#slavery (particularly in prisons)

[gayhenrycreel]

i want to demonstrate how fucked up america is compared to the rest of the world

this is all the types of leave in Aotearoa.

if you're wondering what bereavement leave is, its leave you get when someone in your life dies. the bereavement here is at minimum 3 days, and you also get it if you or a partner has a miscarriage.

thats right, if you are a man and your partner has a miscarriage out of wedlock you can get leave. ive heard about other countries not even letting men take parental leave.

everyone gets a maximum of 12 public holidays off, and if its is on a weekend you get monday off, and it only counts as one public holiday.

annual leave is 4 weeks and paid. you can choose when to take it. this is basically a requirement.

public holidays, annual leave, bereavement leave, and 10 days of sick leave, are the minimum amount of holidays we get.

assuming no one dies, its normal to get around 50 days off per year.

THIS IS NORMAL FOR MOST OF THE WORLD

americans need to know this so they know how much theyve been fucked over. im living in a utopia by comparison, and people still want more days off.

you dont know youre being abused if you think its normal. not everyone lives like that.

unionize. ask for a raise. call politicians and suggest more holidays (towns can have local holidays so dont forget the mayor). its also awesome to tell your boss to give a coworker a raise. if they do they might give everyone a raise, so you do have a selfish reason to be kind.

it is abuse to force you to work yourself to death under threat of death.

its slavery.

[fluentisonus]

I'm genuinely so depressed by these numbers like can we not even do this.

[creatingblackcharacters]

“The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” - Violence, Violent Imagery & Black Horror

TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of death, violence, blood, hate crimes, antiblackness, police violence, rape

Note! I am going to be speaking from a Black American point of view, as my identity informs my experience. That said, antiblackness itself is international. The idea of my Blackness as a threat, as a source of fear and violence to repress and to destroy, is something every Black person in the world that has ever dealt with white supremacy has experienced.

There are two things, I think, that are important to note as we start this conversation.

One: there is a long history of violence towards Black bodies that is due to our dehumanization. People do not care for the killing of a mouse in the way they care about a human. But if you think the people you are dealing with are not people, but animals- more particularly, pests, something distasteful- then you will be able to rationalize treating them as such.

Two: even though we live in a time period where that overt belief of Blackness as inhuman is less likely, we must recognize that there are centuries of belief behind this concept; centuries of arguments and actions that cement in our minds that a certain amount of violence towards Blackness is normal. That subconscious belief you may hold is steeped in centuries of effort to convince you of it without even questioning it. And because of this very real re-enforcement of desensitization, naturally another place this will manifest itself is in how we tell and comprehend stories.

There are also three points I'm about to make first- not the only three that can ever be made, but the ones that stand out the most to me when we talk about violence with Black characters:

One: Your Black readers may experience that scene you wrote differently than you meant anyone to, just because our history may change our perspective on what’s happening.

Two: The idea that Black characters and people deserve the pain they are experiencing.

Three: The disbelief or dismissal of the pain of Black characters and people.

You Better Start Believing In Ghost Stories- You’re In One

I don’t need to tell Black viewers scary fairytales of sadists, body snatchers and noncoincidental disappearances, cannibals, monsters appearing in the night, and dystopian, unjust systems that bury people alive- real life suffices! We recognize the symbolism because we’ve seen real demons.

Some real examples of familiar, terrifying stories that feel like drama, but are real experiences:

12 Years a Slave: “This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.” – Solomon Northup

When They See Us: I can’t get myself to watch When They See Us, because I learned about the actual trial of the Central Park Five- now the Exonerated Five- in my undergrad program. Five teen Black and brown boys, subjected to racist and cruel policing and vilification in the media- from Donald Trump calling for their deaths in the newspaper, to being imprisoned under what the Clintons deemed a generation of “superpredators” during a “tough on crime” administration. And as audacious as it is to say, as Solomon Northup explained, they were fortunate. The average Black person funneled into the prison system doesn’t get the opportunity to make it back out redeemed or exonerated, because the system is designed to capture and keep them there regardless of their innocence or guilt. Their lives are irreparably changed; they are forever trapped.

Jasper, Texas: Learning about the vicious, gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr, was horrific- and that was just the movie. No matter how “community comes together” everyone tells that story, the reality is that there are people who will beat you, drag you chained down a gravel road for three miles as your body shreds away until you are decapitated, and leave your mangled body in front of a Black church to send a message… Because you’re Black and they hate you. To date I am scared when I’m walking and I see trucks passing me, and don’t let them have the American or the Confederate flag on them. Even Ahmaud Arbery, all he was doing was jogging in his hometown, and white men from out of town decided he should be murdered for that.

Do you want to know what all of these men and boys, from 1841 to 2020, had in common? What they did to warrant what happened to them? Being outside while Black. Some might call it “wrong place wrong time”, but the reality is that there is no “right place”. Sonya Massey, Breonna Taylor- murdered inside their home. Where else can you be, if the danger has every right to barge inside? There is no “safe”.

It is already Frightening to live while Black- not because being Black is inherently frightening, but because our society has made it horrific to do so. But that leads into my next point:

“They Shouldn’t Have Resisted”

Think of all the videos of assaulted and murdered Black people from police violence. If you can stomach going into the comments- which I don’t, anymore- you’ll see this classic comment of hate in the thousands, twisting your stomach into knots:

“if they obeyed the officer, if they didn’t resist, this wouldn’t have happened”

Another way our punitive society normalizes itself is via the idea of respectability politics; the idea that “if you are Good, if you do what you are Supposed to do, you will not be hurt- I will not have to hurt you”. Therefore, if my people are always suffering violence, it must be because we are Bad. And in a society that is already less gracious to Black people, that is more likely to think we are less human, that we are innately bad and must earn the right to be exceptional… the use of excessive violence towards me must be the natural outcome. “If your people weren’t more likely to be criminals, there wouldn’t be the need to be suspicious of you”- that is the way our society has taught us to frame these interactions, placing the blame for our own victimization on us.

Sidebar: I would highly suggest reading The New Jim Crow, written in 2010 by Michelle Alexander, to see how this mentality helps tie into large scale criminalization and mass incarceration, and how the cycle is purposely perpetuated.

You have to constantly be aware of how you look, walk and talk- and even then, that won’t be enough to save you if the time comes. The turning point for me, personally, was the murder of Sandra Bland. If she could be educated, beautiful, a beacon of her community, be everything a “Good” Black person is supposed to be… and still be murdered via police violence, they can kill any of us. And that’s a very terrifying thought- that anything at any point can be the reason for your death, and it will be validated because someone thinks you shouldn’t have “been that way”. And that way has far less to do with what you did, than it does who you are. Being “that way” is Black.

My point is, if this belief is so normalized in real life about violence on Black bodies- that somehow, we must have done something to deserve this- what makes you think that this belief does not affect how you comprehend Black people suffering in stories?

Hippocratic Oath

Human experimentation? Vivisection? Organ stealing? Begging for medicine? Dramatically bleeding out? Not trusting just anyone to see that you are hurt, because they might take advantage? All very real fears. The idea that pain is normal for Black people is especially rampant in the healthcare field, where ideas like our melanin making our skin thick enough to feel less pain (no), an overblown fear of ‘drug misuse’, and believing we are overexaggerating our pain makes many Black people being unwilling to trust the healthcare system. And it comes down to this thought:

If you think that I feel less pain, you will allow me to suffer long before you believe that I am in pain.

I was psychologically spiraling I was in so much pain after my wisdom teeth removal, and my surgeon was more concerned about “addiction to the medication”. Only because Hot Chocolate’s mom is a nurse, did I get an effective medicine schedule. My mother ended up with jaw rot because her surgeon outright claimed that she didn’t believe that she was in more than the ‘healing’ pain after her wisdom teeth were removed. She also has a gigantic, macabre (and awesome fr) scar on her stomach from a c-section she received after four days of labor attempting to have me… all because she was too poor and too Black to afford better doctors who wouldn’t have dismissed her struggles to push.

As a major example of dismissed Black pain: let’s discuss the mortality rate of Black women during childbirth, as well as the likelihood of our children to die. When we say “they will let you bleed to death”, we mean it.

“Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.”

Even gynecology roots in dismissal (and taking brutal advantage of) Black women's pain:

“The history of this particular medical branch … it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,” Owens said. “The advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.” Reproductive surgeries that were experimental at the time, like cesarean sections, were commonly performed on enslaved Black women. Physicians like the once-heralded J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor many call the “father of gynecology,” performed torturous surgical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 1840s without anesthesia. And well after the abolition of slavery, hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on Black women, and eugenics programs sterilized them.”

If you think Black characters are not in pain, or that they’re overexaggerating, you’re more likely to be okay with them suffering more in comparison to those whose pain you take more seriously- to those you believe.

What’s My Point?

My point is that whatever terrifying scene you think you’re writing, whatever violent whump scenario you think you’re about to put your Black characters through, there’s a chance it has probably happened and was treated as nonimportant (damn shame, right?) And when those terrifying scenes are both written and read, the way their suffering will be felt depends on how much you as a reader care, how much you believe they are suffering.

There’s a joke amongst readers of color that many dystopian tales are tales of “what happened if white people experienced things that the rest of us have already been put through?” Think concepts like alien invasion and mass eradication of the existing population- you may think of that as an action flick, meanwhile peoples globally have suffered colonization for centuries. The Handmaid’s Tale- forced birthing and raising of “someone else’s” children, always subject to sexual harassment by the Master while subject to hate from the Mistress- that’s just being a Mammy.

There’s nothing wrong with having Black characters be violent or deal with violence, especially in a story where every character is going through shit. That is not the problem! What I am trying to tell you, though, is to be aware that certain violent imagery is going to evoke familiarity in Black viewers. And if I as a Black viewer see my very real traumas treated as entertainment fodder- or worse, dismissed- by the narrative and other viewers, I will probably not want to consume that piece of media anymore. I will also question the intentions and the beliefs of the people who treat said traumas so callously. Now, if that’s not something you care about, that’s on you! But for people who do care, it is something we need to make sure we are catching before we do it.

“So I just can’t write anything?!”

Stop that. There are plenty of examples of stories containing horror and violence with Black characters. There’s an entire genre of us telling our own stories, using the same violence as symbolism. I’m not telling you “no” (least not always). I’m telling you to take some consideration when you write the things that you do. There’s nothing wrong about writing your Black characters being violent or experiencing violence. But there is a difference between making it narratively relevant, and thoughtlessly using them as a “spook”, a stereotypical scary Black person, or a punching bag, especially in a way that may invoke certain trauma.

The Black Guy Dies First

The joke is that we never survive these horror movies because we either wouldn’t be there to begin with, or because we would make better decisions and the narrative can’t have that. But the reality is just that a lot of writers find Black characters- Black people- expendable in comparison to their white counterparts, and it shows. More of a “here, damn” sort of character, not worth investment and easy to shrug off. The book itself I haven’t read, just because it’s pretty new, but I’m looking forward to doing so. But from the summaries, it goes into horror media history and how Black characters have fared in these stories, as well as how that connects to the society those characters were written in. I.e., a thorough version of this lesson.

Instead, I wrote an entire list of questions you could possibly ask yourself involving violence or villainy involving a Black character. Feel free to print it and put it on your wall where you write if you have to! I cannot stress enough that asking yourself questions like these are good both for your creation and just… being less antiblack in general when you consume media.

Black Horror/Black Thriller

We, too, have turned our violent experiences into stories. I continue to highly suggest watching our films and reading our stories to see how we convey our fear, our terror, our violence and our pain. There are plenty of stories that work- Get Out, The Angry Black Girl and her Monster, Candyman, Lovecraft Country (the show) and Nanny are some examples. There’s even a blog by the co-writer of The Black Guy Dies First who runs BlackHorrorMovies where he reviews horror movies from throughout the decades.

Desiree Evans has a great essay, We Need Black Horror More Than Ever, that gets into why this genre is so creative and effective, that I think says what I have to say better than I could.

“Even before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora. Stories of haints, witches, curses, and magic of all kinds can be found in the folktales collected by author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and in the folktales retold by acclaimed children’s book author Virginia Hamilton. One of my earliest childhood literary memories is being entranced by Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear and Patricia McKissack’s children’s book classic The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, both examples of the ways Black authors have tapped into Black history along with our rich ghostlore.” “Black horror can be clever and subversive, allowing Black writers to move against racist tropes, to reconfigure who stands at the center of a story, and to shift the focus from the dominant narrative to that which is hidden, submerged. To ask: what happens when the group that was Othered, gets to tell their side of the story?”

For on the nose simplicity, I’m going to use hood classic Tales From The Hood (1994) as an example of how violence can be integrated into Black horror tales. Tales From The Hood is like… The Twilight Zone by Black people. Messages discussing issues in our community, done through a mystical twist. Free on Tubi! If you want to stop here before some spoilers, it’s an hour and a half. A great time!

In the first story, a Black political activist is murdered by the cops. The scene is reflective of the real-world efforts to discredit and even murder activists speaking out against police violence, as well as the types of things done to criminalize Black citizens for capture. The song Strange Fruit plays in the background, to drive the point home that this is a lynching.

The second story deals with a Black little boy experiencing abuse in the home, drawing a green monster to show his teacher why he’s covered in wounds and is lashing out at school.

The fourth story is about a gangbanger who undergoes “behavioral modification” to be released from prison early. Think of the classic scene from A Clockwork Orange. He must watch as imagery of the Klan and of happy whites lynching Black bodies (real-life pictures and video, mind you!) play into his mind alongside gang violence.

Isn’t Violence Stereotypical or antiblack?

That last story from Tales From The Hood leads into a good point. It can be! But it does not have to be! Violence is a human experience. By suggesting we don’t experience it or commit it, you would be denying everything I’ve just spoken about. We don’t have to be racist to write our Black characters in violent situations. We also don’t have to comprehend those situations through a racist lens.

Even experiences that seem “stereotypical” do not have to be comprehended that way. I get a LOT of questions about if something is stereotypical, and my response is always that it depends on the writing!!! You could give me a harmless prompt and it becomes the most racist story ever once you leave my inbox. But you could give me a “stereotypical” prompt and it be genuine writing.

Let’s take the movie Juice for example. Juice in my honest to God opinion becomes a thriller about halfway in. On its surface, Juice looks like bad Black boys shooting and cursing and doing things they aren’t supposed to be doing! Incredibly stereotypical- violent young thugs. You might think, “you shouldn’t write something like this- you’re telling everyone this is what your community is like”. First- there’s that respectability politics again! Just because something is not a “respectable” story does not mean it doesn’t need to be told!

But if we’re actually paying attention, what we’re looking at is four young boys dealing with their environment in different ways. All four of them originally stick together to feel power amongst their brotherhood as they all act tough and discover their own identities. They are not perfect, but they are still kids. In this environment, to be tough, to be strong, you do the things that they are doing. You run from cops, you steal from stores, you mess with all the girls and talk shit and wave weapons. That’s what makes you “big”. That’s what gives you the “juice”- and the “juice” can make you untouchable.

I want to focus particularly on Bishop, yes, played by Tupac. Bishop, the antagonist of Juice, is particularly powerless, angry, and scared of the world around him. He puts on a big front of bravado, yelling, cursing, and talking big because he’s tired of being afraid, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it otherwise. So when he gets access to a gun- to power- he quickly spirals out of control. His response to his fear is to wave around a tool that makes him feel stronger, that stops the things that scare him from scaring him.

Now, that is not a unique tale! That is a tale that any race could write about, particularly young white men with gun violence! If you ever cared for Fairuza Balk’s character in The Craft, it is a similar fall from grace. But because it is on a young, Black man in the hood, audiences are less likely to empathize with Bishop. And granted, Bishop is unhinged! But many a white character has been, and is not shoved into a stereotype that white people cannot escape from!

Now would I be comfortable if a nonblack person attempted to write a narrative like Juice? Yes, because I’d worry about the tendency to lose the messaging and just fall into stereotype outright. But it can be done! The story can be told!

“But if Black violence bad, why rap?”

The short answer:

“In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.”

Marwhan Makhoul, Palestinian Poet

First, rap is not “only violence and misogyny”. Step your understanding of the genre up; there are plenty of options outside of the mainstream that don’t discuss those things. Second, every genre of music has mainstream popular songs about vice and sin. The idea that Black rappers have to be held to a higher standard is yet another example of how we are seen as inherently bad and must prove ourselves good. We could speak about nothing but drugs and alcohol and 1) there would still be white artists who do the very same and 2) we would still deserve to be treated like humans.

That said, many- not all- rappers rap about violence for the same reason Billy Joel wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire, the same reason Homer first spoke The Iliad- because they have something to say about it! They stand in a long tradition of people using poetry and rhythm to tell stories. Rap is an art of storytelling!

Rap is often used as an expression of frustration and righteous anger against a system built to keep us trapped within it. I’m not allowed to be angry? Why wouldn’t I be angry? Anger is a protective emotion, often when one feels helpless. Young Black people also began to reclaim and glorify the violence they lived in within their music, to take pride in their survival and in their success in a world that otherwise wanted them to fail. If I think the world fights against me no matter what I do, I’d rather live in pride than in shame with a bent head. Is it right? Maybe, maybe not. But if you don’t want them to rap about violence, why not alleviate the things leading to the violence in their environment?

Whether you choose to listen to their words, because the delivery scares you- and trust, angry Black men scared the music industry and society- doesn’t make the story any less valid!

Conclusion

I am going to drop a classic by Slick Rick called Children’s Story. I think listening to it- and I mean genuinely listening- summarizes what I’ve said here about how Black creators can tell stories, even violent ones, and how even the delivery through Blackness can change how you perceive them. Please take the time to listen before continuing.

I’ve been alive for 28 years and have known this song my whole life, and it just hit me tonight: not once is the kid in this story identified as Black! My perception of this story was completely altered by my own experiences, who told the story, and how it was told.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You can tell stories of violence that involve Black characters. I love and adore a good hurt/comfort myself! But you need to be cognizant of your audience and how they’ll perceive the story you’re telling, and that includes the types of imagery you include. It’s not effective catharsis via hurt/comfort for the audience if your Black readers are being completely left out of the comfort. “I wrote this for myself” that’s cool, but… if you wrote racism for yourself, and you’re willing to admit that to yourself, that’s on you. I’d like to think that’s not your intention! You can write these stories of woe and pain without mistreating your Black characters- but that requires knowing and acknowledging when and how you’re doing that!

@afropiscesism makes a solid point in this post: our horror stories are not just fairytales full of amorphous boogiemen meant to teach lessons. Racial violence is very real, very alive, and we cannot act like the things we write can be dismissed outright as “oh well it’s not real”. Sure, those characters aren’t real. But the way you feel about Black bodies and violence is, and often it can slip into your writing as a pattern without you even realizing it. Be willing to get uncomfortable and check yourself on this as you write, as well as noticing it in other works!

If you’re constantly thinking “I would never do this”, you’ll never stop yourself when you inevitably do! If you know what violent imagery can be evoked, you can utilize it or avoid it altogether- but only if you’re willing to get honest about it. You might not intend to do any of this, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t change the pattern, because as always, it’s the thought that counts, but the action that delivers!

[sexboobomb]

Why do online leftists seem to think that voting is a matter of moral purity instead of a purely utilitarian action done in concert with other more effective forms of advocacy and direct action?

Inability or unwillingness to break down what voting actually means I guess. Whether they realize it or not, everyone not voting as a matter of solidarity with Gaza is effectively making themselves a single-policy voter, thus signaling that all the myriad of other very important factors are unimportant to them.

Trump wants to genocide trans people, while Biden doesn't? Doesn't matter because they're both terrible for Gaza.

Trump wants poor people to be thrown in prison and made to work under our modern-day chattel slavery prison system, while Biden wants to legalize marijuana and forgive nonviolent crime? Doesn't matter because they're both terrible for Gaza.

Trump wants to reduce taxes on the rich and stop funding public works and infrastructure, while Biden is putting billions of dollars into trying to revitalize rail-based infrastructure and public transit? Doesn't matter because they're both terrible for Gaza.

Like, I get it! I really really do! I want so fucking badly for America to stop being a fucking menace to the rest of the world and to stop fucking propping up Israel as a legitimate state that is constantly committing genocide. I really really do! But I have to recognize that I do not have the power to change that part of this country, much as I might loathe it, by not voting!

The best thing I can do right now is try to do everything I can to prevent things getting worse, and to improve the few things I can. I can't start some glorious revolution. I can't write up a world-changing manifesto that magically convinces the entire country to change the system to something better! I just can't, and that sucks!

It really really sucks to be helpless to change things, particularly when that thing is literal genocide, but putting your head in the sand and letting it get even worse is not the right play.

[fairsweetlonging]

Suppose Shen Jiu wasn't actually part crow demon, he was part crow yao!

Cultivators are still very suspicious of yao/untamed spiritual beasts, especially when their particular non-human species has a bad reputation, but they are also just respectable enough that cultivators will give them a pass as long as they behave. That would put Shen Jiu right in the sweet spot of being tolerable but untrustworthy.

Many cultivation novels also have cultivators use yao as servants/familiars/etc. which also makes for a nicely terrible parallel with Shen Jiu's past slavery. People side-eying Shen Qingqiu wondering why he is a peak lord, and rather then serving one, which would of course be more appropriate.

The yao and demon aspects could be combined too, if Shen Jiu's crow half had a little bit of demon-crow mixed in. Maybe demon and yao crows get along well enough to have children together relatively frequently (mixes being to the 'pure demons' and 'pure yao' what coywolves are to coyotes and wolves). Or maybe that's not actually true at all, but it's made out to be true by those blackening Shen Qingqiu's name.

nonnie you're killing me!!!! him being so similar to demons but having a different title/partial heritage that sets him apart and lets him stay in juuust the right spot to avoid most prejudice and intolerance that demons face is sooo good

and the yao/spiritual beasts being servents is suuuch a good parallel, maybe some particularly balsy people ask shen qingqiu who his master is, or demand he serve them "as is his job" (it does not go over well with the other peak lords), but it puts shen qingqiu in these bad situations where if he fights back, he'll be seen as a volatile and aggressive creature, but if he doesn't fight back they'll never respect his position. alsooo, the "clipped wing" comments when people see his lame wing, saying it's "good practice to keep a demon bird on the ground".

i can imagine so well how this would go down at jin lan city, with shen qingqiu being accused of causing the plague/sowing because he's part "demon" (he tries to argue he's yao, but they too have bad reputations of causing disease and inflicting harm, so that gets used against him), and then at the trial? oh boy. the old palace master would accuse him of every little thing, of mind control and poisoning and spreading disease and working with the demons, that he's always been untrustworthy and it's a disgrace that cang qiong mountain even allowed a monster to live there, let alone be a peak master!

if you want to make it really angsty, when shen qingqiu gets locked up in the water prison, they don't just tie him up with immortal binding rope and chains but they also damage his wings. they said they would just clip the feathers a bit so he can't fly, but they cut into the joint instead, pinioning him.

the mixed blood heritage is sooo interesting to consider too, him being a quarter bit of everything, with clear human heritage but also crow yao capabilities and demon crow features!

which brings me to your other ask!!

there being TWO shen qingqiu's with each slightly different features and heritage would be amazing and hilarious, especially since they look alike so much! one is actually part human and the other one a cultivated form, yet they look like brothers! amazing!

thank you sosososoo much for the ask, it gave me so many ideas and brain bunnies i love it!!!

[nesiacha]

The Massacre of Jaffa: Bonaparte's Lies

This tragic episode of the Jaffa massacre will explore the events surrounding the massacre carried out by Napoleon Bonaparte, the lies he used to justify it, and how these falsehoods were later repeated by others, including Eugène de Beauharnais, to defend the executions. Although Eugène was not involved in the massacre, he consciously repeated his stepfather's lies. In this analysis, we aim to avoid both the golden legend and the black legend.

On March 7, 1799, Jaffa fell to the French army during their campaign in Syria. The city became the site of a particularly brutal massacre of prisoners, some of whom, according to testimonies, were civilians. The main figure responsible for this carnage was Napoleon Bonaparte.

The account of Jaffa’s capture has been shared in various versions, from immediate eyewitness accounts to official narratives published later. This diversity of perspectives raises important questions about how the events were perceived and reported, both by direct witnesses and by French authorities.

The siege of Jaffa was part of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. After capturing the city, the French encountered a determined garrison composed of soldiers from the army of Djezzar, the Pasha of Acre. The attack on Jaffa was intense and violent, leading to a massacre that targeted both soldiers and civilians.

Bonaparte justified this massacre with two lies. The first was that the prisoners had committed perjury (a complicated lie), and the second was that there was a lack of provisions (a simpler lie). Years later, Bonaparte even reduced the number of prisoners and continued to lie about the massacre, even on Saint Helena. This caused discomfort and raised further questions about the truth.

Men loyal to Bonaparte, such as Eugène de Beauharnais, also repeated these lies (although Eugène was not directly responsible for the massacre at Jaffa, he openly echoed his stepfather’s fabrications and must have known the truth, as he was present on the ground)to justify this massacre . You will see that these justifications do not hold up in the link I will share. Initially, I planned to write an article on the subject, but I found a French website containing the work of Cyril Drouet, who does an excellent job of debunking both the golden and black legends surrounding Bonaparte. His work includes testimonies and exposes the violations of wartime laws.

The golden legend justifies the massacre by relying on Bonaparte's lies, while the black legend portrays him as a man who enjoys massacring people for pleasure or executes people based on whim. Both of these views are false. I believe Bonaparte when he states that he did not take pleasure in such actions and was haunted by certain decisions (this perspective comes from someone who generally dislikes Bonaparte).

However, the Jaffa episode is revealing. Bonaparte sometimes believed that instilling fear in his enemies was the only way to deal with them, even if it meant ignoring basic rules. What happened? His opponents, who were seasoned soldiers, only intensified their resistance. These were not impressionable civilians. Bonaparte's victories, or defeats, came at such a high cost that they were often humiliating, resulting in what could be described as a Pyrrhic victory. I have the impression that Bonaparte was occasionally unable to think long-term and focused only on short-term gains.

Indeed, it has been observed that, contrary to popular belief, the victory against Delgrès in Guadeloupe was difficult. Richepanse himself acknowledged this, and for good reason: the soldiers facing him were experienced and well-trained in the art of war. Initially, Richepanse thought that the soldiers who fought against the restoration of slavery, having already faced the British, would bend under intimidation. This was an absolute mistake. Furthermore, the expected economic results never materialized. Similarly, in Saint-Domingue, the conflict ended with a victory and the proclamation of Haiti.

What is the connection to Jaffa? In a similar vein, the massacre not only strengthened the resolve of his enemies but also prompted the Ottomans to justify the execution of some French soldiers by sabre after this massacre ordered by Bonaparte. This is one of the many reasons why rules regarding the treatment of prisoners were established during wartime and should never be violated. (Interestingly, Ottoman forces, according to some testimonies, were more merciful than the French troops.) In short, Bonaparte’s attempt to intimidate the Ottomans by carrying out this horrific massacre under false pretenses failed, having the opposite effect.

I had initially planned to create a separate post, but I found an archived history forum, now closed, where a user named Cyril Drouet gathered all the testimonies and dismantled Bonaparte's and his allies' lies. It's an insightful read and provides a more analytical summary of the issue than I could. You can access it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170629145019/http://passion-histoire.net/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=37621&sid=7f51b3c72ebbbe9534d2d163d70204fe (it’s in French, but can be translated into English).

For more information on Guadeloupe or Haiti, here are some posts I've written, which touch on the subject alongside Jaffa: More information on slave revolts in the Caribbean Louis Delgrès: Freedom Fighter Mini portraits of three revolutionary women A revolutionary and white battalion leader

The most comprehensive piece so far is about Haiti: The shocking acts by the French army

[octosan]

I've been wanting to find a way to articulate more of my thoughts about what Veilguard ultimately did with Solas and why it feels like they did and did not take him out of character to me, because said thoughts are a mess.

And fair warning that this is going to be critical of Veilguard (and Inquisition a little bit) because essentially I feel like what they did is soft-retconned key parts of the narrative to make Solas both more sympathetic and less sympathetic in ways that are (imo) a disservice to the character.

Let me explain,

Part 0: This is the page I am on

First off let me open by saying that I always thought of Solas as someone who, in regards to his main plans, knew exactly what he was doing. I think it makes the most sense that someone who has been waging a war against vastly more powerful opponents for literal millennia be intelligent, decisive, manipulative, and unwilling to leave things to chance. I think it makes the most sense for such a person to rarely be wrong in evaluating and executing his intended plans, because against someone with literal godlike power being wrong would presumably mean being dead.

I also think it makes the most sense that such a person, who was continually given extremely difficult choices during his years of leadership, to have gained a level of ruthlessness that few other characters in the setting can claim. I think it makes sense that such a character could become horrendously bigoted, as well as jaded, by their own (again, millennia of) negative life experience. I think it makes sense for such a character to become proud to a fault, convinced that they are correct in what they do, even at times when they don't want to be.

At the same time, Solas is also portrayed as being highly principled. At least, I think that was Weekes' intention with the character. You can see at multiple points in Inquisition, through banter and approval, what things he feels the most strongly about and how he does not like to compromise on them. Protecting and nurturing free will, doing your duty to your people, and never doing harm (without a good cause rlly important clause there lmao) are common points suggested with him. Slavery in all its forms is a particularly sore point with him.

I've always thought that Solas' biggest flaws interacted with his guiding principles in interesting ways. That both combined to make him into an extremely dangerous, but understandable (if not sympathetic) antagonist.

I don't vibe with takes that all of Solas' principles are a smokescreen and he's just selfish or just nursing a bruised ego. Don't get me wrong, he says some thoughtlessly cruel things in Inquisition that I can see why the most critical fans feel the ways they do about him. But imo there's a lot of stuff he says and does that is narratively meaningless if caring about people (his people first and foremost, but other people as well) is not a core part of his character. For all his flaws, I personally never got the impression that this was the intention.

Though I also don't vibe with takes that Solas, in his goals and plans to achieve them, is objectively correct either. I think a lot of it comes down to what Solas' actual plan for the veil is and why he's tearing it down in the first place.

Part 1: Solas' Plan (and Lack Thereof)

Veilguard portrays (or at least casts judgement on) a version of Solas who is going at the Veil without much of an actual plan. He is demonstrated as having made a prison to keep the Evanuris from escaping when it comes down, yes, but that's clearly a side concern. He claims he will try to minimize the damage to Thedas, and this is explained to mean that he planned to have spirits intervene to protect people from demons, which is an extremely uncertain method of limiting casualties.

The game refuses to even address what he thinks is going to happen to the elves when the Veil comes down. To go by Epler's AMA response, he seems to just be blindly assuming that all elves will become immortal again when exposed to that much magic, and the game does not suggest one way or the other if that is actually true--the motive to give elves back their immortality is only even suggested in one missable sidequest cutscene.

It's very strange to me that now, with the story finished and the franchise never planning to come back to it, we still don't get an elaboration on what Solas planned. What he was expecting to happen. Unless I missed it, the only explanations we get of what will happen when the Veil comes down, and thus the only thing we can accept as being true, is that the world will be "flooded with demons" and the result of this will be that "thousands of people" will die, and ostensibly the elves will regain their immortality (and command of magic, but iirc even that isn't stated and is just an assumption.)

I absolutely did not think that was the entirety of Solas' plan to bring back the old world. You know why I didn't think that?

Because we heard Solas' original plans in Inquisition.

Low approval dialogue, if you argue with Solas that he should be helping the elves, has this gem of a line:

PC: The man who has lived half his life in the Fade has no ideas? Solas: Not unless we collapse the Veil and bring the Fade here so I can casually reshape reality, no.

At the time, this line is treated as sarcasm or an intentionally absurd suggestion he made because he's irritated with you. But in Trespasser, once you learn the truth about who he is, there is another line of dialogue that suggests that this was actually what Solas intended initially.

PC: What would have happened if Corypheus had died and you’d recovered the orb? Solas: I would have entered the Fade, using the mark you now bear. Then I would have torn down the Veil. As this world burned in the raw chaos, I would have restored the world of my time… the world of the elves.

Isn't this wild?

His plan was actually even worse than Veilguard suggested it to be. It's not that he's okay with some collateral damage to (somehow) restore the elves. He was okay with the entirety of Thedas as being collateral damage. To me it doesn't even sound like the demons themselves would have been the problem, moreso the primordial energy that would spill back in.

And we'll get into what else Trespasser suggested about his plan in Part 2 but the point is that the Veil coming down is portrayed as only being step 1, and step 2 is something that Solas has to guide himself. Even the ending of Veilguard suggests this a little bit? I don't know if intentionally, though. Solas, in the ending where you attack him, has a throwaway line about the "enchantments" needing a "delicate touch" as he goes to finish his ritual, which strikes me as an odd thing to say when the Veil was already falling down and that was the only part of his plan that the game dwelled on. It only makes sense in light of the Trespasser conversation, but I feel like the rest of the game ignores parts of the Trespasser conversation, so I don't know what to think.

Veilguard just isn't interested in exploring what this guidance on Solas' part looks like or what it would actually do to the world. It's content to be vague about it. I am not. I did not want it to stay vague at this last stage of the story.

What enchantments? What are the limits to this reality reshaping he mentioned in Inquisition? How did he intend to restore the Old World? How, specifically, did he think this would be helping the elves? Is there a way that the Veil can come down and not kill everyone in Thedas?

The intelligence of Solas' plan, and therefore his character, depends on the answers to these questions and I never got them! The game won't reward me for making assumptions on them either because the overriding narrative here is "the Veil can't come down, no matter what" so there's no reason to examine what he wants to do with it.

I also think it's weird that they changed it to a comparatively flimsier "thousands of people will die" anyway. I've seen multiple players point out that likely way more people died in the Double Blight that came from disrupting Solas' ritual than the amount of people the characters say would have died if we hadn't. Players who suggest that the resultant disruption to Thedas was so great and the Veil coming down so undersold as a threat that they actually blame Rook not helping Solas with his ritual in the beginning. Which is obviously not the narrative the devs wanted here. If they'd made it clear that Solas planned to destroy all/most of modern Thedas (even if reluctantly) then we wouldn't have this dissonance with players so much, I think.

But in regards to "getting him his goals", I think the intelligence of the plan also relies on figuring out what those goals even are. Veilguard was not terribly interested in those either.

Part 2: Solas' Motivations (and Lack Thereof)

Much like Veilguard evades telling the player what specifically Solas was planning to do with the Veil coming down, it also doesn't really touch on his motivations?

Harding suggests at the opening that he wants to bring back the old world because it is "beautiful". Solas himself claims he has to take down the Veil purely because it is "unnatural", a neutral fact that doesn't address anything, and because it is a "wound" on the world, a negative phrase which is nonetheless not defined. What does it mean that it's a wound? What is happening to Thedas because the Veil is in place? What are the ramifications of leaving it up? I saw little explanation of that in this game, despite previous entries leaving a lot of interesting details to draw on.

We know from the introduction that Solas bringing the Veil up made the elves mortal and destroyed their world, and one of the mural cutscenes suggests that taking it down might give elves their immortality back. So that's another one.

But his main motivation in Veilguard is presented to be simply the fact that Solas regrets having put it up in the first place. In the ending of the game, when he is trying to explain his reasons to (potentially) the literal love of his life who is begging him to stop what he's doing, the reason Solas gives is that if he doesn't take down the Veil then Mythal will have died for nothing. It's the Sunken Cost Fallacy. Yes, he also says that he will "destroy the world [Mythal] loved" but he doesn't elaborate on what this means, just like the "wound" comment, even when it would have been extremely relevant and helpful to his cause to lay his cards on the table here and be honest about what he wants if there is more to it.

So players who have never played prior games are forced to conclude that Solas has no good reason to take down the Veil.

Which might work well enough for Veilguard's narrative of Solas, but it certainly makes his "don't you think if I had another way I would have done it?" to Varric and his "I would treasure the chance to be proven wrong" to a friendly Inquisitor meaningless phrases in retrospect. I personally don't find it more compelling when a heretofore intelligent and principled character breaks their principles for no good reason. I prefer a principled antagonist who breaks their principles for an understandable reason, a reason that the protagonists will have to put in real work to challenge if their goal is to redeem said antagonist.

And I think prior to Veilguard, Solas' motivations were ones that were worth challenging.

Part 2A: Solas' People (and Lack Thereof)

For example, he wants to bring down the Veil to help spirits. There is dialogue between him and the Inquisitor early on that in the days of Elvhenan, spirits were everywhere in the waking world because the waking world was filled with magic. Cole in Trespasser can suggest this too, as a spirit Cole is ecstatic to realize that he "belongs" in the mortal world as much as he does the Fade once they learn that the two were once the same thing. There is an implication that spirits who wish to visit the mortal world become demons because they can't do so without possessing something (unless they are extremely powerful.) Similarly, in Inquisition many spirits were forcibly pulled into the mortal world and twisted into demons in places where the Veil was torn, because they couldn't handle the existential crisis that is a world without magic. The most spirits who show up in Thedas in this setting, do so in places where the Veil is thin, and the Veil is only ever thin in places of great suffering, meaning those spirits reflect that suffering themselves.

Not only does Veilguard never examine this concept as one of Solas' motivations, but they seem to have tried very hard to erase the validity of it from previous games. You would not know, playing Veilguard, that most spirits cannot enter the mortal world without a physical vessel, or that the Veil has been detrimental for spirits. Spirits are all over the Crossroads, and the implication is that they could always go there. You encounter plenty of them in Rivain, Nevarra, and Tevinter, and they are happy, healthy, free, uncontained to a vessel, and even largely capable of retaining their selves under pressure. This is entirely at odds with previous depictions of Thedas and its relationship with spirits. Yes, Nevarra and Rivain have more welcoming cultures and so it makes a little more sense (though not terribly so imo) for you to see more of them around and treated better, but it's not like anyone acknowledges this as outside the norm for the rest of Thedas. Inquisition in particular made a point about how much people hate and distrust them because they're such an unknown to mortals. In Tevinter, they are technically as much victims of magister slavery as elves, at least so Dorian and Solas' banter suggests.

Solas wanting to make the world better for spirits is a particularly important goal for him in retrospect because he was once a spirit, so it's a low blow to his character that it's never acknowledged in this game about stopping him.

But anyway, now we have the whole deal with the elves. This is where I see a lot of the discussion divide. I've seen people argue that Solas should have been allowed to enact his plan because it would end the very real oppression and cultural genocide that elves are facing, and I've seen people say that his plan would not have actually helped the elves at all and so it was a bad plan. I'm not sure how I feel about these takes.

Mostly because I personally did not think that Solas' plan, at least initially, was to end the oppression of elves. I think that if he'd been allowed to carry his plan out, the oppression of elves would end, but only because the entirety of Thedas' oppressive power structures would cease to exist along with its society. I did not think his true goal was to give modern elves their immortality back either, though I guess I can say I judged him wrong on that front in Veilguard. I thought, at best, that helping modern elves became a secondary goal for him later down the line, once he realized modern Thedosians are people--and for a low approval Solas may he rest in retconned peace it was a benefit to help him recruit. In The Dread Wolf Take You, for example, he does have a comment to Charter that the "elves that remain" like her might think his world is a better place when he's done. This could have been a lie to let her think better of his goal, or it could have been the truth and his intention was to somehow spare at least some of the elves what is coming.

The reason I believe that it is only secondary, however, is because Solas for most of Inquisition does not consider modern elves to be his people. He makes it clear he does not identify with the Dalish early on, but even when it comes to non-Dalish elves, which he ostensibly is, he has this line towards the Inquisitor after the Wicked Hearts quest:

PC: I hope Briala uses her position to help your people. Solas: How would helping Briala help… Oh, you mean elves! Solas: I’m sorry, I was confused. I do not consider myself to have much in common with the elves.

PC: Nor should you. You’re not defined by the shape of your ears. They’re not your people. Solas: No, they are not.

This whole exchange can be kind of dfgkdfkgksd ehhh but I think the salient point is that Solas does not identify with modern elves and slipped up when he made this clear.

And yet, he does have people, he isn't just a solitary misanthrope like he tries to shake that off with. He clearly does have people and moreover it is for them that he is doing what he's doing.

Trespasser has this line, for example:

PC: You’d murder countless people? Solas: Wouldn’t you, to save your own?

Consider also that there is an aspect to his motivations that he deliberately refused to tell the Inquisitor at the end of Trespasser.

PC: Why does this world have to die for the elves to return? Solas: A good question, but not one I will answer. Solas (high approval): You have always shown a thoughtfulness I respected. It would be too easy to tell you too much. Solas (low approval): You will survive this day, Inquisitor, and though I owed you an explanation, I will not give you tools to use against me.

I find this exchange so very interesting. There is a reason why the restoration of his world has to result in the end of ours, but he won't tell us because he believes it would give us the tools to stop him. Even on low approval he is comfortable with us knowing that he intends to destroy the world, but not the reason why he has to.

As far as I can tell Veilguard didn't do anything interesting with this. But originally I thought it had to do specifically with his people, the ancient immortal elves, and what he would do to get them back. To bring it back to a previous point, I did not think that it was just in giving the modern day elves their immortality back because I can't see how telling the Inquisitor this would give them the tools to use against him, especially if you yourself are an elf.

I know I saw some people speculate that Solas was trying to bring them back with time travel, as a reference to the Hushed Whispers quest, but even though I could see the Dragon Age devs doing that because the time travel stuff was silly in the first place and yet they decided it was a good plot point anyway I didn't think that was it either? It didn't feel thematically punchy enough.

And as a warning the next section will be getting into more speculative territory, but

Part 2B: The Ancient Elvhen (and Lack Thereof)

So, I don't think it's a huge secret that Inquisition presented the idea that the immortal elves of Arlathan never entirely went away.

We see this in the fact that there are immortal elves, obviously. Solas, Felassan, Abelas, and the rest of the sentinels at the Temple of Mythal are all elves who lived in the days of Arlathan, and yet are still alive thousands of years later, walking about in modern day Thedas. Furthermore, Solas in particular hints to Abelas that there are even more immortal elves than him. Consider the fact that if you're a Lavellan in the temple, Abelas distinctly denies that you number among his people, and in fact if I'm remembering rightly, calls you a shemlen regardless of your race.

And yet when speaking with Solas, he has this to say:

Solas: There are other places, friend. Other duties. Your people yet linger. Abelas: Elvhen such as you? Solas: Yes. Such as I.

Solas who is, of course, an immortal elf. It's even possible that he is one Abelas knows personally, given the importance Solas once had to Mythal. My Lavellan listening to that like wtf :(

Consider also the banter that Solas can have with Cole, if you romanced him and got to the breakup scene after this quest:

Cole: He hurts, an old pain from before, when everything sang the same. Cole: You're real, and it means everyone could be real. It changes everything, but it can't. Cole: They sleep, masked in a mirror, hiding, hurting, and to wake them... (Gasps.) Where did it go? Solas: I apologize, Cole. That is not a pain you can heal.

This banter is never examined in Veilguard! Who is hiding? Who is hurting? The fact that "waking" them is on the table suggests to me that it is sleeping elves, perhaps like the sentinels who only woke to defend Mythal's temple and slept the rest of the time. In the context of Cole trying to explain to Lavellan why Solas broke up with her (and more important, Solas wanting to make sure she does not know this information,) I thought this line referred specifically to Solas' true people, the reason he was doing all of this.

The idea that there are other ancient elves out there, sleeping somewhere, suffering for some reason, as they wait for the Dread Wolf to bring the Veil down and wake them. The "masked in a mirror" part felt especially interesting to me because there's a part in the Masked Empire novel where Briala and Felassan (among other people) come across a couple elves that were allegedly sleeping in Uthenara, in a location they were only able to get to by traveling the Crossroads, which are located through eluvians. In that scene, Felassan gets very upset to see that these particular elves have apparently been killed in their sleep.

It makes me wonder if this is why Solas had to hide this possibility from the Inquisitor at all costs, especially from a low-approval Inquisitor. His motivations for doing all of this are the countless elves, his version of elves, who are scattered all over and currently helpless as they sleep. I can't help but imagine that a particularly desperate modern Thedosian might consider if removing the Dread Wolf's reason to bring down the Veil might not be the only way of stopping him from doing it.

Veilguard doesn't follow up on any of these plot threads. In fact, someone who has never read the novel might even come away from the game with the impression that Solas and the Evanuris are the only immortal elves that survived to Modern Thedas, as even Felassan's role in The Masked Empire is obscured from the player.

It's a shame because if they'd kept this plot point relevant it would have been a major challenge to overcome in persuading Solas not to bring down the Veil. Presuming he is talking about the ancient elves, Cole's dialogue suggests to me that it is the process of waking them, or some element of it, which necessitates that Solas destroy the rest of Thedas.

This brings up an important question, potentially even a difficult choice. Which society do you think is worth saving? Would you be willing to let an entire people sleep and suffer for eternity just to preserve your way of life? Could you convince Solas to allow that? Solas, who sees Thedas as so corrupt and terrible to elves and spirits, who fought so hard to give his fellow elves a more ideal world which never came to fruition?

Also yes the sleeping and suffering to preserve your way of life thing IS ironic because that is exactly what he did to the titans but the game was so uninterested in exploring that too.

And like, to be clear, I never thought that Dragon Age would actually have the player make that kind of terrible choice. Even in Origins you were sometimes given the chance to take a third option that benefited everyone if you did a bit of digging. And both Inquisition and the opening of this game teased the idea of you convincing Solas there was another way. I guess what that third option actually looked like would have depended on more specifics. Mainly, why waking them requires that modern Thedas be destroyed.

Ehh I wonder if any of this was even on the table when Trespasser was written. Maybe I read it all wrong.

Edit: crying and screaming because I apparently DID NOT read it wrong and Veilguard did intentionally retcon that plot point.

-----------

All in all, I personally did not really have a problem with what Solas was willing to do in this game. But when it came to the "why", I found myself really struggling with it after thinking about it for a while.

At the very least, I feel as though what I speculated above would have made Solas' motivations more understandable, even if, again, it did not ultimately make them sympathetic. Going just by what is shown in the game, Solas' actual motivations in Veilguard are not nearly as understandable to me, especially because not even a single elf or spirit is shown as wanting him to do it dfkgksdfk.

And clearly that is what they wanted for this narrative, but I can't believe it makes him more compelling as an antagonist in the franchise as a whole. I like him as a classic trolley problem dude.

Also he literally ignored Mythal when she told him not to do it in the regret mural and yet it's Mythal telling him he doesn't have to do it later that finally makes him stop? I guess Flemythal didn't realize the code word was "I release you from my service" or smth

Also,

Idk man. Thinking about it and I'm still so sad the ancient elves were a dropped plot point. I guess it's possible, with all the racism already shoved offscreen in this game, that onscreen racial tension between even these two different factions of elves was too tall an order.

[autistichalsin]

Honestly, the most reliable way to find out whether someone is really an actual leftist or just likes the aesthetic is by looking at their stances on the human rights of prisoners.

Do you actually think prisoners are still people, or do you think they forfeited their basic rights by being convicted of a crime (and please note the distinction between the terms "convicted of a crime" and "committed a crime," because these are not synonymous). Do you get angry at prisoners having little things that make their lives more tolerable, like books and TVs, OR are you a sadist who growls that they're "there to be punished"? Do you think prisons have an obligation to care for the health of prisoners, seeing as they have no choice but to be there, or do you grumble that "I don't get my healthcare paid for" (in America naturally) and thus think it's the prisoners' fault and not the lack of universal healthcare? Do you see that forcing prisoners to fight wildfires for cents an hour is slavery, or do you think slavery is an acceptable punishment? Do you think it's only basic common sense to offer pathways for prisoners to get a GED during their sentences- which is proven, time and again with empirical evidence, to reduce recidivism rates- or do you think it's not fair to pay for educating "lowlife criminals"? Do you think the death penalty is the ultimate infringement on human rights even in the best circumstances, and a tool for miscarriage of justice at worst given how many innocent people have been convicted, or does your desire to enjoy the suffering of the "right people" make you support it? Do you understand that prison systems are a tool for enforcing structural oppression, particularly towards people of color, poor people, queer people, and the mentally ill, or do you think that's just an acceptable cost for making sure the bad guys get punished? Do you care that the bad guys actually DON'T get punished seeing as how wealthy white rapists almost universally go free, or do you just enjoy the comfort of your imagined scenario too much to let go of it?

Prisons are the real true litmus test for self-proclaimed leftism because the standards are so low that they're in hell and most still can't even match those

[bbcphile]

Mysterious Lotus Casebook and Complex PTSD Representations: Part I

One of my favorite things about Mysterious Lotus Casebook is how surprisingly nuanced and unusual its portrayal of complex PTSD is. So many shows either introduce character trauma to make the character Sad and Brooding, Angry and Violent (if they’re a villain) or Hesitant to Start a Relationship (if it’s a romance), and that’s usually as in-depth as it gets. If they address the unique after effects of child abuse that lead to complex PTSD at all, it’s usually either explain why a character is a homicidal monster (which is all sorts of problematic) or it’s limited to a single phobia, which can be overcome by the Power of Love, or it’s just something that crops up occasionally for Plot and then forgotten about the rest of the time. 

Mysterious Lotus Casebook gives us two deeply traumatized characters–Li Lianhua and Di Feisheng–who each have clear symptoms of complex PTSD, and yet, their cPTSD manifests completely differently because of the types of traumas that caused it and their relationships to the people causing the traumas. And their manifestations of cPTSD affect just about every level of their being, including their sense of self, their decision-making, and their relationships with others, and it includes some of the incredibly important manifestations of cPTSD that are almost never shown in media while avoiding the most insulting stereotypes! 

PTSD vs cPTSD

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is an anxiety disorder caused by experiencing a single (or short lived) traumatic event (an accident, assault, medical emergency, fighting in a war, etc), where the symptoms last for longer than a month. Symptoms include things like reexperiencing the event (flashbacks), avoidance (of things related to the event), changes in mood (depression, anger, fear, etc), and issues with emotional regulation (hypervigilance–being constantly on the lookout for threats–irritability/angry outbursts, etc.).

Complex PTSD happens if someone has experienced long term, chronic/repeated trauma that induces hopelessness and no chance of escape (survivors of extended child abuse, human trafficking, domestic violence, prisoners of war, slavery, etc.). It’s also often interpersonal in ways a car crash or medical emergency is not, and is particularly linked with chronic trauma during childhood: chronic stress hormones introduce literal physical changes in a growing brain, particularly the amygdala (which processes fear), hippocampus (which is responsible for learning/memory), and the prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for executive function), so it can affect every aspect of life and also affect a child’s progression through developmental stages. In addition to these physical changes to the brain, the prolonged trauma–particularly the helplessness–distorts a child’s sense of self, the perpetrator, and the world in ways that alter their decision making, their memory, and their future relationships. 

For instance, whereas a traumatic event that caused PTSD might make you depressed or not trust the person who harmed you (or to fear driving), the trauma from cPTSD might make you suicidal, blame yourself for your victimization, decide to isolate to avoid interpersonal relationships to keep from getting hurt, or become obsessed with never being harmed again.

Basically, cPTSD has the core symptoms from PTSD with some extra challenges, including issues with emotional regulation, self-concept, interruptions in consciousness, difficulties with relationships, perceptions of the perpetrator, and systems of meaning.

DFS and LLH: CPTSD Symptoms

There’s so much more to say about this than I can cover in this superficial introduction, so this will be the first of a series of metas; I’m hoping to go into more depth about some of these categories in future posts (the DFS and emotional regulation/violence one is already drafted, so stay tuned). 

Difficulties with Relationships (problems with trust, communication, missing red flags): Both DFS and LLH have a history of trusting the wrong people and not trusting the right people, both in the past and in the present of the show: in the past, LLH missed the fact that SGD hated him and DFS missed the fact that JLQ was obsessed with him, and as a result, both sects were destroyed, many people died, and the two almost destroyed each other. If they had communicated with each other instead of fighting at the donghai battle, they might have realized they were being set up and could have worked together, but their difficulties with trust after perceived betrayal made that impossible for them. They both have a history of overlooking red flags in the present–DFS in particular, keeping the red-flag-personified-JLQ around despite her history of poisoning people, including himself–and they both tend to struggle with relationships in the present: LLH runs away from and/or drugs the people who care about him, and DFS sends endless mixed messages by not telling Li Lianhua most of his plans to help him. 

Self-Concept (Self-hatred and self-fragmentation): Li Lianhua is basically the poster child for having a negative self concept: he has an overdeveloped sense of self-blame and responsibility, even believing he deserves to die for leading his men to their deaths, and once he learns he was manipulated and SGD was behind it all, he seems to think it’s his own fault that he was manipulated, lied to, and abused. His self-loathing is so extreme that he imagines his earlier self, Li Xiangyi, to have died, and tries as much as possible to be nothing like that earlier persona. His repeated insistence that Li Xiangyi and Li Lianhua are NOT the same person is reminiscent of the fragmentary sense of self that comes with more extreme trauma, like Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Other-Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD), where traumatic experiences are so painful that people form different alters, or differentiated self-states, that can have different names and skills and memories and identities. 

Di Feisheng doesn’t have the self-hatred or guilt that LLH does, and it seems like he tries to skip over questions of self worth, blame, or hatred by focusing exclusively on staying true to his code of ethics he’s developed for himself and focusing on gaining the strength necessary to fight for his freedom from mind control and the Di Fortress. But even though he’s kept his Di name, kept his goals the same since escaping Di Fortress, and hasn’t tried to separate himself from his trauma the way LLH did with LXY, he’s even more willing than LLH to take on different identities: it’s literally one of his martial arts skills. The Bone Constriction Skill lets him become someone else for a time, whether that’s a child or Shi Hun. It fits well with his willingness to be whoever he needs to be to accomplish his goals: he’s perfectly willing to be seen as a heartless villain if it lets him protect LLH, and he’s willing to flirt with and pretend to be jealous of JLQ to get information from her, and he’s willing to be LLH’s a-Fei, both with and without his memories.

Interruptions in Consciousness (Amnesia and nightmares for Everyone): LLH and DFS both have nightmares and flashbacks/memories of traumatic events, and as mentioned above, both have interesting hints of having fragmented/fluid senses of self. They both also dissociate, or separate themselves from the present when dealing with traumatic things:  LLH spaces out and gets stuck in his past memories about SGD when talking to FDB after burying SGD, and DFS dissociates from physical pain so as not to make noise both after he’s been stabbed and poisoned with Wuxin Huai and again when JLQ is torturing him in her water dungeon.

They both also have dissociative amnesia that takes away trauma memories, although one is from a poisonous incense plus the magic of qi macgyvering:  LLH forgot the existence of his older brother who died in front of him, and DFS as a-Fei had just about all of his memories (except a few of killing as a child) taken away. Amnesia is a huge part of cPTSD, because it’s the brain’s way of trying to protect you from truths that you might not survive. It can manifest as blocking out one single traumatic event, a bunch of thematically or temporally linked traumatic events, a skill set related to the trauma, or, in the case of something like DID or OSDD, just about everything. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that the show gives us one example of definite traumatic amnesia through LLH, and then seems to almost transform the experience of having DID and being a new part and finding yourself with a new name and very little else into an exaggerated fantasy setting (interestingly, people often report experiencing debilitating headaches when they try to regain memories behind the amnesia barrier). I doubt this is what they were actually going for, since DID is almost universally portrayed incorrectly and offensively in media (one of the alters is almost always portrayed as a serial killer, but that’s a rant for another day), but the different names and the presence of amnesia with LLH made it a fascinating enough parallel that I had to mention it.

 Problems with Emotional Regulation (Lashing in vs. lashing out): Li Xiangyi and Di Feisheng are polar opposites when it comes to struggles with emotional regulation: whereas LXY turns his anger inward, directing it all toward self-hate in what’s often called a “toxic shame spiral,” both after the donghai battle and after he finds out about SGD’s role in his shifu’s death, DFS lashes out physically at those who have harmed him, usually via choking people, although he is usually exerting an impressive amount of control over his emotions and strength. To put in perspective just how different their emotional strategies are and how much effort DFS puts into emotional regulation, compare how much more calm he is than LLH during any revelation of past betrayal or painful information, any scene where they confront the people who have abused them, or any scene where they learn they’ve been wrong about something big; LLH is most likely having an emotional flashback (re-experiencing the emotions from the earlier traumas) and DFS is probably compartmentalizing them or dissociating from them to process later/never so he can stay semi-functional and not show a potential opponent a weak spot. 

NOTE: This means that DFS is loooong overdue for a very dramatic breakdown when it eventually all catches up to him and he can’t distract himself from it anymore.

Perceptions of Perpetrators: In this way only, Di Feisheng has one advantage: he knows the head of Di Fortress is a cruel, abusive tyrant. While he clearly still fears him, even as a physically strong adult (he has nightmares, flashbacks, and dedicates his life to being free from him, which means he still to some extent feels young, small, and helpless when he thinks of him), DFS knows that he hates him and wants to be free of him. This is probably part of why he’s spared some of the self-hatred LLH experiences: he knows he didn’t deserve the abuse because seeing it happen to other children means he knows the abuse wasn’t a personal reflection on him. It does, however, motivate him to want to be stronger and invulnerable so as to never be helpless again, and that obsession is what drives him to have a single-minded focus on reaching the pinnacle of the jianghu.  

It’s so much more complicated for Li Lianhua (and for a more detailed analysis, check out this meta): the childhood perpetrators were manifold–a slew of bandits, whichever children and adults on the street would abuse him for existing and being poor–it probably felt like life itself was to blame. It’s no wonder that when his shifu and shiniang took him in, they were the ultimate rescuers whom he hero-worshipped, so when he felt he made a mistake and his life fell apart, he blamed himself: at least there would be someone to blame that way and something he could do about it (try to kill his past self and hate everything about him). It’s also very telling that LLH doesn’t blame JLQ or YBQ all that much when he learns they poisoned him, and that he’s more angry that SGD murdered their shifu than he is that SGD set him up, hated him, and was the real mastermind behind everything he had blamed himself for; he struggles to stay angry at people who harm him, and would rather blame and hate himself for being tricked than hate the person who tricked him. So, whereas DFS tries to destroy the people who abused him, LLH tries to destroy himself.

If you read this far, thanks! I’m probably going to be posting the DFS and emotional regulation/violence against perpetrator meta next, because it’s drafted, but if there are any of these you desperately want me to talk about more sooner rather than later, let me know! :D 

[irrealisms]

svsss and sexual violence pt. 5: we live in a society

standard disclaimer at the beginning: i am not saying that this is the Only thing svsss is about, or that other readings are invalid; i am not intending to character-bash most of the characters here (while i will freely admit to thinking e.g. old palace master or qiu jianluo are pretty one-dimensionally shitty, lots--probably most--of the characters in this series who i mention as perpetrating SA are characters who do have depths & who i in fact like a lot! despite this meta, or perhaps because of it, my second-favorite character is luo binghe, and i am in fact a bingqiu shipper!); and, obviously, huge fucking CW for sexual abuse and adjacent topics. this section is about 1.5k words.

TABLE OF CONTENTS pt 1: shen yuan's realization of himself as a target pt 2: gender and homophobia pt 3: non-bingqiu sexual violence pt 4: shen qingqiu's body pt 5: we live in a society (you are here)

something that's universal across all three of mxtx's books is that society allows for & often approves of abuse, that invisibilized abuse of people with less power from people with more power is the bedrock society stands on; that even when society claims to disapprove of abuse, this is a smokescreen at best for attacking what (and who) it actually disapproves of. svsss...is not an exception to this. a lot of the incidents i'm about to discuss are ones i've already mentioned earlier in the series, but here i'm less interested in the specific incidents and more interested in the ways that society implicitly approves. a lot of these are sexual abuse but some of these are in fact nonsexual abuse because "society dgaf about abuse" applies fairly equally to all types of abuse in svsss.

the first and obvious example here is Shen Jiu. society, both in the universe of PIDW/SVSSS and in the ~frame story of the audience reaction to PIDW, objects to a 14-year-old slave breaking the engagement vows he made to a girl from the family that owns him so harshly they would throw him in prison/torture him (within the universe of the story) or demand for him to be castrated (in the comments section of said story). no one objects to the fact that slavery exists, or that Shen Jiu was abused; while it is ambiguous whether he was sexually abused (although I think there's strong evidence for it, as discussed in parts 3 + 4), society would not care if he had been; within PIDW universe, that's Qiu Jianluo's right, to do what he wants with his property, and within the universe where PIDW exists as a novel it would be hated as a storytelling decision the way all of Airplane's attempts at making Shen Jiu sympathetic were hated (because PIDW fandom didn't want complex villains with tragic backstories, they wanted someone they could uncomplicatedly hate).

the second example is also Shen Jiu, but the other way around--while he didn't sexually abuse Luo Binghe, nor was his abuse of LBH presented as particularly sexualized in any way (and if you've read this meta you know i am not shy about seeing technically nonsexual violence as sexualized/referencing sexual abuse in this book :P), it's another good example of how society allows for abuse? SQQ was in a position of power over LBH, so... he just gets to do whatever he wants to LBH. LBH can get revenge as an adult with a lot more power, can leverage that power & the ways SJ is vulnerable, can make it so that torturing and abusing him back is also allowed by society's rules--but when he is a kid without that power? society doesn't care! this is obviously less true on a "what did PIDW fandom care about" level than the other examples, but it's still true enough in-PIDW-universe that imho it counts!

the third example is the water prison. once again, Luo Binghe does not rape Shen Qingqiu in the water prison (although there was some very sexualized violence, shading into sexual assault). but-- SQQ was put in the water prison to be tortured at LBH's whims. if LBH had wanted to rape SQQ in there? he could have. with the material support of society. if Gongyi Xiao had been right that LBH raped SQQ there, GYX would still be disobeying his master to show SQQ kindness and break him out, and he would still end up just as killed for it. in the eyes of society, trying to help a prisoner escape the person who is raping them is worse than raping a prisoner. (identifying obviously identical problems with the prison system in the real world is left as an exercise to the reader.)

the fourth example is the old palace master. i talked about him some in part 3, but two things i want to highlight: - given that he was able to groom and abuse at least two generations, he's been doing this for a long time, and either no one noticed (even though it is obvious enough that sqq notices within a few lines of talking to him, implying that no one cared enough to look) or people did notice and, for whatever reason (some of which are even very sympathetic--certainly if i were his disciple and was mostly getting away with Not Being Abused i wouldn't want to come to his attention! but some of which are, uh, much less sympathetic) they let him, the same way people must have known about shen jiu's treatment of luo binghe and let him. because he's a powerful man, because it's his disciples and he has the authority, because, because, because. either way, this.... does not speak to a society that cares about sexual abuse. - when society learns about su xiyan's history, they blame her. they blame her for getting with tianlang-jun, they blame her for not aborting luo binghe, they assume she left her sect because she was ashamed and not because her sect hurt her. tianlang-jun is demonized (heh) even though his relationship with her was entirely consensual, because society hates him; old palace master is assumed to be innocent of any wrongdoing, because society likes him. do things eventually get figured out? yes. but the immediate reaction here is ... well, it's relevant.

last example here is moshang. again, not sexual/sexualized abuse! but through shang qinghua we get a piece of insight into demon society, rather than just human society, and what we get is... very very normalized physical abuse. shang qinghua is often going around with bruises from mobei-jun, to the point where shen qingqiu notices and is used to it. compare these two quotes, the first spoken by SQH to mobei-jun and the second from SQQ's narration:

“No one likes getting beat up every day, and no one would actually be all cheery after getting beat up every day! I’m not actually a dog! Even with a dog, if you kicked it twice a day, given enough time, it’d learn not to bother with you anymore!”

&

There was no telling what Shang Qinghua had done to piss off Mobei-Jun this time, but the corner of his lip was swelling as he gave Shen Qingqiu a pathetic smile. Shen Qingqiu couldn’t bear to look, so he shifted his gaze back to the file.

and.... the thing is, mobei-jun doesn't want to hurt sqh? when sqh gives him advice on how to woo men, he takes it; he pats sqh on the head instead of beating him, he gets sqh a cart when he's injured, he offers to let sqh hit him back. but the frequent beating is just...how demon society works, esp around the sort of power dynamic that sqh and mbj have. it's normal. and, given the demons we see, i don't actually think this is a fundamental difference of demon psychology. the demons we see who are person-y enough to Have Society are, broadly speaking...basically human? i think this is just... demon society is fine with it, because society is fine with all sorts of abuse as long as it's normal. and as we've seen in this post, it's not like human society is, uh, different in this regard.

the last thing i have to say isn't really a direct example. it's a little aside from shen yuan's internal monologue when talking to tianlang-jun about the plan to merge the realms:

The last part even sounded like rape culture logic: if you violate a person often enough, they’ll cooperate eventually; so do it first and think about the rest later.

which-- honestly i wouldn't have even thought to make that connection! but it was made for me by the book! and this is in a paragraph talking about how tianlang-jun thinks like this because he was mistreated and trapped under bai lu mountain, that he's bitter and resentful because of it, and it draws a neat little bow with our first example--shen jiu. the way that this is one way that rape & abuse culture perpetuate: someone is mistreated. they learn that this is how the world is; they pass it on. the cycle of abuse (and the breaking or attempted breaking of it) is another theme mxtx returns to over and over, in all three books, and you see that highlighted here. there's probably more to say here about TLJ's overall arc but i've worked on this meta for a long time and it is getting Really Quite Late.

if you've read all the meta (or even just this one): thanks for sticking with me through this! i really hope it was interesting & you got something out of it. i wrote. SO much in one day.

[fatehbaz]

all the time, gotta walk away, for a moment, take a break, infuriated, when reading about European implementation of forced labour, particularly and especially thinking about nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plantations, whether it's sugarcane or rubber or tea or banana, whether it's British plantations in Assam or Malaya; Belgian plantations in Congo; French plantations in West Africa; Dutch plantations in Java; de facto United States-controlled plantations in Haiti or Guatemala or Cuba or Colombia. and the story is always: "and then the government tried to find a way to reimpose slavery under a different name. and then the government destroyed vast regions of forest for monoculture plantations. and then the government forced thousands to become homeless and then criminalized poverty to force people into plantation work or prison labor." like the plantation industries are central (entangled with every commodity and every infrastructure project) and their directors are influencing each other despite spatial distance between London and the Caribbean and the Philippines.

and so the same few dozen administrators and companies and institutions keep making appearances everywhere, like they have outsized influence in history. like they are important nodes in a network. and they all cite each other, and write letters to each other, and send plant collection gifts to each other, and attend each other's lectures, and inspire other companies and colonial powers to adapt their policies/techniques.

but. important that we ought not characterize some systems and forces (surveillance apparatuses, industrial might, capitalism itself) as willful or always conscious. this is a critical addendum. a lot of those forces are self-perpetuating, or at least not, like, a sentient monster. we ought to avoid imagining a hypothetical boardroom full of be-suited businessmen smoking cigars and plotting schemes. this runs the risk of misunderstanding the forces that kill us, runs the risk of attributing qualities to those forces that they don't actually possess. but sometimes, in some cases, there really are, like, a few particular assholes with a disproportionate amount of influence making problems for everyone else.

not to over-simplify, but sometimes it's like the same prominent people, and a few key well-placed connections and enablers in research institutions or infrastructure companies. they're prison wardens and lietuenant governors and medical doctors and engineers and military commanders and botanists and bankers, and they all co-ordinate these multi-faceted plans to dispossess the locals, build the roads, occupy the local government, co-erce the labour, tend the plants, ship the products.

so you'll be reading the story of like a decade in British Singapore and you're like "oh, i bet that one ambitious British surgeon who is into 'economics' and is obsessed with tigers and has the big nutmeg garden in his backyard is gonna show up again" and sure enough he does. but also sometimes you're reading about another situation halfway across the planet and then they surprise you (because so many of them are wealthy and influential and friends with each other) and it'll be like "oh you're reading about a British officer displacing local people to construct a new building in Nigeria? surprise cameo! he just got a letter from the dude at the university back in London or the agriculturalist in Jamaica or the urban planner from Bombay, they all went to school together and they're also all investors in the same rubber plantation in Malaya". so you'll see repeated references to the same names like "the British governor of Bengal" or "[a financial institution or bank from Paris or New York City]" or "[a specific colonial doctor/laboratory that does unethical experiments or eugenics stuff]" or "lead tropical agriculture adviser to [major corporation]" or "the United Fruit Company" and it's like "not you again"

[gaiuskamilah]

not particularly fond of this line. the mutual raiding of orc clans with each other and them raiding other ships reminds me of ship raiding culture in pre-colonial maritime southeast asia. aside from goods, they mutually raided each other for people as well, enslaving them and keeping them as prisoners who are then tasked with labor within the society they've been taken into. blades' orcs seem to function in the same way (their political philosophy and designs also remind me of pre-colonial maritime southeast asia). also, iirc they were going to take the party as prisoners when imtura attacked, so this line is pretty weird to me with that considered.

the writers are usamericans so i understand why they'd hesitate to use the term slavery for what the orcs do, as that invokes more of the racialized plantation slavery that was prevalent in the US (and they're seemingly attempting to invoke that same racialized slavery between elves and humans). but that isn't the only form of slavery that's existed, so i'm not particularly fond of dismissing the raiding the orcs do (which would realistically also involve the raiding of people) as not slavery.

[scotianostra]

On 2nd January 1793: Thomas Muir of Huntershill, the Glasgow-born Advocate, was arrested for sedition.

He was released after a few days and went to France. On his return to Scotland, Muir was tried and sentenced to 14 years transportation. Muir was the founder of the Scottish Friends of the People, he and the other leaders of this group transported to Australia, are known as the Scottish Martyrs

Thomas Muir and his companions in misfortune, who later became famous as the Scottish Martyrs, were among the prominent figures of the vast movement for reform that emerged in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. What makes their case particularly interesting is that these men were sentenced to transportation, a form of exile that needs to be included in any consideration of the themes of exile and return. Drawing on the example of Thomas Muir, this article will investigate the specific nature of political exile. Does the “time” (in the sense of temporality) of political exile differentiate itself from the “time” of other forms of exile? Is political exile characterized by a state of “fundamental discontinuity”?1 Does the political, intellectual or ideological dimension of political exiles enable them overcome, maybe more than other exiles, the essential sadness of exile? These are some of the questions I propose to address in this paper.

In the seventeenth century the English and Scottish governments viewed the colonies, for example America, as perfectly appropriate places to send miscreants of all kinds, criminals, vagrants, prostitutes or political prisoners. Transportation constituted an instrument of social control whose function was to deter people from resorting to criminal acts. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who was one of the most determined opponents of the Union of 1707, thought, like many of his contemporaries, that the system of transportation was the panacea for solving the endemic problem of vagrancy:

There are at this day in Scotland two hundred thousand people in Scotland begging from door to door. These are not only no way advantageous, but a very grievous burden to so poor a country in all times there have been about one hundred thousand of those vagabonds who have lived without any regard or subjection either to the laws of the land or even those of God or nature in years of plenty many thousands of them meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country weddings, markets, burials, and other the like publick occasions they are to be seen both men and women perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming and fighting together. These are such outrageous disorders, that it were better for the nation they were sold to the gallies or West Indies, than that they should continue to be a burden and like upon us

In recent years there have come to light an increasing number of writings by Thomas Muir of Huntershill. Among these is Muir’s legal thesis on the topic of slavery that criticized the institution and condemned it as morally unjustifiable it was written for admittance to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh in 1787 and can be found in the holdings of the National Library of Scotland.

[alpaca-clouds]

We need to finally decolonize

You know what? Thanks to Castlevania Nocturne I got a chance to talk a bit more about colonialism. So, let me just talk for a while a bit about decolonialization and what would need to happen for that.

Also, if you are one of the white guys, who is going to whine about "Arab colonialisation, boohoo", I am gonna kick you ass off this blog, just so you know.

I think like two months ago I already wrote a bit about how colonialism has never ended. And it hasn't. For the most part a lot of land is still not only settled, but owned by settlers. This is true for the Americas (including the US of course), but also true for Australia, parts of the Pacific and also large chunks of Africa.

Additionally settlers have constructed contries and borders often to serve their needs and to allow them to assert control. This is particularly clear in Africa of course, where those straight line borders ignore both geography and original tribal lands, splitting it up and hence adding to local conflicts.

Then there is of course the general effects of the genocides that have happened through colonialism and are - arguably - still happening, given how underserved Indigenous communities are often in terms of infrastructure, but also access to justice in any way or form.

And of course once more: Slavery is still happening. Partly in mines (and the like) in countries where you do not see it - often for the enrichment of white people - and of course in the US through the prison industrial complex.

I could go on and on. But let me turn this around and talk about what needs to happen instead. How do we decolonize?

Short answer: Land back and reparations.

No, that does not mean that all settlers have to move, but that tribes get to manage and make decisions about their own land. And if they do not want your fucking pipeline on that land, there is not gonna be a fucking pipeline on the land. And if they allow it, they can charge you for the use of the land. It is their land, they get to call the shots!

And that is not only gonna be true for the US and Canada, but for all settled land that is currently held by white people.

It also means paying reparations to everyone who suffered through colonialism. The people whose ancestors got shipped around the world as slaves, but also the people whose families had to suffer through genocide and all of that.

And no, it should not only be the US to pay those reparations, but all the countries that enriched themselves on all the horrors committed. Which would also include Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal first and foremost.

A lot of western countries act like they are lord and saviors when they give "humanitarian aid" to the global south, even though those payments are not even a fraction of the money they made on the backs of the people living in the global south right now.

The argument against this is always: "But we do not have the money" and "it is all gonna be taken by dictators", to which I say: "Tough luck" and "who was it again that put those fucking dictators in power to prevent the spread of communism?"

I just really do not have any chill for white people going all "but the money" again. That money was stolen. So fuck right off.

[reblogandlikes]

Question, but what's the actual timeline prior acotar?

Sure, the war ended 500 years ago, but when did it start? How long did it last? Which Court fought for and against human slavery particularly in Prythian and beyond it? Was there in-fighting between the courts prior across boarders and causing political rifts between each High Lord and other nations? Which court did this main war take place? And who used the Cauldron to construct the wall in the first place?

Another question in relation to the characters.

Mor, how does her character work in the context of the book? She was known as The Morrigon, meaning she fought in war. Was cannon that she was there that even the human queens know of her, but why would she be there in the first place when she's Kiers daughter and its told that CoN is pretty misogynistic, so I'm sure there's no way in hell he'd allow his daughter to be a warrior. He still scares her in the present day, so why would he agree for her to join a war rather than staying back with the other women trapped in CoN where she can remain monitored?

Also, randomly, wtf if her power? I don't understand what "Truth" means or how it manifests and displays itself into something concrete/physical or mental.

Moving on...

We're told Tamlin betrayed Rhysand (we don't have Tamlin’s back story yet from his perspective) and that he used the information Rhysand had given due to them being friends at the time. Now, how on earth did this friendship begin? How long were they even friends for for Rhysand to have supposedly taught him about women and how to fight? How solid had the friendship been?

Speaking of these two, when exactly did they become High Lords of their courts? It can't have been for 500 years because that was the end of the first war, and Tamlin was still a child at the time. Has it only been 200 years...300...400 in actuality? 🤔

And then there’s Lucien’s timeline. How old is he? How long has it been since he was basically granted asylum in Spring? Seeming he was banished and would be hunted if he stepped foot back in the Autumn Court, did that mean Tamlin used someone else as emissary if he ever had to deal with Baron? Who is this person? Where are all the other offical delegates and Lords and those who hold some standing in any of the courts?

Speaking of missing people, who is this other daemati? Where is this other daemati? Did he, she, it even exist? Can anyone else, Jurian, for example, point them out seeming he had been attached to Amarantha's finger for centuries and saw/heard everything?

How and when did Amren escape the prison. How did Rhysand come across her? Why did she bother staying in Prythian and not go back to where she originally came from? Is she stuck? Wtf even is she if we now know she's not Asteri?

Wtf is now happening with Hybern? The King's is dead now...so? You're telling me he didn't have a council or others there ready to take over? Is there currently a power struggle? Are they potentially a threat in the future?

Why do so many characters lack surnames and other family members don't exist?

In this world, there's now been 4.5 books. Further world building could have easily been implentated to close a few gaps.

Lots of questions. I don’t care if you're pro or anti for this post. Someone, please provide me with something or theory, because I'm left filling in the gaps. I feel like I'm thinking too hard with these books when I really shouldn't take anything seriously.

[loominggaia]

EVANGELITE SLAVE CUISINE

(This article was actually a request from a long time ago. I don't even remember who requested it, but thank you for the idea!)

OVERVIEW

Slavery is the backbone of Evangeline Kingdom’s economy. Without all this unpaid labor, the entire kingdom would crumble, and a big chunk of the world’s food supply would go down with it. Evangelite slaves literally work themselves to death putting food on everyone’s tables but their own, as their masters are often cheap and refuse to feed them properly. These slaves have found crafty ways to supplement their nutrition themselves.

GRUEL

Colloquially known as “slave slop”, gruel is the staple food of Evangelite slaves, which is provided in rations by their masters. This dish is simply a cereal–such as oats or rice–boiled in milk. If the master is especially stingy, the milk is substituted for water. It’s typical for slaves to eat this for every meal. Slave owners choose gruel as their main staple because of its cheap price, but it is lacking in nutrition, so vegetables and chunks of meat may be added on occasion to perk up sickly-looking slaves.

Gruel is not willingly eaten by Evangelite citizens. It is considered exclusively a “slave food”. Only prisoners and those in extremely destitute conditions will resort to eating this bland dish.

BLOODBREAD

This grisly recipe originated in Kelvingyard, the largest slave market on Looming Gaia. Kelvingyard slaves are deliberately underfed so that they will compete for food, leaving only the fittest slaves to survive. This filters out the weak and undesirable slaves without any effort on behalf of staff, leaving them free to do other things. Desperation has driven these slaves to invent bloodbread.

First, a crude flour is formed from crushed weeds, dirt, insects, blood, and bonemeal. The blood and bones may come from vermin or are sometimes harvested from dead slaves before staff comes to collect their bodies. The flour is shaped into biscuits and left out in the sun to “bake”. They must be fiercely guarded from other slaves while they’re baking, so it’s not uncommon for them to be eaten raw.

COURTYARD SALAD

There are two types of slaves in Evangeline Kingdom: Field slaves and house slaves. Field slaves are those which exclusively work outside, and are responsible for chores like crop tending and yard maintenance. This always includes weed-pulling, so slaves pocket all the edible weeds they can throughout the day and make a salad out of them later. Their masters usually prohibit them from taking home crops, but occasionally they find substantial gifts from nature such as wild beetroots, blackberries, and sunchokes encroaching on the crop fields.

The name “courtyard salad” originated from field slaves who tended courtyards of Evangelite nobles. These massive expanses of grass and manicured hedges were a testament to the nobles’ wealth, but they required hours of maintenance each day to keep them looking neat. The slaves who tend these courtyards can reap a large bounty of weeds for themselves during peak growing seasons.

COURTYARD TEA

Courtyard tea was developed under the same conditions as courtyard salad; field slaves pulling weeds from their masters’ gardens and making meals of them. But they didn’t just eat them, they drank them as well. Some weeds, such as dandelion and mint, make healthy, flavorful teas. These teas can also offer health benefits, which is particularly useful to slaves because they receive substandard medical care or none at all.

Evangelite slaves have passed on their knowledge of medicinal herbs to each other for generations. They use mint tea for digestive ailments, willow tea for pain relief, and chamomile tea for soothing anxiety, but those are just a few of the many possible effects these brews can have.

CASTAWAY STEW

Some slave owners do not allow their slaves to eat their table scraps, instead preferring to compost them for their gardens or feed them to their pets. The most miserly of them prefer to keep all but the rotten scraps as leftovers for their own families. But the wealthier ones tend to be more generous with their leftovers and allow their slaves to eat them.

Sometimes these scraps are eaten as-is, but they can also be thrown into a stew to stretch them further. House slaves are responsible for cleaning kitchens, so they typically reap the most benefit. But occasionally they will share their bounty with field slaves, or field slaves will pilfer these scraps themselves from their master’s trash bins. Cooking it in a stew helps to hide unpleasant flavors of any scraps that have begun to rot.

CRUUSTI

Much like castaway stew, cruusti is made from the leftovers that slaves collect from their masters’ dinner tables. However, cruusti is not a stew, it is a bread made from random crumbs that have been swept off counters, as well as bread crusts that the master’s children refused to eat. Crumbs can also be scraped off of baking pans and utensils. Slaves gather these small scraps of dry bread over time, then when they have enough, they rehydrate them in water and make a crude dough. Sometimes they get lucky and a stray chocolate chip or nut makes its way into the mix.

BONE SCRAPS

Cereal-based gruel is not sufficient enough to feed heavyweight slaves such as centaurs and minotaurs long-term, so their diets are supplemented with so-called “bone scraps”. These are the discarded animal bones from butcheries or dinner tables. They are given to slaves raw and they are often eaten raw too, but if slaves have the means, they may boil or bury them to make them softer. The marrow inside is nutritious and the bones themselves become jelly-like with proper cooking. Satyrs, centaurs, and minotaurs have strong jaws that can crush up the bones as-is, but other peoples struggle with this.

BEETROOT SOUP

Beetroot soup is the most famous dish eaten by Evangelite slaves. You can read about it on the main Evangelite Cuisine article.

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