#not because she's oppressing him (lmao) but because people don't work that way

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[peariote]

HI AGAIN!!!

another request if you don't mind:p specifically mari again oops I love her lmao

precrash? or maybe no crash idk. they've been dating for about a year now (maybe Danny happened long before them lmao).

r is like complete opposite of mari in like every way. she's shy and stuff (and shorter if u ever add details like that idk but its good for cuddles and hugs because r likes that crap :p). the team doesn't know about them because r didn't want to tell anyone (she's not on the team and she doesnt know them that well). so mari didn't tell them but after a while she does brag about being in a relationship and they just keep calling bs.

eventually they see them together (r doesn't care about telling them anymore but mari wanted to keep messing with them)

ok that's all I got

THANK YOU AGAIN!!!!!!!! the small (but slowly and ever growing) mari fandom thanks you😞🙏

oh yes more mari x reader !! thank you for requesting <3

"You guys would love my girlfriend." The whole team groans, lockers slamming and conversations puttering out at Mari's familiar echoing.

"Mari. Stop telling people you have a girlfriend." Shauna's most fed up with it; she's bent over, head in hands, like someone died. Her dramatic groans make snickers erupt, Lottie ruffling Shauna's dark, messily-ponytailed hair as she slides past towards the door. "Yeah, Mari. We know you're salty about Danny, but Jesus Christ, it's been a year." The tall girl snickers, grin crooked as she slips out of the locker room towards the field. Mari scoffs, eyes almost rolling white in her annoyance. It's not the first time Danny's been brought up—it's basically their go-to. Losing an argument against her? She's wholly prepared for Danny's name to drop. She gets in a particularly good barb? Your ex-boyfriend broke up with you for his own cousin. It's enough to set her teeth on edge—especially when that dweeb doesn't even occupy an inch of her brain space anymore. Him and his incestual tendencies can give his kids genetic diseases for all she cares. She's got you. Sweet, perfect you.

How she so wishes she could shoot back with your name or shove the sweet polaroid she keeps you the two of you in their faces. But instead she just groans a what-ever, laces up her cleats tight and plays a little too hard. (So what if she barreled over a freshman? They need to get tough.)

She’s found that the faster she moves, passes, destroys the other team, the faster she can get back to you. Her rapid improvement is putting her in contention for a varsity spot, she’s heard, but all that work comes from a desire to see you. The harder she practices, the less time she has to think about how much longer there is, the faster practice goes. She’s got it down to a science.

Her desperation to see you isn’t truly unfounded. She barely sees you at all during the day, just for English—where she can barely even cough without the teacher writing her up—and lunch—loud, oppressive lunch that always makes you hole up like a turtle. A cute turtle, but still a turtle. It’s hard to get conversation when all her friends crowd, so she settles for half-an-hour of hand-holding and daydreaming about after practice.

So as soon as practice ends she’s out. Her excuse, the one she started long before you started dating, is that her parents are super strict. No one would expect the stern-faced Mr. Ibarra to be an absolute teddy bear—especially for his daughter—so it works out. She doesn’t even bother to shower, just hops in her car and peels off towards your house.

She always, always comes through your window. Even though she has a key to your front door she’s insistent on climbing up the tree like some kind of Romeo. You worry about her falling and spraining an ankle, but leave the window unlocked regardless.

She pushes open the glass, crawls through. Flops on you, all sweaty and gross and dirty from the field, right onto your clean sheets.

“Gross, Mar.” You scoff, half-asleep and barely conscious at her routine arrival. It makes her pout, hard.

“You’re not even happy that I’m here? You’re terrible.” She pokes your cheek until you peek open an eye, and then tips her head.

You groan and shift as she wants you to, letting her sweaty ass bundle you to her chest. You curl easily into her, nose nuzzling at her damp collar.

“Asshole.” You murmur.

“Princess.” She retorts.

Rolling your eyes, you go quiet. You’re not sure how to breach the subject—the discussion about going public. Mari’s never expressed the desire, but she’s never kept you much of a secret anyway, even with your pleas to keep it under wraps.

You sigh, and then speak.

“Mar.”

“Princess.” She scoffs, half-amused.

“Be serious!” Laughing now, you hit her on the shoulder, bringing a faux wince and another pout. “I… well. I think it would be good if we went a bit more public.”

Mari goes silent, before a wide grin spreads. It’s spells trouble—big trouble—for you, and anyone else she intends to direct it at.

"Can we fuck with them, at least?"

So you help her do just that. You press lipstick-coated kisses (whether or not you wear it) just low enough so that when she changes into her jersey they'll be visible—bright red and prettily defined. She lets you (begs you) to press hickeys there as well, the skin of her collarbone molted purple and green.

Everyone starts asking who the fuck she got to agree to do that, and all she responds, smug grin splitting her face, is "oh, just my girlfriend,” met with many eye rolls.

At this point you’re getting restless—you’d already waited so long to build up the courage to ask her, and now she’s dragging it out because she wants her friends to suffer.

So, in a show of reckless bravery (though your hands still shake), you kiss her in the lunchroom. She’s unaware of you coming up behind her, even less aware of how her teammates’ gazes stray towards you.

The entire table goes silent as you shut her up yourself, tilting her head back to seal a kiss over the thin seam of her mouth. She smiles, all teeth, as she pulls back.

“Hey, princess.” She murmurs, soft as she scoots so you can sit next to her.

The entire table erupts.

[glitter-stained]

Please do tell us about your literal head canon. I’m so interested. I’ve seen your post on what Outlaws should be, but please let us dive further!

So for a moment there I thought you were talking about that joke I once made about giving the canon head and was very confused lmao.

That being said, wrt the canon that exists in my head (aka complete rewrite of Jason's Red Hood run but I'm head of dc editorial): with pleasure! This should also help understand the context of the fic I'm writing rn!

Glitter's complete Jason Todd Head canon (the canon that is in my head)

Batman and Robin 2025, Batgirl and Robin, Nightwing Annual

> First there's the Extended Robin Run: this one I won't spoil because I'm actively working on writing it and it's not necessary to understand the continuity: it's a bunch of jaybin stories intended to fit into Jason's post-crisis robin run and develop it, give it cohesion while also exploring themes such as class consciousness, trauma, mental illness etc. It's not related to the rest of the continuity in so that it's meant to be understood as an expansion of canon rather than a replacement of it, but I do like to think there's a logical continuity between this one and the stories/themes/idea in the Red Hood rewrite so I think it's worth mentioning.

Now onto the meat of it. I do wanna say first thing first, I don't like the ambiguity around Jason's age in the og Batman Annual/Lost Days storyline and the way it seems to serve some psychoanalytical/psychophobic plots, and the whole point of the rewrite is a big fuck you to DC's bias and attempts at manipulating our empathy. Ergo: Jason crawls out of his grave three years later than he does in canon and is sixteen at the time he comes back to Gotham.

Batman: Antigonish

The UTH. Often from Bruce's perspective, lots of Edgar Allan Poe references. Also lots of disguise fuckery. Because Jason looks and is so young, and mostly because I like it, we're leaning fully into the horror genre. Jason, crucially, is not a crime lord in this one.

The main plot points:

> Jason, in disguise, visits Judy Koslovksy in prison (she had actually been convicted after the canon events of The Dumpster Slasher) and tells her to get in contact with her lawyer. Jason then steals evidence, leading to Judy winning her appeal and getting out.

> Jason begins a campaign to demonstrate that Bruce's campaign of ruling through fear cannot work if he never kills anyone ever. To do so, he targets several people who he believes are 1) key players into systems of oppression/mass violence and/or 2) criminals who he thinks are never gonna change their ways and deserve to die for the horror of their crime. Amongst these targets are (amongst others) Black Mask, an extremely corrupt and wealthy politician, and the cop who sexually abused Jason as a child (this one is implied rather than developed because we'll address it properly in its own time, which we get to do because I'm the head of dc editorial). To start his campaign of terror, Jason adopts the identity of the Red Death and sends several unnerving threats to his targets urging them to quit their activities (leaving bloody handprints on their doors, burning stuff down etc). Jason goes after his victims covering himself completely in blood and gore from the slaughterhouse he keeps breaking into, and makes a ghastly apparition. Jason's game doesn't scare the targets (at least not at first not before the first victim) so he goes after them to kill them. He also sends messages/hints/general psychological fuckery to Bruce about his death, actively haunting him.

> Jason's murder always have a veneer of legitimate self-defense, always make it seem like hey the bad guy did it to himself he could have just not tried to attack Jason with a knife Jason just accidentally diverted that knife in their throat, etc. There's a criticism of the pointlessness and hypocrisy of Bruce's line in Jason's eyes, with lots of references to Starlin's Bruce's deadliest moments (ie locking someone in a room in the subway to die).

> Because this is right after Steph's death and "Who killed Stephanie Brown", Jason is haunted by a hallucination of Stephbin who follows him as an incarnation of his rage and guilt. She is in the robin suit and despite Jason having seen pictures of her he can never recall her face, her image looks like someone has smudged black sharpie all over her face.

> Black Mask, having seen what Jason did to his other targets, eventually flees Gotham after Jason cuts him off from his support and sends a rocket into his building, almost exploding him. From Bruce's perspective, this is evidence that fear>death does in fact win, a reasoning we're meant to find flawed (// Bruce's reasoning about Felipe in Diplomat's Son).

> Jason may be a killer, but he's far from cold-blooded about it (yet). After he goes after his last target and ends up fighting on a balcony in front of roadwork, the villain tries to push Jason into the roadwork down the street; Jason defends himself but ends up accidentally pushing the man and watches him die a painful, horrifying death in some kind of press, a much more gory and terrible death than originally planned.

> Having retraumatized himself, Jason cries on the balcony, the rain washing the gore off his face, and then picks up a red hood/mask get-up and assumes the identity of the Red Hood to go to Arkham and kill Joker, knowing that Bruce will follow him there.

> The confrontation happens like in canon (oh Bludhaven also explodes) but without explosives because I can't bomb Arkham. Bruce sends the batarang through Jason's neck and he clamps on it, starting to bleed out; but before anybody can do anything, Judy shoots the Joker dead with the phone Bruce discarded, revealing that she'd been tracking Jason to repay a debt and also that she did Gotham and humanity a favour. Bruce hesitates, Judy claims that this time, she won't be condemned for sure, and that Jason is bleeding: if Bruce goes after her, surely he will die. Bruce hesitates but goes after her and arrests her. When he comes back, the Joker's body has been taken by an Arkham guard and burnt, there's a large, large puddle of blood on the floor and Jason is gone.

Nightwing: Ash to Ash

This one I need to flesh out much more but basically, Jason, dissociating, walks to Bludhaven (which just exploded) and finds a dissociating, suicidal Nightwing. Ensues a comedy of horror where both end up convinced Jason is dead and his ghost is haunting Dick, with classics such as Dick telling Jason to go away and stop haunting him, Jason almost jumping off the roof, Dick hauling him up and begging him not to leave him, nobody being okay enough to wonder why Dick was able to haul the incorporeal ghost up the ledge and some kind of weird "you don't die and I don't die/leave" pact with your ghost dead brother who's not actually dead. In the end, Dick is a little more stable and Jason decides he doesn't need him haunting him anymore and leaves; Dick wakes up and calls one of his friends and finds evidence/realizes that Jason was actually alive the whole time and not just a hallucination but it's too late, Jason is gone. Dick is the one to inform the hero community that Jason is back, but is in crisis/need of help. Idk if it's shown here since this is Dick's POV, but Jason is also absolutely still hallucinating Steph.

Green Arrow: Double Red Daisies

Seeing Red rewrite! Again, not extraordinarily fleshed out, but the idea is that I wanna keep the parallels and Mia's story, the fact that this is foremost a Mia story where she views Jason as a dark mirror she's terrified of becoming, and the contrast between Oliver and Bruce's parenting, while also pushing the reader to feel empathy for Jason/highlighting his, arguably pretty valid, point about teenage sidekicks. In this one, the reference to Jason's csa backstory is explicit and not open to interpretation. At the end, having been thoroughly rejected by Mia and her conviction that she'll never be like him, Jason leaves.

Red Hood: The Hourglass

Voluntary time-loop time! A mini where Jason finds a time machine and attempts to solve his death/relationship to Bruce/be saved in time/save his mother (Catherine)/save his mother (Sheila) and restarts the time-loop again and again and again. The point is the heartbreaking realisation that you can't fix trauma, you can never save anyone, it already happened, you're never going to have been saved. However it turns out this isn't a time machine but some kind of dream/stasis machine. In the end, someone (Black Canary) ends up freeing Jason under Barbara's lead; it's revealed she's monitored his comeback but cannot bring herself to approach him.

And at the end, training montage! Jason thinks back on everything and decides he was fucked because his hands shake when he holds a gun since the events of Antigonish, so he practices again and again to become more cold-blooded, convinced this is the only way to survive. We are officially entering Red Hood's most ruthless era.

Red Hood: War Hounds

Jason voluntarily enters an illegal fighting ring (dog fight symbolism be upon ye) lying that he is 15 and portrays himself as super vulnerable, and successfully catches the eye of the child trafficking ring he's been tracking due to its ties with Black Mask (who has continued its activities outside of Gotham after Antigonish, surprise surprise). Jason is then sent to a facility that attempts to train child soldier, where he is the oldest, older than their recruitment age. There, the children are trained for combat and murder, and the staff uses torture to "break them". Jason meets and protects the oldest of the kids, a ten years old red head girl called Sasha. She calls him out on some self-destructive behaviour and he replies he has nothing to live for. A couple of Jason torture sequences later, he sneaks into an office and steals intel of their communication with Black Mask. He sends Black Mask false info while pretending to be the head of the ring, then steals a chess piece from the chessboard. He then rescues the kids, going through the facility in a one-man army and either killing or locking anyone he meets up. He tells the children to run, and then goes back to set the whole facility on fire (yes, with all the people inside it; I did say it was the ruthless era.) When he comes back, Sasha is watching the fire and tells him she wants to be like him. He tells her not to and she tells him he was wrong about having nothing to live for because he fights like a survivor.

Batman: Hour of the Mask

Very chess-themed!Jason's plan for torturing and. killing Black Mask goes awry when it turns out Steph is alive. Between Steph finding out about what happened, Black Mask thirsty for vengeance, a righteous Batman and a furious Selina,

Jason, with Batman hot on his heels, still manages to kidnap Black Mask and is found by Steph first; finding out then and there that she is alive, he pivots to offering to kill him for her or letting her do it if she wants; she hesitates but can't bring herself to do it or let Jason do it. They are interrupted by Selina, who decides actually, she wants to be the one killing him for what he did to her family. To give her time, Jason surrenders himself to Batman, smiling even as he kneels with his head behind his head and is taken to Blackgate, looking very much like the cat that got the canary.

Red Devil #16-17: Sympathy for the Devil

Jason escapes Blackgate by poisoning the food of a whole lot bunch of rapists, child abusers and human traffickers (how he managed to do that selectively is future me's problem). He then comes to help Eddie Bloomberg who is struggling with something, but does so in disguise, under an anonymous identity. The two have intense chemistry, they're both such yearners. Despite Jason's acknowledgement that he is a person from Eddie's past and refusal to confess to who he is, they end up kissing about it (well, Eddie kisses Jason's mask) and then Jason ties a scarf again Eddie's eyes and gives him the mother of all blowjobs. At the end of the story, Eddie finds himself in love with this stranger from his past, and Jason realizes that his childhood crush never went away and finds himself in love with Eddie, and thus decides to leave him because he's decided that's something too precious to ruin and he won't be able to take it when Eddie finds out who he has become and abandons him.

Red Hood: Ash Wednesday

Lost Days rewrite! (Taking a page out of Winick's book and putting this flashback mini right after Jason's most brutal crimes to bring back empathy for the character and remind the reader of how young he is to be doing such things). A whole bunch of horror elements in that one too!

We see over the course of the year a progression of a freshly resurrected Jason from his jaybin era to developing his philosophy in Antigonish. This arc has no psychoanalysis, no Talia character assassination (idfc about Death and the Maidens and you can't make me), issue titles are a bunch of "First" because it does follow a teenage/child development/coming of age structure, ie First Steps, First etc. and the last one: First Kill. We also see Rena for the first time since the Jaybin era! She's back in Gotham for college and trying to uncover Jason's grave by washing all the dirty/abandoned/unreadable tombstones in all the cemeteries in Gotham. She started this work as at fifteen but had to leave because of her dad's work and promised Jason she'd come back someday. The panel of her leaving the cemetery in the evening, hands covered in dirt and exhausted, is of course immediately followed by Jason, an alley after the one she was working on, crawling out of his grave alone that night.

[cursed-candlehop]

I'm back with yet another goddamn writing WIP, lmao.

My darling partner is being a horrible enabler about me writing a bunch of emmrook stuff (especially character studies, both of the horny and hurt/comfort-y persuasion), but I was having some difficulty getting going without any setup (especially since Rooks behave more like OCs than canon characters as far as fics go), so I figured I'd make a series out of it and just start at the beginning.

And because I tend to implode and lose interest if I don't share what I'm working on, here, have what I've got so far I guess! Ain't much, but it's a start.

----------

Rook had been more than just a little apprehensive when Bellara nominated a Nevarran professor as their resident Fade expert. The necromancy, he could deal with — Nevarra had made it work for what might've been millennia, and besides, funeral rites in Thedas weren't nearly as united as the Chantry liked to pretend anyway, what with the Dalish and their trees and the Dwarves with their burials (and whatever the Qunari were doing; admittedly he'd never given it much thought). So, walking skeletons in lieu of cremation? Maybe a little peculiar, but not the weirdest thing he was gonna see this week.

He liked the "professor" part a lot less.

It wasn't that Rook disliked smart people or education or anything like that, but his own time as an apprentice had been more than a little fraught. Maybe it was the ears immediately marking him as an outcast in the Minrathous circle schools, or maybe it was just that he'd always been a little off in a similar way as Bellara seemed to be — except he was clearly a lot less charming about it. Whatever the reason, he'd spent a distressing amount of his adolescense hiding ruler-bruised knuckles from his parents whenever he was home for the holidays, because he couldn't stand the idea of disappointing them with material proof of his disobedience and lack of understanding and disruptive personality. Needless to say, whatever he knew about magic, he'd taught himself — from books who couldn't see his ears or hear him rhythmically run his fingers along the trimmed feather stubbles of his quill pen as he read or tell him off for doodling tiny florals in the margins of his notes while he thought.

So, "Professor Volkarin" certainly didn't inspire confidence. Made his fingers ache, if anything. Bel didn't seem to share his trepidation, happily chattering away the entire way to the Eluvian they'd found connecting the Crossroads to the Grand Necropolis.

"Do you know what your professor is like?" Rook asked during a rare lull in the conversation.

"I mean..." Bellara replied, dragging out the "n", and he suddenly regretted asking at all. "He writes really kind and encouraging letters?" she finally concluded with a shrug. "Much less intimidating than Myrna and Vorgoth, and they turned out pretty alright in person too, right?"

They had been shockingly reasonable, to his surprise. Still intimidating, sure, but so was Morrigan, and he liked her alright too. Still, he wasn't sure about any of this — and going by Bellara's tone of voice, neither was she.

The Necropolis itself turned out to be a stunning amalgamation of centuries of architecture and magic so powerful it must've taken hundreds of mages to set up the original enchantments even before eons of Fade influence had made it all so much weirder than it had started out. Half the time, Rook couldn't even tell if he was above- or underground, or something else entirely. It was also absolutely bitterly cold and seemed to get ever colder as they descended, and there was something so oppressive about the atmosphere that even Bellara started talking less and in careful, hushed tones. This? This did not bode well.

"I hope he won't mind us barging in..." Bel half-whispered as they turned another corner.

"You did tell him we're coming though, right?" Rook asked, and figured he could've saved himself the question. Bel was, without a doubt, the smartest person he knew, but she had this horrifying habit of jumping straight from Point A to Point F with nothing in between. He'd have bet his best bit of pocket lint that, as far as his genius friend was concerned, they were basically already back at the lighthouse after this Professor Volkarin had naturally already agreed to join their little team, because clearly there was no reason he wouldn't be on board with chasing down a bunch of elven gods, cultists, and quite possibly a whole bunch of darkspawn. Andraste's tits, did he ever envy Bel for that cheerful confidence that stuff would simply work out. Especially because thus far, she's been right every time.

"I... told Myrna and Vorgoth we'd be coming?" Bellara asked back.

Who, in turn, probably assumed that she'd cleared the whole thing with the Professor.

"So, he has no idea," Rook sighed.

"Probably not, but... shhhh"

"What..." he began — and then he heard it. A rhythmic clanging, paired with the underlying feeling of magic being channeled, turning the air slightly sharper than it was meant to be. They rounded another corner — and there he was. Standing in front of some kind of augmented skeleton, tall and thin and working spells with a fluid, almost musical grace, his elegant, gold-draped hands drawing Fade-green patterns into the air. The skeleton got up, moving slowly and awkwardly at first before gaining its bearings, hefted a large pickaxe, and stalked past them to clean up what looked like a serious cave-in.

And then the mage turned towards them.

"Visitors!" he exclaimed, his genial, friendly voice sharply at odds with the green, glowing skull where his head should've been.

Kaffas, what had he gotten himself into.

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

More hot takes about People's Opinions Regarding Vander and Silco's Respective Parenting of Powder/Jinx (everyone is wrong but me)

So I've talked a bit about how I've seen people be, in my opinion, unfairly critical of Vander's parenting of Vi and Powder (children he didn't choose to have under a brutally oppressive regime and a completely different cultural setting) so I'm gonna expand on that, but first it's Silco's turn to have me as his unlicensed defense attorney (I'm working on the degree buddy dw)

I see a lot of people villainize Silco for his parenting, which... Besties he's already the villain lmao. Like let me be clear, he was NOT a great dad like objectively, but I think people are assigning malicious intent out of nowhere and, like with Vander, being completely unfair about it.

First off I'm not even gonna address the allegations that he was a groomer/pedophile or that his relationship with Jinx was in any way inappropriate. I too got uncomfy the first time I watched the scene where she first gives him the injections, but it's SUPPOSED to be uncomfy, not to imply that they're FUCKING EACH OTHER (???????) but to show that she is locked in a very childish state of mind, as most teenagers would feel embarrassed to be climbing all over their dad. He does not touch her, interact with her, or speak to her in a way that implies sexual pretense AT ALL at any point in the story, he does not deviate from Regular Dad Interactions in that regard.

Now one thing he does get a lot of shit for that has a bit more credence to it (although I still disagree) is accusations of (non-sexual) grooming her into a weapon. So here's my take: I do not believe that he intended to groom her into a weapon for Zaun. I do, however, believe he intended to raise her to be a soldier for Zaun. And this is because he thought everyone should be a soldier for Zaun! He took extreme pride in the undercity and wanted independence for it and wanted to pass those values to his adopted daughter. Everyone who has children does this, I would hardly call it grooming.

H o w e v e r

The reason I say he wasn't a great parent is that he absolutely projected his own trauma onto his child and effectively tried to imprint the trust issues he got from that trauma onto her. This is entirely fair to criticize, this is NOT a good parent move, however I think it's unfair to assume malicious intent. I truly believe that he thought he was helping or protecting Jinx by doing this. I think he fully believed if she reunited with Vi, Vi would betray her and hurt her like Vander did him and he didn't want her to go through that mental and/or physical anguish. I don't think he did it to keep her under his "control." I mean, she isn't under his control lmao did we watch the same show? She constantly does whatever she wants causing him immense issues, but she's his daughter and he loves her and respects her freedom. I believe his actions were not in the interest of manipulating her, but protecting her, even though they were misguided and did her harm, and I believe the narrative supports this conclusion and assuming he's a monster who just wanted to use her is a complete mischaracterization.

Now the last thing I'll say is about Vander. I've noticed a lot of my fellow Silco enjoyers lamenting the fact that Jinx was so invested in Vander/Warwick and calls him dad, but we don't get to properly see her grieve or miss Silco or call him her dad despite him being much more of a father figure to her. First off, I absolutely agree. With the second part. I'd liked to have seen her lose her mind more over the fact that she killed her family again. I'd liked to have seen her steal Silco's coat in Blisters and Bedrock and put it on and cry and show her sister that, while Silco was a monster, he really did love and mean a great deal to her. I'd like to see Silco discussed as the dad he was to her.

H o w e v e r

I've seen a lot of people saying to this point that she shouldn't care about Vander at all, or at least not much, because he was barely a father figure to her and she'd resent him for what he did to Silco.

Again, did we watch the same show??

Vander raised Powder from roughly the ages of four to ten. These are extremely fundamental years in a child's life. Silco raised her through her adolescence but Vander raised her through her childhood. This means Vander (and also probably Vi a lot of the time) was the one who comforted her when she skinned her knees, and read her bedtime stories, and carried her to bed when she fell asleep at his bar, washed her sheets when she had accidents as are common with (esp traumatized) 4-5 year olds, taught her to read and write, fixed her snacks, and built the foundation for her to feel safe in a world that wanted to destroy her. A person doesn't just forget about that, she would still love him and see him as a parent. With Silco gone and Vi hating her, no fucking wonder she wanted to rescue one last piece of her family!!! And yeah, she knew the backstory with him and Silco, but didn't seem to care very much. The one time she brings it up she's clearly annoyed and borderline mocking Silco about it lmao.

Point is they were both her dads and they both loved her and she loved them even though they weren't perfect thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[theladyofbloodshed]

https://www.tumblr.com/theladyofbloodshed/773948820583333888/of-all-the-things-feyre-did-and-was-never-held?source=share

I think that at some point we just have to accept that not everything can be twisted into making the character that we don't like into a horrible person. And this is just one of those times.

This particular take of yours is very obviously born of your own bias and dislike for Feyre not to mention, astonishingly hypocritical considering you call Jurian seducing an innocent woman who loved him and gave him all the information about his enemy just to then kill her in one of the cruelest ways possible all because she was a Fae, him "sacrificing himself" for his people. Like... Make it make sense. If Jurian can cut his lover into little pieces while slowly torturing her, despite her doing everything he wanted then why can't Feyre kill a wolf that a) she wasn't entirely sure was actually a living creature like humans and fae b) was clearly a threat to her own family and all the humans living in nearby villages considering how entire human populations got reduced into bloody ribbons just weeks ago before her hunt?

Trying to paint Andras into this poor innocent, unsuspecting target of the very evil Feyre just doesn't work because not only is he a completely non-character, with nothing to make the audience feel emotionally invested in him, and who exists to serve as a mere plot device to move the story forward, but he's also a supernatural being whose race has oppressed humans for centuries and is still continuing to do so by crossing into their lands (that violate the treaty they'd signed) and Andras was doing exactly that. He enters human lands willingly, with the sole purpose of terrifying humans enough that one of them kills him just so his high lord can take her away to his lands and then make her solve their problem. A problem that was literally just a result of Fae being so racists that they use the word human as a slur to insult each other. If I were to see Andras as a proper character I would think him (and even Tamlin), horribly selfish for preying on human fear and hatred that was completely understandable and born out of the centuries of oppression humans were subjected to by the Fae.

Feyre has made many bad decisions. Many. Remember when she set the Lady of Autumn on fire during an emotional outburst a meeting where there were meant to be sanctions against any violence, but sweet baby high lady never faced any consequences? Or when she stole from Tarquin after pretending to be his friend and flirting? Or when she locked her sister up in a house?

Jurian (a mortal) killed a fae who was ENSLAVING his people and slaughtering them lmao and he gets a lot of heat for that decision from the characters with all of them believing he was insane, including Mor who once considered him a friend. It is entirely different to the situation with Andras, but also Jurian did suffer for that, for 500 years.

Andras is a tragic character because he was doomed from the start. He willingly went to die for the high lord that he loved to try and break the curse on his people. He isn’t fleshed out properly or touched on again really by Tamlin and Lucien because SJM isn’t a good writer. The untapped potential to have a family waiting for their son to return home was wasted. There could have been a mother in the spring court who had no body to bury because he was skinned who could have crossed paths with Feyre and provided amazing drama and yet nope.

Feyre killed him in cold blood which was what the curse required – but she did know he was a faerie. She acknowledges that his size is too large so suspects he is a faerie.

Andras lets her shoot him in the eye then again with an ash arrow. He doesn’t run. He stands there and lets it happen because he knows she will be the mortal to save them. To me, that is tragic and Feyre never acknowledging his death or feeling remorseful either shows SJM is not a good writer OR Feyre has no empathy. It’s swept under the rug so sweet baby Feyre remains innocent.

Nowhere does it say the faerie killed in cold blood must also be skinned for fur. Me saying that Feyre killing him was bad isn’t me trying to twist a narrative.

Feyre is not remorseful about it at all and if sjm wanted to write a nuanced character then she’d at least have Feyre reflect on Andras or the faeries she killed utm with regret.

I'm sorry but you can't claim the spring court fae are racist and terrorising mortals when Tamlin has lost the bulk of his sentries to deaths at the hands by mortals and the only one who was terrorising a mortal in book one was Rhys to his own damn mate lmao

and at the end of the day

it's not real

i can dislike feyre

[toastess-with-the-mostess]

Let's Rewind! Toast watches Voltron: Defender of The Universe (1984)

Season 1, Episode 25: Short Run of The Centipede Express Season 1, Episode 26: The Invisible Robeast

Episode 25: Short Run of the Centipede Express apparently the gg are still in contact with arus because they're sending status reports of a centipede robeast blowing up asteroids in its path i'd rather not hear from the gg ever again thanks

i know this is post ep 20 now, but coran letting the team go observe that damn robeast who's literally a whole galaxy away is eating me whole, i will never forgive coran

Honestly the one thing dotu did right is showing straight up torture, like yea we know the rulers of doom are evil but seeing people forced into a gladiator ring against a robeast for refusing to work on a secret weapon and having the rest of the slaves watch is fucking despicable

Revolt! The slaves snapped after watching one of them get eaten by a robeast and are demanding freedom, sucks to suck lotor, if you kill them you won't get shit done, but if you listen you ALSO won't get shit done

Apparently planet Mora (the planet the weapon is being build on) helped Arus at some point, Hunk seems to remember it, so it must be real recent that's probably the writers way of justifying hunk and allura wanting to go down to help the people, but I think freeing them from slavery against an oppressive government is a good enough reason LMAO

Surprisingly, Keith Lance and Pidge went planet side through the lion head attack, where green literally disconnects her head and launches away, I thought they were going in green because she seems to be the smallest lion also allura wanted to go with Lance and Pidge, but Keith essentially told her to sit the fuck down because he was going instead and to keep watch with hunk LMAO

Where the fuck did pidge go, is he staying in green's head while Keith and Lance act out their spy kids dreams?

Oh god, they tried to censor some guards drinking on duty by calling it some kind of juice OINVSD It's a flask, it's so obviously a flask, though definitely would've worked on kids since they shouldn't have known what it was

ooh real talk time, this dude is swearing loyalty to lotor because he feels abandoned by Voltron, apparently his people helped arus after one of the attacks on it but when their planet own got taken over, voltron was busy elsewhere I understand where he's coming from, it's hard to ignore bad things when it's happening to you so when you actually need help and nobody comes it's devastating

The plan to destroy the secret weapon, which is a laser that's able to fry voltron, goes wrong because of that guy so keith and lance make a break for it the only reason the guy stopped the plan was because lotor was going to kill him, so i don't think he would've said shit if that didn't happen

Why is pidge still in the body of green lion?? I thought he fucking went with them! Everything is so confusing

Time to take down that laser gun, that dude is in charge of aiming it but after keiths pep talk about trusting voltron and not zarkon he ends up shooting it at the centipede express that's coming in for a landing with zarkon and haggar in it it misses, of course, but the guy ends up taking down a tower anyway

i mean i assumed the centipede express was a robeast but seeing it actually set itself up to be one was cool as fuck

Voltron was formed waaay earlier but the robeast is destroyed and the bad guys escape also keith and that one guy have a really weird and really emotionally charged stare for a bit lol

/episode end

Episode 26: The Invisible Robeast Haggar found out how to turn things invisible,,, great Lotor obvs is going to use that to kidnap Allura, sometimes I think that Zarkon isn't on his ass about being driven by his dick more than his head because taking Allura would still make voltron weak enough to destroy

Ew Nanny Pidge keeps inhaling apples, so now his favorite fruit are apples because I say so

your honor i love them

Lance giving Pidge advice on how/where to shoot so the princess doesn't get hurt is the cutest thing, I want to see more of them just being dofuses together

"i just don't like things i can't see" - Nanny you mean like your fucking attitude, but you can definitely see that so no wonder you don't have a problem with it

Keith saves the day from a falling boulder, I know allura going back for nanny was the ethical thing to do but also LEAVE HER TO DIE YOU DON'T NEED HER EVER ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU WERE GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF HER

The boys tell allura to stay in the castle since the robeast is going after her specifically, for once I agree since for now it's good for her to keep her distance as long as she's still watching Keith and Lance bait it to the desert and watching for it to cast a shadow before all 4 let loose on the thing, smart plan

Animation error? keiths background when he's in his lion is all white and just outlined oh all their backgrounds are like that, maybe to save money

the robeast attacks the castle and lures the boys underwater to blue's launch area, turns out we get confirmation that every lion but blue sucks at being in the water also it's princess time now, she's the only one who can actually do well down there

aaand she's knocked out again, but on the bright side the boys had time to figure out how to beat up the robeast and get her back while it was distracted

Voltron's formed, robeast defeated, everyone's safe, hooray!

/episode end

[gettingbyy]

2/3/2025, 3/2/2025, 3/6/2025

this post is for mouse, but you can read it too, if you want.

i'm kind of glad i won't have much more to write about W in the future. i thought it would weigh on me a little more, emotionally speaking, than it has, but honestly, since deleting him off discord, it's been kind of a relief. after our last call, i found myself just... waiting. waiting for that message he claimed he'd send, startling at every discord notification, hoping one of the ones i had in the morning would finally be him. two full weeks and he never bothered to say anything else, or got so frozen by his own unrealistic expectations of himself that it stopped him from saying anything. either way, net outcome is the same. dude had no business being on the apps, honestly. i hope he heals someday, for his own sake.

anyways, that's not what i planned to talk about, but i did need to get it off my chest apparently lmao

what i actually wanted to talk about was curiosity/wonder as concepts, and how we experience them as adults.

or at least i did, but i kind of don't want to anymore! i think basically what i was going to say is that adults find it a lot harder to experience curiosity and wonder because of a few reasons -

first, when we're kids, we find things wonderful and curious all the time because we've literally never encountered that thing or concept before. it's easy to find because it's everywhere. kind of like when a kid is denied an ice cream cone, and he screams like it's the worst day of his life. for all we know, it very well may be. it applies in the opposite way to wonder - if you've never seen a waterfall before, then of course the first one you see will be incredible, even if it's just a tiny one. the first time a child realizes other people are full and whole individuals just like them is going to be mind-blowing, and it's going to send them down a rabbit-hole of self-actualization because, again, they've never thought about life & others that way before. as we age, it becomes harder and harder to find experiences or ideas that inspire that same easy level of awe in us because we reach a certain point where everything feels commonplace.

second, we're burned out as hell. i probably don't even need to elaborate on this point lol i know you know exactly what i mean. when you're running ragged on fumes and dregs of willpower, it's hard to find the energy or motivation to be fascinated by anything. fascination feels like it requires work now that it isn't happening regularly, now that we have to seek it out, and when you're already exhausted 24/7 just trying to survive, creating those experiences is less than your last priority.

third, i think there's a certain level of embarrassment, or fear of embarrassment, that comes with finding wonder. it's related to what i wrote about in this blog post where our culture has shifted so far to one of ridicule and tearing people down. i know there's always been bullying, and people have always struggled to express themselves fully and truly, but i really do think it's gotten exponentially worse with the advent of internet culture. when someone starts to internalize shame and judgment, you get too embedded in it and too deep into it to surface long enough to feel anything else. i've seen it in myself, and i've been working on it, but i also see it in my mom every day. rarely a conversation goes by that she isn't shaming herself for something, or shaming someone else, or judging them, or judging herself, and frankly, it's exhausting. no wonder she feels so bad about herself when this is her internal monologue. no wonder she treats me the way she does when she thinks shame is the only answer.

all of this to say, given the state of the world and our overall mental health, i think joy and wonder and fascination are rebellious acts that fly directly in the face of the oppressive systems we're chained to. our society in america and any post-capitalistic country is set up specifically to degrade, devalue, and ultimately destroy our senses of self so that our identity becomes the value we add to the capitalist machine. when we can push through that to experience something that flies in the face of our oppression and creates no tangible value beyond what we experience as a self, then something as simple as happiness becomes an act of defiance.

i'm not really sure how to end this other than to say i hope it encourages you to keep trying to find delight in the everyday and to see the small amazements in the mundane. love you bbg <3

[blightbright]

@huldine's tags:

#this is a controversial take but imo that concept for him was just supreme #the more we got into fen'harel lore reveals the farther away it all felt from what i loved in the beginning #which is crazy to say but esp with veilguard i feel that #AND ITS NOT THAT I DONT LOVE FENHAREL VER..... #but when i write him in fic i am ALWAYS going off of that solas with the dedication to resistance and revolution that comes from his own #morality and love of people even those not considered people #i literally sjw-ify solas so bad LMAO sorry everyone but i love it #hes just my sweet little guy at the end of the day....

my own hot take riffing off of this:

I think this is exactly who he is, even in canon DATV (which has unreliable narrator elements), and it's why when I was in the middle of writing my main Solavellan fic (sea of frozen words), I kept reminding readers that there would be a TRUE HAPPY ENDING (which there is) if people were willing to stick with me on a shadow work/underworld journey (metaphorically and literally in-universe), from which we would emerge. I love the full journey (so that's where I differ from OP) but ALSO, I see it as more of a labyrinth or a spiral, where we circle back to where we started and realize the first impression of fervent kindness from someone who's experienced oppression firsthand? that was right all along. he never deceived Lavellan about his most authentic self and values.

my Lavellan had to face, head on, all the apparent brutality and seeming disdain for life, all the legitimate horrors and pain, and all the devastating assumptions that Solas was allowing people to make in part because of his willingness to be hated and seen as a villain if it saved more lives for the most vulnerable. my Lavellan had to process her own trauma, test her own dynamic with Solas to see if his true self was even capable of loving her the way she needed (good news!), and explore her own complexities, because how else could she really be confident in a choice to be with him forever? and I as a writer had to keep peeling layers asking why, why, why, until suddenly it clicked and there, left underneath, was a Solas made up of beautiful resistance and absolute love for objectified people.

I legit legit legit think Solas is in disguise as himself in DA:I. he's that apostate hobo wandering off to help at his surface layer, then it's stripped away and there's all this other scary and uncomfortable and painful stuff underneath, a lot of which is playing to others' expectations or being forced upon him in various ways, and then back down at his core once again, there's that inner self that's truthful to exactly who he showed us he is in DA:I.

I don't think it's possible to SJW-ify Solas too much TBH.

For me personally, when I say I’m a Solavellan I mean the blissful ignorance of love for that apostate hobo that wandered off to help the healer in the Hinterlands. I fell in love with whoever was nothing more than that. The more I learnt about him the more I missed who I thought he was when I was so naive to this type of story telling.

[lemonhemlock]

That being said, I'd like to add that Aegon agreed to send Rhaenyra those generous peace terms after he was crowned + the debacle with Meleys. So he may have liked how the crowd responded to him, but he wasn't so high on power that he refused to do what his mother advised.

That whole Meleys scene should be a monumental beat for all characters facing her! And for King's Landing as a backdrop (and greek chorus, one would hope?) but I doubt they will since they boldfaced stated they did that all for an epic MCU moment which is such a shame.. like that's major??? Guess just another Tuesday in King's Landing huh?

Like I really wonder do the writers understand the major implications for, at least, the main cast of characters? Background characters and settings such as the peasants aside for now. Like I believe you're absolutely right in your reading of Aegon by the end of EP10 as at least cooperative to a certain extent, but are the writers? IDK what it looks like inside a writing room and what it's like having to share a narrative with so many people but IDK Scoobs it's not looking that bright.......

I totally follow prev. Anon's line of thinking and I really hope for something nuanced that won't clock you over the head.

I actually don't think we will stay with Aegon a lot... everyone working on HOTD seem to agree that Alicent and Rhaenyra are the MCs and heart of the show which I have nothing against but by nature of it Aegon is secondary to tertiary character. And I say tertiary because they made a bigger effort to put us in, for example, Aemond's POV and I expect them to keep it up going forward. I see no reason why they wouldn't, tho, If I remember correctly, Condal did say he's very interested in the reign of Aegon II so maybe they're saving Aegon-focus for his Hysterical King Arc. Additionally, Aegon will be down post-RR while Aemond is doing fuck all as Prince Regent and Local Terror of Riverland, then Aegon disappears from the face of the earth and the narrative until Sunfyre hits him up again. OFC this is all speculation on my side and depending on the narrative they decide to shoot for, focus and POV can shift. Yet, once again, I see no reason why they would.

I fully expect to see Fight over Dragonstone focalized thru Baela's POV (tho there's much more wiggle room in visual mediums), which I don't mind; she barely gets anything to do in the war as it is.

Rhaenyra being chosen as a POV for her own death march to Dragonstone is a no-brainer.

His return to KL in F&B is already super gloomy and cursed. Hell, his reign is called The Sad Short Reign LMAO so I expect the tone to be kept as oppressive and gloomy as the coronation, if not worse. Like this man is not gonna have a "facing the white stag" fairytale moment. Maybe a dove will anoint him by shitting on him IDK!

Hope the vibes of this ask aren't too bad; I'm in fact rather cheery since I'll be entertained either way!

That whole Meleys scene should be a monumental beat for all characters facing her!

Agreed! Aegon finally has his confirmation that Mother loves him. He should be obsessed with that, instead of towering over her (IDK??) Isn't that more interesting, at least? Trailing behind her like a puppy? King Chihuahua?

Like I really wonder do the writers understand the major implications for, at least, the main cast of characters? Background characters and settings such as the peasants aside for now. Like I believe you're absolutely right in your reading of Aegon by the end of EP10 as at least cooperative to a certain extent, but are the writers? IDK what it looks like inside a writing room and what it's like having to share a narrative with so many people but IDK Scoobs it's not looking that bright.......

Yeah, I expect there are going to be inconsistencies when you have many different writers, each with their different take on the characters (that's inevitable), but there should be someone in charge to even things out and keep track of them thematically. Maybe that's why we had Alicent bitchy @ Rhaenyra in one episode and then wanting to reconcile in the next, with little context/explanation in between?

If I remember correctly, Condal did say he's very interested in the reign of Aegon II so maybe they're saving Aegon-focus for his Hysterical King Arc.

I hope you're right and I hope it means he'll get something to work with.

Aegon disappears from the face of the earth and the narrative until Sunfyre hits him up again.

They could do a lot with this actually. He has to convince some Dragonstone people to take him in and care for him, defect for Rhaenyra and fight for his cause instead. That's no easy feat and could constitute for some meaty, compelling characterization. I hope they're not going to show him in a coma for 3/5s of the show. 💀

His return to KL in F&B is already super gloomy and cursed. Hell, his reign is called The Sad Short Reign LMAO so I expect the tone to be kept as oppressive and gloomy as the coronation, if not worse. Like this man is not gonna have a "facing the white stag" fairytale moment. Maybe a dove will anoint him by shitting on him IDK!

This is the perfect time to go full-Commodus!!! But there has to be some sort of progression to get there, otherwise what's the point of his arc? If he's just a flat character.

Hope the vibes of this ask aren't too bad; I'm in fact rather cheery since I'll be entertained either way!

No worries, I also aimed to be entertained. I just hope we get the best possible story. 😭

[whenmemorydies]

@hwere thank you for this reblog and for taking us through whats happening in Brazil's agricultural industry. I knew so little about this so appreciate those links you included in your post. It is WILD to me that 1/3 of the wildfires in the country have been started due to land clearing for more agriculture. And that the state (via the police) is killing Indigenous peoples to facilitate land theft for agribusiness...this is less surprising to me, though I don't say this to detract from the horror, just that state terror is predictable in its brutality. And that so much of Brazil's agribusiness is for export and not for feeding Brazil and its people? This is capitalism on steroids. This is so fucked :(

You're absolutely right...the Global South is connected, by a shared history. On this point, I may have gone down a rabbit hole after reading your amazing reblog. I went looking into Brazil's agri-exports and was surprised to find that Brazil is the world's largest exporter of beef?! And then I remembered that whilst researching for this meta, I had read that the British had also expropriated large tracts of land in South America, including in Argentina and Brazil, for running livestock (like they did in Aus and New Zealand).

Further down the rabbit hole: I read about the Vesteys who were one of the richest families in Britain and made their wealth in meat, in particular in beef. They got their start when one of the Vesteys went to Chicago (?!) and set up a canning factory there (what is it with Chicago and beef?). They'd go onto run cattle and export meat globally. In 1911 they acquired land and meat works in Venezuela, Australia and Brazil as well as New Zealand and Argentina. This site claims that by 1925 they were responsible for 25% of meat exported from South America. The name "Vestey" was very familiar to me and then I realised that it was the same Vestey mentioned in one of Australia's most recognised protest songs, "From Little Things, Big Things Grow". That song is about the Wave Hill Walk-Off where Aboriginal workers at the Wave Hill Cattle Station (owned by the Vestey Brothers) staged a strike and walked off their jobs after decades of horrid working conditions. Part of their demands included that the station's land be returned to its Traditional Owners, the Gurindji. The strike would become a catalyst for the Aboriginal Land Rights movement in Australia. (While the original song - linked above - is beautiful, I love Electric Fields' cover below):

All of this is to say, the struggle against colonisation (including neocolonial corporate interests) is a shared one and there are so many transnational examples of resistance we can draw inspiration from.

(Another path I went down on the rabbit hole turned up this nugget: Dame Nellie Melba was a famous Australian opera singer. Her granddaughter married into the Vestey family and became Lady Vestey. She also became Melba's heir. Melba had a dessert named after her: the Peach Melba. The dude who crafted that dessert and named it after her? None other than Georges Escoffier (fine dining-bourgeois-circle jerk indeed lmao).

Side note: Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a touchstone for me during uni and probably more than any other text, influences how I raise a curious child to critically engage with the world around him <3 I LOVE the Freire quote you cited.

I have never heard of Safe but am going to try and watch it because it sounds so good!

Also honestly...given the way season 3 ended with the cameos + Carmy's memories of Daniel Bouloud, Rene Redzepi, Thomas Keller and Andrea Terry all being dreamy and positive (you're right in that they really made it like Chef Fields was the one bad apple in an industry that appears geared towards disfunction and toxicity), I I'm also worried about the show incorporating an uncritical, "fine dining circle jerk" into the next season. I really don't think it would make this the entire outcome of s4 given how obvious it seems from s3 that Carmy's current path is a negative one. Anyway fingers crossed s4 returns The Bear to its roots, like you said! I don't know that I have it in me to keep defending this show if it doesn't do this next year lmao.

You love taking care of people: Fine Dining in the Time of Late Stage Capitalism

CW: this post discusses toxic and abusive workplaces and makes brief mention of institutional child abuse and intergenerational trauma. I might also talk about global systems collapse, for shits and giggles. Also this is another long one. You know the drill. Lets have a cuppa. Also this is my last minute submission to Sydcarmy Week 2024 and the theme of “you love taking care of people”. Enjoy!

I have a confession to make to The Bear fandom:

The food is my least favourite part of this show.

Its not that its not interesting. It definitely is. I'm a home cook and for the most part, I enjoy cooking (when I can do it at my leisure and not like most mothers, while balancing the mental load). I just find all the other aspects of the show much more fascinating.

In fact, I think this show about a bunch of cooks in commercial kitchens is so popular not so much because of its take up of cooking but its unflinching and loving interrogation of grief and trauma, including the kinds that get passed down through families.

The truth is, I've also never been overly excited about the world of "fine dining." I grew up in a large, Tamil family and so our meals were big, shared and not necessarily conducive to the minimalist plating preferred in exclusive, "gourmet" spaces:

Photograph is mine, delicious Jaffna Tamil spread is the handiwork of my great aunt (Kunchi Ammamma or “little maternal grandmother”), arguably the best cook in our sprawling, extended family.

As tumultous as family life could get, I often experienced meals (that, lets be real, were almost always prepared by the women in my family) with my loved ones as a happy experience. I mean we also had our share of blow ups at the kitchen table but what was always consistent was the love and care that went into the food that we were given to eat. It was woven into the rich and complex flavours that made up the curries, varais, and sambals we had on our plates (and that even now, make me salivate just thinking about). It was spread throughout the warm, coconut-y rotis and steaming rice and puttu we ate with our hands and used to mop up all that spicy, flavourful goodness.

And if there's one question I heard more than any other from older family members growing up, it was "ni sappittiya?" ("have you eaten?"). More than "how are you?" and definitely more than "I love you." As with many Global South cultures, for Tamil folks, food is used for nourishment but also as a primary means of conveying deep care. Obviously Tamil people don't have the monopoly on using food to show their affection (or even the monopoly on using food to replace actually saying the words "I love you" lmao). Food has been found to increase interpersonal closeness and can also contribute to emotional regulation. Feeding a child is one of the first means of bonding between parents and children. Food also plays a big role in the course of romantic love: as a basis for first dates and future time spent with a partner, and of course also as an aphrodisiac.

As Cesar Chavez, Mexican-American civil rights activist, labor organiser and co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association (which later became the United Farm Workers union) said,

The people who give you their food, give you their heart.

You love taking care of people

Conveying care and love through food is a theme that comes up repeatedly in The Bear. Recall 1x02 Hands and the phone conversation with Nat and Carmy:

Natalie: Chefs always say a big part of the job is taking care of people, right?

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. No I guess.

Also recall an almost identical bit of dialogue between Carmy and Sydney, under the world's most famous table that had absolutely nothing wrong with it in 2x09 Omelette:

Carmen: You love taking care of people.

Sydney: Yeah I guess.

Here's some further mirroring between Sydney and Carmy about giving people joy through food. Recall again the phone call between Carmy and Nat in 1x02 Hands:

Natalie: When did the breathing problem start?

Carmen: I think maybe sometime in New York. I was throwing up every day before work.

[...] Chef was a piece of shit.

Natalie: Then why'd you stay there?

Carmen: People loved the food. It felt good.

Also recall the conversation between Sydney and Marcus in 1x08 Braciole:

Sydney: I want to cook for people and make them happy, and give them the best bacon on Earth.

Be gentle with each other, so that you can fight stronger together: seasons 1-2 of The Bear

As rough and tumble as The Beef was, the clear throughline in season 1 (when The Beef was in operation) was the importance of the relationships and care between the show's characters. This was also the case in season 2 where the majority of the season was spent in the context of renovations and training prior to the opening of The Bear (in that season's last episode).

In season 1, we had Carmy leading the crew at The Beef by being patient, clearly explaining technique and positively reinforcing his staff's work.

Above left: Carmy walking the BOH crew through making Donna Berzatto's Lemon Chicken Piccata in 1x05 Sheridan. Above right: Carmy encouraging the crew to keep up their current pace in 1x06 Ceres.

We saw him working with Sydney, supportively encouraging the team to go further, to push themselves. We even saw Carmy at ease enough to talk about Mikey and his mother while at work. We had a Carmy showing us how integrated he can be.

Above: Carmy and Tina in 1x05 Sheridan

Heck, we even had a Carmy who wanted to get a compost installed at The Beef for processing food so that it didn't go to waste. Recall this golden bit of dialogue between him and Sweeps in 1x01 System:

Carmen: Eh yo Gary, you set up a compost for me today, Chef?

Sweeps: After I do my thing in the place.

Carmen: That's very clear. Thank you.

We had a Carmy who had time. Recall the below scene in 1x02 Hands before Sydney gives Carmy her draft business plan for The Beef (that she drafted on her own initiative and time to support his family's struggling business. If this man doesn't hurry up and fight for her in s4 istg...):

Sydney: Hey you got time?

Carmen: Always. What's up?

Similarly, we had Carmen in the first episode of season 2 making time to talk to a clearly distraught Richie:

Richie: Yo you ever think about purpose?

Carmen: I love you, but I do not have time for this, alright? *starts to walk up the stairs out of the basement*

Richie: *Nods, looks dejected, sniffs*

Carmen: I have time for this. *comes back down the stairs and sits with Richie*

Most pointedly in season 1 we had the conversation between Sydney and Carmy in 1x03 Brigade which lays the blueprint for their joint vision for the restaurant and which should have acted as a touchstone for both of them in season 3:

Sydney: You know, I think this place could be so different from all the other places we've been at. But in order for that to be true, we need to run things different.

When I said I didn't think that the brigade was a good idea, you didn't listen. And its not that you told me that I had to. [...] But you just didn't really listen and if this is going to work the way that I think we both want it to work [...] I think we should probably try to listen to each other.

Carmen: Yeah. You're right.

Sydney: The reason I'm here and not working somewhere else, or for someone else, is 'cause I think I can stand out here. I can make a difference here. We could share ideas. I could implement things that make this place better. And I don't wanna be wasting my time, working on another line or tweezing herbs on a dish that I don't care about, or running brunch, God forbid.

Carmen: *nods vigorously*

In season 2 while The Beef undergoes its facelift into The Bear, some of the show's most beautiful moments were when characters displayed their faith and trust in one another. Recall 2x01 Beef where Sydney asks Tina to be her sous chef, or 2x02 Pasta where Sydney and Carmy send Tina and Ebra to culinary school (and Tina's unwavering belief in and support for a nervous Ebra once they get there), and 2x03 Sundae and 2x04 Honeydew where we see Carmy and Sydney send Marcus to Copenhagen to stage with Chef Luca and build up his skills as a pâtissier.

So what happened at The Bear?

Season 3 of the show has been the most divisive of the series, with its preceding two seasons being almost unanimously adored by fans and critics alike. There's been a lot of debate on here and elsewhere as to why this is the case. What appears to be a dominant line of reasoning in this regard is the shift in Carmy and his approach to running The Bear as a fine dining institution.

At The Bear, we have Carmy as an Executive Chef who's berating, hostile, and blaming everyone else for his emotional state ("You guys are fucking killing me"). We have a Carmy who has taken "every second counts" to a point so minute that he has given up smoking because of the time away from the kitchen that it will cost him. We have a Carmy who has no patience for his team, almost all of whom have no experience working in fine dining before the opening night of The Bear. We see how out of sync Carmy and Sydney are ("Been off"). We have a Carmy who is reverting to patterns of behaviour that have been modelled for him by two of his abusers: his mother, Donna Berzatto and his previous boss, Chef David Fields, Executive Chef at Empire.

Perhaps second only to Donna and her stand in Claire, Chef David Fields' toxic legacy haunts season 3 of The Bear.

This is nowhere more clear than in the sheer wasting of food and money in season 3 epitomised by Carmy's insistence on changing the The Bear's menu every day (to quote Tina: "Every day, Joffrey Ballet?!") and his repeated throwing out of dishes he deemed "not perfect."

The waste did not go unnoticed by other characters on the show. Recall Natalie telling Carmy off in 3x03 Doors:

Natalie: The menu cost is out of control.

Carmen: Nat, figure it out.

Natalie: Oh. Oh. Figure it out? Wow.

Carmen: Figure it out.

Natalie: Why don't you fucking figure it out?

Carmen: I'm trying to use less shit.

Natalie: Okay, well, whatever you're doing, the R&D [research & development] of that, its fucking us.

Carmen: Well, we're using the best shit.

Natalie: Duh. Duh. Well, duh.

Carmen: Duh? Don't duh. No duh. [lmao this dialogue]

Natalie: Don't buy fucking crazy shit and then use it once, Carm. It's so wasteful. Duh! Duh, duh. Fucking duh, bro.

In episode 3x05 Children, Uncle Jimmy commissions The Computer to come in and run analytics on The Bear in an effort to get its costs under control (LOL at his assessment below, scrawled on the back of the dodgiest looking pie chart I've ever seen):

Computer: This sample is based on the month and a half we've been operating and does not take into account any funds spent previously on build, friends and family budget, other assorted fuckery.

Carmen: I mean, there hasn't been that much fuckery.

Cicero: Oh neph. You specialise in the fucking fuckery, bro.

Uncle Jimmy had plenty to say about Carmy's use of the former's funds (which Jimmy has duly invested in The Bear to support his nephew) including Carmy's decision to spend $11,268.00 on Orwellian butter (aka Dystopian Butter from the Fucking Rare Transylvanian Five-Titted Goat, lmao).

Even Carmy was under no delusions about how wasteful he was being this season. Recall his discussion with Sydney in 3x05 Children:

Sydney: You know what we should be doing?

Carmen: Produce vendor. You don't have to say it.

Sydney: Okay, I didn't say it then. I didn't say anything. Do you want me to say something?

Carmen: That I'm jamming us up 'cause we have a new menu every day and the economics aren't great?

Sydney: Well, I'm an accomplice, so...

Note: the language in this small bit of dialogue struck me as being off. Why does Sydney needs Carmy's permission to say anything? Its like she knows that he knows the constantly changing menu and exorbitant expenses are an issue but doesn't want to say anything until Carmy brings it up first. @yannaryartside has a great break down drawing the analogy between Sydney's "accomplice" confession here with Molly Ringwald's (sorry I dunno what her character's name was) confession about facilitating her partner's substance abuse, during an Al-Anon meeting in 1x03 Brigade.

We have Carmy repeating harmful patterns of behaviour at work that he has picked up from his personal life (for example, from his mother) but also from his professional experience.

The world of fine dining that both Carmy and Sydney came to The Beef from was marked, by their own admission, with "complete and utter psychopaths" who screamed, pushed and yelled at their staff (recall Sydney's disclosure to Carmy at the end of 1x05 Sheridan) or "fucking assholes" (in the case of Chef David Fields), who made their staff "very, probably mentally ill." Sadly, this aspect of The Bear is not fiction. @moodyeucalyptus pointed out in this post that both Carmy and David Fields appear to have elements of their characters based off of real life fine dining wunderkind Chef Charlie Trotter: a Chicago-based chef known to be brilliant but who mistreated his staff so badly that he had two class actions brought against him (one by FOH staff, and another by BOH staff led by James Beard Award winner Beverly Kim).

There are other stories about the grinding nature of the fine dining industry which we'll get into below. We'll also look at a few stories of chefs who are leading a renaissance away from the "toxic, hierarchical shit show" that has historically plagued fine dining and who Joanna Calo and Chris Storer may have front of mind as they take us through Carmy and Sydney's journey together in season 4 (because as tempting as Shapiro's offer is, we know Sydney isn’t leaving Carmy). But first, we need to go further back in time to look at how the fine dining industry itself has created the conditions for a chef like season 3 Carmy to exist in the first place. Lets look at the system, baby (to quote Tina in 1x01).

The Bear's culinary ancestry: Chef David Fields and the Fine Dining Industry

I should say that I did not want to go too far into history with this post. After Carmen, Natalie, and the Berzattos, I was committed to trying to write shorter meta (/snort). But I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the origins of fine dining, and before that, the rise of Europe as the base of "haute cuisine" (which itself is directly tied to its history of colonialism and...Empire *badumbum* @freedelusionshere has made the point that The Bear writers have given Chef David's restaurant the name Empire purposefully and they're not wrong). All of this informs the current state of fine dining today.

Though France is often credited as the place where restaurants began (in the 1700s), its been established that folks were eating in communal restaurant settings all over the world, including in China about 700-600 years earlier. The origins of western fine dining (the tradition that Carmy and Sydney have trained within) however, are synonymous with French cuisine and the efforts of Georges Escoffier (who Carmy name drops in 1x03 Brigade).

The French Brigade

Escoffier was responsible for developing the French Brigade system of organising kitchen staff which is still used today in many restaurants worldwide, including at The Bear. The French Brigade was based on Escoffier's own military experience in the Franco Prussian War and was set up to identify roles in the kitchen and increase efficiency and consistency so that restaurants could scale their work to serve larger numbers of customers.

The thing with anything based on structures found in the military is that its going to replicate hierarchy (a chain of command is central to the running of military operations). In fact, much of 1x03 Brigade is spent with Sydney resisting what she identifies as the imposition of a "toxic hierarchical shitshow".

Mariya Moore-Russell, the first Black woman in the world to get a Michelin star (who also happens to be from Chicago) talks at length here about the benefits of the French Brigade for systematising commercial kitchens but also how easily it can get corrupted if the wrong people are in the kitchen. She says in those circumstances, the Brigade can quickly perpetuate, racism, sexism, perfectionism and "all of the isms." My fav quote from the video? When Russell talks about the French standardisation of cooking adopted by most kitchens in fine dining industry (at 23:39):

They were like okay, how do we take what Grandma does, what Mama does and make it you know efficient and consistent but also just extremely stressful for everybody involved? (lmao)

Note: Moore-Russell has a series of videos on YouTube about her experiences in fine dining which are very illuminating. She's also such an engaging storyteller. For example, watch "My path through the restaurant industry".

Service à la française to service à la russe

In addition to the French Brigade, another development in the history of western fine dining was the shift in styles of food service from service à la française to service à la russe. Service à la française ('service in the French style') involved serving all the dishes for a meal at once, allowing patrons to serve themselves. Think something akin to buffet style. See below for table layout using service in the French style from 1775:

Source: Wikipedia.

To me, service in the French style looks kind of similar to how my Tamil family lays out our meals (as can be seen in the first picture of this meta, minus the pheasant, moonshine and roasted woodcocks...lol). This style of service also looks a whole lot like "family style" dining which can be described as: "when food is brought to the table on large platters or serving dishes rather than being individually plated. Guests then serve themselves from the dishes which are passed around the table." In fact, service in the French style or family style dining is how many cultures serve and eat their food, both in the home and in restaurant settings (whether they use these terms to describe that layout is another matter).

I also seem to recall a couple of soulmates Jeffreys deciding to open a family-style restaurant in 1x08 Braciole (which @bootlegramdomneess has also pointed out in her post here).

In the 19th century, service in the French style became replaced in European restaurants by service à la russe ('service in the Russian style'). This style of service is what Western fine dining and haute cuisine restaurants utilise to this day. It involves bringing courses to the dining table in sequence, one after the other. Courses are portioned and plated before being brought to the diner by service staff.

In the case of Western fine dining, Escoffier shaped haute cuisine ('high cooking') through the use of his French Brigade system and the implementation of service in the Russian style. Haute cuisine has undergone shifts and changes since the 19th century including with the nouvelle cuisine movement in the 1960s which was marked by a focus on fresh produce, paired-back menus and a focus on invention. Haute cuisine of today has been described as a fusion: employing elements of nouvelle cuisine and more elaborate techniques and processes from Escoffier's system.

To my mind, service à la russe involves a lot more people (definitely more wait staff) to have it deployed effectively. When you have more people, you have more room for error (like all those dropped dishes in season 3). Family style service or service à la française allows people to serve themselves. It encourages sharing. Personally, I prefer the latter. Also can we talk about how small the portion sizes are in haute cuisine? lmao. I get it, its art. You need a gigantic plate for a small piece of hamachi because thats the canvas. Some (read: me, lmao) might also say its big ol' waste to wash a plate that size for food that takes up maybe a 1/5 of its surface area. Can we also talk about the concept of "chargers" (which the Computer rightfully rips into Carm and Sydney for in 3x05 Children) - why do you need a table setting that no one's gonna use? I'm sure there's other aspects to haute cuisine that make no fucking sense but honestly this meta is gigantic enough as it is so I'll stop there lol.

Anyway, notably it is service à la russe and food that would be described as haute cuisine that we see at The Bear. Family style is nowhere to be seen in season 3.

Colonialism, Empire and the rise of Western food cultures

A fact that is often left out of discussions about why the French and other European countries developed such globally renowned food cultures as well as their staggering wealth and status as "first world countries" (particularly in the period between the 1600s to the 19th century) was that at around the same time, these nation states were expanding their own empires by colonising other parts of the world with the express purpose of acquiring ingredients (and other resources) that they did not have access to in Europe. A brief and non-exhaustive list of examples below:

Europe's demand for flavour was so great in the 1600s that the Dutch traded Manhattan to the British in order to secure the Indonesian island of Banda Run which, at the time, was the world's only source of nutmeg. When they first arrived in the Banda Islands, the Dutch killed and enslaved much of the Bandanese population, taking control of the island's local nutmeg plantations. This violence would come to be known locally as The Banda Massacres.

It was the hunt for a direct trade route with India for black pepper that Christopher Columbus used to pitch his voyage to the King and Queen of Spain and which ultimately led him to the Americas. Columbus' arrival precipitated the colonisation of the Americas, which resulted in enslavement, disease and outright genocide, decimating First Nations populations throughout North and South America.

The colonisation of the Americas would also lead to the exporting of various foods that have come to be staples in European cooking. For example, the tomato - the key ingredient in many Italian (and Italian American) dishes - orginated in South and Central America and was brought to Europe via Spanish colonists.

The British set up their infamously brutal East India Company (EIC) to control the Indian subcontinent and the trade of various resources including precious metals, opium, textiles (silks and cotton), spices (such as cinnamon, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves, mace) and other food items (like salt, sugar, coffee and tea). The EIC would later be supplanted by the British Raj in Britain's stranglehold on India and after almost 200 years of imperialism and economic fraud, it has been estimated that the British drained India of nearly $45 trillion. I can't even begin to fathom an amount of money that large but the British could, and that theft powered much of the empire during its height.

The influence of Indian ingredients and cuisine spread throughout the British empire, including back to Britain itself. In fact, through colonisation and empire, Indian influences appear in various global cuisines (including other European cuisines as well as in the Caribbean).

Indeed the British's impact on food globally included its colonisation of Australia and New Zealand. These two colonial outposts essentially became gigantic cattle and sheep runs for the British who facilitated the wholesale theft of land - and in the case of Australia, did so without even bothering to enter into treaties with First Nations people - in order to run livestock that was then exported to feed Britain.

In order to satisfy its sweet tooth, France operated huge sugar plantations on the backs of the labour of enslaved Africans, particularly in Haiti (known at the time as Saint-Domingue). In the late 1700s, Haiti was responsible for exporting 40% of all the sugar consumed in Europe. The human cost of this was high and brutally violent. Eventually in 1803, after many armed revolts, enslaved African-descent people kicked the French out of the country after over a hundred years of heinous exploitation (thereby creating the first Black republic in the world). The French were so economically dependent on the colony for its production of coffee and sugar that when Haiti got its independence, France decided to punish the new republic for the loss of future income on Haitian exports, demanding 150 million francs in gold as compensation. The French sent warships to enforce this cruel debt. All in all, Haiti spent approximately $21 billion paying off France for the freedom that its people had already lost their lives and shed their own blood for. The debt (which involved the fledgling republic taking out exorbitant loans and fundraising amongst its citizens) was not paid off until 1947: 122 years after it was initially enforced. The French even charged Haiti interest.

Were it not for its vicious history of slavery and its century-long extortion of its former colony, I'm pretty sure France wouldn't have had the quantities of a certain key ingredient necessary to develop its worldwide reputation for pastries and desserts. I mean, you try making a crème brûlée, an eclair, a tarte tatin, a sweet galette, a mille-feuille, a madeleine, a crepe...without sugar.

This history deeply informs fine dining today. For centuries, Europe underdeveloped much of the world (borrowing Walter Rodney's turn of phrase) through colonialism and imperialist extraction. It then used those spoils and excess wealth to, among other things, develop its own food cultures and then self-proclaim itself as the cutting edge of the culinary world. To be clear, you can only faff about in a kitchen and create fancy sugar palaces and 10-course meals if you have the means and resources to do so. Haute cuisine is a product of wealth and resources, accumulated over time. Europe's colonial history also dictates which cuisines are recognised via awards like the Michelin star system. Hell, it dictates why you have the French (Michelin is a French tire company) dictating what constitutes "good" food in the first place. If you want to read more about this topic, this essay on Medium provides a good overview of the sad, racist state of affairs over at the Michelin Guide.

Where Europeans colonised and settled, this same lens was applied. This is why you have the undervaluing of Indigenous cuisine and ingredients in Australia, a situation which has only recently begun to shift. The colonisation of Australia actively involved the lying about Aboriginal foodways in Britain's attempt to falsely claim that Aboriginal peoples were nomadic hunter gatherers who did not use their land. Its why the history of how enslaved Africans brought their food cultures with them through the Door of No Return and transformed American cuisine, is not more widely known. Its why so few chefs of colour have been recognised for Michelin stars globally.

Empire and The Bear

Season 3 of The Bear pays clear homage to the impact of European empire on the world of fine dining in a few ways. The most obvious is the fact that Chef David's restaurant is literally called "Empire" lol. Another example and one of the most visually striking to me occurs in 3x01 Tomorrow. First, recall Chef David Fields' outright theft of Carmy's dish (I think we've established that you can't get more empire than the theft of food, yes?). Can we talk about how not only did Fields steal Carmy's dish but also, turned it into the most beige meal we've seen on The Bear to date, bar that single sprig of dill fighting for its life?

Carmy's penultimate plate (the final version being The Best Meal That Sydney Ever Had™):

Chef David Fields' dick measuring exercise version:

Carm was not a fan:

Can we talk about how the original plate featured the colours of the Italian flag (green, white and red) - emblematic of Carmy's cultural heritage and what is certainly one of the single biggest influences in his culinary journey (the dish also features fish, just like the main course in La Vigilia, the Feast of the Seven Fishes) - but after Fields was done with it, that shit was practically three shades of mayonnaise?

Can we talk about how Carmy's version of the dish almost certainly had a varied and dynamic flavour profile while Fields' looks just how I imagine it tasted like: whatever flavour meh is. The dish literally has no acid from what I can see (ingredients: paupiette of hamachi, fennel soubise, potato chip and dill). And I *know* a balanced dish has salt, fat, acid and heat (cos Chef Samin Nusrat told me).

Can we also talk about how Fields hates the most commonly traded of spices? The one that Columbus was looking for when he landed at what is now the Bahamas. The one that was an integral part of the East India Company's business plan rort to fuck India and South East Asia more generally?

Carmen: He hates black pepper for some reason I'll never understand. (from 3x10 Forever)

White folks in Europe were so hungry for spices to liven up their food that they invaded large swathes of the rest of the world to get the stuff. And yet, here we have Chef Fields, disliking Europe's gateway spice: the one that the Romans (Carmy's ancestors) had been trading with the East for centuries prior to Europe’s imperial frenzy, and which now makes up 20% of the world's spice trade.

Is the man so dedicated to meh that he couldn’t even bring himself to embrace pepper? Used to be one of the best chefs in the world, is right Chef Luca.

On top of dubious taste (I'm not a food critic but no one can tell me that hamachi and fennel soubise dish tasted anything other than fucked lmao. idc idc), Chef Fields is also one of the clear antagonists in The Bear. Along with Donna Berzatto, he is one of Carmy's two primary abusers. His impact on Carmy was never as clear on the show as it was in season 3. Lets take a closer look at that impact below:

Culinary ancestry and intergenerational trauma

Both Donna and David are ancestors of a kind to Carmy. Donna is clearly a biological ancestor in that she's Carmy's birth mother. I've argued here that David Fields is a culinary ancestor to Carmy. For ease of reference, I'll include my explanation of what I mean when I say "culinary ancestry", from that earlier meta, here:

Most folks understand ancestry to refer to our family or genetic lineage. When I was in university, I learned about intellectual ancestors or genealogy: where one can trace your intellectual lineage - the thinkers and creators that have shaped your understanding of the world and/or your chosen profession. I think its useful to take this concept and apply it to The Bear to help understand what the show is saying about legacy. I wouldn't limit the concept to "intellectual" ancestry though. It might be more helpful to talk about culinary ancestors in this context because the process of creating food - crafting dishes - isn't solely an intellectual exercise. It engages our intellect yes, but also each of our senses, our memories (recall that chocolate banana from 2x10 The Bear), and the need to nurture and be nurtured. Culinary Ancestors Carmy's culinary ancestors are varied given his work history. We know he's cooked under some of the best chefs in the culinary world of The Bear, including: Daniel Boulud (of Daniel), René Redzepi (of NOMA), Thomas Keller (of The French Laundry), David Field (a sociopathic Joel McHale, of Eleven Madison Park Empire), and Andrea Terry (a sublime Olivia Colman, of Ever). I'd also include here Mikey, Donna and Natalie Berzatto. I'd include cousins Richie Jeremovich and Michelle Berzatto as well. These are the home and line cooks Carm grew up with, watched in his mother's kitchen and at The Beef. He took his lessons - the good and the bad, learnt voluntarily and involuntarily - from all of these people, incorporated them into his working self and transmuted them into his food.

NOTE: In "Ancestors and The Bear" and in other meta I've written, I've incorrectly noted that Chef David Fields was the EC at Eleven Madison Park (instead of Empire). This was due to the fact that up until 3x10 Forever, we are not told the name of the restaurant that Fields and Carmy worked at together. In the draft script for the pilot, the restaurant is identified as EMP (Eleven Madison Park) by Sugar (see p 23 of that script), however this appears to have changed to "Empire" during the course of the show's development.

Through the lens of culinary ancestry, there is a clear connection between Carmy's wasteful R&D and menu choices in season 3 with the "lessons" he received under the tutelage of Chef David at Empire. For example, and as discussed above, the refusal to serve any dish that isn't viewed as "perfect" led to extreme amounts of waste at both The Bear and at Empire.

Additionally, Chef David focused on "subtraction" (recall his writing "SUBTRACT" on green tape and sticking it to the expo of Empire in 3x01 Tomorrow) and never repeating ingredients in the dishes that came out of Empire. Instinctually, these two strategies appear to me to be techniques to create needless scarcity. They're attempts at repression in and of themselves. Carmy adopts these philosophies and tries to implement them at The Bear as well. They manifest in his unilaterally overhauling the original menu at The Bear (without Syd's input) as well as his insistence that the menu change every day.

Minimalistic subtraction of elements was also a characteristic of Escoffier's approach to cooking which would be taken even further with the nouvelle cuisine movement in France. That movement focused on minimalistic dishes with fewer seasonings and sauces. Chef David Fields is clearly rooted in the French school of fine dining in this approach.

Subtraction also shows up in the show in a more dire way: in the cutting off of relationships and the whittling away of self.

I recently come across a promo still for The Bear. It features Carmy as the CDC of Empire, plating a dish. I've seen the image before but I never noticed the writing on the wall next to Carmy before. It reads:

"Its only after we've lost everything we're free to do anything"

This quote also appears in the 1999 David Fincher film, Fight Club (which itself is based on the book by the same name by Chuck Palahniuk):

Left: Carmen Berzatto, CDC at Empire in The Bear; right: Tyler Durden, general nihilistic fuckwit in Fight Club, also preaching the gospel of David [Fields].

This ethos, written on the wall and haunting the kitchen at Empire is emblematic of how Chef David operates. It reads like a fucked Psalm, giving a poetic shimmer to Field's abuse. Chef David tears down his staff, verbally degrading them to the point that he has the gall to whisper "you should be dead" to them. (OK. Can we...for a minute...imagine being a manager and that being your management style? Telling your best performing staff that they should be dead? Excuse me, mon cheri? A literal devil).

Chef David literally strips his staff of their dignity and their connections to the outside world. He makes them lose their sense of self and claims its all to make them better chefs. He tells Carmen in 3x10 Forever:

Chef David: So you got rid of all the bullshit, and you concentrated, and you got focused, and you got great. You got excellent.

The parallels between Carmy's experience at Empire - and even in the Berzatto household - and the critique of performative violent masculinity that Fight Club was trying to get across are worth pointing out. In Fight Club, white men beat each other up to try and assert control over a perceived loss of power. At Empire, Chef Fields consistently berates and degrades Carmy, clearly threatened by his CDC's talent. Similarly we have Richie complaining about having to take orders from "toddler" Carmy, saying "I was a baby too once, Syd. Nobody gave a fuck" in 1x02 (which could have been the origin story of any one of the men who joined Brad Pitt/Edward Norton to carry out "Project Mayhem" lmao. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the dudes on Reddit fawning over Richie circa seasons 1-2 also watch Fight Club as if it was some sort of aspirational manifesto and not the satire that Fincher intended it to be).

Chef Fields is meant to be representative of a toxicity found in the restaurant industry globally. There have been numerous reports of the physical and psychological violence meted out against kitchen staff by those higher up in the brigade.

Additionally the structure of the French Brigade system is such that those at the bottom - stages - are often expected to work for free. While unpaid internships are common in various lines of work, those industries start to run into trouble when large amounts of their products and services depend on unpaid labour. In fact, darling of The Bear, René Redzepi of Noma faced criticism of his restaurant's unpaid internship program. The internship program was rife with stories of ridiculous working conditions. Redzepi finally began paying interns in 2022 but then announced that Noma would shut down regular service at the end of 2024 due to being unable to afford its staff (at one point, unpaid stages made up almost half of Noma's staff).

The fact that entry into the world of fine dining means people need to work for free as a stage automatically eliminates this as an option for folks who cannot afford to volunteer in order to gain work experience. This would disproportionately impact on certain communities, particularly communities of colour whose members may not have access to sufficient wealth that would allow them to work for free. This is clearly illustrated in The Bear where we see that Carmy has the safety nets and access in place that allow him to stage at various fine dining institutions and gain much sought after experience (e.g. his family's ownership of The Beef and his ability to work there, his cousin Michelle's restaurants in NYC and his access to those spaces). Sydney, Tina, Marcus and even Richie have very different entries into the world of restaurants and fine dining.

The issue of sexual abuse and harassment in the restaurant industry is also very subtly broached in The Bear (though it is more heavily implied in the draft script for 1x01), particularly in 1x07 The Review with Richie accusing Sydney of giving a food critic head in order to get a positive review for her risotto (season 1 Richie was genuinely the worst). But the issue is huge, with more sexual harassment claims filed in the US in the restaurant industry than any other field of work.

Even scrubbing floors by hand and cleaning with a toothbrush, while ensuring sparkling kitchens, have also historically been used as a means of punishment, particularly in institutional settings. During Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, there were numerous reports of children in care homes being forced to scrub floors with toothbrushes as a means of physical punishment and control. (CW: the above link discusses accounts of institutional child sexual abuse).

Given the above, its clear to see that the industry - the system - facilitates a whole lot of shit that its workers are subjected to. So when Chef Adam Shapiro catches Sydney as she leaves the train station in 2x04 Violet and asks her how she's doing, her response is telling:

Sydney: It's been a long month [at The Bear].

Chef Adam: Ah. That bad?

Sydney: No, just-- Restaurants.

Chef Adam: Yeah. Right? Why do we do this to ourselves?

Sydney: 'Cause we're crazy.

Chef Adam: Yeah. What was this month's crazy?

Sydney: Um. The kind that's inherited.

Chef Adam: *Nods emphatically* Understood.

This Financial Times article on the dark side of restaurant culture in Copenhagen, sums things up perfectly:

“We always had this joke, an explanation for why things are so horrible: shit falls down,” [Chef Levi] Luna told [the author Imogen West-Knights], with a cold laugh. In the kitchen, the head chef gets mad at the sous-chef, who gets mad at the person below him, a chef-de-partie, who then takes it out on a stagiaire. Then one day, the sous-chef is the head chef, and he has learnt how a head chef behaves: badly. It should give a sense of the strength of feeling I encountered about how damaging this system is that several people independently described it as being like children who are abused going on to commit abuse as adults. This is the dark flipside of the restaurant-as-family metaphor.

Challenging the status quo @ The Bear

By the end of season 3, Carmy appears to recognise that subtraction in his life is not going to bring him happiness. In fact, in 1x08 Braciole, he identified subtraction - specifically, the cutting out of people from his life - as the reason his life got quiet as he grew more isolated. In 3x10 Forever, when he finally confronts Chef David, Carmy laments the psychic and physical impact of Fields' abuse as well as the isolation it engendered. Fields, psychopath that he is, remained unfazed:

Carmen: You gave me ulcers, and panic attacks, and-and nightmares. You--You know that, right? Do you-- Do you understand that?

Chef David: Yeah, I gave you confidence, and leadership, and ability. It fucking worked.

Carmen: My life stopped.

Chef David: That's the point, right?

Additionally, its worth pointing out that despite all the focus on precision, minimalism and (quite frankly) rage being put into the impeccably plated dishes of The Bear, it's the messy, juicy, multi-ingredient filled Italian beef sandwiches that remain the site's best seller. Indeed, in 3x05 Children, Nat tells Carmy that the sandwich window is the only thing at The Bear making any money. So much for subtraction.

We also see Carmy resisting a total acquiescence to Chef David's approach to running a kitchen early on in season 3. His non-negotiables read in the hindsight of the entirety of the series like his attempt at integrating the lessons he’s learned from various kitchens. It’s why the list says “no repeat ingredients” AND “vibrant collaboration”. We know that vibrant collaboration had to come from someone else’s kitchen cos Fields certainly wasn’t collaborating with anyone. That asshole was out there dictating like a fascist.

Additionally, while Carmy has realised the dangers of the fine dining industry by the end of season 3 (and not for the first time - recall in 2x01 The Beef when he called the Michelin star system "a trap"), and while Sydney grapples with her role as an "accomplice" to Carmy's season 3 bullshit, their protégés Tina and Marcus continue to keep the flame of genuine care, collaboration and inspiration alive. This is most clearly seen during the conversation Tina and Marcus have in 3x09 Apologies where they discuss Marcus' mother and his memories of her as well as brainstorm ideas for Tina's cauliflower, brussel sprouts and horseradish dish (please for the love of gad, give us more Tina, Marcus and Ebra next season).

Challenging the status quo in the real world

There are also actual chefs in the real world who appear to be doing something different with their work: embracing their own food cultures that have historically been locked out of the world of fine dining and also trying to run their kitchens in more egalitarian ways.

Above clockwise from top left: Chefs Tim Flores and Genie Kwon of Kasama, Chef Adejoké Bakare of Chishuru, Chef Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express and Chef Mariya Moore-Russell formerly of Kumiko and Kikkō.

The first, most obvious example of this for The Bear fans is Kasama, (shout out to @currymanganese and @thoughtfulchaos773 for introducing me to the above linked, short doco) the Filipino American restaurant founded and run by Chefs Tim Flores and Genie Kwon (who also happen to be married) in Chicago. Kasama is also where Carmy and Syd were meant to have their palate cleansing "reset" in 2x03 Sundae and where Sydney may have also been hit on by fellow Coach K fan, Kasama bae (shout out to @sydcarmyfan for verbalising what I squee-ed about on first watch of this episode lmao).

Both Flores and Kwon come from fine dining backgrounds but appear to challenge some of that industry's basic tenets, including the messianic role of the EC as top of Escoffier's brigade food chain. Flores openly states that his cooking is an ode to his Filipino mother who regularly taste tests his food. In the Nick Cavalier doco linked above, Flores states "if [his mother Lolly Flores] eats [the food] and there's no reference to her dish at all, I'm not doing the right thing." Flores and Kwon also operate Kasama using a hybrid model (that I think would send regimental Escoffier into a tailspin) where they offer fast and casual service featuring Kwon's baked goods during the day and offer a Filipino tasting menu led by Flores for dinner service only. Kasama was awarded a Michelin star in 2023, the first Filipino restaurant in the world to achieve that title. It also took home a James Beard Award that same year.

Note: if you haven't already, have a read of this interview of Tim Flores and Genie Kwon conducted by the Michelin Guide. ISTG Storer and Calo have read this and lifted whole paragraphs for The Bear's script. An excerpt that stood out to me, in particular:

The two first met at Bib Gourmand restaurant GT Fish & Oyster, also in Chicago. "He was leaving as I was starting. So we didn't overlap for very long. But I actually went to eat at the restaurant that he was working at afterwards, and I had one of the best experiences of my life at a tasting menu. And after that we started talking and hanging out, and eventually started dating," recalls Kwon about how she and Flores first met.

Sounds a lot like a couple of Jeffs we know, yes?

Also check out Chef Adejoké Bakare, who in 2024, became only the second Black woman to get a Michelin star in the world (the first being Chicagoan Mariya Moore-Russell who announced in 2020 that she was taking a break from her career for her mental and physical wellbeing and who also...is married to a chef lol). Bakare's restaurant, Chishuru in London, specialises in West African cuisine rooted in Bakare's Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa cultures. Bakare, like Genie Kwon, has a background in biological sciences. She also began her career as a home cook, then ran a fish and chip cart while studying at university in Nigeria. Once she moved to the UK, she ran a supper club and later won the opportunity to run a short term pop up restaurant. During the ceremony where she got her Michelin star, Bakare noted "[i]t did feel rather odd at last night's ceremony that 90% of the room was white middle-aged men. But the passion I see among young women in the industry is such that I'm confident things will change."

Take also Chef Asma Khan, who got her start in the industry as a home cook and then began running supper clubs out of her house in the UK. She then opened up the Darjeeling Express with a group of South Asian women she had met when they were all fairly recent arrivals in the UK, none of whom had formal culinary training. To this day, her kitchen remains fully staffed and run by women.

In this TEDx Talk about her work, Khan says:

"I wanted to cook but I actually wanted to feed people. This gave me the greatest pleasure. I felt at my most powerful when I was able to serve someone something I had cooked. In some ways it was my way of showing affection and love, and being able to give them something that took them home."

Sounds familiar yes? Like a couple of Jeffreys in season 1 of a certain show?

About the systemic sexism in the industry, Khan says:

"But at that time, in England, anywhere in the West, everywhere you looked it was male chefs you saw that was on television [...] in the media. It was always about men who were cooking kitchens. The greatest irony of it all is that [...] in every South Asian home you go to, you will invariably find a woman [cooking] but in every South Asian restaurant you go to, not just in India but in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, almost everywhere in the world, you will usually find a man cooking in the kitchen. And it was a desire for me that I wanted to cook but there was no road or route in front of me."

Khan elaborates further on the skewed and gendered manner in which elite fine dining operates, in this article:

“There is no public hanging [in her restaurant]. Male chefs have made cooking into a combat sport. I think it’s a reaction to the idea that cooking is feminine: I’m not the dinner lady! I’m not your grandmother! Sorry, but if you’re constantly screaming at staff it means you’ve trained them badly.”

Khan is describing the hyper-competitive nature of fine dining (and her suspicion that in a highly gendered industry that is populated by majority men, that there is a need to perform a hypermasculinity in order to put distance between themselves and the historically feminine-gendered roots of the act of cooking) and how Khan wanted no part of it, for herself, her staff or her patrons. In this Guardian article, Khan points her attention directly at the toxic work cultures of many fine dining institutions:

Khan sees herself as a vital heckler on the sidelines of the industry, rather than part of its elite club of star chefs. She is especially scathing of a macho restaurant culture that has allowed workplace bullying and abuse to become normalised – and of those who enable it.

“My deep concern during the pandemic is seeing very prominent people with considerable wealth remove the entire workforce without a safety net.” A surge of restaurant and pub workers were reported to be sleeping rough in central London in April, a fact Khan can’t shake. “It is so shameful, my heart bleeds for the industry, it is immoral. I don’t want restaurants to be ranked by Michelin stars for the fluff and edible herbs they put on a plate. I want to know how they treat their people, they should be ranked on that. Where there is bullying and racism, where there is sexual harassment, where staff don’t feel safe, people should boycott those restaurants. I don’t want to see them prosper.”

Honestly, after reading some of the horror stories about work place practices in the restaurant industry, I'm with Khan. I'm also with Flores, Kwon, Bakare and Moore-Russell. I reckon Storer and Calo are also with these folks too and that we're going to see a shift in season 4 of The Bear that reflects the larger industrial change in the world of fine dining that chefs like these are heralding.

The death of fine dining

Above: Carmy's phone in 3x05 Children

Like @freedelusionshere says here, I don't think its a suprise that season 3 ended with Ever's funeral. The fine dining of Empire and even Ever is dead. How can it not be given the way its been largely running to date, as discussed above? How can it not be when we are living in a time of severe food insecurity precipitated by runaway consumerism and the twin existential threats of global climate and extinction crises. How can anyone in good conscience justify charging exorbitant amounts of money on a plate that is not going to fill patron's bellies while there are communities worldwide who do not have enough food to feed their children? When some communities, even in so-called "first world" countries like America and Australia cannot access clean drinking water?

Truly, the argument for fine dining posited by Will Guidara in 3x10 Forever made me (and I'm sure many others) actually cringe.

There's nobility in this. [...] We can give them the grace, if only for a few hours, to forget about their most difficult moments. Like, we can make the world a nicer place. All of us in this room. We have this opportunity, perhaps even a responsibility, to create our own little magical worlds in a world that is increasingly in need of a little more magic.

There *is* nobility in nurturing people, in feeding them. But in a time of the multiple and rolling, global existential crises, where particular communities are being targeted not just for marginalisation but whole scale eradication, this is not a time for more "magic"; particularly when those "little magical worlds" are reserved for the select few who can afford them. We don't need more holes to bury our heads in. We need real spaces of care that are accessible, kind (read: not nice, but kind. there is a big difference) and nurturing. And those spaces need to be those things not just for the patrons who visit them but also for the staff who work there.

There is also literally no time for escapism, at least not of the kind that late stage capitalism promotes and as described by Guidara in 3x10. We are living at a time where food systems are said to make up one third of all greenhouse gas emissions, pushing the climate crisis further to the point of no return. What's the point of making magic worlds to escape an actual world on the brink? And while your magic-making contributes to the brink getting closer? Its like putting lipstick on a pig.

Indeed some have posited that it was the British Empire's remaking of the world to feed Britain (which we've looked at briefly above) that has been the single biggest contributor to the current environmental crises facing our planet. The Bear acknowledges the issue as well. Recall 2x04 Violet when Tina visits Jerry at the farmers' market and his explanation for why he has so little produce to sell:

Jerry: There's fewer and fewer moths to grow vegetables now, and 'cause of that, there's fewer and fewer farms. Used to be you could come down here, buy everything you needed for a full menu. All in one spot. Whatever grows together, goes together.

The reason there are fewer months to grow vegetables is because of climate change which has impacted on everything to season length, groundwater and rainfall levels (as the two main sources for global farming irrigation) and increased periods of drought and heatwave.

So whats next for The Bear?

Season 3 put us through the ringer with Carmy replicating toxic practices in his restaurant that are rife in the industry at large. Yes, Carmy also has mental health issues and is a survivor of multiple sources of trauma. We know this. I've talked about this at length here and here. But he's also a guy who's running his own business with folks who are dependent on their place of work for their livelihoods. As such, he, Nat and Uncle Jimmy (as co-owners of The Bear) have responsibilities to their staff.

As EC at The Bear who is directly responsible for managing BOH, Carmy has a choice to make about whether he "blows his trauma through" (shout out to Dr Resmaa Menakem and his book My Grandmother's Hands) the bodies of those closest to him, including the crew at The Bear. Just as parents have to work on themselves so that they don't replicate harmful patterns of behaviour in raising their children, so too do we all in our daily relationships, including where many of us adults spend most of our waking lives: at work.

Like Richie observed, Carmy is not integrated in season 3 but neither is the industry in which he's working. A menu that constantly changes, wasteful food practices, a food production and agricultural industry that contributes to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions leading to increased global warming. These things are absolutely not integrated. In many ways, Carmy's mental state in season 3 - anxious, agitated, exhausted, is a reflection of the times. Given all of the above, Carmy's "I'm so fucking sick of this" in 3x09 Apologies hits me harder in the chest. Yes Carmy, you should be. Now go do something about it.

Having looked at the career trajectories of a few talented, conscientious chefs in the course of writing this meta, I think its pretty clear that the old way of running restaurants a la Chef David Fields is over. As we sit at the precipice of climate disaster, watching multiple genocides unfolding at once, during a time of massive food insecurity, who the hell has time to be suffering in the way Chef David made his employees feel in the course of making food that is meant to nourish people? What fucking cognitive dissonance is required to continue on THAT kind of a path?

Come season 4, I reckon we are going to see a massive shift in the trajectory of The Bear. This will be precipitated by multiple things (like the review Carmy got at the end of 3x10 and whatever the fuck Uncle Jimmy is up to with that box and those golf clubs lol) but most significantly, by a realisation on Carmy's part that his version of Michelin mode IS NOT IT.

I reckon Carmy and Sydney are going to continue to work together but they'll go back to the original plan they made with one another in 1x08 Braciole. They're going to go back to family style. They're going to treat their staff better (after Carmy apologises lol). They're going to shift from wasteful, haute cuisine to sustainable food practices that support producers and the planet more broadly. They're going to leave Chef David Fields' scare tactic of subtraction behind and lean into using more pepper.

Above: Sydney's notebook as she workshops a recipe at home in 1x08 Braciole.

Tagging: @moodyeucalyptus @currymanganese @hwere @freedelusionshere @thoughtfulchaos773 @ambeauty @brokenwinebox @devisrina @espumado @fresaton @kdbleu @vacationship @birdiebats @bootlegramdomneess @mitocamdria @tvfantic87 @angelica4equity @anxietycroissant @turbulenthandholding @yannaryartside @afrofairysblog @ciaomarie

cos you may be interested but as always, I'd love to chat to whoever wants to about this stuff!

[misterbitches]

i wish more than anything he could have had this. i love you man

i really fucking do

my love for nirvana and immense respect for kurt isn't something i ever expected. after being a huge fan of jonghyun too as a musician, a person who had things to say, a human being. the people around him. i fucking hate that kurt is gone and i was like...2. i got into hole when i was like 25 really heavily and refused to listen to nirvana. didnt' care about these white boys. but there's a reason why people love this band and why they loved kurt. i get mad sometimes at his death—selfishness—and then i make jokes to deal and cope. we all do with everything. it's just that and this is from a cis person...but i know so many trans people or people on the gender spectrum who have read his journals see him as someone struggling with gender. and after years of thinking and becoming such a huge fan i think that was honestly the truth. i think at this point we're all pretty sure he was gender queer or struggling with identity.

his aversion for oppression, his stand with the marginalized, not accepting racism, homophobia, transphobia BECAUSE THAT IS THE HEART OF DIY (spurred by my black people cos ofc it is and we do everything) and i wish that he could have beeen better.

to me it seems like his pain with his crohns (or wahtever he had) lead to his intense struggle with drugs because that's pretty common when needing pain management. on top of that, his family's history of MI. on top of that, his life being hounded and not being prepared for it (this i think is the idea of white privilege at work and wasn't naive of him necessarily, but...it's just something he thought wouldnt happen to him. that's whiteness at work as who they were as a diy fucking anti pop anti capital punk band. sonic youth said 'we didnt sell out, we made them buy in') and his rship with courtney. he said without court he might be gay or bi.

i won't read his journals, it's too fucking much for me and i dont feel allowed or maybe i will when i can handle it, but i know reading about them and him and hearing the way he changed his songs and his abhorrence for bravado, for men that talk about women as disposable and sex objects, for not being able to enjoy a punk band, for the whiteness and maleness. krist novoselic was a 6'7 fucking bassist and dave grohl is a sizeable dude with hideous tattoos. back then, no one said a fucking bad thing about them. come as you are.

we know that suicide is a state we get into. when you go to a psych ward you see that it's actually calm and an ebb/flow. it is extremely fucking boring. the thing is we don't know if these feelings last forever. we can't go back and time and history cannot change. it was his decision, like jonghyun's, to end his life. but i know there could have been longer. if they got help. i try not to resent courtney especially not now with people being irresponsible and unearthing the FBI report on him. he killed himself but it was definitely emotionally sparred by her and she should have told people what happened weeks before his death.

but no one failed him per se. his suicide note is full of hope and it kills me to see. he should have been able to be whoever he wanted. been a son, been a daughter, been anything.

whenever i hear the changed lyrics or see him in a dress or hear distress i dont know. i wish we didnt lose him but i also know that no one wants to go back to that time. it wasn't necessarily great but it wasn't all bad. and i wish commodity didn't destroy legacy. i wish we werent's so obsessed with the death and gore instead of the liveliness and hilarity of this band and of kurt. and i wish we could talk about him more and the idea that maybe there's so much going on with it; i have many critiques for things they have done, things kurt has done as well.

i'm talking in circles but i genuinely just get bummed. every day he is still dead. but this dude man......i love him a lot. i'm so glad nirvana gave what they did to the world. getting to know kurt so long after the fact is fucking hard sometimes. it is frustrating. but focusing on the positives too or trying to understand another perspective has given me a lot of insight. and i always try and remember that it wasn't just one thing, that nirvana were a band, it wasn't just him, and he could have been better but it just didn't work out that way. it's not solely about his internal pain and the narrative of a tortured artist is suffocating.

he wanted to be a star, make this insane pop song, and when he got it he didnt realize it became everything he hated. he was already struggling and all this shit hit a point. i have mad respect for them still. dave grohl said billie eilish is the kurt of her gen (about 2 yrs ago) and that drives me up a wall for various reasons. antiblackness and class. fuck that. these dudes were poor as fuck trucking it through washington with other bands and the basis is blacness and black art they were trying to fight and make it and give a shit man. it didnt turn out the way they could handle but they were not PRIMIING themselvs for musical stardom. no artist who cares would do that. but if you get the recognition you want because who doesn't, it comes at a price too.

this is why i critique commodity and capital so intensely. i participate, and i will have to as an artist. i don't have a desire to be poor because i've lived a life that gave me space to see what i want to do. i have class privilege (and a lot of debt) and i am grateful. but it isnt like i dont want peopl eto know. it's just that i know that i can't give in and accept and demand nothing and then decide to hoard it to myself. taht money that goes in funnels out and is not for me to keep. there is no trickling down. dont paly yrself.

artists like kurt and in a sense like MF Doom (rapper who only came out to be seen when he wanted to) or DMX even it's like....man u came out fucking fighting to be heard you know. do your thing. make your shit. be amazing. esp black people. DMX had a fucking face for a camera. hopefully i'm gonna watch belly at my best friend's house on the 28th.

i wish everyone who deserves to stay can stay until their body releases them in the most pleasant way as possible. jessica walter's death made me sad, but she was older and i'm so happy she got to live. same with cicely tyson. at the same time, the young deaths over drugs, suicide, accidents....id on't really get it. why is kissinger alive but these people can't stay? how did this come a somber tale of death instead of just i fucking love kurt cobain lmao

he's def one of those ppl that im like u rock. him, robeson, seberg to an extent. hm who else. wong kar wai, jenkins, joe (thai filmmaker whose name i cant spell.) all those people who are running forward on their own and beating their chest. yea i like that. an award is just another award. what matters is possibility and action.

RATHER BE DEAD THAN COOL