#of the politics or cultures of every place she goes to | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

deafsignifcantother · 10 months ago

Text

if music be the food of love, chapter one

♥ chapter two! ♥ relationships: aroace Alastor x deaf female reader (queerplatonic) ♥ word count: 2.1k ♥ pinterest board ♥ warnings: reader got hurt by someone they loved before death, reader is shorter than him, bickering, reader loves tea, lonesome reader, alastor invading space ♥ my idea is that reader has a small stereo on her chest that lets out classical music based on her mood. I imagine that it comes from both her chest (softly) and the outside of her manor (loud as fuck).

Your manor is only visible to the town when the lights are on a tall hill and covered in trees. However, even if all the lights were off, people would at least know it's there.

There are two reasons: the tale and the music.

Tale, a story for the newcomers. They speak of a demon who plays music all day, doomed to play music forever. Oh, the music. The music can be heard from even miles away.

It's refined and dainty, and it reeks of misery. The classical music never seems to repeat itself; it goes on and on and on and on. The demons hear you only through your music. When you cry, the violins and cellos grow with a cruel crescendo. When you sleep, the music is soft, almost quiet. Everyone comes to an understanding, assumption, that if the music were to stop, you would be dead.

The demons who try to step closer to your manor will find themselves experiencing unfathomable sorrow and guilt. The sound of your music is the demonic ability you possess, and it's out of your control. Due to the sadness of your death, you are forced into misery in the afterlife. When you were alive, those you loved and devoted yourself to only broke your heart.

Everybody affected by your music feels that grief.

Alastor doesn't understand why people fear your manor. Your love-related pain doesn't affect him at all.

He starts up the hill, moving both on his feet and through the shadows. On his way to your manor, he focuses on the landscape. The landscape is beautiful; the forest below is so dense that the red sky disappears. Personally, he loves the music. He loves tuning in on you and hearing how you're doing. He sparsely gets to visit, so hearing the song of your heart is always so welcoming.

The worst thing to him is how long the damn walk is.

You're in your house, passing through the dining room, when the lights flicker. The people from the nearby town stutter when the usual sad music suddenly becomes upbeat.

Opening the door, you are greeted by Alastor's traditional smile. You're the one that initiates the hug. He gently wraps his hand around you, only for a short time before he pulls away and establishes his distance.

"Long time no see, my dear." He signs, his claws adding a flare to the simple signs. Truthfully, his sign for "my dear" translates directly to "sweetheart," which he's aware of, just putting faith into you understanding what he means.

"I'll start some tea." You sign, turning immediately to the kitchen.

He smiles at the jazz sneaking its way into your music. The people outside know what it means.

Alastor looks around at the new decor; the place is different every time he enters. It's all the things that you enjoyed when you were alive. That's what is most noticeable about you beyond the aura you possess and how stuck you are to the past; you refuse to acknowledge your situation, which is both a curse and a blessing.

From the kitchen counter, you look at him, seeing him behind you, his staff out of his hands.

He leans a bit forward. "I have news! Have you heard of the new buzz, the new project from the princess of hell?"

A small smile forms. "Charlie?" You remember many years ago when she appeared at your door, in tears due to your involuntary magic, begging you to teach her ASL. You politely declined, though you wrote her a long paper about Deaf Culture (often derailing to rant about your opinion on common debates/crazy events). You've never seen her again, but you're confident she's read it.

You continue, "Her projects are... sweet?"

"Sweet and quite peculiar. She believes that demons can be redeemed. How absurd!" His smile grows, his eyes squinting in interest. He knows you're devoted to being good and staying away from violence. He's here to convince you to join her cause.

"Fascinating," you can't help but show your pure astonishment. "She's on our side."

"Oh, how kind you are!"

The tea is ready. You turn entirely away from Alastor, and he lets you. Your thoughts are apparent; he has spent weeks excited about this conversation. He's absolutely fighting the urge to spill out every argument he has; he wants to mention that if you participate, you'll see each other daily. That hasn't even crossed your mind yet.

You pour the tea and take your time, a little nervous to continue the convo. Alastor's eyes remain on your frame, your casual clothing. The last time he saw you, you were dressed up despite spending your days alone.

You hand a cup to him. Neither sign; you stand still, staring at each other and drinking. Both of you already know what the other will try to say next. Your eyes are deep in thought while he is locked on you. The only reason you are doubting being involved with everything yourself is that you know your aura makes others depressed. It is not very good, isolating. On the opposite stance, Alastor always noticed how your music gets positive whenever he's around. He knows (guesses) that in the hotel, with his presence, your saddening demeanor would be no more.

He moves abruptly, you follow, and he sits on a heavily cushioned couch, dipping deeply, which makes him smile. Your soft smile grows—more piano.

"What are your thoughts?" He prompts with one hand. You take a very long sip of your tea before putting it down.

"I wouldn't make them feel comfortable," you explain. "That's all I think about."

"Ever so pessimistic, my dear. You never know unless you come to visit. What do you say?" He grabs his mic and jokingly reaches it to your face, "A simple visit?"

You put a hand to your temple. "My love," you sign without noticing how his lids droop in comfort, "do you really think I would belong?"

He puts his hand to his chin in faux thought. "Of course I do! The princess will approach you with open arms."

You let out a small, broken groan. You're not going to be winning this little debate. Alastor's going to be able to rebuttal everything you say. Knowing that, why is it still so hard to give in?

You put your hands in your lap before returning them to your temples. His smile grows, and the static radiating off him grows ever so prominent, tickling your skin. You look up at him when you notice the change in the air.

The way he looks at you gives away his intentions. He is standing tall in his usual formal way in his seat, but his eyes are ever so casual. He gazes at you more than anything. His smile is still wide and prideful.

You wiggle a finger at him. "Ah."

He squints.

You continue, "You want to see me more, don't you?"

"Who wouldn't?" He plays off, shrugging. "Your captivating presence has every demon in hell dropping their jaws agape."

"Youuuuuu," you smile mischievously, "you want to see me more."

He continues to wave his hands. "Your accusations are futile, go ahead and fill your pretty head with things such as affection," his shoulders bounce as he chuckles, "dreams about how I miss you."

A breathless laugh leaves your lips. Rather than continue the teasing, you let the positive atmosphere linger in the air. You lift your chin with confidence. "Practically admitting it."

"I know what you want me from me." He signs. You smile at how he interpreted it. You don't bother responding. Instead, you give him a sly smile and lift your cup, taking another long sip; his bottom eyelid is twitching.

The last time he saw you, he signed you many compliments and even danced with you to the rhythm of your music. He let you put your hand on his face as he leaned his forehead against yours.

Admittedly, you only started teasing him because you wanted him to tell you that he missed you. Obviously, he did. You didn't expect him to be so stubborn about it.

When you don't respond, he continues. "When I'm here, your heart sings in happiness."

You nod and sign with one hand. "Very true."

"Well, I find the sound lovely."

"Very appreciated."

You watch as he leans back and crosses his legs, lifting and finishing the teacup. You both spend a few seconds without conversation, just looking at each other. In an attempt to hide how flustered you are starting to look, you lean your head back and gulp down the tea to the point where the cup is hiding your face. But you can only keep it in that position for a short time. After finishing the drink, you place it back down, finding that Alastor is already sitting with his fingers intertwined and waiting for you. His eyes sparkle.

"My dear, I missed you very much." And as quickly as the affection comes, it disappears. "I must give the little lady what she wants. There, are you happy?"

"I missed you too, Alastor. Thank you for coming up again."

Sappy, sappy, sappy. Will you agree to return to the hotel with him now?

He straights his bowtie and stands. "My dear, I'm afraid our time here will be cut short; I have a hotel to show you, don't I?"

You stay seated, just eyeing him. Peer pressure, you sigh and try not to roll your eyes. A simple nose exhaling is enough to show him how you feel.

He leans his head to the side. "Is there anything I can do to convince you?"

You finally stand and meet his eyes. His eyes are gorgeous; you love the way he looks at you. He doesn't take his eyes off you when you step close to him. Your hands reach for his overcoat, and you adjust it fruitlessly, only wanting an excuse to touch him.

You smile. "I can cook you something for your long trip back."

"Our."

"Your."

You both lean in, smiles straining.

He tries again. "Our."

"Biscuits, I assume," you turn your heels and motion for him to follow you. The motion you make is beckoning, and when you flick your wrist, he grabs it and pulls you into him. He lets you go to see your response. Your heart is beating out of your chest. You fall for people too easily. His touch is demanding, yet his face is calm, and with how close he is, all you can do is stare up at him. Your feet stumble a bit to adjust to your new stance. He will fight tooth and nail to get you to follow him back; throughout his days, he always wonders what you're doing and your music might sound like. He'll close his eyes and try to imagine the melody in moments of silence at the hotel.

You can't find yourself stepping back. "I'm perfectly okay with where I am." A lie. "Nobody will bother me if I'm out here."

"And nobody will bother you when you're next to me, get it?" After he signs, both of his hands hold your cheeks. He tilts your head back and forth to try and lighten the mood that's getting a little serious.

You try to hold his wrists and pull his hands down, but he fights against you. He lifts your face so he can look at you head-on. The waist bends his body; he curls himself up to you. Your touch falls to his sleeves and then moves to his biceps, your fingers grazing him gently.

The music is fast-paced, like your heart. It sounds almost angelic, a new ethereal sound surrounding it.

"Okay," you fold but then immediately chew on the inside of your lip.

"Perfect!" He presses his forehead to yours quickly before pulling away. He's taking this win. He turns and eyes the room, motioning. "Packing anything?"

With a small sigh of defeat, you place your hands on your temples again. What would you even need? Like a spoiled child, you realize that if you did need something in particular, Alastor would get it for you. You smiled and shook your head to yourself. "I don't think I need anything at all."

"Spectacular!" Another dramatic sign. "Come along then." The fast twirling of his staff blows air onto you when you start to walk behind him, eyeing how his fingers twist. His head turns as he glances at you from the corner of his eye, his head dipping as his smile widens. The static in the air becomes thicker.

You take a deep breath. If you can say 'I told you so' to him, you will be bringing it up until the end of time. He knows that, so it's good that he's confident in himself and his deductions. He'll ensure you won't be leaving and isolating yourself any longer.

#x deaf reader #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel x reader #alastor #alastor x reader #x reader #if music be the food of love

1K notes · View notes

headspace-hotel · 6 months ago

Text

I hate a lot of trends in climate-change-aware nature writing, but this is one I particularly detest: works insisting that we live in a "post-natural" world.

The lostness, bewilderment, aching, and searching in this piece is understood by the author to be an all-consuming and universal dysphoria, when it is actually a highly specific predicament that the author put himself into: He tried to understand the universe exclusively through the point of view of white people.

I mean that Purdy takes the colonizer point of view without realizing that it is a colonizer point of view. He thinks the colonizer point of view is a universal document of the authentic, naive encounter of "humanity" with "nature," instead of burning wreckage left over from the apocalyptic destruction of a rainbow of ideas and cultures.

It feels weird to be talking about this as a white person, but it shouldn't, any more than it should feel weird to say (as a white person) that aliens didn't build the pyramids.

Very little of what he's writing about would exist or make sense without European colonization of the world. Purdy constantly says "we" and "our" in reference to things that are very restricted to a particular cultural point of view, as if totally oblivious to the idea that other cultures and other perspectives even exist. When he searches for historical references to chart "human" relationship with nature, history goes like this: Pre-Christian religion in the British Isles->British monarchy-> George Washington-> Industrial Revolution->Thoreau.

He manages to repeatedly stumble over giant hunks of colonialism embedded in every concept he's thinking about, like boulders obstructing a pathway, and pretends so hard that they don't exist that his points are janky and meandering. For example, his discussion of Helen Macdonald's book H for Hawk, touching upon human identification with the landscape and with non-human "nature," blunders into this:

Those who love (certain parts of) nature are often making a point of preferring it to (certain kinds of) human beings. The problem is not only literary. Macdonald describes an encounter with a retired couple who join her in admiring a valley full of deer, then remark how good it is to see “a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in.” She does not reply, but is miserable afterward. The meaning of landscapes is always someone’s meaning in particular. Confronted with all of this, Macdonald tries to shake off the complicities of her own identification with the terrain: “I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.” The alternative that Macdonald wishes for is, of course, not an escape from political-cultural projection onto landscape, but another approach to that same practice — really, the only one a 21st-century cosmopolitan is likely to feel comfortable embracing.

AND THEN HE JUST SEGUES INTO THE NEXT POINT LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED. Like don't worry about it :) We will simply project onto landscapes in a non-racist way :) because we aren't racist anymore in the 21st century :)

The next book he discusses is Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane, which is basically about how the vocabulary of landscape in English is sterilized and monoculturized, and contrasts that with Scots Gaelic. This is how Purdy explains the thesis of the book:

Our sense of what lies outside ourselves has been blunted by “capital, apathy, and urbanization” — enemies likely to draw a range of friends, from cultural Marxists to Little Englanders to those who would like to see a bit more effort, please. But behind this scholarly sketch, Macfarlane’s work is testament to a pretheoretical obsession with unfamiliar ways of encountering places. We disenchanted and distracted (post)moderns describe terrain, he complains, in terms of “large, generic units” such as “field,” “hill,” “valley,” and “wood." (...) Many people who have lived intimately with landscapes have had words for nuances of form, texture, and use. Macfarlane’s purpose in Landmarksis to gather these words as proof of how precisely it is possible to name a place, and so, perforce, to know it.

Why is Gaelic endangered? Because of an effort to extinguish its speakers' culture. This article I found on it talks about the history of the language's decline, and it's strikingly similar to what happened to indigenous people in the Americas and Australia, with children being put in schools where they were beaten with sticks for speaking their native language.

This whole essay is about Purdy's general disappointment with nature writing, his craving for an ineffable Something, some sort of magical, primitive identification with the natural world. In the very first paragraph he claims that the pictures of animals on nursery walls are "totemic" and quotes a guy saying that zoos are an "epitaph" to the relationship between people and animals. It's never very clear what he means, but he uses the term "animism" repeatedly, such as when he says this about MacFarlane's goal in writing Landmarks:

His quarry is an animistic sense that Barry Lopez once identified in “the moment when the thing — the hill, the tarn . . . ceases to be a thing, and becomes something that knows we are there."

Given that ambition, Landmarks, which Macfarlane calls a “counter-desecration phrasebook,” can be disappointingly thin as a lexicon. Too many of the terms are simply dialect or Gaelic for some generic form, such as “slope,” “hilltop,” “stream,” or “tuft of grass.” The effect is less pointing out how many things there are to see than cataloguing how many names there are for the same thing.

This is Purdy missing the point, perfectly crystallized as though frozen in amber. He is oblivious to the clear subtext of a language showing a culture's connection to its home, and of the violence against that culture. The Gaelic language doesn't make him feel primal and mystical the way he wants it to, therefore it doesn't mean anything to him. MacFarlane doesn't make him feel a magic animistic connection to nature, therefore his book must have failed at its task.

Who gives a shit? Gaelic isn't FOR you.

He discusses another book about a guy that hikes a bunch of Cherokee trails, but I don't know what to say about that one, observing it through the sludge of the reviewer's unwillingness to recognize that historical context exists. He summarizes his disappointment in a confusing way, using the Gaelic language as a symbol for an obscure and inaccessible place where the answer to your personal emotional cravings lives (???) Then he talks about a kind of epistemicide, or extinction of knowing, of nature, but again, totally oblivious to any relationship to colonization.

Every inhabited continent has been denuded of ecosystems and species. Most North American places have shed wolves, elk, moose, brown bears, panthers, bison, and a variety of fish and wild plants, which were all abundant four hundred years ago.

Wow, I wonder what happened four hundred years ago?

This writing acts like the dominant Eurocentric attitude towards the world is universal, but the author is haunted by this nameless specter of the possibility of a different way of thinking, which he treats as some kind of mystical, primordial state hidden in the past instead of just a different cultural perspective.

Not only does he not recognize that his own cultural perspective of Nature is dysfunctional and unsatisfying because it was created by exploitation and genocide of other cultures and their symbiotic relationships, he acts like other perspectives don't exist. Take his perspective on forests and the mycorrhizal network:

Wohlleben’s emphasis on interdependence and mutual aid is part of a recent tendency to recast nature in an egalitarian fashion — as cooperative, nonindividualist, and, often enough, hybrid and queer, in contrast to the oaks of generals and kings. Nature does answer faithfully to the imaginative imperatives and limitations of its observers, so it was inevitable that after centuries of viewing forests as kingdoms, then as factories (and, along the way, as cathedrals for Romantic sentiment), the 21st century would discover a networked information system under the leaves and humus, what Wohlleben calls, with an impressive lack of embarrassment, a “wood wide web.”

Listen, I don't think this is accurate to how Europeans thought of forests throughout time, let alone "humanity" in general. The emphasis of power and competition in ecosystems emerged after Darwin, in collusion with capitalism and "race science." Trees have been symbols of life, wisdom and selflessness, and regarded as sacred or even sentient, for centuries before that. But on top of that, this is just blatantly pretending that only white people's ideas count as ideas.

It's the same dreck as all the other "literary" writing about climate change: self-pityingly and unproductively mourning "Nature" and a fantasized "wild" state of the Earth, ignoring colonialism, treating human influence of any kind on other life forms as something that either destroys them or makes them soft and "tame."

I'm tired of reading nature writing from people that obviously do not go outside, or if they do, they do it in such a suffocatingly regimented, goal-oriented way that they can't just sit outside and relax.

Maybe I shouldn't be such a hater if I want to do nature writing. But my love of nature is WHY I am a hater.

#nature #ecosystem #climate change #the ways of the plants #goes under #doomerism

640 notes · View notes

phoenixcatch7 · 2 months ago

Text

Something that always bugs me is that the way fanfic authors have it, there's absolutely nothing between 'beloved son treated and raised precisely the same as the two blood siblings in the blood based ruling lineage' and 'despised and excluded indentured servant psychologically manipulated into having no self worth cut off from any emotional support'. This is, historically, a very, VERY recent binary, as the fostering system outgrows things like orphanages and the idea of the nuclear family is cemented.

There is a whole range of different statuses that exist between those two extremes just in Western society, and more than that outside of what I already know. Wardship, for example. Fostering without adoption. Room and board apprenticeship.

Wwx is older than jc. Him being adopted and legitimised, despite not being jiang, would cause a succession crisis. By rights, as the eldest male (and prodigious and well liked besides) he would be first to inherit in some people's eyes. Being adopted formally in this way would cause those rumours of bastardry madame yu was always banging on about (though I'm never convinced those rumours were as prevalent as she believed). Jfm would lose reputation and status, yzy would take a tremendous hit to her reputation, jc's place as heir would suddenly be cast into uncertainty, coming under intense scrutiny as people suddenly feel as though they had a choice in who to support, and wwx would be forced into a role and potential future he has absolutely no desire for. And by putting him in a position where he could become head of jiang, there's the risk that he might assassinate jc to become the undisputed heir, something impossible if he isn't brought into the family officially. Would wwx ever dream of doing so? No! Not even slightly! But it is a valid fear of the time and culture, jgy just proves that worst case scenario.

Instead of being the child prodigy coming out of nowhere, the son of respected rogue cultivators so generously taken in the jiang and well trained, suddenly he'd be 'proof' of infidelity, both families involved would become scandals, even post-humeously. As jgy and mxy prove, being a bastard is a lower social status than the right hand man of the sect heir, head disciple of a major sect. Now wrapped in gossip and scandal, they would no longer be called the prides of yunmeng.

And then of course that kind of divisive succession would backfire horrendously when lotus pier is burned and jc tries to rebuild the clan while wwx goes demonic cultivator! It would be DISASTROUS for the jiang, jc having lost a lot of his legitimacy and political support, wwx's now filthy reputation being tied even tighter to the clan, reflecting on them so much more. Worst case gossip would be that the jiang as a whole are turning to demonic cultivation. People who wanted wwx for heir would be in a very dangerous position! People who disliked jc as heir would make it even harder for him! Not that the jiangs would/could have predicted the war and the burning of the sect but fr it would have made an already nigh impossible situation even harder and more volatile.

And it's not like wwx is treated purely like a servant! He isn't going round fetching tea and carrying jcs sword and keeping one step behind. He eats every meal with them, he gets pocket money from them, he is openly and pretty universally considered siblings with the other two, and nobody except yzy acts like it's weird, or he's acting above his station for it (though people like the wens and jin aren't above trying to use that 'son of a servant' thing when they're targeting him to get their own way).

Yes, yzy is deeply insecure and blames him, yes during their goodbyes jc gets hugs and wwx gets orders. They're far from perfect. That's the most affection jc ever got from either of them. Jyl got nothing, she wasn't there. Which is pretty representative of her treatment from her parents, ngl. But wwx had support from jc, had sorta paternal support and a safe authority figure in jfm, had maternal support and care from jyl (though she shouldn't have had to, but that's a different conversation). There are actual family servants (yzy's twins) who grew up with her and were trained for it and they act very differently to wwx. For all yzy throws her weight around and jfm is a bit of a doormat, wwx grew up well cared for and well loved.

The fact that the family as a whole was pretty messed up and his part in it made it worse? That's on the family members themselves. His never arriving would not have fixed that family. For wwx, genuinely, there really wasn't anywhere else he could really go once he was orphaned. If he hadn't died on the streets perhaps he could have made it as a civilian working for someone else, dabbling in cultivation because we know him.

The wen and jin would have eaten him alive. The lans? Don't make me laugh. I love a good 'wwx gets betrothed to lwj as teens and he moves to gusu and Fixes Everything' as much as the next person but let's not kid ourselves, canon wwx would have ended up whipped to death or expelled with the way he is. As a visiting disciple he got so many punishments and kicked out not even halfway through the year! Him living there with lwj as adults is due to him 'redeeming' himself through mystery solving and lwj being fully, openly ready to ditch the sect for him. Even then they're constantly on the road night hunting and lwj being the lightning rod of all of wwx's trouble making tendencies (and being 100% down to breaking the rules with him without enacting punishment). They might accept him now but it would not have happened without lwj doing it first (and the juniors all loving him lol).

The nie? Maybe, but that would have left NHS in pretty much the exact same position as jc: inferior second fiddle, unskilled, constantly compared to him. Wwx would be in the exact same position of being pressured to tone himself down and keep his dangerous ideas to himself, and NHS would have double the fear of inevitably losing both his brothers. And of course, the nie aren't exactly as patient and laid back as the jiang sect as a whole, with their hyper aggressive murder resentment swords. The first sign of wwx acting 'outside' of the clans best interests and getting risky and he's going straight down those stairs the same way as jgy.

Tldr: there's more options to raise a kid than full adoption or abused servitude, even today, and though officially adopting wwx would have made everything SO much worse, his other options would not have survived him. He deserved better with the jiangs but frankly so did the blood kids (and the mother and the father). All three were emotionally neglected and adoption would not have fixed that.

This is why I believe that if wwx had been even a day younger than jc everyone would have been so much happier.

#mxtx #mxtx mdzs #mdzs #Yeah I mostly learned about wardship from batman lol #It's very interesting to see different ways you could formally take care of kids #Of course no matter how it happens on paper the important thing is that you actually raise them well. And no matter how you structure it #That's always up to the individual family. Every kid deserves parents or at the very least beloved adults who give them the care they need #wei wuxian #jiang cheng #jiang yanli #jiang wanyin #jiang fengmian #jiang family #yu ziyuan

300 notes · View notes

antianakin · 1 year ago

Text

An AU where Obi-Wan and Satine are somehow forced into an arranged marriage post-Civil War, like Satine can't become Duchess if she's not married because she's a woman or she's too young, or maybe she decides to join the Republic post-Civil War in order to give herself legitimacy as a leader and gain herself enough followers to effectively force a peace without causing another civil war, but the Republic is reluctant to let them in and Satine discovers a workaround where if she marries a Republic citizen or something as a world leader she can use that to gain entry into the Republic. She asks Obi-Wan to help her out and he leaves the Order for her because she has literally no other options available and this will hopefully bring peace to Mandalore and allow Satine the chance to change things for the better, even though it means he loses EVERYTHING and has to give up who he is, his family, his friends, his home, etc.

And the marriage goes terribly because Satine and Obi-Wan's "tension" or whatever was basically just a trauma bond combined with teenage hormones and while he respects her ambitions, she never truly understands what he's given up for her and she doesn't entirely respect the Jedi culture sometimes and so Obi-Wan is absolutely miserable among the Mandalorians. None of them accept him, hardly any of them even LIKE him, he doesn't have any real power politically because Satine is too worried about people thinking she's letting an outsider rule through her and wanting to establish herself as a competent leader on her own, and Mandalorian culture is just so vastly different from the Jedi. There's a lot he DOES like about it, obviously, every culture has its own beauty to it, but it's not HIS culture and there's a lot about it that goes vastly against what the Jedi believe in and teach that makes it really uncomfortable for him sometimes. Satine and Obi-Wan just end up in screaming arguments all the time and can barely stand each other just a few years into the marriage, but they can't get a divorce because Satine doesn't want to admit to that kind of weakness or mistake or seem like someone who just made a political marriage for her own agenda (even though that's effectively exactly what she did, as Obi-Wan points out).

There's other tensions that come up, as well, like the problem of heirs. Obi-Wan and Satine DO try, but it never seems to actually work, and Satine's worry that she'll have made all of these changes to make Mandalore peaceful only for it to fall into civil war again upon her death if she doesn't have an heir means that she keeps trying to insist on more attempts and getting upset with Obi-Wan when it inevitably doesn't work. They end up in separate bedrooms because of this, despite the gossip this inevitably creates about their relationship fracturing. Eventually, Bo-Katan shows up with the baby she had but refuses to keep and asks Satine to raise in her place, and Satine agrees so long as Bo-Katan allows Satine to name the baby her heir. Bo-Katan agrees, and Satine stops trying to create an heir of her own in favor of raising Korkie as her heir.

Obi-Wan also keeps trying to find work-arounds to Satine's reluctance to let him help her politically. He accepts that she doesn't want him in the room when she's holding council and he can't be ON the council, but even when he suggests something as simple as just discussing things together in the privacy of their own bedroom so he can try to help carry the burden with her, Satine refuses to do even that much just in case people start suspecting that she's taking advice from him and assume he is ruling through her. Obi-Wan ends up entirely cut off from all political work and decisions, Satine never tells him anything about what's going on at all and never wants his advice on how to lead Mandalore. She barely even allows him near Korkie to make sure no one ever questions Korkie's right to succeed her or his ability to lead Mandalore.

Obi-Wan attempts to stay in contact with some of the Jedi, but they're often busy and can't respond very quickly, if they respond at all, so those relationships start to fade. Only Qui-Gon keeps up any kind of regular communication and even that is still relatively sporadic depending on how his missions go. He tries to cling to the Jedi teachings he remembers as best he can rather than assimilating into Mandalorian culture, something that further alienates him from the Mandalorian people. Satine had given him formal clothing to wear and had told him that, as her spouse, he had to present himself a certain way, which meant he could not continue to wear Jedi or Jedi-style clothing. But he continues to meditate as best he can, at least once a day, reciting the meditation mantra he was taught as a child to ensure he never forgets it: there is no emotion, there is peace.

Satine hates that he seems generally uninterested in most Mandalorian customs, even though he knows them and has studied them as best he can. She sees his continued interest in practicing Jedi culture as a rejection of Mandalorian culture and doesn't really understand Obi-Wan when he says that they often feel diametrically opposed. He cannot do both, and she's asked him to give up enough of his Jedi heritage as it is, it feels cruel to ask him to give up what little is left to him for her own comfort. Satine points out that he wasn't BORN a Jedi, so it shouldn't really matter to let go of it. Obi-Wan doesn't speak to her for weeks after that, and while she does apologize for having hurt him, she still doesn't entirely understand, and Obi-Wan isn't interested in explaining anymore, something that just makes her angry all over again and the two of them have to agree to simply never discuss the topic again.

Obviously all of this creates irreparable damage to their relationship. Satine's youth when she took over Mandalore caused her to focus exclusively on what she believed needed to be done to solidify her position so she could do what was best for her people, regardless of what that meant for Obi-Wan. She doesn't INTEND to hurt him and abandon him, but she married him for political reasons even if she had feelings for him. Obi-Wan's desire to replace the purpose he'd had as a Jedi with some kind of purpose on Mandalore causes him to push Satine to give things in their relationship that she's unwilling to give, and her refusal to meet him halfway and his alienation from her life creates resentment in him. Even as they grow older and Satine could theoretically try to rectify some of these mistakes and allow him to help her more politically, there is a rift between them that neither one knows how to cross. So they don't; Satine continues to put all of her focus on politics and Obi-Wan keeps his distance. They just continue to grow further and further apart without any way to free themselves from the black hole that is their marriage.

The one time they manage to get along is when Obi-Wan gets word that Qui-Gon died on Naboo. Satine finds him in his room after he didn't show up for something and he's practically catatonic on the floor, the room in a state of disarray. She sits down next to him and just offers him her silent presence until eventually he reaches over to hold her hand and she grasps it back. The two of them sit on that floor for the entire night until she has to leave to go to a meeting in the morning. They never discuss it.

And then TCW comes around and we're just assuming canon went mostly as per usual somehow and so the war still starts and the Jedi are leading the clone army and Death Watch has been building over on Concordia and Ferus Olin shows up on Mandalore to figure out what's going on. Ferus tries to speak to Obi-Wan because he'd heard a lot about Obi-Wan from Siri even though they'd obviously never had a chance to meet and Siri had mostly fallen out of contact with Obi-Wan by the time she took on Ferus, but he has very little time to do much more than tell Obi-Wan who he is and pass on the news that Siri had died recently during the war.

Then Satine goes to speak to Coruscant to convince them that she's NOT the one sending people to attack supply ships and she ends up bringing Obi-Wan with her. Obi-Wan isn't allowed to take part in the political dinner she has with Ferus and the other senators, so he wanders and ends up meeting Ferus's men, including Waxer, Boil, and Cody. Cody is initially more stiff and formal given Obi-Wan's assumed political position as Satine's spouse, but he warms up to Obi-Wan eventually, especially when Obi-Wan is able to sense the spider droids in the cargo area and proves himself a decent shot. Obi-Wan asks for stories of Ferus because he was fairly certain he wouldn't get a chance to really get to know him on this trip, but he'd been close with Ferus's old master and wanted to get to know the student Siri had trained in the only way available to him. Waxer and Boil are more than happy to tell him what stories they know and even Cody joins in eventually. A few other troopers switch out with Waxer and Boil later and Obi-Wan is able to get even more stories. This is the closest Obi-Wan has felt to a group of people in almost 20 years and he feels practically giddy about it.

When they arrive on Coruscant, Obi-Wan is told to stay in the apartments they're given, but when things go sideways for Satine, she has no one else she can call for help that she trusts except Obi-Wan, so he still comes in to help her with the assassins and manages to make his way into the Senate building to pass over the evidence she'd acquired to Padme, someone Satine believed to be trustworthy. It works, and Satine is able to be "neutral" in the war without having to leave the Republic. Before they leave, though, Satine tries to insist that Obi-Wan should go visit the Jedi Temple, try to see if any of his friends are currently there, just experience being there again, but he refuses. When she tries to push the issue, Obi-Wan snaps at her to drop it and insists that they just leave immediately. She does, and they leave without Obi-Wan being able to get anyone's contact information.

However, Satine is different after this. This was perhaps the first time in almost two decades that the two of them had actually worked TOGETHER on something and it reminded her of how they had used to be. It reminds her of the person Obi-Wan used to be, and the person he was supposed to become, the person he'd chosen to give up for her and her goals for Mandalore. And she hates the person she sees now, this defeated, jaded man she's helped create. So she goes back to him when they arrive on Mandalore and tries to talk to him again about why he didn't want to visit the Jedi Temple. Obi-Wan isn't receptive initially, asking her why she cares and rolling his eyes at her when she claims that she cares because she cares about him. But eventually, her gentle nudging gets him to admit that it would've hurt more than he could bear to walk in his home again knowing he couldn't stay. And it would've been too painful to see his people caught in a war that was killing them, to know just how many of his friends were now dead, and be unable to do anything to help them. It felt almost like it would've been insulting for him to have done so. Satine tells him that she doesn't quite understand, obviously, she'll likely never entirely understand how he feels, but she knows now that she doesn't NEED to understand. She just needs to accept how he feels and be there for him. She asks if there's anything she can do to help, and Obi-Wan is silent for a moment, almost stunned by this changed version of his wife, before telling her that there's nothing she can do to help him with this, but he'll let her know if that changes.

Their relationship doesn't really MEND afterwards, but it becomes less actively hostile. Satine tells him about her day sometimes, including the political things she gets involved in. She asks him questions about his time as a Jedi and listens when he chooses to say something (and when he tells her he'd rather not discuss it). They occasionally take meals together now, although they're often awkward and uncomfortable. Satine starts very VERY quietly looking into the option of a divorce. She doesn't say anything to Obi-Wan in case she can't follow through on it, but she at least wants to know her options.

When Padme shows up, she invites Obi-Wan to dine with them and when they go visit the children's hospital. When the council meets, she invites both Padme AND Obi-Wan, and it's the first time Obi-Wan ever sits in on a meeting with the council. Padme still asks to speak, but Obi-Wan tries to stay as unobtrusive as possible. Even during the rest of Satine's hunt for the perpetrator of the poisoned drinks, he keeps to himself. Right up until she starts threatening the innocent dock worker if he doesn't blow up the warehouse. He steps in and defends the dock worker's insistence that the warehouse could have evidence in it that could actually lead them to who allowed this to happen and while he understands her anger at the situation, making a statement isn't worth losing valuable time and information. Satine almost snaps back at him before his words sink in and she recognizes them to be true and she allows the warehouse to stay, but orders that it be quarantined and blocked off from the public.

Satine still wants to call for Jedi assistance in looking into the issue and Quinlan Vos is sent to help her. Obi-Wan remembers him from before he left, they'd been friends and he remembers being attracted to Quinlan and thinking Quinlan might have similar feelings back, but neither had acted on it and they hadn't quite known each other well enough to keep in contact after he married Satine. Much to Obi-Wan's surprise, he's no less attracted to Quinlan now than he was as a teenager, but it's not something he can actually act on and Quinlan is here to do a job anyway. But Quinlan remembers Obi-Wan, too, and takes the opportunity to get to know him again. His laid-back attitude and sarcastic quips start pulling Obi-Wan out of his shell a little. Satine takes a step back on this one and allows Obi-Wan to be her primary "ambassador" between the government and the Jedi representative, which allows Obi-Wan to get out and do something more productive to actually help Mandalore finally and gives him more time to bond with Quinlan. They discover the Prime Minister's secret black market dealings. Because they're still within the Republic, their supply of goods isn't actually THAT impacted, Almec is just a greedy asshole.

When Quinlan leaves, he insists on leaving his contact information with Obi-Wan and while he does warn that, due to the nature of his work, he likely won't be able to immediately respond very often, he'll make sure to always respond once he's in a position to do so and Obi-Wan should feel free to just keep sending/leaving messages for him. Obi-Wan says he'll think about it, but he sends his first message the next day. The contact is still pretty sporadic, Quinlan sometimes doesn't respond for a week or two at a time, but true to his word, he DOES always respond eventually and always seems happy to have received Obi-Wan's communications.

And then Maul invades Mandalore with Death Watch. Obi-Wan tries to speak up again when Satine says the people have made their choice, he tries to convince her that this fight is hardly over and if she was able to bring together all of the warring clans and force them into a 20-year-peace, she can fight this and keep Death Watch from outplaying her. She points out that Death Watch is armed while most of her guards were killed when the criminals attacked, but she agrees to at least TRY to negotiate and win back the hearts and minds of the people. When she and Obi-Wan show up to negotiate, Pre Viszla isn't there, Maul is, and he immediately kills her. Obi-Wan is barely able to escape because his use of the Force to hold Maul back shocks him enough to give Obi-Wan an opening and Bo-Katan shows up at the last second and gets him to a ship.

Obi-Wan is devastated by the events, obviously, he never wanted Satine DEAD or Mandalore run by a Sith and they'd just started to fix things between them, but a guilty part of him is also relieved because he's finally free. He goes to Coruscant to request asylum from the Republic and and he ends up staying within the Jedi Temple in order to receive their protection. The Jedi set Obi-Wan up with a mind healer to help him through not just the trauma of Death Watch and Maul's attack on Mandalore, but the impact of the entire last few decades since he left the Order. Obi-Wan immediately sheds his formal Mandalorian clothing and starts wearing Jedi robes again, he spends a lot of time reading in the Archives and meditating in the gardens and just wandering around the Temple and sort-of soaking up the serenity that still exists there despite the war and its effect on the Jedi. It's painful to know how many of his old friends and mentors are already lost, still, but there are still many left alive and the Temple still stands. It's still a bastion of hope. Instead of the painful visit he anticipated the last time he was on Coruscant, he can feel himself beginning to heal the moment he steps foot back in the Temple.

He speaks to Yoda quite a lot and while Yoda does ask if Obi-Wan has considered rejoining the Order, Obi-Wan isn't really sure. He'd obviously be a particularly unorthodox case since he'd need to finish (restart really) his training at a very old age and his old Master is long dead. Yoda tells him that Obi-Wan definitely isn't ready yet, he needs to heal a little more, but he hasn't lost as much of his training as he thinks he has, and after the war, they'll need more good Jedi to help replenish their numbers. Yoda promises to take him on as his last student if he does choose to come back, but also promises him that none of them will think any less of him if he decides it's no longer the right path for him to walk. Obi-Wan agrees to think on it.

Eventually, Obi-Wan meets Quinlan again and the attraction they'd once had for each other as teenagers rekindles and combines with the friendship they'd begun developing the last time they met. Obi-Wan is uncertain about having sex given that his only experiences with it have been the disastrous attempts at creating an heir with Satine that were so emotionally draining and so damaging to their relationship, but Quinlan takes it slow and makes sure they both have a good time and doesn't just walk away afterwards, but stays until the morning. They spend time training together, with Obi-Wan trying to remember what he'd been taught before and Quinlan giving him pointers and offering to spar whenever he's up to it.

One day, Obi-Wan is wandering the halls, just looking at the artwork on the walls of the Temple, when he hears someone address him as "Your Grace" and he turns to see Cody standing nearby. Obi-Wan is exceedingly happy to have confirmation that Cody has survived the intervening time since they'd last seen each other and offers to show Cody around the Temple a little (Cody's been given a tour before, but he opts not to tell Obi-Wan that, besides it's a big place and he'll probably have different places to show Cody than Ferus had). They end up spending all day together at the Temple and agree to meet up again before Cody has to leave. This time, Obi-Wan makes sure to get Cody's contact information before he goes and they continue to keep in contact with each other as often as they can.

Bo-Katan eventually shows up at the Temple and demands that he help her fix and restore Mandalore after Maul and Death Watch's takeover because he may have been an outsider, but he was married to Satine for two decades, he has a responsibility to Mandalore, etc etc. And he refuses. He gave his entire life to Mandalore, he gave up everything to try to help Satine fix Mandalore and look where it led. Satine is dead now, he won't make the same mistake twice. If Bo-Katan wants to try to fix what she broke on her home planet, she can go through the proper channels and ask the Republic Senate for assistance. He owes Mandalore nothing. Bo-Katan asks if he ever even loved Satine at all. He looks her dead in the eye and says, "Did you?" Bo-Katan leaves.

Maybe at one point, he ends up running into Anakin in the Temple, like maybe Anakin sits at Obi-Wan's table for a meal or something and he's clearly agitated, so Obi-Wan tries to be polite and ask if he's okay and because Obi-Wan is a complete stranger, Anakin sort-of snaps and tells Obi-Wan things he likely shouldn't. He's probably sleep deprived and caught up in his head and barely thinking about the ramifications of what he's doing, he's just upset and needs to talk to SOMEONE. Maybe he's had an argument with Padme or thinks she's cheating on him or something to that effect, so he can't talk to Padme and he hasn't been able to make it to Palpatine yet, so he's stuck at the Temple and Obi-Wan kind-of just ends up caught in the crossfire, for better or worse, and figures out not only that Anakin is married to a sitting senator (from a planet that doesn't allow their senators to be married no less), but that he did SOME kind of horrible thing not too long ago that his secret wife is aware of and that definitely breaks the Jedi code. Obi-Wan does his best to navigate the minefield that is this conversation before Anakin just sort-of wanders off and then immediately decides to report what he's learned to the Council.

The Council calls Anakin in and interrogates him about this and they speak to Padme to try to get to the bottom of it. Both of them deny it, but it turns out that the Jedi interrogating Anakin and Padme about it spurs one of Padme's handmaidens into finally bringing the evidence she's been collecting to the attention of the Naboo government. She has evidence of Padme being secretly married to a Jedi, evidence that Padme has used her relationship with Anakin to ensure he prioritizes Naboo, evidence that Padme has ditched her responsibilities as a senator to spend time with Anakin. And while Padme had no issue lying to the Jedi Council, especially when all they had was hearsay from one witness, she can't lie to her own government when it's her own handmaiden who is presenting all of this evidence against her. She HAS to confess and her confession inevitably brings down Anakin, too.

The Council offer Anakin the opportunity to make a different choice, to terminate his marriage with Padme and re-commit to the Order. He'd have to be removed from his position as a General in the GAR and grounded to the Temple to speak to a mind healer until the Council decided his commitment was genuine. Anakin initially refuses, but when he tries to go back to Padme, she turns him away. She chose to admit to having covered up Anakin's massacre of the Tuskens as well and that admission turned the accusations from something fairly simple to something much more heinous. Neither Naboo nor the Republic care about the Tuskens, but they do care about one of the Jedi charged with protecting them having massacred a village down to the last child and a sitting senator not reporting him for it. Palpatine has already laid the groundwork for the people of the galaxy to fear the Jedi, so this new information about Anakin is seen as proof that the Jedi could turn on anybody if sufficiently pushed. Padme is going to face serious consequences for covering it up, but the Queen steps in and promises Padme her protection if she agrees to terminate the relationship and promise she'll never see Anakin again. Padme agrees.

Anakin goes back to the Jedi before Palpatine can get to him and agrees to their terms. The relationship is over with Padme, he'll accept the demotion and the mind healing sessions in order to remain a Jedi because it's all he has left. Palpatine can't really speak to him because Anakin's basically under seclusion in the Temple. He's not really speaking to anybody. He does ultimately figure out that it was Obi-Wan who snitched to the Council about him and hates Obi-Wan for it and never wants to speak to him again. Obi-Wan has no problems with that, but he hopes Anakin figures out how to get better, that much anger can't be good for anyone. Ultimately, the mind healing starts to work. Anakin starts being just a little more mindful and starts accepting certain things about Palpatine so that when the Council offers him a job speaking to Palpatine and basically spying on him for the Council, he accepts in order to earn back their trust. Palpatine still tries to manipulate him, pulls out every trick in the book, but this time, Anakin has just enough of a buffer to keep from falling right back into Palpatine's orbit. He figures out Palpatine's a Sith, informs the Council, and ends up invited along when they go to arrest him. Palpatine doesn't survive.

And after that, it's just a matter of everyone settling into a happy fix-it AU. Anakin leaves the Jedi on amicable terms and goes off to do whatever, who cares. Padme stays on Naboo to reconnect with her family. The war ends, the Separatists probably have to realize how little of their government actually functioned and maybe gain a few clues about the atrocities done in their name. Some of them ultimately rejoin the Republic in the wake of these revelations, others refuse and try to continue their own government together, but this time they're actually able to make a treaty with the Republic. The clones are able to stand up for themselves and refuse to continue to be an army for a Republic no longer at war and the Senate votes to demilitarize. The Jedi's work doesn't end with the war, peacekeeping involves a lot more than just fighting after all and this is the part of the job all of them have been hoping to make it back to.

Obi-Wan decides to take Yoda up on his offer and rejoins the Jedi Order as Yoda's last Padawan to finish the journey he started so long ago.

#star wars #obi-wan kenobi #codywan #commander cody #quinlan vos #quinobi #anti obitine #obitine critical #anti satine kryze #satine kryze critical #anti satine #satine critical #obitine arranged marriage au

205 notes · View notes

the-valiant-valkyrie · 3 months ago

Text

I don’t know if this is going to resonate or matter to anyone, but as a black gamer who has seen this trope time and time again in video games and tv and movies, I really like the way NotGames goes about establishing Jeremy’s character. Specifically, how they dive around turning him into another victim of the dreaded white savior trope.

[Not for Broadcast spoilers beneath cut 🫡]

Personally, I think Jeremy separates himself from falling into this trope in two ways. The first, and the most simple of the two, is Megan’s presence and character. Though she starts out being the culture correspondent without much political or cultural sway, she inevitably rises to the same position Jeremy once held of being the country’s most beloved and trusted news anchor. Despite having this position, she hardly treats it the same way that Jeremy did before her.

She’s willing to use her power to benefit Advance- and by extension, herself. She understands that the country trusts her, and uses her position on Channel One to placate them, lulling them into a false sense of security and compliance. She acts in every way Jeremy wouldn’t- and while she comes to her senses as the world begins to crumble around her, she made a bold departure from Jeremy’s ethics in a way that has explicit consequences.

Not saying that Megan is white, because she isn’t- or her actress isn’t, at any rate- but she hits every other beat that Jeremy hits in regards to power and influence, and by introducing a character who does it wrong, it’s way easier to digest a character who does it right. It doesn’t feel as out of the blue. In many ways, Megan is a great foil for Jeremy’s character.

The second (and more important) element of Jeremy that stops him from drifting into the white savior trope is the way that he weaponizes his defiance. I’m not sure if it was written intentionally or not, but Jeremy is a really great example of being an ally to those around him- regardless of if it’s in regards to race, or status, or gender.

Jeremy is acutely aware of how much influence he has over people around him. He knows how much his word matters to those who watch Channel One- he knows the National Nightly News is the station everyone trusts. And so, when he is asked by everyone around him to throw his morals to the wayside for the sake of Advance, he refuses and defies them in whatever way he can.

He addresses the power outages and resource shortages directly, despite being scripted to treat them as alleged claims. He outright goes off-script after J-Zuss’ performance to tell their viewers that the NNN will never silence ideals. Even when he has to endorse things like the Team Membership Cards or transition centers, he twists the knife just enough to elude to his disapproval, even if he can’t say the quiet part out loud.

But he also goes out of his way to abide by his moral compass even to his own detriment. And I think that’s a really important- and potentially even overlooked- element of his character.

The entire reason he has a gun during the Heatwave broadcast in the first place is because he wrestled it off an officer. And why did he wrestle it off an officer? Because he was silencing one of his guests- arresting them for speaking their mind- and violently retaliating when his friends tried to help. Even when Truman was practically slandering him- accusing him of being the Advance bootlicker he would rather die than become- push comes to shove, Jeremy would rather scrap with an officer than stay silent and passive.

Jeremy Donaldson is not a passive man. Because he is aware that passiveness is the same thing as compliance. He is aware that staying silent about Advance is the same thing as endorsing them. He is aware that not helping is the same thing as harming. And his moral compass will not allow him to become a blunt instrument for Advance to wield.

The CCO would have tackled and arrested anyone else who dared to get in the way of his work. But no one would dare hurt Jeremy Donaldson- especially not on live television.

The security team in the Heatwave B route would have gunned anyone else down in a matter of seconds. But they wouldn’t dare do that to Jeremy Donaldson. They give him a countdown- hell, the even slow down their counting to give him more time to come to his senses.

Because they know the power he has over the country. Because they can’t just put their boot on his neck and bully him like they bully everyone else.

I found it very fascinating that Alan’s race was meant to play a critical part in his position as a pawn to the dark side of Disrupt. How he was supposed to be a pied piper for people of color, lulling them into a dance sense of security so they could all be rid of once Advance was out of the picture. Admittedly, I bristled a little bit when I realized the new, race-related layer that added to Jeremy specifically being the one to expose Disrupt for who they really are. But, when looking at his character in a deeper light, I feel like it’s hard to see him as a standard issue of the white savior printing press.

Jeremy, to me, is a great example of a white ally protagonist. He weaponizes his position of power for the purpose of good- does things that other people can not do for the purpose of good. I feel like I don’t see a lot of characters written that well in most media- especially not explicitly political medias like this one.

#nfb #not for broadcast #Jeremy Donaldson #Megan Wolfe #i mentioned her so she can get tagged. why not. she’s relevant to this #not Alan though sorry bud #LONG POST but it’s important. to ME #read my flop black perspective boy. or die by my blade.#wizard studies #what the hell it gets the gamer tag too

24 notes · View notes

nereidprinc3ss · 4 months ago

Note

aubrey plaza is a zionist. all i had to google was “aubrey plaza zionist”; i understand they were being very rude about it but please attempt to educate yourself next time. ❤️

hi, I'm writing this on my laptop because I couldn't focus on my phone so please excuse if the capitalization is weird or inconsistent, and fair warning this is going to be very rambly and not incredibly eloquent. but we are for real going to talk about this now

i do not consider Aubrey plaza relevant to what is going on in Gaza. i do not consider knowing every single actor's uninformed takes on a genocide as being useful or important. a lot of these celebrities don't even have a high school diploma and can't conceive of an issue they cant pay their way out of, so I don't go to them for their politics or their ethics. she is utterly irrelevant to Gaza and she is utterly irrelevant to me politically speaking. I called her hot. that has absolutely no bearing on my values and I sincerely resent the idea that calling a celebrity hot suddenly means you are responsible for knowing everything about them and you are endorsing all of their idiotic takes. I absolutely would not consider knowing Aubrey plaza's take on a two state solution as being self-education because it literally could not mean less. I know my opinions, I know where I stand, and she does not factor in.

if we want to talk about educating ourselves, lets talk about following journalistic sources on the ground in Gaza, lets talk about reading books (a good read is the hundred year's war on Palestine by Rashid khalidi), lets talk about donating. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be the most educated person in the world, or that I have the authority to make declarative statements about Palestine, but I sincerely hope people do not consider paying close attention to American celebrity culture as being activism or self-education. what is going on in Gaza is more than any of us can conceive of and I think its really strange to water it down and make it about celebrities. if this were an Aubrey plaza stan blog, these messages would receive a very different response, but as it stands, I am not an Aubrey plaza stan, never claimed to be, and spoke about her one time. I am glad to know that we have fundamentally opposing views, and if I were in any way supporting her that would stop with this information. but I'm not and never was. what I will not do is call her hot again because Zionism is NOT sexy! and I agree that we should not be uplifting celebrities who are known zionists. but if your activism only goes as far as knowing what actors and actresses have the wrong opinions, that's not enough and it's not activism.

i hope this doesn't come across as too defensive. I acknowledge that this is not the most productive use of anyone's time. I'm probably making it too much about myself but it has really been odd to be accused of being a Zionist because I said one thing about a celebrity when that is so unaligned with my values. I'm aware that is such a first world issue--me whining because I don't like how I'm being perceived on the Internet, but I think it bothers me because this is so far from being an issue about Aubrey plaza and I find it upsetting that the most flagrant and vehement pushback i've ever gotten on this account has been about one comment I made about a celebrity because that's all people know about the genocide in Gaza. that's not activism and it is not useful or helpful to the people being rounded up and exterminated.

tumblr is not the number one place to be educating yourself, but I will link to a website that is a really good starting place to learn more about the issue. its true that if you don't have an expendable income, being informed and educated is the best tool of resistance you have to help the palestinian people. and that doesn't mean just skimming and reblogging whatever comes across your dash, it means seeking out information and making a concerted effort to learn. I would really really recommend this website as a starting point if you don't know much, it's not overwhelming and it's very informative.

i haven't talked about it at length here because sometimes I think an issue warrants its own dedicated space, not to be mixed in with smut and fanfic and my day to day ramblings, but I am capable of being wrong and sometimes there's not a clear right or wrong thing to do. I apologize if I handled anything poorly but I assure you that my goal is always to be doing the right thing. still, I am not an authority, and I don't become an authority just because I have a small following. I don't think everyone with a few thousand followers on Tumblr is qualified to be talking about this because most of us are not educators and are not well informed enough ourselves to be trying to educate anyone else, but it's entirely possible I haven't been clear enough about where I stand. this is just a criminal minds blog, but the girl who is typing on her silly little Chromebook in her silly little bedroom right now is always pro decolonization. I do not wish to associate with Zionists, on my blog or in my personal life.

and let me reiterate I'm not an authority, I don't know everything, and I don't claim to. but you also don't know anything about me beyond this blog, which is so incredibly far removed from any real world issues. I truly hope Tumblr is not the place where any of us are doing most of our activism and talking about Palestine.

anyways I wrote this over the course of like two hours and will probably come back and edit it a lot so please do not take any of this as being like set in stone, some of it is reactionary and some of it is more level headed and well thought out, but I hope it makes enough sense and that I got my point across effectively and in a way that is not harmful

#asks #ramblings

32 notes · View notes

rosesradio · 9 days ago

Note

if nico and jason attended edgarton post-hoo, what extracurriculars and electives would they take? (yes i need validation that some ideas i have for an au are in-character)

so i remember seeing the thing on jason taking just about every extracurricular in existence both to experience mortal life & distract from the demigod side of things, & that's one thing i can actually agree with richard on. i could totally see him wanting to explore any & everything, and nico can't help but fall more & more in love with him as he watches him discover who he is.

jason would show him plants he helped grow in gardening club and have movie nights with movies from film club, yapping about behind-the-scenes fun facts. he'd get all flustered, asking if he's talking too much, but nico's so lost in how much he loves jason that he wasn't even paying attention to the movie in the first place.

also, ofc, jason picking up sports with ease, grateful to be playing on a team instead of being the leader. nico never intended to be the kind of boyfriend to go to his boyfriend's events in full face paint, but once he sees jason playing rugby...👀 he's there, face paint and all

also hc that even though he excels at the topics, jason doesn't like any sort of club related to like...debate or politics, because that reminds him too much of his praetor days. not to mention in one of those clubs some pos guy would be like "let's have a debate about human rights" & nico would have to hold jason back from summoning lightning on his ass 💀

as for nico, i don't think he'd be into as many extracurriculars (he loves his rotting at home/in the dorm time, just like me fr), though he would try out some at jason & his friends' insistence. nico would join some sort of paranormal research club, quickly rising in the ranks as he has the Strange Ability to attract paranormal sightings like nothing else. as much as jason respects & admires nico's underworld culture, the club isn't really his thing. still, he'll go on watches every now and then & pretend to be scared so he can hold nico's hand <3

also, i know edgarton is an all-boys school, but like...in my mind, piper goes there too, and she has nico join the baking club...they deserve to make some tasty treats together even if nico burns his more often than not

#jasico #jason grace #nico di angelo #pjo #asks

15 notes · View notes

coochiequeens · 2 years ago

Text

Yes I already covered this and how Nessa’s car was vandalized. But I will always share stories about the gender cult threatening women.

A popular TikTok comedian has reported her car was vandalized following a series of videos she did criticizing non-binary activist Jeffery Marsh for allegedly inviting minors to communicate with him privately.

Shumirun Nessa, also known as @therealoverloadcomedyon TikTok, became the target of trans activist aggression after posting a series of videos responding to non-binary content creator Jeffery Marsh. In her first video, dated February 22, Nessa took issue with Marsh’s “therapeutic services,” some of which appear to be geared towards minors.

In Nessa’s video, she showed a few seconds of a close-up of Marsh wearing green eyeshadow, false eyelashes, and speaking through clenched teeth as angrily told his viewers to “stop telling trans people we’re inspirational.”

Mimicking Marsh’s pressed tone, Nessa tells Marsh: “Stop telling kids to go on your Patreon and chat to you privately without their parents knowing.” Nessa ends her video with a facial expression characteristic of her comedic styling, one which has earned her over seven million followers on the TikTok platform.

Following her critique, Nessa became the target of backlash from trans activists, who accused her of mischaracterizing Marsh’s intentions towards minors and likening her words to murder and violence. While many replies to Nessa’s video thanked her for her cadence, others took the opportunity to attack her appearance, religion, and political views.

“Please show us proof.. or are you just accusing someone with hearsay? Allah would be proud..NOT,” one user wrote in response to Nessa’s February 22 video.

Another commented: “This is transphobic. I have made excuses for you when you previously did problematic things but this is definitely far past the line. You are spreading harmful rhetoric that gets trans people murdered.”

Despite being a Bangladeshi woman who was born in and lives in England, one user @bluebelleofthesouth2.0 responded to Nessa’s 18-second clip with information regarding “child marriage in the Middle East.”

The woman shared the screenshot of information with a caption addressing Nessa directly:

“I genuinely liked you before this. Now I see you so fucking differently. Jeffrey isn’t fucking doing that shit and until you can provide proof that they are SIT DOWN… But we have proof of what men in your culture do every fucking day to little girls.”

Another user responding to the clip accused Nessa of “tokenizing” herself for “white supremacists,” and suggested that Nessa “really need[s] to go with the ethnic project.”

One non-binary TiktToker named Chelsea Hart responded to Nessa with an emotional two-minute video which she has since made private. In the video, Hart proclaimed that Nessa had “put Jeffrey’s life in danger and put every nonbinary person and trans person’s life in danger with [her] behavior.”

Hart said Nessa’s humorous TikTok was the “third time [she] has seen this lie about Jeffrey.” Hart declared that “recently, a bunch of conservatives have made it a point to edit Jeffrey’s videos in such a way that it leaves out the context that Jeffrey is a counsellor and a coach helping adults deal with childhood trauma.”

She says she does not know how Nessa got “swept up into far-right conspiracy theories,” and swears multiple times while defending Marsh, insisting that his content is for adults and adults only.

She talks directly to Nessa, saying “you were so willing, without any groundwork, to label Jeffrey a predator which would put Jeffrey’s life in danger…”

Hart goes on to reference the murder of a trans-identified teen Brianna Ghey that took place in England and accuses Nessa of “putting another trans life in danger… because cis people always believe each other over us.” She continues lecturing Nessa and again asserts that her short video “put a trans person’s life in danger less than a couple of weeks after a trans person was brutally stabbed to death in the country where [Nessa] lives.”

“Jeffrey Marsh is a fucking counselor,” Hart angrily shares, demanding Nessa take her video down.

In response to the backlash against her February 22 video, Nessa uploaded her second TikTok on March 1.

In her video Nessa says: “…a lot of people made stitches of me saying I’m transphobic… they’ve even attacked my scarf, my religion… and these people have also said [Marsh is] not talking to the kids.”

To defend her position, Nessa pieced together five clips of Marsh directly addressing minors taken from his own TikTok page, adding “so yeah, there’s a lot of videos of [Marsh] addressing kids.”

The main video she takes issue with is one where Marsh tells his audience: “Your parents screwed up. It’s okay to say so! That’s why I made a Patreon.”

Nessa responds to that clip and asks Marsh, “So you wanna talk to kids whose parents have screwed up? Why? Why you wanna talk to these particular kids? Why?”

She stitches more of Marsh’s footage where he informs his audience that his Patreon allows them to “connect in a way that has more privacy, so [they] could talk to each other in a way that’s more open and stuff that [they] wouldn’t share, like, in the comments…”

Nessa invites Marsh to clarify on his offer of private communication.

“So you wanna talk to kids on a social media platform privately about topics that cannot be talked about in… comment sections… because why? Why you wanna do that? What could be the reason? You teach kids how to go no contact with their parents…is that what you’re teaching them on Patreon? Or is it this” she asks, as she points to a screenshot from Marsh’s Patreon where he shared a post headlined “more on sex.”

Then Nessa goes into some frequently used grooming tactics by predators which include gaining access and isolating the victim.

Finally, Nessa shows a clip of Marsh in a tiara talking to his viewers and saying, “If you do not have a family that loves you… I’m going to be your family.”

Nessa boldly responds, “No, you cannot. You are a stranger on the internet. You are not their family,” and also notes that age restrictions can be turned off on Patreon, so children can indeed access his account where he coaches and encourages kids to go “no contact” with their parents.

Nessa ends her final video telling viewers, “you guys decide what you wanna believe.”

But on March 3, Nessa would report she had faced a real-world attack for her videos on Marsh.

Calling it her final address of the controversy, Nessa shows multiple clips of Marsh’s own content in which he repeatedly encourages his followers to go “no contact” with their parents.

Nessa responds to the clips and asks her own audience and to those intent on debasing her, “So if Jeffrey Marsh is really wanting to talk to the adults, why is… why are they already saying to the kids, ‘go no contact with your adults…?’”

Nessa even refers to Marsh with “they/them” pronouns in a show of respect for Marsh and his “nonbinary” identity and to prove that she is concerned with his content regarding children as opposed to his “gender identity.”

Approximately two days prior to filming her final video on the topic, her car was vandalized outside her home. She admits that she has no cameras to show footage and does not know who is responsible for damaging her vehicle. Still, Nessa asserts that this is her final video on the topic “for obvious reasons.”

Nessa provides footage of her car in the TikTok, showing one of the back doors had a piece of panel seemingly ripped off. She confirmed in the comments she is in the process of getting cameras to monitor her property.

While Nessa received an immense amount of backlash for stating her concerns about Marsh’s conduct, she is not the only one who has expressed similar worries.

On March 3, the same day as Nessa recorded her final video on Marsh, screenshots began to circulate on social media from a UK school warning parents and carers about Marsh’s content.

While the source TikTok for the screenshot has been made unavailable, it was initially posted by a mother who claimed she had received it from her son’s school.

Marsh has long been the topic of discussion amongst pro-woman activists for regularly denying the existence of biological sex, and even taking platforms to advertise feminine hygiene products.

In 2020, Marsh took place in a tampon advertisement campaign while calling himself a “non-binary person who does not menstruate.” Marsh claimed his intention behind taking the paid gig was to help end the stigma associated with periods. He said in a video: “And then the hate came for me,” and scolded women who took issue with his participation in the tampon promotion, claiming that they were “policing” gender by criticizing him.

In January, Reduxx noted that Marsh was well-known amongst child safeguarding advocates for his catalogue of videos directly addressing the “kids” in his audience. Marsh has encouraged people to go “no contact” with families or relatives who invalidate their gender identity, and has advised parents to provide “gender affirming care” for their children.

Violence directed at women who criticize gender ideology or proponents of child transitioning has seen a distinct uptick over the past year.

In November, Reduxx reported that mother and activist Jeanna Hoch was attacked after attending a Tacoma demonstration in support of women’s right to free speech. Colorado Springs Antifa published a blog post about Hoch on their official website in which her home address was offered at the top of the post, as well as a link to a flyer with her photo, full name, age, and address. The flyer also featured a QR code and a link to the blog post itself, which painted Hoch and the other women who attended the Tacoma event out to be far-right fascists.

On November 6, Antifa members distributed physical copies of the flyer in Hoch’s neighborhood and showed up at her home. Antifa members also took pictures of one of her vehicles and posted her license plate online. One of her vehicles was vandalized during the visit, with one Antifa member gluing a death threat to the driver’s side front windshield of her car.

Most recently, a Reduxx exclusive revealed a woman in Australia was left permanently disabled after being physically assaulted by a trans activist for her views on gender ideology.

By Yuliah Alma Yuliah is a junior researcher and journalist at Reduxx. She is a passionate advocate for women's rights and child safeguarding. Yuliah lives on the American east coast, and is an avid reader and book collector.

Early life and education

Marsh was born in York, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a farm nearby. Marsh often spoken about having felt misunderstood during a self-identified rough childhood.

Marsh attended college at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and earned a BFA in Musical Theater, later moving to New York City to pursue a career in cabaret performance[1] before becoming an internet celebrity[2]and leader in the LGBTIQ community.[3]

If Chelsea’s defense is that he’s a counselor then my question is he actually licensed?

#Tiktok #Jeffery Marsh #Shumirun Nessa #@therealoverloadcomedyon #Chelsea Hart #Is Jeffrey a licensed counselor?#Trans cult and violence against women #Trans cult silencing women

284 notes · View notes

ilovedthestars · 2 months ago

Text

i think i'm gonna have to go back to doing a mini liveblog of Hands of the Emperor because this book just gives me so many Thoughts.

one thing i am appreciating only a few pages in is the depth of worldbuilding. it goes beyond the classic "think through how every system works, the weather, the economy, the government, etc, and make sure they all Make Sense" and indeed it honestly doesn't seem that concerned with Making Sense, at least not in the way where every element has to be planned out and fit together in advance. it's not that it doesn't, it's just not trying that hard

no, what i'm impressed by is the thought that's been put into the cultures. Victoria Goddard clearly understands, as a friend of mine once explained to me, that culture is much more than "food, festivals and fun." she's put thought into all the little parts of a culture that are so much harder to see and understand. things like formality and politeness and humor. unspoken social rules that nonetheless guide how everyone acts.

and it's all made visible and used to great effect, particularly to highlight the tension Cliopher feels when returning to his hometown. all the little mismatches in expectations, like when his old friend laughs at his statements of fact as if he's making a joke, that make him realize that he doesn't understand this familiar place & people as intuitively as he used to. it's really effective at showing that discomfort, in a way that i don't think you could get any other way

#stars reads lays #<- liveblog tag (has some stuff in it from the last time i tried to read this & didn't finish)#lays of the hearth fire #hands of the emperor #'mini liveblog' she says and then sits down at her laptop to write three paragraphs after like 30 pages of book

14 notes · View notes

bharv · 9 months ago

Text

Also I planned this and shared with some folks and others might find this interesting!

In my little canon world Gortash has many lovers, and I compiled a little list of his favourites!

Everybody listed here happened multiple times over a time period, so people like Haarlep which was a very set period and one off seductions like Liria (the name I gave to the elf whose head can be found in the workshop in Moonrise) don't count here.

Neither technically does Manva Warhelm, though she sits on top for always being on his mind sue me.

Putting under the cut because Enver Gortash is a bad, bad, bad man.

Bane. I mean this goes without saying. Visits from his God are always eventful.

Musahn Mensahn (Human) a Calishite importer of people who docks every few months. One of the few people Enver is actually fond of, Musahn is a shrewd, cultured man who spins a good yarn and is an attentive, gentle presence in his life. Afternoons with him are like a little holiday.

Del Dawnstar (Dwarf) A young employee at Mistress Yare’s flophouse in The Wide, Enver has been seeing them since they were a teenager starting out. Their position fluctuates; on the one hand they will do anything he asks of them as long as their price is met and he has been able to shape them to his tastes, but on the other hand, sometimes he likes a bit more of a fight (features in Let Me Adorn You)

Hester Ashenheart (Dwarf) A servant in Gortash’s household. He knows Hester does not like him, but that is part of the appeal on both sides. She has found herself in his bed on a number of occasions, often when he has received a less than pleasing letter - and she bears the brunt of the worst of his temper (Features in The Portrait)

Franc Peartree (Human, deceased) Franc and Enver have been working together for around a decade and have been lovers for almost all of that time. Franc has been a close supporter of Enver’s rise across business, politics, and religion, and their affair has always been one of a mutual understanding of his place.

Kruugar (Half-Orc, deceased) Kru is a mercenary who has worked for Enver across jobs. This one is pretty much just physical, and Kru has a prosthetic that Gortash fitted himself as a prototype (having also cut off his arm)

Kerrie Lovelace (Half-Elf) Gortash traded Kerrie and her brother Ellyan from Calimshan, and let her be bought by Karlach Cliffgate in what he saw as a very funny and misplaced moment of chivalry. She went on to become Ulder Ravengard’s mistress, which then sparked his interest; he blackmails her for her company when he feels he wants that particular feeling of power, and she cries all the way through, which is exactly what he is looking for (features in The Portrait and Ammunition)

Ivo Thorngrove (Halfling) A very shrewd moneylender, Ivo has been working with Enver for decades. They had a much more physical relationship when both men were younger, which has petered out into something more familial for the most part, though Ivo can sometimes be persuaded…

Helsik (Dwarf) A completely transactional, only occasional relationship when he wants something. He admires her business sense.

Wisteria Jannath (Human, deceased) Another transactional relationship, Enver nonetheless enjoys her sharp wit and warmth, and her understanding of what their relationship is.

Ettvard Needle (Human) Editor of Baldur’s Mouth. Enver met Ettvard when working on improvements to the efficiency of print and they formed a close working relationship which became closer when he joined the Banite church.

Ffion Goldgrind (Dwarf, deceased) Another working relationship, he sees Ffion when he needs a heavy reset.

Fariza Linnaker (Human) Technically his wife. Fariza was kidnapped and held as collateral for ransom to attempt to get Lady Ruth to hand over some of the family’s gold. She did not play ball, a move that Gortash deeply admired, and instead suggested that he keep her if he really wants the investment of the Linnakers. She has gone from locked up in a safehouse, visited only by Manva who “trained” her in what to expect should she live, to being locked up in his estate. He loathes her weakness.

Avery Sonshal (Human) Avery is a recent addition, an ambitious young man who is a Banite “friend of Gortash.” Enver doesn’t think much of him, but he takes a cock well and is eager to please, so is also easy to subjugate.

#dunno how to tag this lmao #it's my own little universe #my writing #i guess

28 notes · View notes

wonder-worker · 4 months ago

Text

"Despite her indisputable agency and successes as ruler of the Mercians, the title of ‘queen’ eluded Aethelflaed. [...] Her feats were adjudged by Irish, Welsh, and Anglo-Norman chroniclers as worthy of the title, but in contemporary West Saxon and Mercian sources Aethelflaed is known as the ‘Lady of the Mercians’. This title was not an indictment of her merits, but rather a reflection of Mercia’s relative status within the context of West Saxon hegemonic expansion. […] To all intents and purposes, every indication within contemporary West Saxon and Mercian sources is that Aethelflaed was not viewed as a queen, that her subordination to her brother [Edward the Elder of Wessex] was well known, despite her having garnered immense authority as the Lady of the Mercians."

-Matthew Firth, "Early English Queenship, 850-1000: Potestas Reginae"

Aethelflaed's role as co-ruler in the tenth century [...] takes on an element of pragmatism. There was no male heir to the rulership of Mercia, and presumably no prospect of this given either Aethelflaed's abstinence or Aethelred's illness. In turn, their daughter Aelfwynn would only have been around 12 years old at the turn of the tenth century, thus representing no reasonable alternative to her father’s rule. For Edward, annexation of Mercia was not a resolution to this problem, especially with Aethelred still alive, no matter his physical condition. This would have risked rebellion in Mercia and conflict between the two kingdoms, which would have rendered both vulnerable and jeopardised the gains that had been made against the Danes in preceding decades. For Aethelred and Edward, Aethelflaed's promotion to co-ruler served a useful political artifice. It maintained the status quo, giving the semblance of Aethelred's continued involvement in governance, even if those powers in practice devolved to Aethelflaed. This then avoided any potential power vacuum developing during Aethelred's convalescence, it placed an individual with personal loyalty to both rulers at the head of Mercian government, and it ensured a succession tolerable to both Edward and the Mercian elites in the case of Aethelred's death. In short, Aethelflaed's rise to power preserved political stability. It remains, however, that in all extant diplomatic evidence for the couple’s rule prior to 911, this was formalised as co-rule and a tradition of this, as codified in Aethelred and Aethelflaed's charters, entered subsequent cultural memory.

Although Aethelflaed was well positioned to take over governance of Mercia upon Aethelred death, this did not mean that the Mercian ruler’s passing went unnoticed in Wessex. Aethelred's death represented a shift in the West Saxon–Mercian political dynamic, and Edward was poised to take advantage. According to the Chronicle, he immediately moved on Mercia’s southern borders, seizing London and Oxford and their surrounding lands. Yet there is no indication that this was an act of aggression directed at Aethelflaed herself, and it may be that this annexation represented some agreement between the siblings. The Register characterises Aethelflaed's period of sole rule as one of great activity, defined by remarkable outward-facing political and military agency. Aethelflaed goes on to build further burhs in the north and east of Mercia, annex key Danelaw burhs, and even arrange an incursion into Wales. However, she is never shown to be active in Mercia’s south. The implication is that the West Saxon–Mercian hinterland was stable, and sovereignty settled, so long as the siblings ruled over the two kingdoms. This allowed both Edward and Aethelflaed to turn their attentions to the project of extending their hegemony into those territories that had been claimed by the Heathen Army at the end of the ninth century.

[...] For all her independence in ruling Mercia, any doubt that Aethelflaed was, at least on a performative level, subject to her brother’s authority, should be put aside on review of the numismatic evidence. No coins were issued in either Aethelred or Aethelflaed's name. Those Mercian coin designs likely to derive from their reigns are remarkable for their distinctiveness – a symbolism undoubtedly imbued with meaning for a Mercian audience – but they bear the inscription Eaduueard rex: King Edward.

[...] However, whatever political or cultural considerations lay behind the Register’s decision to characterise Aethelflaed as Lady of the Mercians, rather than as their queen, was clearly absent from external sources. The histories and chronicles of societies separated from tenth-century England by time or place (or both) demonstrate no such reservations. While few sources purport to record the perspectives of Scandinavian settlers to Mercia’s east, no less their experiences of the Lady of the Mercians, Welsh and Irish sources provide valuable insights. In reporting her death in its entry for 918, Annales Cambriae names her Queen Aethelflaed (Edelflet regina), as does Brut y Tywysogion (Edelffleda vrenhines). This prominence is yet more pronounced in the Irish annals. In noting her passing, the Annals of Ulster declare her to have been famosissima regina Saxonum (the most famous queen of the Saxons). The claim that she was queen of the Saxons, rather than just Mercia, is also reflected in Brut y Tywysogion, as well as in Fragmentary Annals. In this latter, of course, she features more prominently than the simple recording of her death in the other Welsh and Irish chronicles. Fragmentary Annals names her as queen around eight times, identifying her as ‘Queen of the Saxons’ (rioghan Saxan) to Aethelred's ‘King of the Saxons’ (righ Saxan). All four texts are, as noted, later compositions or collations, and thus not necessarily contemporary to Aethelflaed's queenship. Nonetheless, they give some insight into the cultural memory of Aethelflaed's rule in Mercia and the perceptions of it held by her western neighbours.

It may also be that Aethelflaed's legacy simply grew in the telling. And here we come full circle to Henry of Huntingdon’s panegyric. William of Malmesbury does not accord Aethelflaed the title of queen, nor does John of Worcester. Geffrei Gaimar introduces Aethelred as king of the Mercians and later asserts that Aethelflaed was the rightful heir to his kingdom, but she herself is never named queen. Henry is, in contrast, refreshingly direct. While his prose closely follows the Register, and so titles Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians, his verse is unambiguous. Aethelflaed was regina potens rexque trophea parans (a mighty queen and a victory-winning king). There is, of course, no evidence for Aethelflaed's ceremonial endowment as queen, quite the opposite in fact. But, to borrow from Stafford again, medieval authors ‘knew a queen when they saw one’, and in Aethelflaed, Henry of Huntingdon clearly saw a queen in action. So too did Welsh and Irish chroniclers who compiled their various annals around the same time as Henry. Perhaps then, the ideals of queenship had shifted into the twelfth century and beyond, and so Aethelflaed was more readily recognisable as a queen by later historians. More likely, however, is that the political impetus that saw her modelled as the ‘Lady of the Mercians’ had died alongside the West Saxon dynasty in 1066.

[...] Aethelflaed's political trajectory was remarkable among pre-Norman royal women. She ruled Mercia as its queen in practice, if not in name, for seven years, exercising singular military and political agency. She achieved political stability within her realm, secured its defensive capabilities, reconquered lost territories, and expanded Mercian hegemony to the north, east, and west. There is little wonder that the Lady of the Mercians stood out to later generations of historians, that she attracted their admiration and praise, and that they claimed for her the title that she had been denied in her own lifetime: queen.

#SO glad he spelled it out properly I'm tired of this misunderstanding #historicwomendaily #aethelflaed #anglo-saxons #10th century #english history #Æthelflæd #Edward the Elder #my post #queue

17 notes · View notes

stephofromcabin12 · 5 months ago

Note

(🗣️) I'm trying to write a PJO fanfic and my oc is a daughter of Athena, so my question is how would you make the oc different enough from Annabeth to make her seem like her own charecter. I think I asked something like this before.

Good question!

Firstly consider what similarities they *don’t* share. Its fine to have similarities — they are half siblings after all — as long as you can balance it with some things that set them apart! It doesn’t have to be huge, and they don’t have to be polar opposites.

Examples:

- Appearance, age.

- Place of birth, family situation.

- Interests, skillsets (reading comic books and being into spelling bees is also a sign of intelligence + counts towards being a bookworm, just saying)

- Humor, cultural knowledge (im never going to let the show writers live down that they wrote Annabeth to have never seen a movie. Even before she ran away? Ur telling me Frederick Chase didn’t sit his baby daughter down for A land before time or Labyrinth? Winnie The Pooh? The dark crystal?? JURASSIC PARK????But he’s so nerdy???? Huh????)

On that note:

- There are many ways of being the same thing. Intelligence and strategising can play out in a million ways.

They might both be smart, but in what areas do they excell?

Where are their interests? Annabeth has her love of architechture, maybe your oc is super nerdy about geography and cartography (good for battle strategising) or even cooking (it is a science after all) — the list goes on!

Places that require intelligence, science and logic:

Art restoration and archival work

Cooking and baking (candy making is straight up wizardry, and Demeter kids are unlikely to be into that specific area of cooking)

Finances and business

Painting/sculpting (art in general)

Music, composition especially but also mixing and producing.

Film and stage managing (techies for theatres is a very Athena kid career)

Logistics in general. Every field ever needs people who can work a spreadsheet and calculate all the possible outcomes of a situation before it happens.

Cleaning (if you mix the wrong chemicals ur gonna poison yourself with mustard gas or something worse)

Teaching

Politics

Journalism

Law

Running a non-profit org/organizing events and protests

Archeology (Must be into: dirt and ugly shoes, sincerely, and lovingly, an archeology dropout)

Anthropology, Psychology, Linguistics

Learning languages in general

Vis dev and animation

I could go on but you get the point I think

Basically: Don’t focus on the core areas they have some overlap. If your oc isn’t named Annabeth, likes archaeology and wears a yankee’s cap, you’re probably good to go.

Remember that everything shapes a person (and character) so it’s not so much about the trait or skill itself but more the effects those things have on your character. Same goes for their relationships.

Lastly consider their purpose and goal (purpose is outside the story: You as a writer deciding what role the character will play. Goal is inside the story: The ‘thing’ your character strives for)

It’s probably not the same as Annabeth’s — so work from there until the venn diagram isn’t a flat circle; some overlaps are fine but they’re not one and the same.

I hope that helps!

#asks and answers #writing advice #ask game🫒#🫒#im still working on that compendium on making characters 101

14 notes · View notes

manias-wordcount · 2 years ago

Note

Got another request for ya! :D

Can I please request headcanons for Joker, Ann, and Akechi being invited to Sunday dinner with their American S/O's family?

Sunday Dinner HCs (Akira Kurusu, Ann Takamaki, Goro Akechi)

𝗔/𝗡: 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗼 !!!! 𝗶𝗺 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗳𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝘆 (𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗸𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘀 𝗟𝗢𝗟) 𝘀𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗶 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝘁. 𝗲𝗻𝗷𝗼𝘆!

𝙒𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚? ⇒ 𝙈𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩

𝙟𝙤𝙞𝙣 𝙢𝙮 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙘𝙤𝙧𝙙 𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙧?

Joker

Your family will be charmed by him, that’s for sure

Your family is gonna think he’s real handsome and they’re gonna say he sounds real smart and polite

Might be a little blunt when telling him to speak up when his accent gets in the way of him speaking English but they’re impressed by how fluent he is

And you know someone is gonna say “Damn, and I can barely speak English!”

At the table, someone (probably Mom or Grandma or even Auntie) is trying to fix his plate

“Just point at what you want baby, I’ll get it for you” type beat

Of course, he’s a bit overwhelmed and culture-shocked- America is a very different place from Japan after all

But with your help and with how excited and welcoming your family actually is, he gets comfortable relatively quickly

And it feels like there’s never a dull moment while he’s with you and your family in the states

Just don’t tell them he was on probation- that’s a whole can of worms you don’t want to mess with

Ann Takamaki

First thing you’re gonna hear when the food gets set out and everyone starts fixing plates is “Eat baby, you’re too skinny”

Now of course, you know that you and Ann are both perfectly fine the way you two look but…

Ann canNOT say no to all the homecooked meals in front of her so she’s more than ready to let everyone pile a little bit of what they want her to try

When she talks to your family in English, everyone is just floored by how different she sounds because of the accent change

And they all want to know all about her parent role in the fashion world and her job as a model

Naturally, there are gonna be a few people upset to hear how she had spent so much time alone as a kid but they remedy that by saying she’s always welcomed back anytime she wants

Pretty much, your family lowkey adopted her

Out of everyone, Ann is able to take this experience in stride the most since she has experienced so many different cultures while she moving around when she was younger

And her personality makes her so easily liked and well-received that it’s just a good experience all around

Especially when Auntie brings out dessert and lets Ann have the first piece

Goro Akechi

Oh they’re IMPRESSED by him

Highschool detective? Making his own money? And he’s handsome?

All around the table, people are gonna be asking him questions about his job and how much money he makes and all that

And they’re gonna be hanging onto his every word so much that food goes cold

And when Goro accidentally lets it slip that he’s an orphan with the shittiest absent-tee father in the world?

You know everyone and their momma are gonna start hollering and getting mad for him

All the while Grandma is shaking her head and piling a mountain of food on his plate like he’s suddenly one of her grandkids

Of course, he’ll gonna be a bit unsure of all this affection- he grew up without it and Japanese culture is just so different from all this

But he eventually warms up to it all and finds himself receiving the warm love of family that he always wanted but never thought he would get

And naturally, your family is very proud to welcome such a successful, impressive young man into their family as soon as possible (think of the bragging rights lol)

352 notes · View notes

nimblermortal · 5 months ago

Text

@drelmurn

Also, warning to neopagans: This one is not for you. I try to be polite and respectful about neopaganism and y'all do some cool stuff, but this is specifically complaining about things neopagans do. So if that's your jam, this is a good place to stop reading.

So the thing is, for assorted reasons we don't have any writing from actual Norse pagans. There's archaeological records and what you divine (ha) from those, but everyone serious is telling you that we cannot have any real idea of what these religious practices look like. There were groves; there were figurines of gods which had their own spaces; it seems likely that rich/powerful people were also priests; there were sacrifices of beasts and animals, and some really freaking creepy funeral rites.

(Part of the volcano rant is about how prior to the volcanic eruptions there is sun symbolism in the archaeological record, and afterward, none. Probably related to the whole "ash blocking out the sun in the Arctic Circle for three years straight, leading to the deaths of 40-60% of the population" thing. So we have that sort of record too.)

And I'm also going to preface with how when I took a bellydancing class the instructor was careful to tell us that she learned from someone who learned from someone from the regions this was practiced, so we were at best three removes from the culture. When we're talking about Norse paganism, we are a thousand years removed from the culture. Put a generation at 20 years, that is 50 generations. If we want to be super generous and assume that every other generation some grandparent taught their grandchild the secret rituals they remembered, we are still 25 removes from a living culture.

Nothing has actually survived.

But, you say, what about the Eddas? Those were written down in the medieval period. Those are contemporary.

Nope! Those were written by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). He's an Icelander. Iceland was officially Christianized in the year 1000, it's very easy to remember. Snorri was born 179 years after Christianity got enough of a grip to be enshrouded in law. I've been reading the Grágás (early law book, ~1260) and it has an initial section specifically on Christianity, with the punishments for things like men not knowing the words to baptize a child, much less daring to fast incorrectly. These people were not pagan. Snorri was writing down what he could guess from very old stories, and he begins by saying the gods were Asians from Troy.

There's just a period in medieval Europe when paganism was considered cool, and so everybody wanted their own pagans, and they tried to resurrect the concepts and everybody kind of suspiciously came up with the same general kind of paganism, which is an artifact both of like. How monotheists think about polytheism, and of wanting to keep the cool elements from what they heard from their friend in France or wherever. It's like how everybody knows that vampires can't be seen in mirrors.

So that brings us to my archnemesis Stephen Flowers, who would really prefer I called him Edred Thorsson.

Mr. Flowers originally decided to research runes "after I audibly 'heard' the sound 'RUNA' on a summer day in 1974." Two years later, in 1976, he completed his handbook of rune magic, which he assures you remains largely unchanged in this its third edition, because he uh spiritually inherited everything there was to know about runes in two years. He believes the Norse pagan "ancestors never died but rather were reborn, generation after generation, always keeping their secrets with them - until now, they are us" because who doesn't love some Hindi wheel of reincarnation in their Norse paganism.

So this sort of reincarnation/divine inspiration is one way he gives himself legitimacy. The next is by judicious use of Nazis, because Norse stuff has always had a problem with Nazism. Mr. Flowers, rather than disavowing Nazism in his introduction, goes with "Indeed, the Nazis made use of the runic forms in their most external aspects, akin to what we might call 'branding' today. The beginning rune vitki* of today may take some strange comfort from the fact that the runes did continu to show themselves to be such potent symbols in the twentieth century!"

He will grant that "the Germanic spirit itself was not at the heart of this 'bureaucratic blasphemy,' but rather it was a sort of pseudo-Christian messianic Manicheanism that owned the soul of the Nazi party." Far removed from the true religion Flowers intends to invent! He, after all, intends to create "a system as free as possible from any Judeo-Christian influence" with the classic random flinging of the Judeo- prefix in to seem more, I don't know, cosmopolitan, without showing any sign of having done the slightest research on Judaism and whether it might apply to his construct religion.

*Flowers proposes vitki as a practitioner of runic magic, which he refers to as galdrar. I have been sufficiently wrong often enough not to argue with him on this point; I will say only that there are many words for magic, and for all I know galdr (nominative singular) does refer to runic magic. I have not seen the word vitki elsewhere as yet.

I am probably getting overly het up about Stephen Flowers; I am prone to doing so. He concludes his introduction as follows:

Too long has the Westerner suffered "bearing the cross of alien fruits." They have had their chance and have failed time and again in their impotent effort to satisfy the depths of the IndoEuropean soil. Their aeon has come to an end; the time is ripe for a reemergence of the wisdom of the Eriloz (the vitki). The breakthrough of holy power must take place within the soul of each individual - and it is in this hope that this work has been wrought.

Which just. Having established the word vitki we're now going to add another cool foreign word for the same thing?? Westerners have suffered bearing the cross of Christianity?? It has failed to satisfy the depths of the IndoEuropean - look, it's just a list of white supremacist dogwhistles, okay. And I could be wrong about that, because I don't know white supremacist dogwhistles, but it sure reads like that to me!

I have a friend who is a neo-pagan and is studying Egyptian magic. Apparently the Egyptian practitioners wrote their things down. Which is cool and great, they had a writing system and they were using it, I know nothing about that and have nothing to say about it. She also says a lot of pagan practices are invented wholecloth, which is true and great. It's the "we are reviving a practice that has simply lain dormant for a thousand years until we arrived to accept this unbroken tradition" that drives me wild.

Anyway the key concepts include: appealing to some sense of an ancient unbroken tradition, which should appeal to you specifically because you are special in [spiritual and/or racial trait], and you can reject [practice that many people have been hurt by] because your special nature was reaching out to this the whole time. Sprinkle in appropriate symbols. Use some cool foreign-sounding words. Throw a minority under the bus if at all possible.

#replies #I should go do something else for a while #as usual after reading Stephen Flowers's work #and like. This does not have to be a harmful pattern!#consider applying it to Percy Jackson and the Olympians

10 notes · View notes