#preemptively turning the reblogs off on this one.

[officialgleamstar]

okay now that ive been harassed (joke. fond.) by a gaggle of teenagers in the middle of the night, i need to get some sleep. gnight yall ^-^!!!

[obstinatecondolement]

Found out that I overpaid my singing teacher who I had thought I still owed money to, so she's going to put it towards next term. Peace and love on planet earth.

[sparatus]

heyoooo I saw some tags on a post you shared that said something about how the batarian resistance was born, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on a batarian resistance because I also want to do a batarian resistance, but I've been having trouble noodling out what that looks like.

okay attempt two at answering this cause my computer decided to restart itself last time and i got mad and didn't want to retype everything lol

obviously i'm going to start with saying the vast majority of my batarian work is in my no-reapers au exponential differentiation, especially blood in the water where the two deuteragonists working with shepard are second in command of the resistance tarvok shad'derah and his friend and close ally of the resistance gurji taeja, and we're also poised right at the start of the hegemony plotline in in the land of giants and the resistance will be pretty involved in upcoming chapters (and are already there, please come read it i have essays). moving on.

the short answer is... there is no short answer. it's complicated. the hegemony, per canon, is a strict caste-based, totalitarian oligarchy with complete control over every aspect of life underneath them. you can't work with batarians without addressing the hegemony somehow. there's going to be a lot of messy politics, and wildly varying opinions towards the resistance (there's going to be a lot of people who think it's not worth fighting! let them kill themselves off! why are you going to so much effort!), and very heavy topics that need a lot of care to portray sensitively. the hegemony is very clearly based on very real regimes that killed a lot of people and left a lot of lasting damage. a lot of where i started looking at batarians with a sympathetic lens is from talking to a friend of mine who lives in brazil and saw a lot of their own experiences reflected in the batarians, and quite a few other regimes there are still people alive who remember living under them are obvious inspiration for bioware as well (stalinist ussr is the most obvious, but there's definitely aspects of mussolini's italy and north korea as well, to name a few). accordingly, i've been doing my best to approach the topic sensitively; literally the most important thing i can stress with working with batarians is do your research. there's an awful lot of nuance to consider, and boiling it down to basic "good guy rebels vs evil government" does it a serious disservice.

that out of the way, let's get into it after the cut. i'm going to preface this with a disclaimer that a lot of this is my own work and i am not comfortable with others using it without permission. nothing against you personally i just have some bad experiences with people "taking inspiration" from me and literally just lifting my shit whole-cloth without asking me and only crediting me in a separate place away from the actual fic, lol. so anything with specific names or timelines or just anything that's me speculating and not found in canon is not free to use, kthx.

anyway.

in order to write a resistance against the hegemony, you have to start with actually writing the hegemony. yeah i know i know nobody wants to put too much effort into the slaver assholes, but it's important. and we do actually have some canon details about how the hegemony functions, so Reading The Wiki actually a pretty good place to start! based on what (admittedly not a lot) we know about the hegemony, they're a totalitarian oligarchy where the richest rule. you can potentially buy your way to a higher caste if you make enough money, but it's very difficult, and they're incredibly cutthroat. basically, life under the hegemony is very every man for himself.

this is to the upper castes' advantage! aggressive enforcement of the status quo by the higher-ups, using fear and violence as weapons, not only works very well to oppress the lower castes, but it also encourages people to turn on each other and rat each other out. you're unlikely to find a lot of camaraderie among average batarians - if anyone could turn you in to the cops, you're not gonna trust anybody, and that's gonna go a long way to keeping people under the upper castes' thumbs. we can even reasonably infer that family members are encouraged to report on each other - it's happened irl! it's super useful! nobody trusts each other, everyone's afraid of surveillance, nobody is safe. building up any sort of resistance movement is going to be incredibly difficult anywhere the hegemony can listen.

further, it's canon that the hegemony very tightly controls the flow of information in and out of their borders, and that includes information about the other species and life outside the hegemony. keeping the population ignorant makes them easier to control, after all. this is a known and very common tactic in authoritarian regimes. the common batarian living within hegemony borders believes that their way of life is best, this is how things are meant to be, and all the aliens are lesser beings and basically savages, so it's best to just listen to the hegemony and do as you're told and never ever leave :) why would you want to leave when this is the best possible life for you :) most batarians aren't going to be aware that there's anything wrong with the dystopian horror they're living in, because it's all they've ever known and all they can know. so odds of the lower castes all realizing they're being oppressed and agreeing "fuck that" together are uhhh slim to none, to say the least. this shit goes very deep, and the hegemony has been in place for centuries, so they've had a lot of time to root themselves in the populace's collective heads as Good And Correct And The Only Way To Live.

so, okay, let's leave the hegemony. easy right? wrong. sure, omega has no rules, but that means you're unlikely to find a lot of help if the hegemony decides to drag your ass back. you're still going to have to stay vigilant for spies and trackers and unfriendly tech, assuming they're not going to just up and kill you (which is probably more likely, even - out in terminus, nobody looks twice at somebody getting ganked, but a kidnapping will draw more attention, and then you've got martyrs, and nobody wants those). outside hegemony space, you're going to run into two main flavors of batarian:

batarians who were born under the hegemony, but no longer live there. these can be divided further into batarians who are still loyal to the hegemony for one reason or another (money, habit, blackmail), and those who have cut ties. either they managed to escape somehow, they were let go willingly and decided never to go back, or somebody else took them out of hegemony space.

batarians who were not. these will then be divided into those who still work with the hegemony (we know they pay good, after all) and those who want nothing to do with them.

of those four groups, you're going to have to make a hell of a pitch to get allies for any budding resistance movement - the hegemony are seen as an omnipresent evil in terminus, but one you can live with as long as you don't do anything stupid. keep your head down, or take their money even, and you'll probably be okay. they're a big damn government with a wide territory and lots of guns, and we know canonically that they have a lot of tech and stuff that they don't even share with the rest of the galaxy because they're paranoid and selfish, so "just stay out of their way" is going to be a very, very popular method of dealing with them.

oh, and remember what i said about hegemony info diets? yeah. culture shock once you're out is gonna be a bitch. we're talking near-catatonia levels of existential crisis here.

"what about the citadel," you may ask. great question! fair point! we can in fact reasonably infer that the vast majority of citadel species, with the exception of the asari with their """indentured servitude""" and possibly the hanar depending on how far down the rabbit hole of the hanar-drell relationship you feel like going down with me, are very anti-slavery and would support going against the hegemony! except, unfortunately, it's more complicated than that, because the batarians were the fourth species to reach the citadel, can be inferred to have been the "peacekeepers" of the galaxy prior to the uplifting of the krogan (yes i have textbooks of batarian history no we're not getting into it right now go read bitw), and in general are a big damn nuisance that the council don't want to risk war with right at the moment. "but there's more of them then there are of the hegemony!" yeah and you know how many of them are actually capable of war? the turians. das it. until the alliance start getting in slapfights with the hegemony, the turians are the only species really capable of waging war to any meaningful extent, and supporting the resistance in any way, even just allowing them to Exist on the citadel, would cause a lot of trouble for the council that they simply aren't able to deal with while the batarians still have their embassy on the station. remember what i said about politics? yeah you came and asked tumblr user sparatus about this there's so much xenopolitics involved in why the hegemony haven't been wiped off the map yet i made this field up but it's my passion--

ahem. does this sound like more effort than it's worth yet? good. that's the point.

in short: getting any sort of resistance movement going with any degree of traction is going to be incredibly difficult. there's very few places to run, getting recruits who are at least mostly sane will be like pulling teeth, and you're basically on your own. it's even fair to assume that resistance movements have happened in the past and failed. the hegemony are large and in charge, and yeah sure they're falling down on themselves and a shadow of their former selves but that makes them more dangerous because, as we can see in canon, that pride makes them aggressive and very determined not to show weakness or let anyone know how bad things are getting. taking them down is an uphill battle in the blinding snow and brother, the resistance are a beat-up rear-wheel drive with no snow tires and a faulty fuel injector.

no, i don't make metaphors that make sense. i write about political intrigue and the comics characters, it's obscure bullshit or bust over here.

obviously that's not all to say a resistance movement is impossible. i have one myself, hi how ya doin read my fic. that's all just set up. to write a resistance movement against a massive, well-entrenched regime like the hegemony, you first have to have a good, solid idea of what they're resisting against, and all the factors getting in their way. it's hard! it's difficult! it's true to how these things tend to work out in real life!

here's how i have things set up for my own work (again, keep in mind this work is not free to use):

the hegemony's fall from grace following their defeat by the rachni and their job as the main military might being usurped by the krogan and later turians has led to infighting and cannibalizing each other. as conditions steadily declined and the bad parts of the bad system got worse, what was previously a sustainable dystopia spiraled downwards into a ticking timebomb. the conclave (the "senate" which is now effectively no longer elected running everything, the top caste) is inbred to hell and back, because you can't possibly marry outside your caste, and the question of nonviability is becoming a when, not an if.

the arrival of the alliance and the council's apparent "favoritism" (read: not simply letting the hegemony have their way, because no you're both breaking laws actually please just shut up and sit down for mediation) has destabilized their standing in galactic society, causing their retreat further into isolation. this is making everything worse. things fall apart.

some senators within the conclave, particularly senators shahok khor'berran and morem kednelok, have recognized the hegemony is barrelling towards its breaking point and are looking for reform.

morvarn taryn, a cop in dasrak (the capital city, btw i will always be salty bioware didn't even give khar'shan a CANON CAPITAL CITY), has always struggled with having more empathy than a man of his caste is supposed to have. this gets him in trouble when dealing with a krogan slave that keeps breaking confinement, wragg, because damn that poor guy's really fucked up huh. (this also gets into alien slavery and that whole quagmire, but that's a different essay), but he doesn't really actually question the regime fully until a friend of his, air force lieutenant tarvok shad'derah, comes by the bar one day clearly in pain, and morvarn convinces him to come to his apartment for treatment and finds tarvok and his squad have been subjected to sapient experimentation without anaesthesia and the wounds have been left exposed.

the shad'derahs are a prominent family line due to their ancestor rothok being the second spectre in history and a close friend of gurji beelo. further, as a military officer tarvok is roughly the same caste as morvarn, and they both should be spared from this kind of treatment. the fact that even their middle-tier caste isn't enough to keep them from being seen as tools and objects radicalizes morvarn, but he doesn't realize it yet.

he brings his concerns to a close friend. friend happens to be senator shahok, who sees an opportunity and agrees with morvarn that either things need to change, or the hegemony will fall, and perhaps it needs to for their own survival as a species.

several months pass, with much thinking and discussing of what to do. tarvok disagrees that anything needs to change, and insists this is just the way things are, but morvarn's compassion sticks with him until a fateful mission rattles him, and the hegemony's plan to subject his younger brother thrajul to the same treatment he's had convinces him it's time to leave.

shit happens, blah blah blah, morvarn and tarvok end up fleeing khar'shan with a small group of supporters and also non-supporters who have no other choice but to go with. they run to omega and spend a few months trying to sort themselves out before deciding to keep trying to rescue friends and family from the hegemony.

this evolves into other batarians seeking their help getting their own loved ones out, raiding slavers, deep-cover missions, etc etc, until they're actually a proper resistance movement. they even make non-batarian friends, including gurji taeja, beelo's descendant who has a familial loyalty to the shad'derahs because salarians have like a whole thing about that.

there is no true plan for taking down the conclave, because how the fuck are they supposed to do that

and that's how exdiff and the whole x57 and resulting hegemony plotline tie in, because x57 kicks off the hegemony gearing up for war properly and once [REDACTED] then well the hegemony's the only problem left to deal with and hey look there's this whole group of guys with very intimate knowledge of what to do with them and some guys on the inside,

i have a fic planned for the actual downfall it's called carrion men and i am GOING to outline it next year so maybe i can get started writing it for camp nano or proper nano

..... oh my god this is so much. i am so sorry to anybody whose phone this fucking destroys trying to load it. but also not really. my m.e. big bang fic was an entire treatise of political intrigue and speculation on potential asari supremacy conspiracy, you don't come to me for concise answers on xenopolitical things. anyway hello i have put a completely normal and reasonable amount of work into the hegemony and the resistance and batarians in general

[jonahmagnus]

Sorry I asked for reassurance are you mad at me

[eighthdoctor]

so whats the deal with gor thats sunk the claws of spite so deep into you? like yeah I can skim the wikipedia and ive heard about it second or thirdhand through kink circles but what about it has got to you personally

it started as just goofy id writing exercise to let me flex writing muscles again--it's not super obvious from my ao3 because i cleaned some things up to post, but i wrote basically no coherent fiction from 2020-2023. snippets of things here and there, a chapter or two, but really...nothing.

and then on a whim i went and read @systlin's lightning from a clear sky, and went wow gor fucking sucks. and tried to move along but, here's the thing:

i am. very kinky. i have several fun kinks. and gor covers a number of them, so i went and hunted down the first book to see and uh.

it's not just that it's misogynistic as all getout and the author cannot plot to save his life and the worldbuilding veers from "wildly implausible" to "racist" to "you have HOW many apex predators???" to "please stop saying numbers".

because like. i read porn. i read smut. some of it is very good and some of it is very not and i will forgive (or at least, ignore) a lot of sins as long as the sex is hot.

if the books had been HOT then i would probably have written 3k and left it in the abandoned projects folder. like yes it is misogyny central but so is, frankly, a lot of kink stuff and sometimes if you're just looking to get off you put up with that, right?

but it isn't even horny it isn't even good smut it's just BAD

so here i am 200k (and one (1) sex scene) later

[lez-exclude-men]

It's annoying when the "wrong" posts get attention. Like something you just word vomited in annoyance that wasn't like, prepped for peer review, gets spread around and breaks containment and then your notifs get flooded with people telling you all the nuances you missed and how you're wrong etc etc. And it's just like. Y'all. I do not care. I do not give a single shit what you think. This was not something I was putting out there for discussion. It wasn't carefully worded, it wasn't meant to get any more than *maybe* two likes. The fact that yall are starting discourse on this post is ridiculous. So I turned off reblogs and yet people were still commenting on it and sending me anons 🙄 so I yeeted the post. I'll probably still get a few anons about it but like. It was an OPINION. A FLEETING thought. I was not engaging at all and I don't intend to (so if you see this and send me anons about that post anyway, just know they'll be deleted bc I. Do not. Care. about your opinions on the subject)

[zosonils]

i don't know what a bi lesbian is and at this point i'm afraid to ask

[redysetdare]

Got jump scared by my own post appearing on my dash TWICE because two aspec blogs I follow reblogged it 😵‍💫

[plutotheforgotten]

“talk to people who disagree with” fuck off I am SURROUNDED by people who disagree with me for the love of god I want to find someone who does fucking agree with me for once

[dogshit-enchantment]

Smth about the mouth/washing discourse of ppl calling Jimmy their Blorbo feels like a 1:1 parallel of ppl kinning the Joker. Like it's not a crime and it doesn't automatically make you a bad person or a criminal but it does make me wonder how much you actually respect women and how shallow I would have to dig to find a misogynistic take. Like ppl can obvs do whatever they want and like, I'm personally a fan of Jimmy's fucked up portrayal and I think he's an interesting and well developed character (and dare I say relatable in the way he's fucking neurotic!) but like. There's a strange Vibe Distinction that I think should not be vilified or ignored

Vibes aren't crimes but man some ppl just suck about things. Thanks for coming to my tedtalk

[lighttailoring]

BASICALLY what I am saying is plotlines that say "you should have killed this specific person the moment you had the chance because they're never going to do anything except be worthless and pathetic and cause problems for everyone else" are never going sit right with me because as soon as you say that about one person you open the door to thinking it's okay to say it about whole groups of people

and no, that isn't the same as "killing in the name of revolution is wrong" for reasons that I really wish were obvious to everyone

[skyburger]

Ohmy god my bad guys i spent like an hour ramblingabout music opinions. at least its in the tags of my own post though could be worse

[autumndragons]

sorry oh my god not to be all "old man yells at cloud" today but that bittern video i reblogged too!! i was looking in the notes to see if anyone mentioned the type of bird and there were SO many fucking replies/reblogs/tags being all like "this needs [x] song" "why doesnt this have [y] song" "i thought this would have [z] song" like wHO CARES!! WHO CAAAAARES ARE THE SOUNDS OF NATURE NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU, DO YOU STRUGGLE TO ENGAGE WITH THE NATURAL WORLD IF ITS NOT BEEN MEMEFIED

perhaps you can just fucking enjoy a peaceful video of an animal you likely have never seen before in its natural habitat !! i promise it wont hurt!!!

[rubiatinctorum]

OH MY FUCKING GOD it is because SHE WAS A DOLL AND DIDN'T HAVE the parts that she goes to the fucking gynecologist, AS A WAY OF SHOWING SHE'S HUMAN BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T HAVE THE DOLL ANATOMY ANYMORE. christ. i really don't think it's any more sinister than that. it's about her transformation into a human, not "haha woman is only Those Parts" that was the meaning conveyed by that scene. in all aspects she is no longer a doll because she decided not to be a doll, i really don't know where some of ye are getting "her [REDACTED] made her a woman, i cant believe this movie is saying that's what womanhood solely is" out of this. HER REDACTED IS SYMBOLIC OF HER FULFILLED DECISION TO BE A HUMAN AND NOT A DOLL. you dumb fucks.

[neechees]

hello, thanks so much for doing your scam busting, is the account @/shtunning another palestine scam? i can't find the images used on google anywhere, but the lack of a gofundme makes me wary

This one is looking veeeery suspicious & is pretty much most certainly a scam for the dollowing reasons:

El-shab-hussein, a Palestinian who's been helping us with vetting real Palestinian fundraisers from scams, says that the ONLY confirmed Palestinian fundraisers who claim to be in Gaza are on this list, and that blog is not one of them

That blog already has me preemptively blocked 🤨 🚩 I've never interacted with this person in my life, and its a big red flag to have scam busters blocked

Their donation post was made YESTERDAY, and their archive is turned off 🚩we see scammers do this to hide how old their blog actually is (that it's new and suddenly asking for money) and to make it harder to investigate them

Their donation post reblogs and replies have been turned off 🚩scammers do this usually after someone has called them out on their suspicious behavior, often with proof that they're scamming, and they do it to hide the evidence and prevent anyone from seeing or reblogging this evidence against them

They're asking for donations, but do not provide a paypal or gofundme attached 🚩 scammers nowadays also often try to hide their paypal because they like to reuse one account across multiple scams, and used them enough for those accounts to be recognizable bc scam busters keep track of them. Additionally, you can tell someone's actual location by a paypal link, so scammers often are trying to hide any discrepancies in their fake story (like say, pretending to be in Europe but are actually in Canada). Laura Deramas & co have been doing this a lot, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was her

They claim that the photos they provide are of their family in Gaza, but there's literally a watermark of these photos originally being from the website Gazanow 🚩 why you would use a seperate website's photos of your family & then blur out your family's faces from the photo (even though it's already on a public website & that's where you got it?), instead of any photos that THEY themselves took, makes no sense to me, & is extremely suspicious.

They claim their "entire family" is in Gaza and that they've been working & supporting their family abroad (presumably allegedly in Europe since theyre asking for money in Euros) since 2016, and that they are 24 years old. So according to them, They've been the single sole supporter of their entire family in Gaza & moved to & have been living in Europe ALONE since the age of 16? Idk that kinda doesn't seem that plausible to me.

They've backdated their blog, and tried to use posts with thousands of notes to make it harder to find that out lol 🚩🚩🚩according to the screenshots below, they backdated their blog (& in particular, this post) to look like it reblogged a post on February 17th, 2024. But once I looked in the notes, I very quickly found it in the most recent notes that it was ACTUALLY reblogged YESTERDAY

[Image description: two vertically stacked screenshots with a blue water filter over them. The first shows a screenshots of a reblog by the user shtunning, showing a falsified reblog date of February 17th 2024. The second shows the real date within the notes of this post that they had reblogged, dated to "1 day ago", April 17th, 2024. End image description.]

And as another thing, they're claiming to be Palestinian, but using language an actual Palestinian who has lived in Palestine would never use lol, such as "revive peace between us". There was no "peace" in Gaza before this, Gaza is an open air prison under a settler colonial occupation and has been bombed regularly for decades?

So yeah this is definitely a scammer lol

[eighthdoctor]

hey re: that post about the exodus being fake - a common scholarly opinion on the exodus is tht while theres no evidence for the large scale enslavement of israelites in egypt, there is Some historical basis - its decently likely that there was a smaller group (high double or low triple digits iirc?) of egyptian slaves who Did flee egypt to canaan and wound up assimilating with the israelites, and Their story got told and eventually incorporated into the mythos of the larger group. more complicated than it just being fake

which is still, you realize, absolutely bugfuck bonkers right?

it'd be like. okay. let's say that the american revolution did not happen. modern day america exists! don't tread on me flags exist! nothing TODAY has changed but the revolution didn't happen.

what did happen is the boston massacre.

and that's it, that's all that happened, the british left for some other (probably napoleon related) reason, but we still HAVE THE WHOLE MYTHOS AROUND THE REVOLUTION

like that's the scope here. we have evidence of an exodus narrative (ie, slaves freed from egypt by god who then migrated to canaan) from the northern kingdom (israel) prior to or contemporaneous with the assyrian captivity, and again we're talking about a potential escaped population in the low thousands, who are obviously not political power players because they're escaped slaves

and yet this becomes THE STORY the one judaism is built around what the FUCK