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maddiviner · 2 years ago

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A person can worship a goddess and still be a raging misogynist.

I see this all the fucking time, too, and the "b-but I'm pagan!" line does get trotted out.

Yeah, no. I don't care how devoted you (claim you) are to Hecate/Freya/Babalon etc, I care how you treat flesh-and-blood people.

You can't pretend that "worshiping a goddess" makes someone, by default, not a misogynist. I see guys who have a (weird) notion of "divine femininity;" a perfect nurturing caregiver of sorts. They then get irate when a woman won't take that role for them.

They expect a (very narrowly-defined) goddess, and when they don't get one, they get mad. I end up reading their rants online as a bystander. A lot of these guys will claim the woman has somehow betrayed them, isn't pagan enough, or is an evil supernatural being?! Vampire? It's sometimes something like that.

On another note? Many transphobes are also very loud about how they "worship goddesses." They're, of course, equally loud about their disrespect for women, though. There's some "trad pagan" types, too (or whatever they're now called) who believe in goddesses - but also believe that women belong in the kitchen.

So yeah. Don't assume someone's safe and not bigoted simply because they worship Demeter or whoever. Don't let them claim that their goddess patron absolves any shitty behavior. This is a thing that keeps popping up, and I think people should be mindful of it. Don't let people like the above act as if worshiping Minerva, Aphrodite, or Juno (or whoever) gives them a free pass to be a bigot.

Also? A whole fucking civilization can worship goddesses and still be a terrible place for women.

That doesn't mean that those pantheons are misogynistic. It also doesn't mean that those reconstructing the religions are misogynists. It means that it's possible to have systemic goddess worship and misogyny together.

Don't give me that "b-but in some very specific scenarios, rich women could even *gasps of joy* own property!" either. Don't act like the mere existence of priestesses meant women there held great power, or even that the priestesses themselves necessarily did.

You can't take that kind of thing to mean that your average woman had basic rights in some of these pagan societies. In some cases, that was the case, yeah, but it's hardly been the majority. From what I've read over the years, a lot of it depended on wealth and status.

Even in Ancient Athens (pre-Pericles), women weren't considered citizens, exactly. They could take part in some religious ceremonies, but not most. While they had some financial freedom, they were generally relegated to domestic roles.

Colette Hemingway from the Metropolitan Museum describes this as "extreme social restraint." It doesn't sound like I'd want to live in that kind of civilization, even if I had modern creature comforts. It's similar elsewhere in the ancient world. Not everywhere, but enough places. Don't pretend otherwise.

Much of our history has included misogyny. This isn't a new thing. It was part of paganism. It unfortunately still is. Pretending "we were all considered equal before the Christians came" is disingenuous. And yeah, I've heard people make that exact claim in pagan places.

#pagan #paganism #witchblr #witchcraft #witch #eliza.txt #occult #misogyny #feminism #goddess #goddess worship #diana #history #gender #ugh #be aware and beware #safety #assumptions

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tropes-and-tales · 2 years ago

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Holiday Memories

December 16: Candy cane/playlist - Oh my god, they were roommates (Horacio Carrillo x F!reader)

(From the winter prompts found here)

CW: Super-convoluted plot-point; pining; fluff; tons o’typos and grammar snafus

Word Count: 1307

AN: Requested by anon!

It’s the least ideal situation: Horacio Carrillo, grown man and stoic leader of the Search Bloc needs to humble himself and move in with you.

Admittedly, it’s not his fault…nor is he the one that actually has to humble himself and ask you. The Colombian government does the official asking.

It’s a series of catastrophes—there’s a fire in his neighborhood with the house next door, and strong winds blow it in the direction of his house. It’s a near-total loss, and it’s unclear if it’s the usual culprits (faulty wiring, unattended candle) or if it’s arson from the narcos. Threats had been made. Chatter and bragging after the fact point to a possible crime.

Usually, the head of the Search Bloc would get his own temporary apartment in the block of buildings that the U.S. embassy uses for its employees, but they are at capacity.

Carrillo can’t move in with Steve Murphy and his wife and young, adopted daughter.

Carrillo can’t move in with Peña. Well, he could move in with Peña, but he’d be relegated to the couch and while he isn’t a prude, Carrillo doesn’t think he could handle a listening post at Javier’s tour through the women of Medellín.

Carrillo can move in with you. You somehow snagged a rare two-bedroom unit when you moved in, and while he doesn’t work with you day to day—you focus on the political side of the Search Bloc/DEA relationship, keeping the skids greased for mutual benefit—he gets along well enough with you. You’re serious about your work, fluent in Spanish, and quiet.

He could do worse.

-----

That was back in June. Now, six months later, he is no closer to moving out.

You don’t seem to mind him. You seem to enjoy the company, and you readily admitted early on that you’d been lonely in Medellín. Carrillo had not admitted then that he felt the same, lonely in the evenings.

He hasn’t lived with a woman since Juliana left and divorced him. Living with you is something else entirely.

It’s a strange thing, being so close but so separate: the intimacy of cooking together, sharing a meal, and then sleeping in different rooms. Of seeing you early in the morning, bleary-eyed and in your sleepwear, grouchy until you get some coffee in you.

Of waking you up when he comes in late, stinking of bitter gun smoke and cordite after losing a man. Of the gentle, sleepy way you lay your hand on his arm, the way you gaze at him and ask if he’s okay, if he wants to talk.

You grew up in a family of comfort feeders. Every time he comes in late and low, you offer to make him something. He usually waves you off, but sometimes he doesn’t, and it nourishes him: the way you heat up leftovers, the way you sit and watch him eat. The pleased way you nod when he pushes his empty plate away, as if the heartache of his job can be cured by reheated tamales or a lasagna or a slice of your apple pie with a chunk of mild cheese melted on top.

Maybe the heartache can’t be cured, but he does feel better afterwards.

-----

Of course he falls in love with you. Any idiot would, and Horacio Carrillo is no idiot.

-----

You get a delivery one evening, a box from the States covered in colorful stamps and giant block printing.

“From my dad,” you tell Carrillo as you plunk it down on the kitchen table with a grin. “A taste of home.”

He sits down and watches as you unbox everything. There’s obvious nods to Christmas—an advent calendar of chocolates, a box of cordial cherries, candy canes. A container of cookies, a container of homemade candy. There’s a jar of homemade salsa, brand-new socks, a framed photo of your family. A framed photo of a dog that makes you sigh sadly.

There’s letters from family and friends, a tidy stack of them tied off with a ribbon. There’s a handful of cassette tapes too, and you look at the handwritten track lists before you laugh and spin away to load one in the stereo.

“All the songs we used to play during the holidays,” you tell him as the opening strains start to play. It’s Nat King Cole, and Carrillo can see the way your eyes light up at all the memories sparking for you.

“Tell me about the holidays when you’re home,” he says softly, and you do.

Your mother’s and grandmother’s militant baking schedule: the cookies from recipes passed down for generations, the fudge, the yule log cakes with marzipan. How an entire weekend is carved out to make hard candy, rock candy flavored with peppermint and cinnamon and lemon.

Midnight Mass with your family, then home to drink eggnog in front of fire. Dozing off in the family room with your siblings by the tree—your parents were New Age types, kinda sorta, and never told you the lie of Santa. Waking up to waffles and breakfast casserole and strong coffee, then unwrapping presents.

“I grew up in Colorado,” you tell him. “It snows there. It was magical, waking up to the world covered in glittering snow. The whole world frozen and cold, but we were tucked in warm with our family.”

“It sounds wonderful,” he says, and it’s not a lie. He’s almost envious, though his family’s Christmases were magical in their own way.

You open the box of candy canes and snap one in two, offer him the hooked end while you suck at your own piece.

“Tell me about your holidays,” you say, and you gaze at him so openly that he does. He shares that with you.

The two of you talk so long that the tape flips to the B side and starts to play. He can feel the shift in you, a melancholy that seems to fall over the evening. All of the talk of family and friends, the memories…it makes you realize what you’re going to miss. What you are missing.

It’s when Dean Martin’s version of “I’ll be Home for Christmas” starts to play that he sees the tears start to rise in your eyes. Carrillo doesn’t think—he only operates on feeling in this moment, and he stands, holds a hand out to you.

“Here,” he says. “Dance with me.”

“Huh?” You blink against the tears and look up at him, confused, but you place your hand in his and allow him to pull you out of your chair. He pulls you away from the table and puts his other hand lightly on your waist, spins you into the living room and sets you into a gentle swaying against the slow song.

You don’t resist him. You hold his hand too, and you lay your other one on his shoulder.

“Didn’t take you for a dancer, Colonel,” you say with a joking lilt, but your voice is quiet, soft. You say it like you don’t want to break the spell he’s woven—transforming your rising melancholy into something better, more intimate.

“I’m good on my feet,” he deadpans. “Dancing, running across Medellín rooftops.”

“A man of many talents.”

“If not many, at least a few.”

You hum at that, but you don’t reply. Neither of you say anything else; you listen to the song and sway gently to it, but you don’t talk. After a few bars, you sigh and rest your head against his shoulder, so he holds you tighter. You squeeze his hand, and maybe he’s reading too much into this single, small moment, but he guesses what you’re saying with that squeeze of your hand.

Maybe you’re saying thank you. Maybe you’re saying I miss my family but I’m glad you’re here.

#horacio carrillo #horacio carrillo imagine #horacio carrillo x reader #colonel horacio carrillo #colonel horacio carrillo x reader #colonel Carrillo #colonel carrillo x reader #colonel carrillo imagine #narcos #tropes-and-tales #winter prompts 2022

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literaturessound · 5 months ago

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Literatures and Sound: Introduction by Wassan Ali

Literary sound studies engages with the relationship between text and sound. As Anna Snaith describes it, writing and reading literature are generally perceived as “silent, visual processes” (1). Snaith, however, counters the narrative of the silent text by positing literature as a site that functions not only on a semantic level, but also offers a sonic experience, whether the reader is prompted to recite the words aloud or to hear them inwardly, or whether the text conveys an acoustic level that cannot be reduced to meaning alone (2).

This approach to literary sound studies, which emphasises words as endowed with sonic effects, is perhaps especially relevant to poetry and jazz writing. When I started out this research, I had a vague notion that this would be my focus of interest, and theory on poetic and musical writing is featured in my research, but, as I have discovered, literary sound studies encompass much more.

Sound proves to be a useful tool in many of the texts in this tutorial, with which questions of meaning, voice and semiotics are approached. As Jonathan Sterne notes, looking at texts through the lens of sound offers a way to re-approach literature, to think the text anew and deconstruct its visual, sonic and semantic dimensions (6). In the introduction to The Sound Studies Reader, Sterne describes how W.E.B. Du Bois wanted to reshape racial discourse in the United States by turning to sound. Du Bois aimed to re-evaluate African American culture by defining the spiritual songs that had emerged out of enslavement as major and distinctly U.S.-American cultural expressions (2). With the concept of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy too highlights how music and the “phatic and unspeakable” plays a prominent role in black culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

The relationship between race and sound also features in the books by Anthony Reed and Fred Moten, which both can broadly be described as dealing with sonic cultural productions that evade commodification by the white establishment as well as its racist gaze. While Reed focuses on the cultural scene around “phonographic poetry” (2), Moten discusses visual representations of blackness and the notion of subjectivity as historically fraught—whereby sound bears the potential to break with violent visual conventions.

While Du Bois recognised the cultural value of early African American music, Marie Thompson describes how the white establishment in the United States viewed jazz as raucous and unintelligible noise in its early days (28). Thompson’s Beyond Unwanted Sound underlines that the question of whether we label something as sound or as noise is a highly political one, since what can be considered intelligible and meaningful sound is ambiguous—any classification a matter of perspective.

The intelligibility of sound is at the heart of literary sound studies, and Adriana Cavarero formulates the relationship between meaning and non-meaning as a dichotomy between speech and voice, describing poetry as an area in which voice is privileged over speech (10). Mladen Dolar, on the other hand, considers the distinction between semantic meaning and sound to be untenable, since intonation, rhythm, etc., contribute to how we interpret utterances, and since even abstract sounds initiate processes of signification. Dolar argues that non-semantic language units can only be hypothesised about, as in research on phonological patterns, and that abstract sounds always involve a linguistic surplus that in some way entails meaning (544).

From a feminist point of view, Kaja Silverman addresses how the separation between semantic speech on the one hand and sonic inarticulations on the other, is informed by gender norms. Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror demonstrates how women in Hollywood cinema have been denied representation as participants and creators of discourse by being relegated to the diegetic level of film, where they are portrayed as inarticulate and not in charge of their own speech (31). By dealing with the question of how women’s voices are recorded and whether in the final production the voice is synchronised with a body or superimposed as a voice-over, Silverman, like other theorists in the field of literary sound studies, highlights the significance of technology to our perception of sound.

Another theorist who draws attention to the technological aspect of sound is Luca Soudant, whose experiments with a speaker system in an enclosed space, which cause objects to vibrate at different frequencies, show that sound is tangible as well as audible (342-43). Soudant considers the philosophy of sound as an avenue for “trans*formative” thinking, since sound, like gender, is not rigid, but disseminates in a multidirectional and rhizomatic way as opposed to thinking that follows a linear and directional trajectory (344). In Soudant’s text, sound is closely linked to issues of spatial awareness, illustrating how socio-cultural conventions impose stillness on the feminine, while masculinity is granted the loudness and volume with which to take up space (339).

In The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer also highlights sound as a marker of territory, pointing out that in historically quieter landscapes, in a time before industrialisation, the conspicuously loud sounds of the hunting horn and the church bell were tolerated because they were produced by those in positions of power (47, 67). As one of my early readings, Schafer’s book was of great use for learning the discourse of sound studies, and it is fitting that a book that sets out to raise awareness of the composition of our soundscapes, has sharpened my vocabulary on sound. Our access to sound involves language, as Anthony Reed notes—sound cannot be considered a “pure” presence but is always semantically charged and embedded in discourse (4), a tenet that resonates with literary sound studies generally.

Lastly, the issue of listening is relevant to research on literature and sound because, as Nicole Furlonge emphasises, in order to make oneself heard, one needs a listener (7). Furlonge depicts listening as a civic act that promotes processes of democratisation and sharpens interpretative skills of the “lower frequencies of representation” where, as she describes it, African American Literature is culturally situated (2). On a similar note, Roland Barthes and Roland Havas argue that dialogue, provided it involves speaking and listening, can be seen as transformative because it creates an intersubjective space (246).

Barthes, Roland et. al. “Listening.” Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, edited by Editions du Seuil, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 245-60.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, edited by Paul A. Kottman, Stanford University Press, 2005.

Furlonge, Nicole B. Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature. University of Iowa Press, 2018.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1999.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Lowney, John. Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Perloff, Marjorie et al. The Sound of Poetry: The Poetry of Sound. The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Reed, Anthony. Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Duke University Press, 2020.

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1994.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana Univ. Press, 1988.

Snaith, Anna et al. Sound and Literature Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Soudant, Luca. “Transformative Thinking through Sound: Artistic Research in Gender and Sound Beyond the Human.” Open Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 1, 2021, pp. 335-46, doi:10.1515/opphil-2020-0189.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Sound Studies Reader. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012.

Thompson, Marie. Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

#literature #sound

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user-needs-new-hyperfixation · 1 year ago

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About the WIP game, Tsubasa? 👀✨

Post-canon established relationship Kurofai snippet where they land in a place where homosexuality is accepted but expected to be VERY heteronormative. (This is also proof that my "make all the ships switchy" agenda extends beyond Yuumori. My inability to make Mycroft bottom is the exception, not the rule. 😂)

It peeves Kurogane slightly, nonetheless, that Fai has been absorbed into the women. There’s an assumption that because Fai is obviously Kurogane’s lover, and is beautiful and slender and fair, he must be playing the part of a woman. He doesn’t like the presumption that Fai is somehow a replacement for something, his prettiness convenient in the absence of women in their traveling party. Kurogane had been to bed with women once or twice back in the day, and enjoyed himself, but ultimately he likes that Fai is a man. He likes the hidden strength in that wiry frame. He likes not having to hold himself back in sparring or bed-play. He likes that they can just haul off and punch each other when the other is being stupid. He likes that Fai’s voice drops an octave when he’s angry or aroused. And if these simple people knew that Fai is as likely to sink his teeth into Kurogane’s shoulder from behind and see to it that he limps the next day as he is to lay back and spread his legs, they’d probably be much more hesitant to relegate him to the kitchens. Fai, of course, doesn’t care a whit. He likes cooking and sewing and children, and hates more strenuous labour, so he has dialed the effeminate mannerisms up to eleven for his own convenience. It’s as funny as it is aggravating.

*the author does not actually endorse punching your significant other, or kurogane's mildly sexist inner voice 😅

#asks #writing snippets #tsubasa reservoir chronicle #kurofai

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notalkingbusiness · 2 years ago

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Kitchen Nightmares - Part II

I did a post a while back about how Carol has been relegated to the kitchen for a lot of Season 11. And it got me thinking about how TWD showrunners tackled kitchen scenes/domestic duties.

To be clear, kitchen/laundry scenes are fine – provided that the writers are thinking carefully about why a certain scene has to take place in a kitchen or why it’s important to show domestic chores on screen. If you’re just putting your female characters into the kitchen because you’re not sure what to do with them, that’s where we have a problem.

With this in mind, I’m going to do a quick run through of some notable scenes with each showrunner.

Quick disclaimers: (1) This list isn’t exhaustive. (2) Most (but not all) of these scenes are Carol focused for obvious reasons. (3) All of this is just like, my opinion, man.

Darabont Era – Season 1

Two scenes stand out to me and they’re both in Tell it to the Frogs.

1. Our first Carol/Rick interaction comprises of Carol doing Rick’s laundry.

2. Carol, Andrea, Amy, and Jacqui wash clothes together at the quarry.

Both scenes get a thumbs up from me because they end up subverting expectations. There’s actually a lot going on when you stop and think about it.

Carol might look unassuming as she irons Rick’s laundry but looks can be deceiving. We’re seeing code-switching in action as she consciously self-presents as a harmless housewife rather than as a woman who would swipe a grenade from your clothes.

The sexist division of labor is highlighted in the clothes washing scene. But the thing that really elevates the scene for me is Carol’s cheeky admission about missing her vibrator. It’s the first obvious indication that there’s more to Carol than meets the eye.

I’m not claiming Darabont as a feminist icon, but I think he employed his domestic duty scenes carefully. I feel like there’s always something deeper going on and they provide insight into characters like Carol.

Mazzara Era – Seasons 2 & 3

I liked Mazzara, but I don’t think he did anything particularly interesting with Carol’s kitchen scenes in Season 2. We see Carol serving Daryl food and Carol proposes cooking a big meal for everyone in the Greene family kitchen. Just felt a little surface level to me.

So, not so good on the Carol front BUT I loved the exchange between Lori and Andrea in the Greene family kitchen.

Andrea: I contribute. I help keep this place safe.

Lori: The men can handle this on their own. They don’t need your help.

Andrea: I’m sorry – what would you have me do?

Lori: Oh, there’s plenty of work to go round.

Andrea: Are you serious? Everything falls apart, you’re in my face over skipping laundry?

Lori: Puts the burden on the rest of us. On me and Carol and Patricia and Maggie. Cooking and cleaning and caring for Beth – you . . . You don’t care about anyone but yourself, you said it up there on that RV, working on a tan with a shotgun in your lap.

Andrea: I am on watch against walkers - that’s what matters. Not fresh mint leaves in the lemonade!

Lori: We are providing stability. We’re trying to create a life worth living.

I really like this exchange. On the one hand, Lori is enforcing traditionally feminine roles, but on the on the other hand, Andrea is devaluing the work of the other women – she wants to be one of the boys. Is Lori being regressive or is she looking for solidarity from Andrea? Does fresh mint in the lemonade matter – should you make the most of these things before it’s too late? How should the division of labor be settled? There aren’t any answers to be had in Season 2, but the main thing is that these tensions are addressed.

Gender boundaries are being drawn and redrawn in the brave new world. It’s not lost on any of the characters that women risk slipping back into regressive roles in the apocalypse.

Gimple Era – Seasons 4-8

I’ve talked about Gimple’s approach to kitchen scenes before, so I’ll just keep this to a few lowlights/highlights.

30 Days Without an Accident

Carol’s already a badass by the time Season 4 rolls around – she was established as an excellent shot and a survivor against the odds in Season 3. So, before watching the Season 4 premiere, you might have expected to see Carol taking out walkers or practicing her surgical skills in the opening minutes of Season 4.

But the first time we see her in Season 4 . . .

She’s cooking.

Feels like a giant step backwards, doesn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the exchange between Daryl and Carol, but this conversation didn’t have to take place with Carol serving Daryl food. Patrick could have been serving. Carol and Daryl could have had the “I liked you first” exchange while they both wait in line for their food.

The Grove

The Grove is rightly hailed as one of the best episodes . . . but the kitchen scenes don’t really do anything for me.

Maybe I’d feel differently if the writers had done more to explore Carol’s relationship with her grandma in the kitchen scene.

The Birth of Kitchen!Carol! (Seasons 5-8)

I don’t have the heart to go through all of Carol’s kitchen scenes from Seasons 5-8, but we all know that she was in the kitchen an awful lot.

And I know it’s meant to be about Carol being in deep cover and how she’s secretly playing all the Alexandrians. IDK, it felt like it got to a point where it wasn’t being done ironically anymore. They just put Carol in the kitchen because they didn’t know what else to do with her – they’d rather relegate her to the kitchen and focus on the very important manly men instead.

Like the whole beetroot cookie thing was meant to show how she’s resourceful and innovative and caring . . . But is this really the best way to showcase these qualities? Do you think the writers would do this for any of the male characters?

And I feel as if someone like Mazzara could have teased out the complexities of post-apocalyptic food culture. E.g., the conversation between Olivia and Carol about the boar leg could have been great. Olivia asks if Carol can bring back a boar leg so that she can make prosciutto and Carol makes a face. It’s clear by the way that this scene is set up that we’re meant to side with Carol – we’re supposed to see Olivia as unbearably cosseted and out of touch. Is she though? You’d think that salting and curing meats would be a smart thing to do and that Olivia’s knowledge would be really useful in a world where refrigeration capacity is severely restricted. We could have had another interesting “mint leaves in the lemonade” style discussion.

Anyway, I’m not saying that all the kitchen scenes should have gone on the chopping block. There are bright spots – take New Best Friends. It’s an emotionally charged moment between Carol and Daryl that ties into all the little and large ways that they take care of each other. Carol might not be able to do what Daryl needs right now, but she can still provide for him. Daryl might not be able to stay with Carol right now, but he’ll take a break from his hellbent mission to spend quality time with her.

Kang Era 9-10

I’ve already talked about Kang’s approach to kitchen scenes, so I’ll keep it brief! Kang’s kitchen scenes are emotionally driven, and they never feel like just a kitchen scene. Like with Darabont, there’s always something deeper going on with these scenes. And we’ve had a few instances of Daryl cooking for Carol which was refreshing.

If you can’t stand the heat

Personal ranking for the best use of kitchen scenes/domestic duty scenes are as followed:

1. Kang

2. Darabont

3. Mazzara

4. Gimple

It goes without saying that the more women you have in your creative team, the more likely it is that sexist assumptions will be questioned. As the TWDU expands, the writing team should be more diverse than ever, not more homogenous than ever before.

#frank darabont #glen mazzara #scott gimple #angela kang #carol peletier #caryl

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grahamlandiwellbeing · 1 year ago

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Why Screen Time Hurts Parents More Than Kids

I’m in the car on my way to a poetry gig with my friend Martin. He’s driving and I’m regretting agreeing to buy my son dinner from Nando’s and having to place the order online using my phone.

Switching back and forth between his texts and the Deliveroo app I screenshot the completed order having just received a photo from my son with the menu item I was missing circled in blue.

“How do you even add blue circles to photos?”

I wait for a message from him that I’ve got it right and maybe a “thank you”.

The message doesn’t come as quickly as I’d like.

While I’m beginning to feel disgruntled, I get a cheery “Perfect. Thank You! xx” smiley emoji.

Tech has created an invisible wall between me and my children. One that I don’t suppose they notice. I feel jealous of their screens because they spend more time with my kids than I do.

Among all the warnings of the dangers of too much adolescent screen time, there don’t seem to be any about how it has a negative impact on the wellbeing of parents.

Once, during a conversation with my daughter about the impact of too much screen time she said “Blaming everything on phones is just lazy parenting.”

As if being a parent isn’t hard enough the stakes are apparently high when it comes to knowing the difference between parenting properly and abdicating responsibility. I don’t want to be a lazy parent so now I never blame phones, even when phones are at fault.

I don’t want to be critical of something which makes my children happier than I can but it’s hard not to feel inadequate.

When my children used to play Minecraft together I encouraged the teamwork, the gentle and cohesive hum of their relationship. I told myself it was just Lego for the modern age and that felt justifiable. Even when we couldn’t prise them away for their tea it didn’t seem so bad. Then my son got into GTA and instead of mining for natural resources with his little sister, he was popping prostitutes on street corners and dragging respectable-looking women from their cars by their hair.

I tried to ignore it.

Worse still was that for a while I began to feel left out so I downloaded and installed Minecraft on my own laptop and would sit playing it instead of joining a teleconference on marketing budgets for the fourth quarter. I was worse than what I feared for my kids, isolating myself and not doing the work I was supposed to be doing. I imagined my boss firing me and, while ushering me off the premises, telling me “You’re always on that bloody phone”.

In the kitchen, I am making cookies. A place my children always helped me when they were younger. I have a photo of the two of them covered in flour one time before technology got a hold.

In another, taken one rainy afternoon, we’d made fresh pasta and meatballs. They look happy. They still do.

I call to my daughter, “Do you want to help me cut the cookies?”

“Nah”.

Putting my head around the door she has the TV on, is listening to music through her headphones and is glued to her phone chatting with friends.

I dig out the photo of the flour children and stare at it longingly.

Last week I was relegated to disciplining my daughter by phone. She wasn’t home when she’d said she would be. She read my messages but didn’t answer. I felt impotent.

Complaining to my wife I said, “She’s 18 next month so I don’t suppose there is much we can do”.

“Well she still lives under our roof”.

I’ve lost confidence in using 1970s discipline on children of the future.

Then there's the ignominy of having to go to them for help when something isn’t working.

Last week my wife was experiencing some trouble with the email on her phone.

Me: “I could try deleting it and reinstalling it?”

Her: “Whatever, but if I can’t find a way to sort it out this phone is going through the fucking window”

My son fixed it in an instant and harmony was restored while I ached for the days when he needed a puncture fixed on his bike.

Back at the car park after the gig, there is a massive line waiting to pay while people find they don't have the right app.

“Why isn’t there some faster way of doing this?” I say to Martin looking at my phone with disdain.

"You mean, like cash?"

When we are eventually back on the road I get a message from my daughter. It’s a picture of her snuggled up with the dogs and a message.

“Hope you had a lovely evening. I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow xx”

#screen #parenting #anxiety #self-help #self improvement #wellbeing #happiness #psychology #Positive Psychology #mental health

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 8 months ago

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"The Waitresses Action Committee [WAC]’s success in garnering public support was evident in the letters of protest sent to the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Industry and Tourism. Thoughtful and sometimes extensive, these letters described women’s structural disadvantages in the workforce as well as the inherent unfairness of the [wage] differential. A mere $2.65 an hour was “scarcely enough to live on,” wrote the Christian Resource Centre, while the YWCA pointed out that women in general made 55 per cent of a male wage, and there already was a “differential” in the restaurant industry as women were relegated to lower-wage venues. The Law Union of Ontario laid out a long list of objections, including the fact that a tip differential would further disadvantage workers who were seldom unionized and thus some of the most economically vulnerable – those who “can least afford it.” Moreover, the differential would set a dangerous precedent for other business lobbies. Some letters to the Minister of Labour came from natural allies: two NDP riding associations, Times Change Women’s Employment Service, and the Northern Women’s Centre and Women’s Resource Centre in Thunder Bay and Timmins, respectively. Others indicated the WAC’s persuasive ability to reach out to less obvious supporters, such as the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Fort Frances, which endorsed the brief. So too did the Thunder Bay city council. Waitresses also responded individually with calls and letters to the WAC. These were not simply the result of the WAC’s smart communication skills. Waitresses were angry. What the WAC outlined – uncertain employment, wage theft, sexualization, “hustling” for a tip – applied everywhere, and women had had enough. They wanted copies of the brief, the petition, information on what they could do, or simply to vent their unhappiness with wages and working conditions. A few wrote directly to Labour Minister Bette Stephenson. The “work is no joy,” wrote one Thunder Bay waitress at a licenced steakhouse; it entailed constant stress from uncertain pay, fear of losing the job, and “boorish [customer] behaviour” that “drove her to tears…. Something happens to people when they are hungry,” she concluded. “They become less than human.” A former waitress who had worked in other countries, even as a maître d’, identified exploitation as transnational: “It has always been a slave trade, with the poorest working conditions, paying the lowest wages.” As the government dug in its heels on the differential in 1978, a Kitchener waitress blasted Stephenson. The government policy was “sexist” since it discriminated against most women at “less classy establishments,” and it ignored all waitresses’ unpaid labour. In her job, she filled in for other workers; as a result, only 50 per cent of the time was she even able to get tips. The government also ignored the health hazards of the job, including noisy, smoky bars where waitresses “risked being injured in fights between customers.” Some waitresses, she wrote, spent their paltry “nickels and dimes” tips on taxis to get home late at night. She identified the true culprit – the tourist industry, demanding small savings “on the backs of the hired help” – and suggested that the business lobby’s comparisons with American wages was “unfair to Canadian workers.” She ended with a comparison the WAC also made in its publicity: “I find it ironic,” she wrote, that “well paid” government officials, who voted on their own pay increases, were depriving waitresses of “25 to 50 cents” an hour.

Finger pointing about the class interests of the government were apparent in other protest letters. “We need an equitable incomes policy, not one that decreases the earnings of working people in lower economic brackets,” wrote a woman from West Hill. “I wonder when the government will treat working people as well as they do [those] in the upper middle class.” Others implied that the Tories, eating at “high class” establishments, naturally did not understand the issue, while one letter offered a sarcastic take on Premier Davis’ recent election slogan: “Davis for all the people – well, just not waitresses.”

- Joan Sangster, “Waitresses in Action: Feminist Labour Protest in 1970s Ontario,” Labour/Le Travail 92 (Fall 2023), p. 34-36.

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aronarchy · 1 year ago

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https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2.2.007

…

Could it be possible to develop a general theory of interpretive labor? We’d probably have to begin by recognizing that there are two critical elements here that, while linked, need to be formally distinguished. The first is the process of imaginative identification as a form of knowledge, the fact that within relations of domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question really work. Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant kitchen, for example, knows that if something goes terribly wrong and an angry boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to carry out a detailed investigation, or even, to pay serious attention to the workers all scrambling to explain their version of what happened. He is much more likely to tell them all to shut up and arbitrarily impose a story that allows instant judgment: i.e., “you’re the new guy, you messed up—if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong so as to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The same thing usually happens with ongoing relations: everyone knows that servants tend to know a great deal about their employers’ families, but the opposite almost never occurs. The second element is the resultant pattern of sympathetic identification. Curiously, it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of moral sentiments (1762), who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as “compassion fatigue.” Human beings, he proposed, are normally inclined not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but as a result, to spontaneously feel one another’s joys and sorrows. The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers face a tacit choice between being entirely overwhelmed, or simply blotting out their existence. The result is that while those on the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those on the top, it almost never happens the other way around.

Whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women, employers and employees, rich and poor, structural inequality—what I’ve been calling structural violence—invariably creates highly lopsided structures of the imagination. Since I think Smith was right to observe that imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the result is that victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries far more than those beneficiaries care about them. This might well be, after the violence itself, the single most powerful force preserving such relations.

All this, I think, has some interesting theoretical implications.

Now, in contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate administration of violence is turned over to what is euphemistically referred to as “law enforcement”—particularly, to police officers, whose real role, as police sociologists have repeatedly emphasized (e.g., Bittner 1970, 1985; Waddington 1999; Neocleous 2000), has much less to do with enforcing criminal law than with the scientific application of physical force to aid in the resolution of administrative problems. Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons. At the same time, they have significantly, over the last fifty years or so, become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. If nothing else, all this throws an odd wrinkle in Weber’s dire prophecies about the iron cage: as it turns out, faceless bureaucracies do seem inclined to throw up charismatic heroes of a sort, in the form of an endless assortment of mythic detectives, spies, and police officers—all, significantly, figures whose job is to operate precisely where the bureaucratic structures for ordering information encounter, and appeal to, genuine physical violence.

Even more striking, I think, are the implications for the status of theory itself.

Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification. Usually it’s not so different than the boss who walks into the kitchen to make arbitrary snap decisions as to what went wrong: in either case it is a matter of applying very simple preexisting templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have, for some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only two percent of what’s in front of them. But doesn’t something very similar happen in social theory? An ethnographic description, even a very good one, captures at best two percent of what’s happening in any particular Nuer feud or Balinese cockfight. A theoretical work will normally focus on only a tiny part of that, plucking perhaps one or two strands out of an endlessly complex fabric of human circumstance, and using them as the basis on which to make generalizations: say, about the dynamics of social conflict, the nature of performance, or the principle of hierarchy. I am not trying to say there’s anything wrong in this kind of theoretical reduction. To the contrary, I am convinced some such process is necessary if one wishes to say something dramatically new about the world.

…

As long as one remains within the domain of theory, then, I would argue that simplification can be a form of intelligence. The problems arise when the violence is no longer metaphorical. Here let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones. A former LAPD officer turned sociologist (Cooper 1991), observed that the overwhelming majority of those beaten by police turn out not to be guilty of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars,” he observed. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to “define the situation.” If what I’ve been saying is true, then this is just what we’d expect. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema, and its monopoly of coercive force, come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. …

If I had more time I would suggest why I feel this approach could suggest new ways to consider old problems. From a Marxian perspective, for example, one might note that my notion of “interpretive labor” that keeps social life running smoothly implies a fundamental distinction between the domain of social production (the production of persons and social relations) where the imaginative labor is relegated to those on the bottom, and a domain of commodity production where the imaginative aspects of work are relegated to those on the top. In either case, though, structures of inequality produce lopsided structures of the imagination. I would also propose that what we are used to calling “alienation” is largely the subjective experience of living inside such lopsided structures. This in turn has implications for any liberatory politics.[8] For present purposes, though, let me just draw attention to some of the implications for anthropology.

One is that many of the interpretive techniques we employ have, historically, served as weapons of the weak far more often than as instruments of power. In an essay in Writing culture, Renato Rosaldo (1986) made a famous argument that when Evans-Pritchard, annoyed that no one would speak to him, ended up gazing at a Nuer camp of Muot Dit “from the door of his tent,” he rendered it equivalent to a Foucauldian Panopticon. The logic seems to be that any knowledge gathered under unequal conditions serves a disciplinary function. To me, this is absurd. Bentham’s Panopticon was a prison. There were guards. Prisoners endured the gaze, and internalized its dictates, because if they tried to escape, or resist, they could be punished, even killed.[9] Absent the apparatus of coercion, such an observer is reduced to the equivalent of a neighborhood gossip, deprived even of the sanction of public opinion.

Underlying the analogy, I think, is the assumption that comprehensive knowledge of this sort is an inherent part of any imperial project. Even the briefest examination of the historical record though makes clear that empires tend to have little or no interest in documenting ethnographic material. They tend to be interested instead in questions of law and administration. For information on exotic marriage customs or mortuary ritual, one almost invariably has to fall back on travelers’ accounts—on the likes of Herodotus, Ibn Battuta, or Zhang Qian—that is, on descriptions of those lands which fell outside the jurisdiction of whatever state the traveler belonged to.[10]

Historical research reveals that the inhabitants of Muot Dit were, in fact, largely former follows of a prophet named Gwek who had been victims of RAF bombing and forced displacement the year before (Johnson 1979, 1982, 1994)—the whole affair being occasioned by fairly typical bureaucratic foolishness (basic misunderstandings about the nature of power in Nuer society, attempts to separate Nuer and Dinka populations that had been entangled for generations, and so forth). When Evans-Pritchard was there they were still subject to punitive raids from the British authorities. Evans-Pritchard was asked to go to Nuerland basically as a spy. At first he refused, then finally agreed; he later said because he “felt sorry for them.” He appears to have carefully avoided gathering the specific information the authorities were really after (mainly, about the prophets that they saw as leaders of resistance), while, at the same time, doing his best to use his more general insights into the workings of Nuer society to discourage some of their more idiotic abuses, as he put it, to “humanize” the authorities (Johnson 1982: 245). As an ethnographer, then, he ended up doing something very much like traditional women’s work: keeping the system from disaster by tactful interventions meant to protect the oblivious and self-important men in charge from the consequences of their blindness.

Would it have been better to have kept one’s hands clean? These strike me as questions of personal conscience. I suspect the greater moral dangers lie on an entirely different level. The question for me is whether our theoretical work is ultimately directed at undoing or dismantling some of the effects of these lopsided structures of imagination, or whether—as can so easily happen when even our best ideas come to be backed up by bureaucratically administered violence—we end up reinforcing them.

Social theory itself could be seen as a kind of radical simplification, a form of calculated ignorance, meant to reveal patterns one could never otherwise be able to see. This is as true of this essay as of any other. If this essay has largely sidestepped the existing anthropological literature on bureaucracy, violence, or even ignorance,[11] it is not because I don’t believe this literature offers insight, but rather because I wanted to see what different insights could be gained by looking through a different lens—or, one might even say, a different set of blinders.

Still, some blinders have different effects than others. I began the essay as I did—about the paperwork surrounding my mother’s illness and death—to make a point. There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them value or meaning. They are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel the imagination. But if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them.

It is one thing to say that, when a master whips a slave, he is engaging in a form of meaningful, communicative action, conveying the need for unquestioning obedience, and at the same time trying to create a terrifying mythic image of absolute and arbitrary power. All of this is true. It is quite another to insist that is all that is happening, or all that we need to talk about. After all, if we do not go on to explore what “unquestioning” actually means—the master’s ability to remain completely unaware of the slave’s understanding of any situation, the slave’s inability to say anything even when she becomes aware of some dire practical flaw in the master’s reasoning, the forms of blindness… that result, the fact these oblige the slave to devote even more energy trying to understand and anticipate the master’s confused perceptions—are we not, in however small a way, doing the same work as the whip? …

… All of these forms of blindness ultimately stem from trying to navigate our way through situations made possible by structural violence. It will take enormous amount of work to begin to clear away these dead zones. But recognizing their existence is a necessary first step.

[8] I have explored some of these implications—concerning both alienation and liberatory politics—further in an essay called “Revolution in reverse” (Graeber 2011).

[9] In fact, the way the image of the panopticon has been adopted in the academy, as an argument against the primacy of violence in contemporary forms of power, might be considered a perfect example of how academics can become complicit in the process by which structures founded on violence can represent themselves as something else.

[10] It would be interesting to document the ebb and flow of ethnographic interest within different historical empires to see if there are any consistent patterns. As far as I’m aware, the first large empire that gathered systematic ethnographic, culinary, medical, and similar information from within the empire were the Mongols.

[11] There has been of late a minor boomlet in anthropological studies of ignorance (e.g., Gershon and Raj 2000; Scott 2000; Dilley 2010; High, Kelly, and Mair 2012), and some of the more recent examples even take some of the arguments of my original Malinowski lecture into consideration. But even here, one can observe at least a slight tug pulling in the opposite direction, as when High, Kelly, and Mair suggest, in their introduction, that while a political critique approach to the subject is not invalid, a distinctively “ethnographic approach” must mean seeing ignorance not in purely negative terms, as the absence of knowledge, but “as a substantive phenomenon with its own history” and therefore to understand its “productivity” (2012: 15–16). This of course sounds very much like Foucault on power. Ethnography abhors a vacuum. But vacuums do exist.

#repost of someone else’s content #theory #Graeber #dead zones of the imagination #anthropology #police violence #oppression #academia #slavery #abuse

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mxgyver · 2 years ago

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I still cannot believe that my 7 bazillion questions about Fanboy y Cielo's holiday traditions led to this 🥹 I am so honored and in awe of the fact that you turned that, into this. my holiday loving, romantic af heart is yearning over all of this.

“Bien, mija,” she appraised, as Mickey sipped his punch from the corner he had been relegated to in the the kitchen, watching with honeymelt eyes as the women who shaped his past, his present, and – his eyes lingered over you – hopefully, his future, all worked in tandem to make homemade tamales. Gossipping away and giggling with each other as though you had been their friend for decades.

oh 😭 something about Mickey seeing all of the important women is his life coming together, knowing deep down that this is it, this is all he wants in his life.

"You admired the hewn wood, popping the lid on the box to find a handful of recipe cards in what you recognized form letters and cards to be Mrs. Garcia’s handwriting.

“Just a few recipes for you – so the two of you can have them for your home. And start some of your own traditions.”

You thanked her, with teary eyes and a warm hug, all vestiges of worry set aside as you enmeshed yourself into the warm welcome of the Garcia home."

brb sobbing because this truly felt like Mrs. Garcia's way of fully making her apart of the family. because holy shit?? sharing family recipes with someone?? that requires a lot of love and trust. and I would be truly honored if my boyfriend's mother shared family recipes with me.

"And it was a cosmic, karmic collision – something in the stars, you think. Watching him play with Artoo, watching him eat his breakfast, watching him pluck packages from beneath the tree, ready to give to you. And maybe it was the magic of the holidays – that tinges everything in evergreen romance, warm and sweet and cinnamon. But you think, perhaps, that it will always feel this way with Mickey – as though he was the sunshine in your wintery sky, iridescent and luminous."

okay but Mickey having his moments of watching Cielo with his sisters & mama and then the roles being reversed now Cielo is watching him doing domestic homey things??? 😭 Mickey is so easy and so fun to love 😭

brb gonna go fall asleep thinking about how much I wish I was Cielo. brava my darling Rae, you've knocked it out of the park yet again.

mi media naranja [holiday!AU - mickey “fanboy” garcia x fem!reader, aka “cielo”]

A/N: For Fanboy’s fangirls - a holiday celebration with Fanboy y Cielo. Lots of callbacks to my original Fanboy HCs – so if you’ve been following their journey thus far, there will be lots in here for you. Bonus points if you get the references!

Pairing: Mickey ‘Fanboy’ Garcia x fem!civilian!reader (aka “Cielo;” as always no use of y/n – my readers are written ambiguous, but with a latina!reader in mind.)

Warnings: my writing is its own warning, smut, so 18+ ONLY – p in v sex, unprotected sex, v mild breeding kink, references to oral sex

Word Count: 5.8k of the warmth of a holiday spent together with your beloved, of chestnuts roasting on an open fire, of the cinnamon-orange passion of sharing half of yourself with someone else.

Summary: You spend your holidays with your sweet boyfriend. Mickey takes you home to visit his family, but of course, you make sure to indulge in the magic of the holiday, just the two of you [part of the Fanboy y Cielo ‘verse].

(moodboard courtesy of lovely @ouralcohol)

–

Divided holidays were a challenge.

You and Mickey had opted to spend the few days preceding Christmas with his mother and his sisters, which meant, of course, holiday travel.

You’d left your beachside home in San Diego, packing gifts and luggage alike to make the trek to Mickey’s hometown. Artoo was set up with your friend for the few days you’d be gone. And it wasn’t as though you weren’t coming back in just a few days to celebrate Christmas with Mickey, just the two of you. It would go by in a flash. So why were you nervous?

You had met his family before. And, of course, they’d never indicated anything other than that they’d liked you … Still, you’d felt the perpetual need to impress. To ensure that they still liked you, as though their opinion would have changed in the six months since you had seen them for the family’s summer beach weekend.

And the drive was pleasant enough, Mickey expressing to you ad nauseam that he was glad you were coming,

“You don’t understand, cielo,” he urged. “Every time I talk to my tía it’s like – ‘¿Y tu novia? ¿Y tu novia?’” he parroted. “I swear, it’s like she’s convinced you don’t exist, even though my mom has literally met you.”

Keep reading

#oh god the idea of being worthy of a partner's family's love is so daunting #i'm also so grateful my family never bugs me about having a significant other either 💀#oh his sisters sound like so much fun 😭#MAKING TAMALES 😭#listen my family is so very white #but i fucking love tamales & growing up with a lot of hispanic/latinx friends i was obviously exposed to a lot of the culture #and i was so jealous that had easier access to tamales #like i know it's hard work and it takes foreverrr #but god i would love to be able to help make some #because being able to partake in something & then enjoying the end product is so much better when you play a hand in it #also i fucking LOVE masa and could probably eat way too much of it #okay but being called mija by older hispanic/latinx women is just so wonderful 🥹#one of my old b&bw managers used to call me that and it made me want to cry tears of joy #can mama garcia be my mother in law/mom 🥹#the callback to the cookies fic 🥹😭#can't believe my influence??? wow #okay but i feel like seeing the love of your life in their unchanged childhood bedroom would totally make you fall that much more in love??#oh the ocean references 😭#mickey you absolute dog trying to fuck your girl in your mother's house #'he'd high-five me for a home-run?' MICKEY #okay but the garcia sibs all having that same look is so sweet and endearing #okay but not my coworker's nickname popping up 💀#'my darling girl' okay yeah that's definitely her seal of approval for sure no take backsies #THE FANBOY AND PAYBACK GRAPHIC NOVEL FINALLY GOT FINISHED OH MY GOD #shut the fuck up that's the significance of the oranges??? I can't deal 😭#brb going to go stare longingly at the orange tree in my yard #THE PROMISE RING #oh the way you weave metaphors and descriptors in is so elegant and flows so well #like a smooth brushstroke (not to literally use almost your own words against you lmao)#mickey garcia fic

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yoori-ya · 2 years ago

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two.

My mother exploded. Since walking through the front door of my aunt's farm, she and my aunt have been chatting non-stop, firing away like the ratatata of a machine gun. When was the last time they've seen each other? Maybe three years? Four?

My brain has relegated most of the chatter into background static, but every once in awhile I'll tune in and catch snatches of conversation. I'm not even sure whether I can call them conversations. My mother unloads. Then my aunt unloads. Neither of them really seem to dig too deeply into each other's stories. It's common to think of talks between friends as tennis matches, a good-natured back and forth. My mother and aunt seem like they're just cracking bats against pitched balls, swinging for the fences, not caring whether anyone's there to catch it.

As I pick up on bits and pieces of these conversations, the underlying tone is resentment. Bottled up resentment that's putrefied into something dark and bitter. Both have suffered for decades in silence, chafing under the yoke of tradition all in the name of striving to be the ideal Korean woman. Even my aunt, a larger-than-life chain-smoker with a sailor's mouth has not come out unscathed from society's machinery.

I've been thinking of this for a while now. I think a combination of my age and living in close proximity to my mother has given me a new perspective on her life. She used to be the model. The archetype. The paradigm for how I should behave, look, and live my life. If I followed in her footsteps, I'd be okay. I'd meet the perfect husband, eventually end up in the big house, have the kids, go jet-setting around the world. I'd be comfortable. Wah-lah, happily ever after. With age, I've gone from being a bright-eyed thing to clear-eyed and sober.

From the outside my mother's life is picture perfect, and generally life is good. But two opposite things can be true at the same time. My mother, I can't help but feel, is trapped within the folds of my father's dreams. My father is a terrifying dreamer. He can shape the fabric of reality to his will, and for thirty years, my mother and I have been woven into it. I try not take stability for granted, but it should not come at such a steep cost.

My mother came roaring to my father's defense when I said he wasn't too different from B. She pointed out the smallness of B's character, his self-centeredness, his need to be constantly babied.

"Your father's not like that at all! He's very caring," she said. "He'd never do x,y,z."

"I guess that's true," I told her. I didn't tell her that despite all of this, they were both men who, at their core, demand that we one-sidedly concede to their needs.

For the past five days, I've sat here at the kitchen table listening to these two older women voicing their stories. I can pick up on the catharsis in the their tone, the relief that they can talk about their experiences with no push back. And for the past five days, a feeling has slowly cemented in me: I’d like to try and escape a future like that.

#countryside silence gives you a lot time to think and write.#maybe i really should look for an MFA program out here

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xxgoblin-dumplingxx · 2 years ago

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Disabled reader x jason angst?

You were used to feeling invisible. You and your cane and your dog against the world. For a long time, you'd even prefer it that way. It felt better. Safer.

No expectations. No disappointments.

And then Jason noticed.

It was impossible to hide from him. He was there. At every turn. Seeing things most people over looked. He wanted to protect you. Aware of you, hearing the things that you didn't say. He made you believe you deserved the things you'd quietly put away. As secret little longings, pulled out to torment yourself on the nights you were in too much pain to sleep.

With Jason you were never invisible. Until now.

From the minute you'd arrived at the Gala, he'd hardly had time to look at you. Pulled in different directions. People demanding his attention. Pretty women; women who didn't have to wear flats with custom orthotics and lean on canes, were flirting with him.

And you were relegated to the background.

No one noticed you- Or Cola, being the best boy. As you did your best impersonation of a potted plant, watching another woman hang on him, you felt stupid. "Time to go home, Cola?" you murmur, reaching down to pat his head.

A pathetic little tail switch and a whine made you smile a little and you let Cola lead you towards a door. It didn't, evidently, matter if you were there or not. So why be there?

It felt like Prom. And a dozen other parties and dances and Galas before. And all you wanted to do was cry. You hadn't even wanted to go. You'd wanted to stay home and get work done. But Jason insisted. If he had to go he wanted to go with you.

____

Alfred looked up from the letter he was writing and frowned. No one was supposed to be home for hours- but when he heard the telltale clicking of claws on the floor and the clack of a cane- and no accompanying heavier steps, his frown deepened.

"Everything alright, my dear?" he asked, standing, ready to offer assisstance.

"Fine, Alfred," you murmur, not looking at him. "I was just-"

"You've been crying," he said sternly, folding his arms.

"Just a headache," you sigh, wiping your nose on the sleeve of your coat before bending slightly to unclip the dog's leash. "I didn't want anyone to worry."

He made a soft disbelieving noise, but didn't press. He'd seen a headache make you cry. But this reeks of something far less medical in nature. "Master Jason didn't see you home?"

"He was busy," you answer shrugging, "It's aright-"

"It certainly is not," Alfred said, making a note to have words with him about it. While you were perfectly capable of getting around, he'd feel better knowing you had more than your faithful hound to protect you.

"Please," you sigh, "I just want to go to bed."

Alfred nodded, frowning. And watched as Cola trailed after you, keeping close to your side. His back against your hip.

_____

The slap caught him off guard when he walked through the door. To be perfectly honest, it caught them all off guard.

Silencing the chatter and complaining as they all walked through the door.

"Alfred what the-"

"I'm doing it because Miss Y/N is too upset to do it herself," he said sternly.

"She had a headache!" he protested.

"If you really believe that you're an idiot," Alfred scolded. "It's not like it isn't all over social media."

Bruce folded his arms, watching several pieces fall into place and suppressed and sigh with effort. He'd watched you leave. Slinking out like you usually did, as soon as everyone was distracted. Looking hurt. Looking tired. And like it usually did, it made his chest hurt. But this time it made him angry.

"Fuck." Jason groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Is she still awake?"

Alfred shrugged elegantly, "If she is, she declined to answer the door when I went to inquire if she wanted anything from the kitchen. And as is his custom, Cola kept his own council."

Jason nodded slowly and took off his jacket, rubbing the side of his face as he walked down the hall. He was genuinely surprised Alfred hadn't punched him. He would have punched him.

#Jason Todd #Jason Todd x reader #anon ask #ask answered #disabled!reader #minors dni

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romance-of-three-memes · 5 months ago

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I like a lot of things about this movie, including most of the characters, but I think the best written and most interesting is Rocky's grandmother and the main antagonist, Danlakshmi. She's a very successful woman, her husband had no business sense and early on in their marriage he received an injury that made him mentally unfit to run a business at all, so she took over. She's named after Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and success, and she's chosen to cultivate a personal relationship with her, she even has a huge shrine to Lakshmi in their family home and it's clear that she's been shown favor by her namesake as her business is very successful to the point of being a household name in the movie's world (and how her family is obscenely wealthy, although they certainly weren't hurting before she came along). The business even carries both of their names in the form of Danlakshmi Sweets (a business built on the traditional domestic roles often assigned to women, as the sweets sold by the business are mostly baked in kitchens).

But instead of using her incredible success to uplift and empower other women she's chosen to become a tool of their continued suppression. She has this incredible yet unfortunately very believable hypocrisy about her where she upholds traditional 'values' despite being an antithesis of those values (something that is by no means unique to India, Asia, or Hindus, I see plenty of women doing that in my own cultural sphere, women who are successful in ways that would be considered inappropriate for them traditionally yet they style themselves as upkeepers of TRadiTioNaL CHristiAn VALuEs).

At one point she expresses that she wouldn't have any appropriate heir to her business after her son if her grandson, who's well meaning but not very smart, didn't take over, despite the fact that she has a granddaughter named Gayatri who showcases considerable smarts and business acumen, but has to hide this from her grandmother and father instead of having it cultivated by them because she knows they wouldn't approve, and their main concern with her (when they think about her at all) is to marry her off to some other family.

She relegates her daughter-in-law Poonam to practically being a servant to the rest of their family, and we even get a glimpse of how Danlakshmi was herself subjected to this by her own mother-in-law, but instead of deciding to be better than her, Danlakshmi has chosen to take her resentment over it out on Poonam, thus continuing the vicious cycle that reaches back who even knows how far into the past.

And Danlakshmi is totally oblivious to her hypocrisy. She even punishes men who don't fall into line by humiliating them for not upholding traditional masculinity. Unfortunately, there's no sort of universal allyship among all women, and Danlakshmi is emblematic of that.

It's clear how much thought and care went into her writing, I think more might've gone into her than anyone else, including the main couple.

Basically this is me on my knees begging you to consider watching this movie, it's on Amazon Prime... Although tbh it's unfortunately nowhere near as stunning as watching it in a theater given how visually gorgeous and exciting it is.

A lot of more modern American movies have been low-key ruined for me since I saw a Bollywood romcom called Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani in the theater on a whim last year, since I happened to be dog sitting in a part of my town where a lot of immigrants from all over Asia live and a couple of theaters there occasionally show movies mostly from India because there's a particularly notable population of people from south Asia.

I was already aware of all the problems that comparing a lot of modern American movies to it highlights; the shitty lighting, the ugly, colorless set design, the irony poisoning and deathly allergic reaction to sincerity. But seeing that movie just made those problems even more blatantly obvious and now a lot of the time when I watch modern American movies I spend at least a few minutes sitting there like >:( thinking about how it doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't. And yet it is because a lot of big American film makers have decided it should be.

Listen, I actively dislike the romcom genre. I avoid it like the plague most of the time. You don't know how off-brand it is for me to recommend a romcom, pretty much everyone who knows me irl has been a bit shocked when I tell them I found a romcom I not only like, but deeply enjoy. So you know when I say a romcom is good, I'm really, truly serious about it.

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wardenannie · 3 years ago

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Okay!

Can we get a fic of Levi being jealous? Like some doggy style with hair pulling??

🥰🥰🥰

Please

anything for you anon ;)

NSFW below the cut

Pieck was visiting again.

It was the third time that week, and though the woman was perfectly polite Levi found it difficult not to side eye her as she chatted vivaciously with his spouse.

Hange.

Bandages finally stripped away; gnarled, angry scars exposed and then hidden once more beneath the long sleeves of a shirt. They had only been made more ruggedly handsome by the patchwork of their healed wounds.

Speaking to Pieck, grinning despite the stiffness in their cheek, they were glowing. Beaming. Radiating an energy of confidence and an attitude that leaned towards the masculine. A rare form for the usually androgynous Hange Zoe.

They were positively charming, and Levi was beside himself that such a reaction wasn't directed towards him.

Hange liked Pieck. She awakened something within them that often lay latent. And having heard the rumors within the Corps that Hange had once preferred women to men? Levi was piqued.

But he wasn't an animal. And he certainly wasn't about to mistreat a guest in his own home. So he poured the pair their tea and bided his time in the kitchen as they caught up.

Where normally he preferred to be relegated to the quiet, supportive role of house husband, the longer Pieck lingered the more irate he became. The uncharacteristic wave of jealousy had him fuming by the end of the afternoon, scrubbing a plate in the sink until it shattered in his hand.

“What was that?” He heard Hange stand and Pieck make a slight noise of alarm.

Levi cursed, holding his hand beneath the stream of warm water as it bled.

“Levi, is everything alright in here?” Hange peered around the doorframe, handsome face framed by russet hair. Their single eye shone curiously; mercifully spared from the flames all those months ago.

“Yeah,” Levi groused, not so much as looking up from his wound. He prodded it with a finger, finding that it wasn’t particularly deep. He took a clean dish rag and patted the area dry before wrapping it. “I’m fine. Go back to Pieck.”

“Levi,” Hange’s voice dropped to a whisper, “Is that a hint of jealousy that I detect?”

“Shut it!” Levi snapped, finally spinning on his heel to face his partner, “You have a guest, attend to her!”

A knowing smirk passed over Hange’s face as they shrugged their shoulders and left the kitchen, presumably returning to Pieck.

Levi let out a frustrated huff, leaning his back into the damp counter. He pressed the rag tight around his hand, staunching the flow of blood. His eyes were drawn to the shattered plate, and he silently cursed his own emotionality.

“It was great seeing you,” he heard Hange from the living room.

“You too, Hange,” slowly, Levi crept towards the kitchen door, peering out towards the living area where Pieck and Hange were currently locked in a friendly embrace. His stomach sank like a stone watching them.

Hange saw Pieck to the door, and as soon as it was shut behind the woman they turned on heel and planted their hands firmly on their hips.

“And how fares my jealous husband?” They called to him where he remained in the liminal space between the kitchen and living room. “You’re being ridiculous, you know.”

Levi pursed his mouth, removing the rag from his hand. The wound had clotted. It would likely scar.

“You pick the strangest times to be possessive,” Hange sighed, approaching him. They wrapped their arms around his waist, pulling him flush to them. They smiled down at him, ran a hand up the curve of his spine. Levi shivered at the contact. “Pieck, really?”

Levi looked away, even as Hange raised a hand, thumb brushing over the curve of his cheekbone. He flushed, unbidden.

“Pieck is a woman,” the admission was small, perhaps slightly ashamed.

“Your deductive skills are still keen, I see,” Hange teased, and they kissed the corner of his mouth.

“Fuck, shitty-glasses, what is it that you want from me?”

Hange kissed him, slow and chaste. He was beginning to calm despite himself, his partner’s soothing touch was irresistible. Then he remembered the sight of Pieck’s hand on Hange’s arm; friendly and harmless, and prickling rage climbed up his spine once more.

“Pieck is a woman and I’m not,” Levi seethed, unable to help but lean into Hange’s warmth.

“Again, your skills of deduction are unrivaled... are you really jealous?��

“Hange.”

Wordlessly Hange dropped their hand to take his, winding their fingers together even as his quivered with jealousy.

“I know what you need,” the former Commander teased as they led him towards their bedroom. The bed was neatly made; dark coverlets pulled flush beneath downy pillows. It would not remain that way for long.

“Sex?” Levi grunted? He couldn’t pretend he was interested, but he was still fuming (unreasonably).

Hange laid back on the sheets, spreading their arms wide, “I was going to suggest a nap for the grumpy toddler.”

“I don’t want a fucking nap,” Levi seethed, and he pulled Hange up by their arm, seating them on the edge of the bed so he could kiss them, ravish them, really. All of his anger and possessiveness was poured into the kiss. Their teeth scarped, Levi’s tongue lancing as Hange submitted under his assault.

Their hands caressed down his shoulders, but he stopped their slow descent towards his fly by snatching their wrists in a single hand.

“Tell me you love me,” He snarled, flipping them onto their stomach. He tugged their pants down hastily, revealing the pink folds of their dewy cunt. Levi pressed a probing finger inside, finding that they were already wet and pliant. Moaning and writhing against his jealousy fueled ministrations. “Only me.”

“Love you,” Hange whined, hips rocking back and onto his hand wetness spilled around Levi’s finger. “Only you. Only ever you, Levi.”

Grinding his teeth, Levi removed his finger, pressing it between his thin lips to taste the essence of his lover. They were sharp, tangy, earthy and human in a way that he could not put to words. It made his cock twitch.

“Fuck, Hange,” He fished his thick cock out of his fly, aligning himself swiftly with the heat of Hange’s cunt. His eyes flashed dark and dangerous, teeth flashing as he rocked forward and sheathed himself in a single fluid motion.

“Shit!” Hange bucked back onto him, fisting the sheets with white knuckles. They turned their head to the side, face flushed bright pink as Levi set a steady, rough pace, fucking them loud and lewd.

“Mine,” Levi grunted, half sobbing with pleasure and rage, his hand fisted into Hange’s russet hair, forcing their back to arch as they took his cock even deeper. “My Hange.”

He brought his hand down on the smooth skin of Hange’s asscheek, the loud slap carrying through the narrow hallways of their shared home.

“Yours!” Hange exclaimed, rear jiggling back onto him, cunt squelching wetly as they began to tighten with impending orgasm.

Levi leaned over them, breath puffing hot on the back of their neck as he snapped his hips, losing all rhythm. He tugged their hair harder, craning their neck and kissing along the curve of it as his dick began to swell and twitch, balls tightening to his body. Their was fire in his loins, blooming across his lower back and thighs as he reach the pinnacle of their jealously fueled fuck.

“M gonna cum,” Hange whimpered, drooling into the sheets as Levi finally dropped their hair. He stood behind them, slightly crouched, hands on their hips, fingers digging in with a force that would surely bruise as he fucked them with every ounce of his strength and energy.

The sight of his handprint, red and stinging on their ass like a brand, was enough to send Levi spiraling over the edge.

“Hange!” He shouted their name as his hips stuttered to a stop, dick buried deep as he spilled himself into them.

Hange groped at the sheets, sweating and gasping as they came alongside him, cunt bearing down like a vice.

“Fuck,” Levi rasped, collapsing onto Hange’s back. All of his rage, his jealousy, his misplaced anger began to wane in the softness of the afterglow. He brushed his lips along their clothed shoulders and the exposed notches of their spine. Their skin was salty with sweat.

Hange let out a breathless laugh, flipping onto their back and tugging Levi with them. His head settled on their chest, fingers curling lightly into the fabric of their shirt.

“You know, Levi,” they were grinning ear to ear, tone playful, eyes glassy with the remnants of their pleasure. “I’m not particularly interested in women... and even if I were, there isn’t a person in the world who compares to you, tiny husband.”

Levi huffed, now it was his turn to flush, “I’m not tiny.”

Hange’s russet eye flashed with mischief, “You’re big where it counts.”

The former Captain snorted, then propped himself up on his elbow so he could reach his partner’s lips.

When they parted, Levi glanced down the bed to where their mingled cum had stained the spread. His lips quirked downward into a scowl, “Damn it, I just washed the sheets yesterday.”

Hange’s eye was beginning to flutter shut, preparing for an afternoon nap. They mumbled, half asleep, “We have sex in this bed at least four times a week. A little cum won’t kill you.”

Levi sighed, then pressed his lips to Hange’s temple, “Sleep, four-eyes. I’m sorry I got so jealous, that was foolish of me.”

Though their eye was closed, a small smile graced their lips, “Love you, short stack.”

“I love you, too,” Levi answered.

#levihan #my writing

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