigger than before, and we also launched an aro census, and just so many different cool projects.  It’s so cool having a good comprehensive centralized aro resource like AUREA and just having a specifically aro activism organization focusing on aro issues specifically, not just having aro included under aro & ace groups.  I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do and what we continue to do.

I feel like in the last year since AUREA has been formed, the aro community feels a lot more solidified and stable, like we’ve finally concretely established ourselves as an independent entity to be recognized.  And even though we’re more solidified, we’re still growing and creating and innovating, there’s still this wonderful energy and motivation which we continue to grow with.  Some other things have happened this year, in April 2020 we had to kinda scramble to keep the arocalypse forums going, and now I’m a mod there too because I don’t seem to know how to not be involved in things, especially because I vehemently care about seeing them continued.  (Why is it always spring? 3 springs in a row I’ve gotten involved in big ongoing aro projects like that).  Then June 2020, TAAAP pride chats started and have continued every month, which is a really cool opportunity for people from the a-spec community, both ace and aro, to gather to discuss various topics, and also to interact with various a-spec activists.  

It’s been really fascinating watching and helping to aro community grow over the past few years, and I feel like I’ve grown with it.  Through my activism, I’ve learned a lot about what I am good at and how I can work well in a team, which has helped me gain a lot of confidence about things where in-person experiences had made me lose confidence.  It’s also kinda wild when I think about the scale of it all; the aro, and also ace, communities are really fairly small, such that it’s not hard to end up doing this activism on a national or international scale.  I never really set out to be an activist, I just wanted to get involved and cared about improving things and have lots of ideas, so I kept doing things, and now I look at what I’ve done and realize that huh this is activism, I am an activist, and probably a rather prominent aro activist at that.  It’s weird especially compared to how extremely ineffective I feel I’ve been at doing any sort of activism at my college, to then think of what I’ve managed to help accomplish on an international scale online.  I feel inspired by the changes, the growth of the aro community, and I look forward to helping it grow even more.

[potteresque-ire]

(I wrote this as a response to another post. It got long, potentially upsetting, so I decided to move it here.)

(TW: Criticism of Draco Malfoy under the cut.)

I think the best analogy I can come up with for Slytherins in an Americanized Hogwarts is if they are the children of the tech giants (Hello Draco Bezos) and multi-company conglomerates, the top-earning Wall Street hedge fund managers, the property moguls like the Trumps and the Bloombergs, and the legacy politicians like the Bushes and the Kennedys. This would be a fairer comparison to the social-economic power of Slytherin families in the books because conservatives in the USA mostly do not come from privileged homes. And I suspect even this American analogue may pale to its UK counterpart, for it lacks the centuries of practice ("tradition”) as a convenient excuse for continuing its underlying bigotry.

Draco Bezos or Draco Trump or Draco Bush has as little choice as being of these surnames as Draco Malfoy. The members of the Americanized Slytherin house, likewise, don’t deserve to be seen as all evil, and maybe — and very likely — they’re not. But consider what Americanized Ron would think about the Slytherins as a group, bearing in mind that the books are written in the POV of Harry, a child himself and Ron’s fierce friend, if…

(Under the cut, for I’m VERY talkative today ...)

- If this Americanized Draco still buys his way into the Quidditch team with a Nimbus 2001. The obvious bribery aside, everyone in this Slytherin team can readily afford the same thing, and likely already has, at least, a Nimbus 2000 in possession.

- If Americanized Lucius also interferes with school policy with connections to Washington; he rubs shoulders with Secretary of Education Umbridge, who he got to know back when they were lobbying together in the capital.

- If the execution weapon of choice for Buckbeak is a golf club, a gift from the President Goyle of MACUSA. Walden McNair, former Slytherin, has just received a medal of honour for being able to wield it with style. This is a tale retold by a very bitter Theodore Nott, whose father owns the golf course resort where President Goyle plays but Nott Sr. only gets to keep the hamburger wraps of the President’s lunch. The other regular attendee of these lunches is the landowner of the entire Hogsmeade, who happens to be Gregory Goyle’s father.

And speaking of Hogsmeade...

- If Goyle Inc. hikes the rent of the town after every visit by Hogwarts students. Prices of items sold in Hogsmeade shops hike accordingly to deflect the cost. The Weasleys haven’t been able to afford anything there for years.

Goyle Inc. has also been looking to invest in Ottery St Catchpole, re-develop the area into one with ... farmer’s market. Lots and lots of farmer’s markets where a loaf of bread costs $10.00 apiece.

- If American Hogwarts is also free but God knows for how long. Its profits from the previous years — sorry, not profit, but endowment as should be referred to for non-profit organisations — has been channelled into the stock market and the stock market hasn’t been doing so well. Mrs Zabini, the manager of the fund, still gets her commission even if Hogwarts goes bankrupt. In fact, a volatile market with high trading volumes is a godsend for her income, and her yearly bonus is large enough to run Hogwarts for a year. She’s very generous, however, and donates 1% of it to the school, which gets her name engraved on the Gryffindor-Zabini Tower.

Meanwhile, if the Weasleys go home every summer not knowing if they can return to the same tower on September 1st.

- If Skelegro and other potions in the infirmary are rationed due to high cost and every time a Weasley find themselves injured in a Quidditch match, the Malfoys, father or son or both, would remark on the Weasleys having more children than they can afford, and recommend the school board that these potions should be rationed by surname as well. The Slytherins have no such concerns of course; the Parkinsons are heads of an international potion conglomerate and they can always import extra potions from Brazil, which are sold at a small fraction of the cost they sold to Hogwarts (yes, they have the licence and patent to produce the Skelegro. Why did you ask?).

…

Perhaps -- assuming my understanding of UK’s class system isn’t too off the mark -- these if’s can provide a sense of Slytherin’s privilege in canon to the American audience, and related to this, how Draco’s prejudice towards Ron cannot be put on the same moral scale from Ron’s prejudice against Draco. I’d also like to emphasize this: I haven’t touched at all, on this list, on Voldemort’s reign of terror. I haven’t touched, at all, on the fact that Voldemort’s war had been spearheaded by the parents of many current Slytherin students, and this war had only been suspended -- not ended -- for just short of a decade when the Class of Harry Potter entered Hogwarts. The wounds were still fresh. Arthur and Molly could’ve easily suffered similar fates as the Potters and the Longbottom’s. The bigotry of the Slytherins, and of the Malfoys, wasn’t merely a suspected thing in the canon years, like how we feel about a celebrity who’s made a questionable tweet. Not only was their bigotry a fact in the canon years, but it was also a real, ongoing threat that, if permitted to run its course, could and would ruin the lives of the Weasleys.

Ron seeing the Slytherins as a threat arguably served the dual function of keeping him safe -- perhaps not at the moment, but in the future. Draco, on the other hand, had nothing to fear about Ron and above all, the socioeconomic class that the Weasleys represented.

They never stood on equal grounds.

And here’s the thing I don’t understand. Or I think I understand it, having seen this Ron-is-as-bad-as-Draco-and-Slytherins-are-victims-of Dumbledore’s-prejudice debate in various forms over the years — this isn’t new or controversial, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this has become the dominant view within the ship — and I’m not sure I can get myself to face what I’ve understood, because what this is is worrisome for me.

Please hear me out.

The Drarry fandom on Tumblr has, in my observation, always taken a very strong, hardline stance against prejudice. The post that says something along the line of 10 people who sits with a Nazi makes a table of 11 Nazis get numerous likes and reblogs. And yet in this situation, we have a boy, Ron, who is directly affected by the prejudice, who’s familiar with the connections between his Slytherin classmates and those who have not only worked to make their brand of bigotry the law but helped murder those who do not agree, and his distaste for these oppressors as a group is somehow seen as equal as his likely future oppressors’ disgust at his presence.

The reason given is inevitably a variation of this: Draco was a child. He was parroting his parent’s beliefs. He was too young to be responsible for his words, or his actions. He was a victim.

I’ve not seen this defence offered, not even once within the Drarry circle, for a real-life bully. Tumblr’s user base is young, and many have a history of being bullied due to their race, gender, sexuality, disability, socioeconomic class. After a bit of subtraction (Young Age - Bullying History in Years), I’d take that many of these RL events happened when the victim and the perpetrator were about the age of Ron and Draco in canon. And yet, not once have I seen a shipper on my dash suggest the bully was a victim, or that they weren’t at fault because they were only parroting the prejudice of their conservative families, their schools, their religion etc. That maybe they didn’t mean what they were saying or doing.

This is a (very) good thing. But it also makes me wonder: defenders of Draco and the Slytherins do know, deep down, that the excuse they’ve offered Draco isn’t nearly good enough to exempt him from his behaviour.

Draco might not have understood the greater political ramifications of his bullying, but he knew he was hurting Ron. Bullying cannot a be mindless act; it cannot be a passive reflection of one’s lessons from school or family for It’s a pre-meditated, targeted behaviour, and a good bully like Draco — he came up with a bullying chant that the whole school knew in the end — tailors his acts to serve a specific purpose of hurting the victim. Draco might not have known that calling Hermione a Mudblood could devalue her life enough to make it ripe for elimination when Voldemort came to power, but he knew perfectly well that the term was derogatory. This is especially true if one agrees with the common headcanon that Draco was second only to Hermione in marks in school, that he was no Crabbe or Goyle and he was intelligent.

Our ship celebrates Draco’s sharp tongue, but that tongue was used exclusively to ridicule, to bully in canon -- it’s fandom that has given it a better / higher / romantic purpose. His father’s tongue spoke the language of bigotry to the ears of the Ministry; this was the Malfoy’s weapon of choice and Draco was forging his own in the books. His bullying ways in canon was written with humour, with Weasley is Our King being the epitome of the laughs. I don’t believe it was JKR’s intention for her readers to fall in love with Draco via his bullying style, however. The HP world was built as a mirror of our own (rather than as a manual of what an ideal world should be, as many in fandom has seemed to assume), and Weasley is Our King showcased how easily bigotry can creep into our day-to-day language when it’s masqueraded as a joke (Even Luna was singing it at some point):

Oh, relax! It’s perfectly fine for everyone to know the Weasleys were born in a bin, into poverty! Funny, isn’t it? HAHAHAHA!

Imagine seeing this kind of behaviour on Tumblr. Imagine trying to defend this kind of behaviour on Tumblr.

I have faith that most of my Drarry friends cannot, will not do the latter.

So please, please reconsider what you’re really saying when you call Draco the victim, the vulnerable one, when you insist that he and the Slytherins had been wronged. I don’t mean to start another debate and I don’t plan to engage in one; this isn’t a call-out post either, I enjoy reading all the opinions expressed and I understand many of the sentiments I’m questioning comes from a place of love. I just hope that everyone who’s reading (thank you) can sit back, think a little. Imagine for a moment that table with the Nazis. Even if, at the table, there’re actually 10 Nazis and 1 who isn’t, who is more vulnerable? The non-Nazi sitting with the Nazis? Or the person who refuses to sit at the table and makes a bad judgement call on the 11th sitter by assuming they are a Nazi as well? Who is more the victim, or more likely to become one? The 11th sitter who’s wrongly labelled? Or the standing person who is being eyed by the 10 Nazis with disgust, the 10 Nazis who already have a family history of hunting down the standing person’s family and friends?

Or does the answer -- and this is the understanding I’ve got but haven’t dared to face -- does the answer depend on if he character in question had white-blond hair that glinted so beautifully in the sun? Is that the reason why Draco Malfoy, bigot, bully, has been given this special treatment, this carte blanche in the sense that he’ll always remain on our good side, be exempt from our moral judgement regardless of what he did, because his physical description doesn’t contain a single hint of melanin?

[infj-zen]

#GetSorted challenge

#GetSorted from mbti-sorted

Okay, for interest’s sake I’m going to answer a few of these questions in writing. It’s almost midnight, we’ve been in COVID-19 lockdown for a while now and I don’t look camera ready.

Actually, that’s an excuse.

I would not go on camera even if there were no pandemic.

To everyone who does the video challenge, congratulations on your bravery.

So, here goes...

Tell us about a teacher or a coach who left a big impression on you. I had a longstanding EFSJ music teacher who would probably be considered charismatic, dominant, driven, hot-tempered, sometimes extremely funny. She emphasized repetition so that all her students had as close to perfect technique as possible. You were not allowed to have any input into her methods and students with a lot of opinions usually left or were asked to leave. She was very good at teaching the way she taught and for some students her methods worked particularly well. I learned that I did not like learning by repetition and did not retain as much that way. However, by subjugating my own preferences I was forced to address my weaknesses. Maybe it resulted in personal growth in terms of seeing the value of repetition in developing physical technique, muscle memory, and the memorization of music. I think it would have helped to also have combined the emphasis on repetition with explanations of the history and theory of the music in order to more fully understand and retain what I had learned. I also learned how to be self-effacing when I needed to be and not to insert ego or opinions where they were not wanted when I later had bosses with similar personality traits. I learned to be more selective and to actively try and put myself in long-term situations where I would be learning/working in the ways most conducive to me. Besides this learning experience, I had some really amazing science and English teachers in later years of high school and university. These were mostly ENTPs along with a few ENFPs and ENTJs. I found the ENTJs often had the most clear explanations for complex subjects. The best ENTP teachers were often very personally considerate and good at explaining things in ways that were easily understandable to me; I was good at synthesizing their ideas. The ENFPs were probably more smooth speakers and yet somewhat less easy to follow for me (they probably also addressed weakness in how I learned, for example, by not always explaining what they wanted super clearly beforehand; learning was a lot of trial and error; we did a lot of acting and oral presentations in class; Ne and Te make for a different way of thinking theoretically, of connecting ideas and facts).

What was your favourite subject in school and did you pursue it as a career? English and Chemistry. I pursued English in University and probably would have gone into Chemistry otherwise. However, I then realized I liked researching as an activity more than actually doing all that academic English involved and ended up studying and working in social sciences - somewhere I never considered when I was younger. A background in literature and writing is generally useful in the various jobs I’ve had though.

Do you have any athletic injuries and how did you get them? Yes, tendonitis from dancing (repetitive jumping and landing on the ball of the foot). This was as a child and it was not permanent.

Do you believe in any supernatural phenomena? No, but I can imagine a lot.

Tell us about a recurring conflict with a family member. Probably the most recent common recurring conflict revolves around being in a conversation with ‘a family member’ who is not listening and responding appropriately. For example, I am talking and ‘a family member’ to whom I am speaking responds by addressing something that takes on a totally different issue from that which I just referenced. Is the listening fine and the responding not? Is the listening poor and the responding good? Are both the listening and the responding off? Is my articulation poor? Is it mind manipulation?

What character do you identify with the most and why? The closest thing I’ve seen on screen is probably Caroline Turing in Person of Interest. Episode 23, Season 1 of POI features an INFJ actress playing something very close to an INFJ psychologist. Her mannerisms, speech patterns and interactions with her ISTP co-star (playing an ISTP former-military-guy-acting-as-a-patient-to-save-her-from-hitmen) are pretty realistic. Unfortunately, her real character, Samantha Groves aka Root, a serial killer for hire is only pretending to be Caroline Turing in order to gain access to the ISTP’s INTJ computer genius boss (played by an INTJ) and his AI surveillance system. So, the portrayal of this character only lasts for one episode.

How many languages do you speak?  Is English your first language?  If it isn’t, answer a question in your native language (please summarize it after in English!). Two. English (native speaker) and French.

What advice would you give to your younger self and what would they think of where you are now? Would you warn them about anything? Maybe just that what fields you enjoy studying in and working in may end up being different areas. In terms of having better job prospects, I might advise my younger self to study a subject like software engineering (which I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of or exposure to through our high school education system). That might be very useful in finding a fulfilling job now or in complementing the degree or field I went into. Also, I was extremely driven when I was younger and I would probably advise myself to take school more slowly, less courses at a time, more time to focus on course work, and generally to manage things in a way that resulted in less burnout.

Do you people-gather?  (If you’re unsure, ask others in your group(s) if they’re there because of you.)  How many groups do you belong to, and what do you think of this? Not so much for the people-gathering. I do not join a lot of groups. Usually, when I do, it is because I got dragged into it by someone charismatic and friendly. I often stay with the group for a relatively lengthy period. I end up feeling highly committed out of a sense of loyalty to the recruiter/group. At some point I end up leaving the group (often involves physically moving away to justify) and having a sense of extreme burnout when the mention of joining anything similar comes up.

Are you passionate about your career? Tell us about it. Sort of. I went into my career with the idea that I would have less chance of burnout if I went into something I was dispassionate about. For example, less interaction with people (using Fe) and more paperwork (using Ni and Ti). Some of my jobs have involved a lot of customer service and the use of Fe all day was overstimulating and emotionally draining. The best jobs so far involved working at a desk 9-5 and basically using a lot of Ni and Ti while organizing information in systems. This felt like meditating; I would achieve a zen-like state and feel energized afterwards. I would not say I was passionate about the nature of the work but the zen-like feeling was nice. In terms of being passionate, I think I might prefer a job that involved more of a research component. I think I would like to feel more challenged, to learn a lot of new things every day. However, I would not like to be in a career that feels too passionate for really long periods of time, or in a high-stress environment that would result in burnout. I would like more of a balance. You can always find hobbies you are passionate about on the side.

Which holiday brings you the least joy? Labour Day. The thought of going back to school or work ruins it.

Are you a heartbreaker or a heartbreak-ee? 50-50.

What is your dream car?  Or if you aren’t into cars, what piece of technology do you dream of owning? I really like my laptop.

Would you rather make a lot of money at a job you hate or do a job you love that keeps you below the poverty line? I would rather have a job I love that keeps me below the poverty line because I don’t spend a lot. However, I would not like to have a job that keeps me way below the poverty line, because then I would feel used and would start to hate the job that kept me so much below the poverty line.

Do you collect anything? Other than information gathering, not really. The idea of accumulating large quantities of physical items and taking care of all of them sounds like a lot to think about or unnecessary stress.

Have you ever had any alternative career paths/life gameplans?  Do you wish you had taken another path in retrospect? Sure. Chemistry or Software Engingeering looked interesting and probably would have helped in the job market, even in combination with the field I’m in. That way, my skills might have been more of a focus than personality, career-wise.

Do you have a good sense of direction?  How do you navigate (when you can’t rely on GPS)?  Do you navigate new places/buildings the same way you navigate your home town/familiar buildings?  Is your sense of time better or worse than your sense of direction? No, I do not have a good sense of direction. Mbti-sorted is the only person I know whose sense of direction is worse than mine. And that only applies when walking somewhere. When driving somewhere, she has a better sense of direction. I am decent but not excellent with maps, professionally made and drawn by me. With a place I know well, I just walk around without thinking much. Usually it’s okay. Sometimes, I’m surprised to be lost in a place I thought familiar. With new places, I usually plan ahead. I study maps, bring them with me, compare the map with the physical reality around me for similarities and differences, get upset by perceived inaccuracies, visualize the layout of the land if the land and the map were flipped in different directions, try and detect logical patterns in street layouts and names, I try and remember locations of importance and what they look like, directions between key starting points and destinations, and I take down numbers for taxis in case of failure. Sometimes I walk new streets rather than drive in order to actively experience routes more slowly and have time to memorize them better. My sense of time is okay but not great. I feel the need to meet deadlines. I remember I used to rush to classes at the last minute for school, but I guess I did feel the need to get there on time. I have learned to avoid rushing, to be more responsible and set alarms and to carry a cell phone with a clock around with me to arrive on time and often early for important events. Probably my sense of time is better than my sense of direction.

Credit to Temple Grandin for this question: if I tell you to think of a church steeple, what’s happening inside your head? (You could also talk about a clock tower, or a water tower, or a minaret - something you are familiar with, but have less personal connection to works best.) I immediately thought of a white, aluminum sided cube topped by a black pyramid with light blue sky in the background. My mind was adverse to or somehow felt it unnecessary to think beyond that.

Would you be unable or unwilling to answer any of these questions?  Which? No, in that I answered all the questions. I guess I did so in writing and was unwilling to answer them on video. I think you can almost always figure out how to phrase things in a way that is acceptable to you in writing. Yes, in as much as message is affected by medium.

C. ANSWER THESE THREE QUESTIONS (30 seconds):

How much preparation did you do before making this video?  If you have an interviewer, did you pick the questions or did they?  Who decided to do it that way? A bit / no interviewer / me

What type do you think you are? INFJ

In 1-3 adjectives, describe how you think others see you. Calm and conscientious (from collegues and acquaintances), scrappy (from family).

[claudia1829things]

"BAND OF ANGELS" (1957) Review

"BAND OF ANGELS" (1957) Review I have been a fan of period dramas for a long time. A very long time. This is only natural, considering that I am also a history buff. One of the topics that I love to explore is the U.S. Civil War. When you combined that topic in a period drama, naturally I am bound to get excited over that particular movie or television production.

I have seen a good number of television and movie productions about the United States' Antebellum period and the Civil War. One of those productions is "BAND OF ANGEL", an adaptation of Robert Warren Penn's 1955 novel set during the last year of the Antebellum period and the first two years of the Civil War. The story begins around 1850. Amantha Starr, the privileged daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner, overhears one house slave make insinuations about her background to another slave. Before Amantha (or "Manthy") could learn more details, she discovers that Mr. Starr had the offending slave sold from the family plantation, Starwood. He also enrolls Amantha in a school for privileged girls in Cinncinati. A decade later in 1860, Amantha's father dies. When she returns to Starwood, Amantha discovers that Mr. Starr had been in debt. Worse, she discovers that her mother had been one of his slaves, making herself a slave of mixed blood. Amantha and many other Starwood slaves are collected by a slave trader and conveyed by steamboat to New Orleans for the city's slave mart. Upon her arrival in New Orleans, Amantha comes dangerously close to be purchased by a coarse and lecherous buyer. However, she is rescued by a Northern-born planter and slave owner named Hamish Bond, and becomes part of his household as his personal mistress. She also becomes acquainted with Bond's other house slaves - his right-hand-man named Rau-Ru, his housekeeper and former mistress Michele and Dollie, who serves as her personal maid. Although Amantha initially resents her role as a slave and Bond's role as her owner, she eventually falls in love with him and he with her. But the outbreak of the Civil War and a long buried secret of Bond's threaten their future together. Many critics and film fans have compared "BAND OF ANGELS" to the 1939 Oscar winner, "GONE WITH THE WIND". Frankly, I never understood the comparison. Aside from the setting - late Antebellum period and the Civil War - and Clark Gable as the leading man, the two films really have nothing in common. "GONE WITH THE WIND" is a near four-hour epic that romanticized a period in time. Although "BAND OF ANGELS" have its moments of romanticism, its portrayal of the Old South and the Civil War is a bit more complicated . . . ambiguous. Also, I would never compare Scarlett O'Hara with Amantha Starr. Both are daughters of Southern plantation owners. But one is obviously a member of the Southern privileged class, while the other is the illegitimate and mixed race daughter of a planter and his slave mistress. Also, Gable's character in "BAND OF ANGELS" is a Northern-born sea captain, who became a planter; not a semi-disgraced scion of an old Southern family. Considering the political ambiguity of "BAND OF ANGELS", I suppose I should be more impressed with it. Thanks to Warren's novel, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts' screenplay and Raoul Walsh's direction; the movie attempted to provide audiences with a darker view of American slavery and racism. For instance, Amantha's personal journey as a slave proved to be a harrowing one, as she deals with a slave trader with plans to rape her, a traumatic experience at the New Orleans slave mart, Bond's lustful neighbor Charles de Marigny and her attempts to keep her African-American ancestry a secret from a Northern beau later in the film. The film also touches on Rau-ru's point of view in regard to slavery and racism. Despite being educated and treated well by Hamish Bond; Rau-ru, quite rightly, is resentful of being stuck in the role of what he views as a cosseted pet. Rau-ru also experiences the ugly racism of planters like de Marigny and slave catchers; and Northerners like some of the Union officers and troops that occupied New Orleans and Southern Louisiana in the movie's last half hour. I also noticed that the movie did not hesitate to expose the ugliness of the slave trade and the system itself, including the reveal the fate of a great number of slaves who found themselves being forced by Union forces to continue toiling on the cotton and sugar plantations on behalf of the North. There are other aspects of the movie that I found admirable. Not all of "BAND OF ANGELS" was shot at the Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank. A good of the movie was shot on location in Louisiana. I have to give credit to cinematographer Lucien Ballard for doing an exceptional job for the film's sharp and vibrant color, even if the movie lacked any real memorable or iconic shot. If I must be honest, I can say the same about Max Steiner's score. However, I can admit that Steiner's score blended well with the movie's narrative, I just did not find it memorable. Marjorie Best, who had received Oscar nominations for her work in movies like "ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN" and "GIANT", served as the movie's costume designer. I was somewhat impressed by her designs, especially for the male characters, ironically. However, I had a problem with her costumes for Yvonne De Carlo. Nearly dress that the Amantha Starr character wore, possessed a low cut neckline that emphasized her cleavage. Even her day dresses. Really? After reading a few reviews about "BAND OF ANGELS", I noticed that some movie fans and critics were not that impressed by the film's performances. I have mixed feelings about them. Clark Gable seemed to be phoning it through most of the film. But there were a few scenes that made it easy to see why he not only became a star, but won an Oscar well. This was apparent in two scenes. One of them featured the Hamish Bond character recalling the enthusiasm and excitement of his past as a sea captain. And in another scene that impressed me, Bond recalled the "more shameful" aspects of his past. At age 34 or 35, I believe Yvonne De Carlo was too old for the role of Amantha Starr, who was barely into her twenties in the story. Some would say that the role could have benefited from being portrayed by a biracial actress and not a white one. Perhaps. But despite the age disparity, I still thought De Carlo gave a very strong performance as the passionate and naive Amantha, who suddenly found her life turned upside down. Ironically, I thought her scenes with Sidney Poitier seemed to generate more chemistry than her ones with Gable. Speaking of Poitier . . . I might as well say it. He gave the best performance in the movie. His Rau-ru bridled with a varying degree of emotions when the scene called for it. And the same time, one could easily see that he was well on his way in becoming the Hollywood icon that Gable already was at the time. There were other performances in "BAND OF ANGELS", but very few of them struck me as memorable. The movie featured solid performances from Rex Reason, who portrayed Amantha's Northern-born object of her earlier infatuation - Seth Parson; Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who not only portrayed Amantha's later suitor Union officer Lieutenant Ethan Sears, but was already on the road as a television star; Carroll Drake, who portrayed Hamish Bond's introverted and observant housekeeper Michele; Andrea King, who portrayed Amantha's hypocritical former schoolmistress Miss Idell; William Schallert, who had a brief, but memorable role as a bigoted Union Army officer; and Torin Thatcher, who portrayed Bond's fellow sea captain and friend Captain Canavan. Many critics had accused Patric Knowles of bad acting. Frankly, I found his performance as Bond's neighbor and fellow planter Charles de Marigny effectively slimy . . . in a subtle way. Ray Teal was equally effective as the slimy and voracious slave trader Mr. Calloway, who had conveyed Amantha to the slave marts of New Orleans. The only performance that hit a sour note from me came from Tommie Moore, who portrayed one of Bond's house maids, the loud and verbose Dollie. Every time she opened her mouth I could not help but wince at her over-the-top and if I may say so, cliched performance as Dollie. I think I could have endured two hours in the company of characters like Prissy and Aunt Pittypat Hamilton from "GONE WITH THE WIND" than five minutes in Dollie's company. I guess I could have blamed the actress herself. But a part of me suspect that the real perpetrators were screenwriters John Twist, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts; along with director Raoul Walsh. I wish that was all I had to say about "BAND OF ANGELS". I really do. But . . . despite the movie's portrayal of the ugliness of slavery and racism, it ended up undermining its attempt. Quite frankly, I found "BAND OF ANGELS" to be a very patronizing movie - especially in regard to race. And the most patronizing character is this movie turned out to be Hamish Bond. Someone had once complained that although the movie initially seemed to revolve around Amantha Starr, in the end it was all about Bond. I do not know if I could fully agree with this, but I found it disturbing that the character "growths" of both Amantha and Rau-ru revolved around Bond and their opinion of him. One aspect of "BAND OF ANGELS" that I found particularly bizarre was Amantha's opinion of Hamish Bond's connection to slavery. At first, she simply resented him for being her owner. But she eventually fell in love with him and opened herself to being his mistress. Amantha certainly had no problems during that ridiculous scene that featured Bond's field slaves lined up near the river side to welcome him back to his plantation with choral singing. Really? This was probably the most patronizing scene in the entire movie. Yet, when Amantha discovered that his past as a sea captain involved his participation in the Atlantic slave trade, she reacted with horror and left him. Let me see if I understand this correctly. Once she was in love with Bond, she had no problems with being his slave mistress or his role as a slave owner. Yet, she found his participation in the slave trade to be so awful that she . . . left him? Slave owner or slave trader, Hamish Bond exploited the bodies of black men and women. Why was being a slave trader worse than being a slave owner? Not only do I find this attitude hypocritical, I also noticed that it had permeated in a good deal of other old Hollywood films set in the Antebellum era. Even more disturbing is that after becoming romantic with an Union officer named Ethan Sears, Amantha has a brief reunion with her former object of desire, Seth Parsons. He reveals knowing about her mother's ancestry and her role as Bond's mistress, and tries to blackmail her into becoming his. In other words, Seth's knowledge of her racial background and her history with Bond leads Amantha to run back into the arms of Bond. And quite frankly, this makes no sense to me. Why would Seth's attempt to blackmail Amantha lead her to forgive Bond for his past as a slave trader? The movie never really made this clear. I found the interactions between Rau-ru and Hamish Bond even more ridiculous and patronizing. Rau-ru is introduced as Bond's major-domo/private secretary, who also happens to be a slave. Despite receiving education from Bond and a high position within the latter's household, Rau-ru not only resents Bond, but despises him. And you know what? I can understand why. I noticed that despite all of these advantages given to Rau-ru, Bond refuses to give him his freedom. Worse, Bond treats Rau-ru as a pet. Think I am joking? I still cannot refrain from wincing whenever I think of the scene in which Bond's friend, Captain Canavan, visited and demanded that Rau-ru entertain him with a song without any protest from Bond. This scene struck me as very vomit inducing. What made the situation between Rau-ru and Bond even worse is that the former made an abrupt about face about his former master during the war . . . all because the latter had revealed how he saved Rau-ru's life during a slave raid in Africa and - get this - some bigoted Union Army officer tried to cheat Rau-ru from a reward for capturing Bond. The former sea captain/planter ended up leaving his estate to Rau-ru in a will. How nice . . . but I suspect he did so after Amantha had left him. If not, my mistake. And why did Bond failed to give Rau-ru his freedom before the outbreak of war? Instead, Rau-ru was forced to flee to freedom after saving Amantha from being raped by Charles de Marigny. In Robert Warren's novel, Rau-ru eventually killed Bond. Pity this did not happen in the movie. Overall, I see that my feelings for "BAND OF ANGELS" is mixed. There are some aspects of the movie that I found admirable. I might as well admit it. The movie especially benefited from Lucien Ballard's colorful photography, an interesting first act and an excellent performance by Sidney Poitier. Otherwise, I can honestly say that "BAND OF ANGELS" focused too much on the Hamish Bond character and was a bit too patronizing on the subject of race and slavery for me to truly enjoy it.

[ihaveneverbeengivenflowers]

(Not so) Random considerations on birth control methods and menstrual cycle

Although absolutely nobody fucking asked, I wanted to talk about my personal experience with birth control pills and menstrual cycle. First of all, let's catch up on how did I get here.

I started taking oral contraceptives (OC) since my mother took me to a gynecologist for the first time. The doctor made me a prescrition because I told her I suffered with cramps during my period. I was about 13 years old.

I kept taking OC every single day for the following 11 years, until I reached 24. Several doctors I passed by along these years changed the dosage and combinations of hormones I took, because each of them gave me a different bunch of adverse effects. Headache, nausea, menstrual cramps, recurrent urinary tract infections, candidiasis, vaginal bleedings... the list goes on.

During my teenage years I found out some women from my mother's family have circulatory problems, from varicose veins to venous thrombosis. There are also cases of cancer possibly induced by sexual hormones. That is: conditions that make OC, especially the combined ones, contraindicated for me. I got worried and decided to come back to the doctor and talk about another options available. The only one that was presented to me was the so called minipills, which are OC made with a single hormone instead of a combination of two. I took it for the following 5 years straight, and it seemed a good idea at the time because I've spent all my life struggling with underweight and anemia. Since the OC completelly suspended my period, I was supposed to be fine.

However, last January I had a major vaginal bleeding, even though I didn't stop taking my OC. I had terrible abdominal pains, and the bleeding continued for almost 10 days straight. Like I said, being underweight didn't improve the situation and my immune system shut down very quickly. Besides, I was having a hard time to keep up with my bills and wasn't covered by any health insurance at that time (I live in Brazil, and for those who are not familiar, things are a little bit different here. Theoretically we do have a public health system, but in real life we can't barely count on it and the access to the private system is kinda surreal for those living with minimum wage).

Well, as soon as I could, I saved enough money to go see a private doctor. I paid for the appointment and a several exams to find out that my bleeding was possibly caused by multiple ovarian cysts. Both of my ovaries were 3 times bigger than the normal size, and the doctor hypothesized that a big one of them (or a few) must have simply ruptured, and that the whole shit was probably induced by the fucking OC.

In summary, the doctor said I had polycistic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Plus, I should stop taking my actual OC and go back to the combined ones. Yeah, those same I was not supposed to take both because of my family history and the previously described adverse effects. He emphasized that was the only treatment available, and that my condition actually had no cure, so I should just take it for the next 30-40 years until I’d reach menopause, while praying for not having cancer or thrombosis or embolia and... well, to die of something else not related with OC.

So, well... I quit. I smiled and waved to the doctor and left the office. I was about to turn 25 and I decided I wasn’t going to take it that way. Now that you’re up to date in the story, let’s move on to where I was really trying to get with this post.

Please note: I ain't no gynecologist nor physician, but nowadays I’m a post-graduate health professional with a couple years of clinical practice. And I think I’m allowed to apply the little knowledge I acquired during 7 years (so far, still counting) of higher education to see through this situation with a tad of criticism. Not only regarding my own case, but regarding the doctors’ position when it comes to women’s reprodutive health - at least in my country. Therefore, let’s consider some key points:

Is there a real need to prescribe OC to young girls aged 13 years or less just because they come to the office complaining about menstrual cramps? During the period the lining of the unfertilized womb is being shed through the vagina. It involves muscular contractions, so of course it might get painful. There’s nothing abnormal about it, so why purging it like a plague instead of teaching them that’s a physiological process and how to relieve the pain in case it happens? Nutritional counseling, physical exercises, simply using a hot-water bottle or even taking an occasional painkiller can totally solve the problem.

The primary aim when taking OC is expected to be, should be, birth control. Yet, they’re frequently prescribed to girls that don’t even have an active sex life because of light acne, oily skin, menstrual cramps and/or intense menstrual flow without any further clinical complications... or just because. You might take it as some conspiracy theory, but you know what it looks like to me? Creating a very profitable market for pharmaceuticals. And nothing more. If women get sick and end up developing cancer or whatever, even better, so more drugs (way more expensive ones) will be sold.

In fact, there are another treatments available for PCOS. But it seems doctors are too lazy, or too comfortable in their position of filling a single standard prescription, that they completely ignore any alternatives. Can you wonder why? Maybe because it requires a minimum of health and sex education, and that takes time. How are they going to be able to attend people in less than 5 minutes if they’ll have to talk to their patients, right? Simply doesn’t worth it. Anyways, again, alternatives include acupunture, homeopathy, phitoteraphy, dietotherapy throught nutritional counseling and regular physical activity. Each case is different, but keep in mind: OC aren’t the only way, indeed, literally speaking they’re not even a treatment because they don’t treat it.

Opening a parenthesis: of course there probably are exceptions and good doctors no matter where. But doctors at public health system are in general unsatisfied with their working conditions and environment, while doctors at the private system usually are anything but well paid by insurance companies. In overall terms, the more academically qualified the doctors get, the less prepared for attending real life demandings in developing countries they are. Also, the less willing to work in such places they are. (If you’d wish to read more about it, I highly recommend seeing Chapter 5 - An example of a paradigm and its social conditions: scientific medicine of La construction de sciences, by Gérard Fourez.)

Still on PCOS topic: first of all, having multiple cyst on one or both ovaries doesn’t necessarily mean PCOS. PCOS, as a syndrome, means there are multiple criteria that need to be fulfilled for closing the diagnostic. In this case, criteria involve imaging exams, symptomatology, clinical and biochemical evaluation. In my case, for instance, PCOS is a diagnosis that simply doesn’t suit my medical history, but no doctor has ever bothered making an anamnesis. I’m not trying to say anybody should go to Dr. Google’s opinion (seriously, don’t), but look out for more information than it’s given to you at the office, even because often none is given.

I know suspending the menstrual cycle can make life much more easier. No worries about pads, unexpected leaks, cramps, PMS etc. But take it from a different perspective for a second. There seems to be a lot of content over the internet nowadays about body positivity, empowerment and tons of so called movements of deconstruction of established paradigms in our society about feminility and feminism. I’ve seen a lot of girls online sharing their experiences on stopping taking OC etc. I don’t know how far it’s good or not, but there’s a point that can be taken from all of it: the menstrual cycle is a natural part of every woman’s reprodutory phase in life. It’s not disgusting, embarrasing or whatever nonsense we’ve been told. And it can be a good way for us to conect with ourselves, to listen to our bodies. Observing symptoms such as pain, fatigue, cravings, emotions, sex drive; checking on cervical mucus, body temperature, hours of sleep... all of this can be part of a daily self-care routine and, moreover, be useful to birth control.

Talking about birth control: I’m genuinely surprised on how much the doctors whom I interacted during my life underrate condoms as a method against unwanted pregnancy. They say out loud that it’s not safe and, unless the conspiracy theory about selling drugs is real, I simply don’t get the reason why they do that. In first place, this is bullshit because condoms are a very effective fisical barrier that prevent even a single spermatozoid from swimming along the vaginal canal and straight up to the womb. Second, there’s no 100% safe method except for sexual abstinence; not even OC + condoms (theoretically not even tubal ligation) are 100% safe, since the human body isn’t a static machine and everything is prone to error. So, yes, opting for non-pharmacological methods of birth control instead of synthetic hormones can be valid.

Obs: condoms work as long as they’re properly stored, used and discarded. But the same can be said about OC and any other contraceptive methods. And, important: choosing a contraceptive method involves not only statistical data on the margin of error of condoms and pills, but also individual phychossocial aspects. In other words: a determined method might not be the doctors’ first option and they might not personally like it, but they can suck it up and use their fucking knowledges to find the best alternative for you.

Again, I’m not trying to encourage you anybody else to contradict their doctors. However, I think that questioning is part of a healthy and constructive process. First because doctors are human beings, therefore they’re as prone to error as anybody else (or even more due to long working hours). Second, because they’re supposed to be the primary source of information for any questions you might have about your own health. Third, because I believe with all my heart that the relationship between health professionals and their patients must include, if not be based in, trust.

[woman-loving]

some thoughts on femininity

I start off with a long quote, so the whole thing is going under a cut.

There is a scene in the film The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, where the heroine’s mentor Effie Trinket is learning to adapt to her new life in the revolutionary compound of District 13. Previously an inhabitant of the wealthy Capitol area, Trinket has been forced to leave behind her old excessive style in favour of a grey jumpsuit, a uniform worn throughout the District. Cleaned of makeup and without her frilly dresses, Trinket retains only a set of bangles which she still wears and often touches wistfully. Her fellow District 13 comrades find Trinket’s attachment to these objects absurd, and she is met with derision. This response from her revolutionary companions calls to mind Germaine Greer’s assertion that “the women who dare not go outside without their fake eyelashes are in serious psychic trouble” (1970, 325). That Trinket’s affection for feminine accoutrements makes her the focus of ridicule illustrates an important conundrum. It begs the question: should we laugh and pity the Trinkets of the world “who dare not go outside” without their feminine accessories? Are Trinket’s bracelets symbolic manacles? Or should we sit awhile, and wonder why these attachments might remain in the face of strong suggestions from others that liberation can be found in throwing such objects away? This leads to the central question: how can we consider femininity in a way that best attends to people’s experiences of, and attachment to, feminine styles?

Looking to both popular and scholarly feminist commentary over history we see that feminine styles of the body are often not merely understood as the effect of an oppressive gender system, but rather are seen to perpetuate and maintain this system. So the dominant theory goes: if a woman fails to reject those bodily expectations of the gender regime, she is part of the problem. I do not wish to deny that there are norms and expectations that shape the way that we are expected to appear and present ourselves in the world. Indeed, at times this regime is a punishing one. Women are expected to put an enormous amount of energy and money into their appearance, in order to be understood as “respectable”, “beautiful”, and “sexy”. The effort required to produce feminine aesthetics is increasingly being discussed in terms of labour (Baker 2016, 52). Furthermore,successfully achieving various looks for different contexts is no easy task. To wholeheartedly celebrate the various aspects of appearance which often constitute what is recognised as “feminine” – including makeup, clothing, hairstyling, and so on – would be to deny the daily experiences of women who are compelled to conform to particular styles in both the private and the public sphere.

For these reasons, I do not wish to celebrate femininity as something that should be seen as necessarily empowering nor inherently “good”. However, I do seek to intervene in the idea that political transformation can or should be affected at the level of appearance and identity. That is to say, I argue that femininity is not necessarily disempowering, nor inherently “bad”. Those aspects of feminine styling that may for some people feel cruel or laboursome may at other times or for other people be a source of pleasure or, indeed, may be central to their sense of identity and belonging. [...]

That gender expectations are contextual and change over history and location also reveals that it is not the specific elements of what we designate as “feminine” in appearance that are innately problematic, but rather what is arduous is being compelled to conform to expectations. While women of one era might define long dresses as oppressive, another might see miniskirts in the same way depending on the specifics of the disciplinary regime at the time. Another clear example of this is currently the colour pink, which is discussed in some detail in chapter two : pink is not inherently bad, but functions today as a symbol of girlhood. While many reject pink for the gender normativity it represents, at times the debate gets mired in making pink the problem rather than seeing the real issue as the system that merely encourages the use of pink as a signifier. [...]

--Hannah McCann, Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism, and the Politics of Presentation, 2018

This is an excerpt from the introduction of a book that I was looking through, just because I was hoping it would annoy me into writing something. I have a bit of a bias against using "femininity" as a category of analysis; I fear that people are going to use this concept imprecisely, leaving it vague and relying on unspoken, preexisting connections between femininity, womanhood, and female to suggest its meaning. However, I haven't actually read much theorization on femininity or femme-ness, so I don't know for sure what this book is going to argue; I read another theoretical article on femme just before this and it seemed to be going in some interesting directions (building off other queer and feminist theorizing). But still I want to share some of the thoughts and concerns I have going into this topic, acknowledging that other people may very well be saying the same sort of thing, and that this isn't original to me.

First of all, I want to give my own, very rough working explanation of "femininity" (or at least one angle of it), which would go something like this: femininity names the quality of womanliness, or the range of physical characteristics, styles, mannerisms, interests, work, etc that are imagined to be the natural expression of womanhood. In other words, "femininity" and womanhood are tied together through an essentialist logic, one which also locates womanhood and its expression (femininity) in "the female body." (I will use "the female body" here to indicate another construction.) The reference point for all this that I'm thinking about here is specifically Western European constructions of womanhood, femininity, and the female body, and how these are constructed through race, class, ability, sexuality, and other factors.

While we've come to speak about femininity as something independent from being woman or "female"--as that which has simply been "traditionally associated" with women--I think this is the logic behind that "association." To be feminine is to be "womanly." One concern I have with using "femininity" as a analytic category is that... so long as the reference point for understanding the meaning of "feminine" is an essentialist logic of womanhood, we risk carrying over this logic uncritically, and reproducing it even where we claim to have severed it off. How can we talk about both "womanliness" as an independent expression that can be found in people of any gender and also "women" as a group that can have a full range of possible expressions? 

Going back to my explanation of femininity and the broader gender logic of which its a part, another point that needs to be made is that... while ideal (meaning: white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis) women and womanliness are seen as fundamentally distinct from men and manliness, these categories are not as separate in this scheme as would appear. These values of male-man-manly and female-woman-womanly interpenetrate one another and can be quite mobile. Womanly characteristics can be found in a man; male traits identified on the female body. This mobility actually helps preserve the underlying essentialist logic. For example, we might understand a brave woman as expressing a manly characteristic, rather than questioning the notion that bravery is fundamentally male (and therefore an aberration in women) or that the real, essential man is brave. (This is touched on a little bit here, too.)

Moving on.

So, we have this introduction that starts out with considering the reception of Effie in The Hunger Games, and what Effie misses when she's in District 13, and what she's sneered at for being attached to, is identified as "femininity."

It's been a lot time since I read or watched The Hunger Games, but surely it would be accurate to say that what Effie is missing is a particular style, particular accouterments, a fashion; these are what the author here identifies as "femininity." And that's not wrong, exactly, but there are other ways of naming this. Lemme turn to a quote I saved from another book I read:

In spite of their differences in education, wealth, and social standing, most of the [Victorian] bourgeoisie resembled one another in dress, habits of speech, and deportment. Bourgeois men dressed somberly, in dark colors, avoiding any outward signs of luxury. Their clothing fit closely and lacked decoration—a symbolic adjustment to the machine age, in which elaborate dress hampered activity. It also reflected a conscious attempt to emphasize achievement-oriented attitudes, and new standards for what constituted honorable manhood. Through dress and other fashionable tastes, middle classes distinguished themselves from what they viewed as a decadent and effeminate nobility.

Bourgeois conventions regarding women’s dress were the opposite of men’s, further reinforcing gender distinctions—women’s clothing became the material symbol of male success. Extravagant amounts of colorful fabrics used to fashion huge, beribboned hoop dresses reflected the newfound wealth of the middle classes and confirmed their view of women as ornaments whose lives were to be limited to the home and made easier by servants.

--Western Civilization: Beyond Boundaries, Thomas F. X. Noble, et al., 6th ed., 2010

Ok, now this is where all my thoughts start to get scrambled together. Let's see in what order all my points will wind up.

So what appears to be happening here is the emergence of two fashion genres (to use a term from the previous femme article I read) within the white Victorian bourgeoisie. (Is that the same thing as middle class?) And these are shaped to express one of two sets of contradictory values held by the bourgeoisie. And while it's reasonable to assume that bourgeois women would also hold and reproduce these values, I expect that these social trends were largely shaped by white bourgeois men, and that both sets of values reflected their own interests. In other words, it's not that bourgeois men held one set of values and bourgeois women the other, and each were allowed to develop fashions as suited their own (singular) preferences. Rather, bourgeois men valued both somberness and display of wealth through luxury, and wished to express both, and resolved this contradiction by externalizing one of these value sets onto women. They were able to have their cake and eat it too: they could express esteemed middle-class values as a part of their manhood, while also getting the benefits of the values they decried: extravagance, excess, luxury, ornamentation--all foisted onto women, whose fashions were imagined as deriving from an essential womanly disposition that naturally gravitated to such qualities. I.e. women's femininity.

AND LEAST THAT'S HOW I'M READING THIS. I haven't looked into the development of these fashions beyond the quote from the book. So, if that's correct.

The use of The Hunger Games to illustrate the reception to women's attachment to "feminine" styles is odd, because the fashions of the Capitol must also be sharped by class values. Popular fashion in the Capitol appears to be characterized by exaggeration, excess, and flamboyance, a display of luxury which resonates with what the Capitol represents in the series.

HOWEVER. The Capitol does not seem to have markedly distinct genres of fashion for men and women. Let me qualify that. Just looking at these pictures, the few men who appear are less... excessive, but still notably flamboyant. (Two more examples.) It's been quite a while since I read the books or watched the movies, so I don't remember exactly how gender appeared to be constructed in the Capitol. But I'd posit that the difference in degree of excess between men and women here results from the fact that these fashions are built on the base of real-world fashions, where those for men and women have had different trajectories. Perhaps we could say, though, that the same basic concept lies behind all fashion in the Capitol, and imagine that the spirit behind Suzanne Collins' vision of the Capitol might be more "ideally" represented by a world where the forms of Capitol fashion were not gender-specific.

In that case, extravagant fashion is not specifically womanly. It might make more sense to speak of Effie not as missing the accouterments of "femininity," but more specifically the accouterments of a fashion characterized by exaggeration, excessive ornamentation, or however we might describe it. These fashions might be intimately tied to her identity and sense of embodiment, without primarily being understood as an expression of a uniquely womanly quality. Where, then, does the concept of "femininity" fit into it?

Moving on from The Hunger Games, the suggestion I'd like to make is that, rather than using a vague notion of "femininity," we attempt to be more precise in naming the contents of "femininity." By utilizing categories like "extravagance" or "flamboyance" (or perhaps other, better terms), we can uproot the characteristics that make up "femininity" from their presumed location in womanly nature. We can connect them as well to “manly” expressions of these same qualities, and perhaps note a range of similarities and differences in how they are socially received depending on the gender, race, class, etc of the subject in which they appear. This is not to say that we should ignore how certain things are gendered, or how people do in fact adopt certain styles as a way to express or embody their gender. This can/should still be part of the analysis. But expanding the repertoire of categories used to name what we mean by "femininity" might help us avoid over-determining the significance of gender, which can be a pitfall when the subjects under consideration are viewed as markedly gendered. (I complained about an example of this.)

(I suppose I'm basically describing a method of analysis that evacuates the category of femininity. I remember once, in a discussion of Buddhism, the concept of non-self (anatta) was illustrated by saying "a flower is made up entirely of non-flower parts." In this case, "femininity" or womanliness is made up entirely non-woman(ly) parts. So what are those parts?)

I also want to comment on something McCann said in the last paragraph of that first quote. She said that the elements designated as "feminine" are not innately problematic, but become so when they are compelled to be adopted. I’d agree that it’s a problem when these elements are compulsory (especially if they tend to require greater time, labor, expense, and self-monitoring to embody). However, the contents of "femininity" may in fact be problematic within the social context in which they are developed. Returning to that second quote, the ornateness of bourgeois women's fashion was problematic in its own right because it contradicted another, more centrally affirmed set of bourgeois values.

Now, I'm not sure what is the best way to name the characteristics that are identified as "feminine," but one common complaint against certain "feminine" clothing or processes is that they are impractical and unnecessary. And when women specifically are compelled to adopt styles that are impractical for a wider range of situations, it makes sense to complain about that. However, what may be needed to defuse tensions around "femininity" is not just a rethinking of the meaning or value of womanhood (e.g. what women "should" look like), but also a rethinking of the value of “impracticality.” A rethinking of forms of expression (and the labor they entail) that serve no purpose other than meeting an aesthetic or bodily goal, one which may be attained at the expense of practicality, efficiency, or frugality.

At the same time, even here we can't look at this question outside the interlocking context of sexism, misogyny, racism, classism, et al, since these determine which forms of expression that might in fact be impractical (toward a certain goal) actually get identified as impractical or unnecessary. It just goes to show how multiple approaches are needed, since these phenomena are complex.

Fin.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

The Sun Still Rises

Knowledge chooses its project, each project is new and chooses its moments, each moment is new, but simultaneously emerges from the memory of all the moments that existed before

— The Interior of the Absolute

1. The Beginning

The Fire Cells Conspiracy revolutionary organization didn’t begin its activity from out of nowhere. It wasn’t as if a straight line had cut through space and time. It was a future crying out from the past. The Conspiracy comprised a collective synthesis, connecting the backgrounds and viewpoints of all who participated in it and drawing valuable conclusions from past experiences of subversive projects and attacks we took part in.

It represented our desire to take a step further, not to climb some ladder of informal hierarchy that fetishizes violence and its methods, but to simply advance, move forward, and explore new perspectives, making the shift from a “bunch of friends” to an organization, from the sporadic to the consistent, from the spontaneous to the strategic.

Along the way, we assumed a critical stance toward the past, but we never went out of our way to be hostile. We are anarchy’s misfits, born from its potent moments and gaping voids. Additionally, the goal of critique and self-critique is not to put an end to something, but just the opposite: it’s an aspiration to evolve something. The fact that we’re not going to elaborate a corresponding critical review right now doesn’t mean we’re afraid to recognize our mistakes. Rather, it’s because that kind of examination is better served by distance and cool nerves than by impulse.

During no phase of our brief, intense history did we lose our collective memory of the anarchist milieu we come from. We also feel we discovered something we have in common with comrades who began the struggle before us, engaged in their own battles, were arrested and imprisoned, but never lowered their heads. We discovered the unrepentant passion for revolution that connects histories and realities of struggle from different decades in a shared context of individual and collective liberation.

In that context, we forged our own alphabet. Speaking the language of direct action, we openly raised the issue of creating organized infrastructure. As anarchists, we often distance ourselves from the concept of organization because we equate it with hierarchy, roles, specialization, “you must,” and obligations. However, words acquire the meanings given by the people who use them. As the Fire Cells Conspiracy, we stormed into battle over the meaning of revolutionary anarchist organization.

2. The Path from Spark to Flame

From the very beginning, we rejected the idea of a centralist model and chose to start from the basis of individual initiatives that wanted to collectivize. What emerged during organizational meetings were issues of coherence, consistency, individual and collective responsibility, and direct action as a means of transforming our words into deeds. At group meetings, each comrade had the opportunity to propose a plan of attack, thereby opening up a debate on planning, timing, political analysis, and operational problems posed by a given target’s location. During these discussions, there was no guarantee that we would reach agreement. Opposing arguments sometimes developed into a powerful dialectic, especially regarding the strategy and prioritization of timing, and quite often there was more than one proposal, so we then had to choose which we were going to select and which we were going to keep in “storage” to be refined in the future. It was a process that allowed us to open our minds; broaden our horizons; learn from one another’s different experiences; vigorously defend our opinions; figure out how to recognize our mistakes; understand the concept of shaping something together; become conscious of the need for strategy; and — most important of all — create relationships not in the name of some “professional” revolutionary goal, but based on friendship, true comradeship, and real solidarity.

We love what we do because it contains our entire essence. Therefore, the “Conspiracy” isn’t just all of us together, it’s also each one of us apart. Even in cases when there wasn’t collective agreement on a particular action, we didn’t resort to “begging” from the prevailing democratic majority. Instead, the minority of comrades who insisted on carrying out the attack took the autonomous initiative to move forward with their choice. That happened in parallel with the rest of the collective, which supported them at specific times if necessary, naturally playing a part in our overall organization.

That’s why a number of communiqués were signed by groups (Nihilist Faction, Breath of Terror Commando, Terrorist Guerrilla Unit) that arose out of each separate initiative. During the second phase, after reaching agreement, whether as the entire collective or as a separate initiative, we planned the attack. Each one of us contributed our knowledge; information was culled from newspapers, magazines, and the Internet; the area where the action was to take place was reconnoitered and mapped; the approach to and withdrawal from the target was laid out (avoiding cameras and police checkpoints), including alternate routes in case something unexpected happened, and of course keeping in mind the eventuality of a confrontation with the pigs. There were also support groups, “hideouts,” ways of asking for help, etc. (In a future manual, we will analyze and explain our experiences, which are related to how we perceive what is going on while an attack is being carried out.)

During the third phase (which was never far removed from the initial proposal about target selection), we worked on the text of the communiqué. When a topic was suggested (for example, attacking the police), the comrade who made the proposal argued for its content. Then a discussion began, during which each person fleshed out the concept, expressed disagreements, pointed out problems, and offered other ways to approach the topic. As soon as the debate finished, no matter how many meetings were needed to finish it, the collective brought together the central themes of all the meetings and shaped the main axes around which the communiqué would be written. The writing of a communiqué on a specific topic was usually shared out among those who wanted the responsibility, and after it was written, we got together to read it and make corrections, additions, and final touches. If the communiqué was connected to a separate initiative, then the comrades involved in that separate initiative were responsible for writing it.

The same process held for our Thessaloniki comrades, and when we collaborated as the Athens-Thessaloniki Fire Cells Conspiracy, comrades from both cities coordinated those actions based on principles of mutual aid and comradeship.

3. “Everyone Does Everything”

Of course, we’re well aware of the dangers lurking within each collective project that aspires to call itself antiauthoritarian — the appearance of informal hegemony and the reproduction of corrupt behavior, of which we are enemies. We feel that the purpose of power is to divide. To eliminate the possibility of the emergence of any informal hierarchy within our group, we struck directly at the heart of specialization and roles as soon as they surfaced. We said: “Everyone does everything.” Everyone can learn and devise ways to steal cars and motorcycles, fabricate license plates, forge ID cards and official documents, expropriate goods and money, target-shoot, and use firearms and explosives.

Therefore, it was and continues to be important to us that the means and methods we use for our actions be straightforward and relatively simple to obtain and prepare, allowing them to spread and be used by anyone who decides to move toward the new urban guerrilla warfare. These include gasoline, jerry cans, camping gas canisters, and candles that can easily be obtained at a supermarket, but also improvised timing mechanisms that — after the appropriate “research” in technical manuals and guides available on the Internet, plus a little innovative imagination — anyone is capable of fabricating.

We certainly aren’t forgetting that, while “everyone does everything,” each person also has their own separate abilities and personal inclinations, and it would be a mistake to gloss over those differences. With desire and mutual understanding as our guide, each of us undertook to do what we felt most capable of. For example, if someone was a good driver or a skillful thief, or perhaps had a knack for writing, that didn’t mean their creative abilities would be suppressed in the name of some false collective homogeneity. It was up to each comrade to offer their abilities and methodologies to the other comrades without making a “sacrifice” of their own participation, and it was even better if that happened in the broadest possible way, going beyond the narrow context of the collective and facilitating access by the entirety of the antiauthoritarian current — for example, through the publication of practical guides like those released by some German comrades, which contain a number of different ways to make explosive devices.

Additionally, our actions never involved fixed, immutable roles. Without resorting to the cyclical rotation of tasks, which recall compulsory work hours, all the comrades took advantage of a common foundation that allowed them to be able to execute any task at any time during an attack. The process of improving your ability to use materials and techniques is naturally a continual process of self-education. Along those lines, we want to emphasize how crucial it is to simultaneously develop a group’s operational capacity as well as its revolutionary viewpoint. At no point should the level of sterile operational capacity intensify without a corresponding intensification of thought and discourse, and the same obviously holds true for the converse. We had no central committee to designate roles. There were only particular tasks within a specific plan — positions that changed according to the desires of the comrades who took part.

4. Guerrillas for Life

We’ve always felt that an organization doesn’t necessarily have to be exclusive to the comrades who are part of it. Our action neither begins nor ends within the context of the group. The group is the means to revolution, not an end in itself. Because when the means become their own raison d’être, “diseases” begin to appear, like vanguardism, the armed party, and exclusive orthodox truth.

Through the Fire Cells Conspiracy, we say what we believe in, who we are, and what tendency we represent, but in no way do we say that someone has to precisely follow some so-called correct line or participate in our group in order to be recognized as a comrade.

Thus, we ourselves have also taken part in processes apart from the Conspiracy, like joining coordinated action networks, attending assemblies, participating in marches and demonstrations, supporting attacks and acts of sabotage, putting up posters, and painting slogans. But we never thought one thing was superior to another. That’s because the polymorphism of revolutionary war consists of an open and permanent commitment that has nothing to do with fetishized spectacle (embracing armed struggle as the only thing that matters) or accusatory fixations (insisting on the quantitative characteristic of “massiveness” as the criterion for revolutionary authenticity). On the contrary, we position ourselves as enemies directly against the “polymorphism” of café gossip, speeches in university auditoriums, leadership roles, followers, and all those conservative fossils of dogmatism and habit that act as parasites within the anarchist milieu, wanting only to control young comrades, sabotage them, and prevent them from creating their own autonomous evolutionary path through the revolutionary process.

We believe that the concept of the anarchist urban guerrilla isn’t a separate identity one assumes only while engaging in armed attack. Rather, we feel it’s a matter of merging each person’s private and public life in the context of total liberation. We aren’t anarchists only when we throw a Molotov at a riot police van, carry out expropriations, or plant an explosive device. We’re also anarchists when we talk to our friends, take care of our comrades, have fun, and fall in love.

We aren’t enlisted soldiers whose duty is revolution. We are guerrillas of pleasure who view the connection between rebellion and life as a prerequisite for taking action. We don’t believe in any “correct line” to follow. During the past two years, for example, new urban guerrilla groups frequently posed the issue of robberies and expropriations from the banking machinery as yet another attack on the system. Their communiqués and claims of responsibility are powerful propaganda for the rejection of work via holdups and robberies directed at the belly of the capitalist beast — the banks — with the goal being individual liberation from the eight-hour blackmail of wage-slavery on the one hand, and collective appropriation of and direct access to money for infrastructural needs and revolutionary projects on the other.

We are exiting the scene of urban guerrilla warfare’s past ethical fixations, which rarely took a public position on the issue of revolutionary bank robbery. We feel that there is now plenty of new urban guerrilla discourse and practice that opposes — in a clearly attacking way — the bosses’ work ethic as well as the predatory banking machinery, proposing armed expropriation as a liberatory act, and obviously not as a way to get rich.

Nevertheless, we don’t consider the expropriation of banks to be a prerequisite for someone’s participation in the new guerrilla war. There is one revolution, but there are thousands of ways in which one can take revolutionary action. Other comrades might choose to carry out collective expropriations from the temples of consumerism (supermarkets, shopping malls) in order to individually recover what’s been “stolen” and use those things to meet each person’s material needs, thereby avoiding having to say “good morning” to a boss or take orders from some superior. Still others might participate in grassroots unions, keeping their conscience honed — like a sharp knife — for the war that finally abolishes every form of work that enriches the bosses while impoverishing our dignity.

We feel the same way about voluntarily “disappearing” to go underground. The fetishization of illegalism doesn’t inspire us. We want everyone to act in accordance with their needs and desires. Each choice naturally has its own qualities and virtues as well as its disadvantages. It’s true that when a group voluntarily chooses to go underground (“disappearance” from the environment of family and friends, false papers, etc.), that certainly shields them from the eyes of the enemy. But at the same time, their social connection to the wider radical milieu is cut, and to a certain point they lose a sense of interaction. Of course, the same doesn’t apply when there are objective reasons for going underground (arrest warrants, a price on one’s head), in which case clandestinity is the attacking refuge of those caught in the crosshairs of the law. This creates a parallel need for the existence of support infrastructure, both among guerrilla groups themselves as well as within the wider antiauthoritarian milieu, that will “cover” the tracks of wanted comrades. Prerequisites would be a certain complicity and discretion, which concepts are frequently seen as “outdated” but in our opinion should once again be launched piercingly into battle. If comrades from a guerrilla group engage in regular above-ground interaction — participating in movement meetings and processes, taking part in debates, and creating projects with others that address shared concerns — then the hermetic nature of the guerrilla group should clearly be protected from open ears and big mouths. Therefore, it’s general attitude also must be one of discretion in order to circumvent the deafening exaggerations that can turn it into a “magnet” for bastards from antiterrorist squads and the police. Taking a page from our own self-critique, we must mention the fact that many of us behaved completely opposite to the above, which — along with the viciousness of certain conduct originating within the anarchist milieu — “guided” a number of police operations right to us. In any case, self-critique lays down solid ground from which to develop oneself and offer explanations, but the current text isn’t appropriate for that. We’ll return to it in the future.

5. The First Phase of the Conspiracy and the Proposal for the “New Conspiracy”

The guerrilla has finally escaped the pages of books dealing with decades past and taken to the streets with ferocity. Because the urban guerrilla doesn’t offer utopian freedom. She allows access to immediate freedom. Accordingly, each person begins to define herself and liberate herself from society’s passivity.

There is now noise everywhere — the marvelous noise of widespread destruction — as well as the requisite revolutionary discourse to follow bombings against targets that serve domination. A determined armada of anarchist groups is setting fire to tranquility in the middle of the night, groups with names that reflect the “menu” they offer the system (in Athens: Deviant Behavior for the Spread of Revolutionary Terrorism, Warriors from the Abyss/Terrorist Complicity, Revolutionary Conscience Combatants, Lambros Fountas Guerrilla Formation; in Thessaloniki: Chaos Warriors, Attacking Solidarity Cell, Arson Attack Cell, Schemers for Nighttime Disorder, Fire to the Borders Cell, Combative Conscience Cell, Revolutionary Solidarity Cell, etc.). Many of these groups are also experimenting with a new international liberatory project as accomplices in the alliance known as the International Revolutionary Front/Informal Anarchist Federation.

Those of us who have taken responsibility as members of the Fire Cells Conspiracy are not intimidated by the dozens of years in prison the courts have in store for us. To begin with, we are creating an active collective inside prison.

We know that, for us, the opening phase of the struggle has been completed. However, we also know that nothing is over. The Conspiracy will not remain disarmed. It will continue to be a valid commitment in prison, as well as an open proposal to the antagonistic sector of the metropolis.

The Fire Cells Conspiracy proved itself as a network of cells, just like its name suggests. Right now, we’re not attempting to go over its operational record. We simply want to clarify its political perspective.

We feel that committing to a new Conspiracy most closely approaches the essence of the word, so we are opening up that possibility by making a proposal for a new Conspiracy comprising a diffuse, invisible network of cells that have no reason to meet in person, yet through their actions and discourse recognize one another as comrades in the same political crime: the subversion of Law and Order. This Conspiracy would consist of individuals and cells that take action, whether autonomous or coordinated (through call-outs and communiqués), without needing to agree on every single position and specific reference point (e.g., nihilism, individualism). Instead, they would connect on the basis of mutual aid focused on three key points.

The first point we are proposing in this informal debate is agreement on the choice of direct action using any means capable of damaging enemy infrastructure. Without any hierarchization of methods of violence, comrades can choose from rocks to Kalashnikovs. However, direct action on its own is just another entry on the police blotter, so it should be accompanied by a corresponding communiqué from the given cell or individual claiming responsibility and explaining the reasons behind the attack, thus spreading revolutionary discourse. The pen and the pistol are made from the same metal. Here, let’s note that the Conspiracy of the period that is now over never dismissed any incendiary method in its arsenal. It would be disingenuous of us if some young comrade thought that using the name of a new “Conspiracy” was conditioned by the use of supposedly superior methods (e.g., explosives). The new urban guerrilla warfare depends much less on operational methods than it does on our decision to attack power.

The second key point of agreement is to wage war against the state while simultaneously engaging in a pointed critique of society. Since we are revolutionary anarchists, we don’t just talk about the misfortune caused by power and the ruling oligarchy. We also exercise a more comprehensive critique of the way in which the oppressed accept and propagate the promises of happiness and consumerism offered by their bosses.

The fact that we engage in struggle against the state doesn’t mean we blind ourselves to the diffuse complex of power that administers contemporary interpersonal relationships. Antiauthoritarian discourse frequently alters and generalizes a concept like the state, relieving the rest of the people who constitute society of their responsibility. In doing so, it creates a sterilized viewpoint that treats entire social sectors as revolutionary subjects, whether called proletariat or oppressed, without revealing the individual responsibility each one of us assumes in the enslavement of our lives.

The state is not a fortress. You won’t find any door that leads you to some kind of machine or engine that can be turned off by throwing a switch. The state is not a monster you can kill with a stake through the heart. It’s something quite different. We could compare it to a system: a network comprising thousands of machines and switches. This network doesn’t impose itself on society from above. It spreads throughout society from within. It even extends to the sphere of private life, reaching into and touching our emotions at a cellular level. It molds conscience and is molded by it. It connects and unites society, which in turn nourishes and sanctifies it in a continuous exchange of values and standards. In this game, there are no spectators. Each one of us plays an active role.

— Costas Pappas, No Going Back

The enemy can be found in every mouth that speaks the language of domination. It is not exclusive to one or another race or social class. It doesn’t just consist of rulers and the whole potbellied suit-and-tie dictatorship. It is also the proletarian who aspires to be a boss, the oppressed whose mouth spits nationalist poison, the immigrant who glorifies life in western civilization but behaves like a little dictator among his own people, the prisoner who rats out others to the guards, every mentality that welcomes power, and every conscience that tolerates it.

We don’t believe in an ideology of victimization in which the state takes all the blame. The great empires weren’t just built on oppression. They were also built on the consent of the applauding masses in the timeless Roman arenas of every dictator. To us, the revolutionary subject is each one who liberates herself from the obligations of the present, questions the dominant order of things, and takes part in the criminal quest for freedom.

As the first phase of the Conspiracy, we have no interest in representing anyone, and we don’t take action in the name of any class or as defenders of “oppressed society.” The subject is us, because each rebel is a revolutionary subject in a revolution that always speaks in the first person to ultimately build a genuine collective “we.”

The third key point of agreement in our proposal regarding the formation of a new Conspiracy is international revolutionary solidarity. In truth, our desire to apply all of ourselves to creating moments of attack on the world order may cost some of us our lives, with many of us winding up in prison. “We” doesn’t refer to the Conspiracy or any other organization. It refers to every insurgent, whether they are part of a guerrilla group or taking action individually on their path to freedom. As the first phase of the Conspiracy, our desire and our proposal to every new cell is that the full force of revolutionary solidarity be expressed — a solidarity that cries out through texts, armed actions, attacks, and sabotage to reach the ears of persecuted and imprisoned comrades, no matter how far away they may be.

The solidarity we’re talking about doesn’t require those showing solidarity to express absolute political identification with the accused. It is simply a shared acknowledgment that we are on the same side of the barricades and that we recognize one another in the struggle, like another knife stuck in power’s gut. We therefore also propose support for the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, so that it can function — as demonstrated by the Italian FAI comrades — as an engine of propulsion.

From this point on, any comrade who agrees (obviously without having to identify herself) with these three key points of the informal agreement we are proposing can — if she wants — use the name Fire Cells Conspiracy in connection with the autonomous cell she is part of. Just like the Dutch comrades who, without us knowing one another personally but within the framework of consistency between discourse and practice, attacked the infrastructure of domination (arson and cyber attacks against Rabobank) and claimed responsibility as the Fire Cells Conspiracy (Dutch Cell).

We feel that a network of such cells, devoid of centralized structure, will be capable of far exceeding the limits of individual plans while exploring the real possibilities of revolutionary coordination among autonomous minority structures. These structures — without knowing one another personally — will in turn be able to organize arson and bombing campaigns throughout Greece, but also on an international level, communicating through their claims of responsibility.

Since we live in suspicious times, we should clarify something. Actions claimed using the Fire Cells Conspiracy name that aren’t consistent with any of the points we’ve laid out and don’t take the necessary precautions to prevent “damage” to anything other than the target of the sabotage will definitely arouse our suspicion, given the likelihood that they will have been hatched by the state.

Returning to our proposal, “anonymity” with regard to personal contact will reinforce the closed nature of the autonomous cells, making it more difficult for the police to “compromise” them. Even the arrest of one entire cell that forms part of the new Conspiracy wouldn’t lead the persecuting authorities to the other cells, thereby avoiding the well-known domino effects that took place in our time.

In the past, the fact that that we first-phase comrades may not have been involved in certain incidents never stopped us from publicly expressing our support or our critique, and the same applies to the present if new comrades choose to use the organization’s name. Without needing to know one another, through the communiqués that accompany attacks we can begin an open debate on reflections and problems that, even if viewed through different lenses, are certainly focused on the same direction: revolution.

Consequently, we first-phase comrades are now assuming responsibility for the discourse we generate inside prison by signing as the Fire Cells Conspiracy, followed by our names.

The new “Conspiracy” will maintain and safeguard its customary independence, writing its own history of struggle. This significant continuation will surely connect the dots on the map of rebellion, sweeping them toward the final destination of revolution.

6. The Epilogue Has Yet to Be Written

Through our actions, we are propagating a revolution that touches us directly, while also contributing to the destruction of this bourgeois society. The goal is not just to tear down the idols of power, but to completely overturn current ideas about material pleasure and the hopes behind it.

We know our quest connects us to many other people around the world, and via this pamphlet we want to send them our warmest regards: the Fire Cells Conspiracy in the Netherlands; the FAI in Italy; the Práxedis G. Guerrero Autonomous Cells for Immediate Revolution and the ELF/ALF in Mexico; the ELF in Russia; the anarchists in Bristol, Argentina, and Turkey; the Autonome Gruppen in Germany; the September 8 Vengeance Commando in Chile; the comrades in Switzerland, Poland, Spain, and London; and everyone we’ve left out, wherever the rejection of this world is in bloom.

This text has no epilogue, because praxis will always continue to nourish and transform itself. We’re just making a quick stop, concluding with a few words someone once said:

It’s an astonishing moment when the attack on the world order is set in motion. Even at the very beginning — which was almost imperceptible — we already knew that very soon, no matter what happened, nothing would be the same as before. It’s a charge that starts slowly, quickens its pace, passes the point of no return, and irrevocably detonates what once seemed impregnable — so solid and protected, yet nevertheless destined to fall, demolished by strife and disorder... On this path of ours, many were killed or arrested, and some are still in enemy hands. Others strayed from the battle or were wounded, never to appear again. Still others lacked courage and retreated. But I must say that our group never wavered, even when it had to face the very heart of destruction.

— Fire Cells Conspiracy: Gerasimos Tsakalos, Olga Economidou, Haris Hatzimichelakis, Christos Tsakalos, Giorgos Nikolopoulos, Michalis Nikolopoulos, Damiano Bolano, Panayiotis Argyrou, Giorgos Polydoras

[indomitablekushite]

Progression and Regression in Reconstruction History

Many of us Black Studies who are reconstructing history (the history of the United States) think that we are entering a new era in American history. We may think that the things we are witnessing today, i.e., the election of Blacks to political office and their appointments to various positions, their accomplishments in various corporations and so forth, are something new in American history. Yet the study of reconstruction history should quickly convince us that we are currently undergoing deja vu.

Many of us view history as a continuing progression upward and onward. We have bought the American concept of progress: the idea that things must over time necessarily get better. There is no law in the universe that tells us our future survival is assured: that we will continue to exist now and into the future. There have been races and ethnic groups who have been virtually wiped out on this planet. There is no guarantee that our own group will not be wiped out as well. the idea that we must necessarily arrive at a point greater than that reached by our ancestors could possibly be an illusion. The idea that somehow according to some great universal principle we are going to be in a better condition than our ancestors is an recognizing that progressions and regression occur; that integration and disintegration occur in history.

History is not a fairy tale wherein certain things are accomplished and people live happily ever after. Many of us think the accomplishment we have made up to this point means that we are only going to expand them in the future. We had better think about that again. I will point out today why we must not be so optimistic as to be foolish.

Let us go back for a moment to an article written in Ebony magazine, October 1982, wherein Lerone Bennett wrote (I think) his conclusion to his book Black Power U. S. A. When I finished reading that book, I felt that that last chapter was missing. It went on to laud Black Power during the Reconstruction era and so forth and yet, somehow, its logical conclusions weren't arrived at. The lessons that the book brought to mind were not expressed openly and completely. Consequently, I think some people would have been left with the wrong impression. But lo and behold he did write the final chapter, not within the book itself but in Ebony magazine under the front cover heading heading"The Second Reconstruction: Is History Repeating Itself?"

He titled the article, "The Second Time Around. Will History Repeat Itself and Rob Black og Gains of 1960s?" So he's dealing with the issue again. We gained it [freedom] once and we lost it. Is there any law in the universe that says that we will not lose it again? He introduced the topic:

OVER. It was, at long last over and done with. How could anyone doubt it? How could anyone fail to see that the race problem has been solved forever? One man who had no doubt said, "All distinctions founded upon race or color have been forever abolished in the United States." Another who saw things this way said the category of race has been abolished by law and that "there [were] no more colored people in this country." Thus spoke the dreamers and the prophets--and victims---in the first Reconstruction of 1860s and the 1870s.

I don't think I have to elaborate on this kind of attitude. We run into too many youngsters today who say, "Oh, that was in slavery time. Oh those were things we talked in the 1960s and 70s; we're in a new day now." We're not in a new day ladies and gentlemen. The same words that we are saying today are the same words that people were saying over 100 years ago. Why are we in a new day saying the same thing that someone said 100 years ago? Bennett goes on to say:

And it is worth emphasizing here, at the very beginning, that these flights into fantasy were based on the same "hard" facts that grip the imagination of Blacks in the second Reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s. There was, for example, a Black man in the U.S. Senate in 1870s and there was a Black governor in louisiana. In the 1860s and the 1870s--as in the 1960s and 1970s--there were Black sheriffs and mayors in the South and there was open speculation about a Black vice presidential candidate. [So the Jesse Jackson run is not new in Black American history]. There was moreover,a network of civil rights laws that seemed to settle the issue beyond all possibility of dispute or recall..

There are so many of us who believe that fair housing laws, anti-discrimination laws, civil rights laws, voting laws and so forth, guarantee our freedom. that is a illusion. What a fight into fantasy! Laws are no stronger than their enforcers. The same people who pass those laws are the same people who are responsible for enforcing them. If the people who enforce the laws no longer decide to do so, the laws are of no value and have no power. Ultimately, then fairness rests not in laws but in the activities of people and in the attitude and consciousness of people. Therefore, if the people who are responsible for enforcing those laws change their attitudes then the treatment of those people whose freedom is protected by those so-called laws is changed as well.

We cannot put our faith in White man's law and laws enforced by whites. I have warned and it bears repeating that if there comes a day when the society has to make a choice between feeding White children and feeding Black children, no amount of civil rights laws or any other laws on the books will prevent those people from feeding their children first. It is a silly faith we have in laws. For Black people in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to still rest their freedom on the basis of laws when history itself shows us that this cannot be done, we must question our sanity and what we have learned from the study of our history.

"Back there, 100 years ago there was a federal law protecting voting rights in the South--- Does this all sound vaguely familiar?---- and there was a national public accommodations act."

"So the public accommodations law didn't begin with the freedom rides in the 1960s. We had those rights in the 1860s and 1870s as well.."

Such, in broad outline, was the racial situation 100 years ago--in the 1860s and 1870s--when racism was "forever abolished" in America for the first time.... It was a short "forever."

I'll just read other selected excerpts from Bennett's article.

"As almost every schoolboy knows, the first Reconstruction ended in a major historical catastrophe that wiped out the gains of the 1860s. As a consequence, it required 100 years and oceans of blood for Black people to climb back up to the political plateau they had occupied in 1860-70."

So, as I stated earlier, history contains both progress and regress. However, regressing at this point in history will not be a situation where we will be able to fight the battle all over again. Regressing at this point in history essentially spells annihilation for Afrikans, not only in America but for Afrikans the world over.

"For as I said in Black Power U.S.A., and as Dubois said before me in Black Reconstruction, "Reconstruction in all of its various facets was the supreme lesson for America, the right reading of which might still mark a turning point in our history."

The election of Black mayors and governors and our getting jobs in White corporations can in no way ensure the survival of Black people. We cannot make the progress of Black people synonymous with our qualifying for degrees and we've had this game played upon us before. Lerone Bennett mentions the founding of,

"..a prototypical War on Poverty [from the 1860s-1879s] (the Freedman's Bureau) and putting on the books civil rights laws which were in some instances stronger than civil laws passed in the 1969s and 1979s. In the wake of these events, there were many gains which surpassed, in many instances, the political gains Blacks made in the 1960s and 1970s. ********************************************* At one time, in fact, Black legislators were in the majority in the South Carolina legislature. In the same period, as in the comparable period in the 1960s and 1979s, poor Whites received social and economic benefits rich Whites had denied them."

Once we got in we were even good to poor White-folks. We set up school systems and a whole lot of other things. I'll conclude this portion by reading this:

"Long discussions about the morals and educational equivocations of Blacks obscure the main point--power or the lack of power. The worst thing that can be said about some leaders of the reconstruction period is that they did not seem to understand that the only issue was power."

We don't talk about that issue very much today either; it seems to frighten many of us.

"One final point is relevant to an understanding of the power realities of the social movements of both the first and second Reconstructions. In both cases, social and political leaders failed to provide the economic ballots that made political ballots viable. no one understands this better than the Black masses of the 1860s who said in marches and demonstrations that their freedom was not secure without a firm economic foundation."

Therefore, think again when we celebrate Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, king, and others. We should begin to look at the central issues. If our study of Black history is merely an exercise in feeling good about ourselves, then we will die feeling good. We must look at the lessons tat history teaches us. We must understand the tremendous value of the study of history for the re-gaining of power. If our education is not about gaining real power, we are being miseducated and misled and we will die "educated" and misled.

The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness..

~Dr. Amos N Wilson Pg 8-13