#that goes against the whole POINT of the term. even more than someone who isn’t a lesbian ID’ing as one

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

“butch men” yeah I’m sure there’s something so revolutionary about men rejecting femininity in favor of full masculinity. you guys have no idea what butch means

[tianasficrecs168]

Venom fanfic recs

A black dot • means it's a one-shot

A heart ♡ means it's focused on Sexy times (it's pure filth PWP, or like, a plot focused on getting to the porn part lol)

Wildehack: “Intra-personal negotiation” (Eddie/Venom) • How fucked is that, that a compromise that ended with eating raw shark liver under the Golden Gate Bridge in the dead of night is probably the most interpersonally mature he’s ever been? Intra-personally, Venom corrects, not really paying attention.

Arahir: “Wrapped around your finger” (Eddie/Venom) • Venom goes about love in every wrong way he knows how. Thank god for late night television. “Me. They invited me for dinner,” Eddie insists, trying again to make his hair look some specific way in the mirror. He’s given up and started over three times. It’s a double date. Like on that show. “What—what are you watching that there are double dates? Jesus. I should cancel cable. Make you read a book instead.” No!

Impertinence: “Something Like A Pipe Bomb” (Venom/Eddie) Eddie already had enough problems, what with being a busy reporter with an alien parasite, when he caught one of his neighbors holding a fridge above her head. Now he has twice as many problems, including a kid who won't stop treating him like the big brother she never had and a moody alien parasite. Or: you can totally secretly pine while sharing a brain with someone else, as Venom and Eddie are both determined to prove.

Pepperfield: “That blessed arrangement” (Venom/Eddie) • That’s us, Eddie, Venom says suddenly, with a bizarre amount of intensity. We’re like these two fools. Eddie squints at the screen for a second before he understands. “What, married?” Venom is well aware that they live in a romantic comedy. Eddie isn’t, but he’ll get the picture eventually.

Dezemberzarin: “The no dating policy” (Venom/Eddie) • a two-shot series What’s the point? Eddie glances around to the other people hurrying along the sidewalk, lowers his voice until he’s muttering into the collar of his jacket. “I like sex! I want to have sex again in the future, so you’ll have to find a way to deal with it.” If you say so.

xzombiexkittenx: “Nice to Taste” (Venom/Eddie) • Eddie doesn’t do well when he thinks the symbiote died in the fire. He doesn’t tell Dan that suicide is the reason he’s in this mess in the first place. He didn’t go to the Golden Gate Bridge to throw Anne’s engagement ring into the water, he went there to throw himself but got distracted by Dr. Skirth’s messages and justice against Drake instead.

Tuesday: “Terms of Endearment” (Venom/Eddie) • In which there are accidental pet names, Eddie leaning into being in love with an alien symbiote, and an ill-advised kidnapping. — The first time Eddie called Venom dear, it was automatic. They were shopping, and Eddie bypassed the freezer section to pick up some chocolate first. Venom said, "Don't forget the tater tots." Eddie, well-trained by more than one serious relationship in his life, said, "Yes, dear."

Ottergirl: “Heartthrob” (Venom/Eddie) ♡ • He feels encompassing when Eddie says that, he feels like there's no end to him. All that affection in Eddie's voice and the knowing, knowing he wants to be with Venom, wants to belong to Venom. Eddie calls Venom by a pet name, and Venom likes it. Maybe a little too much.

MercurialTenacity: - “Nightlife” (Venom/Eddie) ♡  • Eddie is soft when he sleeps. During the day he’s wound taut, one thing or another always running through his head and keeping tension in his muscles, but when he’s asleep - oh yes, when he’s asleep his defenses melt away. All the hard edges smooth out, his body goes all loose and pliant, and his mind mellows into the background. Venom loves when Eddie sleeps, and he does it for hours at a time. Sometimes even eight or nine. Nine whole hours, and Venom has its host’s warm body right there to explore.

Redredribbons: “Storms” (Venom/Eddie) • The Symbiote struggles to understand human habits and biorhythms. Especially Eddie's, when his own brain seems intent on sabotaging him.

Stereobone: “No Idea That You’re in Deep” (Venom/Eddie) ♡  • If the last eight months have shown Eddie anything, it's that foresight is not his strong suit.

Surveycorpsjean: - “Lovesick Baby” (Venom/Eddie) Eddie spent his whole life alone in his head. Now he’s not sure he could ever go back. Sometimes, you want things you shouldn't.

[imthepunchlord]

[1/2] 5 out of 7 are nailed down - we’re really in the home stretch now! I’m another follower who hopes that we get Mantis!Marinette as well as Butterfly!Juleka in the last two remaining Bugettes!Miraculous polls; the colors alone are enough to persuade me (Indigo and Violet match them the best respectively), but also all of the other reasons that the previous Dragonfly!Sabrina+Mantis!Marinette anon and Butterfly!Juleka anon brought up in their asks that I hadn’t considered before. An extra reason that I have is that it would free up Rose to get the Centipede, which would be really interesting to see considering how you said Arrdor goes about trying to manipulate the humans he links up with and given that Rose canonically possesses a great deal of willpower against negativity and negativity-based powers—like the ones Guiltrip had that were able to engulf its victims in their own guilt—despite her chronic illness. Speaking of which, as someone who gets chronic migraines, I would REALLY like to see someone tackle that aspect of Rose with far more tact than what canon did, even if it’s still in not-so-many words, and I sincerely believe you’d be able to do it given your writing history and consistent acknowledgment of research needing to be done for topics that writers aren’t personally related to, be it race or religion or afflictions of any kind. In terms of personality, I read canon!Rose as naive instead of oblivious in that she has a lack of experience and sophistication that manifests as a neglect of pragmatism in favor of moral idealism rather than being unmindful, unaware or ignorant of the existence of negativity. Two examples way back in Season 1 that illustrate this to me are Princess Fragrance and Timebreaker. In the former, Rose stutters when she asks Chloe if she mentioned Prince Ali and frowns and shrinks when Chloe smugly replies “Not to you.” And speaking of shrinking, Rose’s body language during that whole scene is very *timidly* hopeful, what with her hiding behind her love letter and bringing back her smile when she hands it to Chloe but being hunched over and not looking her in the eye. She actually only fully perks up and looks at Chloe when she lies about giving Prince Ali the letter before laughing in her face and ripping it up. And, while still heartbroken by the interaction, Rose is seen preparing another letter for Prince Ali to give him herself before getting akumatized instead of just giving up. Should Rose have known better than to even consider asking Chloe for any kind of favor? In my opinion, ABSOLUTELY, especially considering not only the in-universe class history we knew of at the time but EVERYTHING ELSE that’s been revealed up to this point. But what makes this genuine character flaw of hers (which isn’t a bad thing to have in and of itself if handled well) naïveté and not obliviousness is that she ISN’T just skipping up to Chloe and expecting everything to go well and DOES recognize and get hurt by Chloe’s first insult before pushing through it. The same goes for how she behaves in Timebreaker when she moves to help the titular akuma as she fakes being injured; Rose is hiding behind the stairs when Timebreaker calls out to her instead of standing out and about and trepidly inches towards Timebreaker to help her up instead of just rushing over. Timebreaker even says “Sweet Rose! Always thinking of others before yourself!” as she laughs and takes her energy. I honestly think that, considering their plan to make her a hero later on, canon!Rose is ML’s attempt at writing a character similar to She-Ra’s Perfuma that isn’t as well-written or fulfilled, especially with this quote from her to Catra in the last season: “It's hard keeping your heart open. It makes you vulnerable. But it doesn't make you weak, and I have to believe it's worth it.” …

So, first and foremost, while I get the idea, I'm not a 100% yet on Rose getting Centipede, and depending on how this story develops as it's planned out, I'm not certain on Arrdor returning to being Pink and becoming Miraculous once more.

Centipede is currently on the crossroads and I just can't take a path until I get farther into the planning, and that can delve into whoever has the Centipede as it could go someone trying to be a hero but is an enemy by fairy standards so they're in an awkward position, someone just being a neutral wildcard messing with both heroes and villains, or someone being a 3rd solo villain. There's options and I'd rather sit and wait and see where the story points to, as sometimes the story will just go ahead and write itself, whether it planned it a certain way or not.

I probably will do a take on Arrdor turning Pink once more, I just don't know if it'll be this story, nor do I know if it'd happen with Rose.

So until polls are done, I'll just put a pin on the possibility.

I also will give a heads up, I'm not sure if anything like Guiltrip will even come up at all, especially as I haven't watched it and I'm not sure if I want to. I also don't know how much of a focus point Rose having chronic migraines should be, especially as this feels like a detail that got slapped on her really late, and I kinda wonder if it even matters as chances are good it only exists for that ep and will never come up again.

Assuming if she does get an important role in Bugettes, that's not a full certainty yet, I'll then do research on chronic migraines and hopefully get an idea on how much attention it should get narrative wise, but at this time, I'm not going to make promises it's going to get a lot. I don't even know if it'll actually even come up as I just don't have ideas for it to be focused on right now.

[legend-of-cupcake]

Is Hanako a yandere?

This is something I’ve been wanting to explore for a little while now, but never really had the time or mental energy for it. But today, that is exactly what we are going to do (warning: this post ended up being very long!!)

For starters, we need to define what exactly a yandere is. 

A yandere is typically characterized as someone who initially appears as  loving and caring, but becomes violent and possessive over their love interest. The term comes from yanderu (病んでる), meaning (mentally or emotionally) ill, and deredere (でれでれ, "lovesick"), meaning to show genuinely strong romantic affection.

Some well known examples of yanderes can be found in characters such as  Anna Nishikinomiya, Satō Matsuzaka and Yuno Gasai. 

Female yanderes a lot more common, and are generally the first thing people think of when asked about yanderes. However, male yanderes also exist!! 

When you first take a look at Hanako as a character, you see he’s a cheeky and playful character, who has a perverted side that’s typical of a boy around his age. The very first thing he does when introduced is tease our protagonist, and then laughs at her reaction to him.

And we see this a lot in the early chapters of tbhk, Hanako goes out of his way to get reactions out of both Nene and Kou and enjoys how they respond. As the story slowly progresses, he slowly forms a friendship with the 2 of them, and gets particularly close with Nene and becomes protective of her.

Doesn’t sound very yandere so far, does it?

However, from the very beginning at chapter 1, it’s shown Hanako has a more serious and potentially malevolent side as he pulls a knife out from his stomach and easily defeats the mermaid that had tried to take Nene away. The moment was quick, and Nene never focused on the change in Hanako’s demeanor, which in turn made us the audience not look too deeply into the whole thing.

It isn’t until chapter 3, with the introduction to Kou, that we truly see the sinister side of Hanako rear it’s head. 

Hanako’s secret about being a murderer is forcefully dragged out by Kou, and in response Hanako holds Nene from behind to hide his expression from her, and holds a knife to Kou’s neck. 

Very clearly, Hanako didn’t want Nene knowing about this, and this is a trend that continues all the way up to the current chapter. If it was up to Hanako, Nene wouldn’t know a single thing about him, not even his real name. Everything she’s learned came from a third party source, not once did Hanako willingly divulge any information to her, apart from the fact that he murdered his own twin brother.

Hanako doesn’t even tell Nene about her own lifespan, that is how little information he gives her. 

Now this in itself, isn’t a very yandere trait, but it is a douche-bag thing he continuously does and never truly learns from. 

As the series progresses, it becomes clear Hanako develops feelings for Nene not long after the confession tree arc.

He becomes more clingy, not liking it when Kou and Nene are too close together and sliding himself in-between them to create distance. He’s often seen casually holding onto Nene for no real purpose, other than just to keep close to her.

He even becomes jealous when Nene becomes concerned about Kou after the hell of mirrors arc, 

and is very against her wanting to take Kou to a festival to cheer him up.

And when Akane threatens to kiss Nene, Hanako abandons his plan to try and force Akane to make a wish to him, just because he couldn’t handle the idea of them kissing. 

Again, this itself isn’t very yandere, Hanako’s interest in Nene usually portrays itself as a typical school boy crush. He finds it hard to talk about his feelings so he often resorts to teasing her, but he also loves to find ways to be close to her and easily becomes jealous when other boys are involved.

So, if that’s the case, then why am I making this post? 

Because Hanako isn’t a typical school boy.

At this point in the story, it’s more or less obvious that Hanako tricked Nene in chapter 1 so she would become his kannagi, and he proceeds to use her to destroy the yorishiros. Hanako basically admits himself that he never planned to care about her. 

Hanako hadn’t planned on caring about Nene at all, he thought her life wouldn’t matter to him because he’s already dead-- why should he care if Nene was going to die?

But then he got to know her, began to like her for who she was, enjoyed the attention she gave him and then he realizes what a horrible mistake he’s made.

And that’s when another part of Hanako’s personality slowly reveals itself as the series progresses...

His overly controlling nature. 

As I’ve mentioned before in this post, Hanako refuses to tell Nene anything, not even about her own lifespan. He justifies this by trying to make her final days happy, not wanting her to worry about her impeding death. 

This, while can be interpreted as him trying to be kind in his own way to her, was also Hanako taking away Nene’s rights to know. She has a right to know that her time is short, and she has a right to choose how to spend the rest of that time. If she wanted to forget and remain ignorant, we know Hanako can make that happen, but he never gave her the option in the first place.

And this isn’t the only time Hanako takes away Nene’s rights and agency.

When given the choice to become a fish princess, Nene is unsure of what the right answer is. And although she decides she wants to stay with Hanako, she gets swept up on the idea of being popular and almost drinks the blood that would’ve severed her from Hanako.

This is when Hanako intervenes, forcefully taking Nene away from the fish and effectively making the choice for her.  

While this does end up aligning with what choice Nene would’ve made had she not gotten carried away, Hanako had no way of knowing that. He took away her ability to make that decision for herself, and then speaks of Nene as though she were his belonging and not a person. 

Hanako even indirectly admits that Nene probably would be better off with the mermaid, but to him it doesn’t matter, because she likes him. 

This isn’t an isolated incident either, the entire point of the PP arc was that Hanako was making the executive decision to keep Nene there against her will, because he deemed it as a way to save her life. To him, it didn’t matter what Nene thought about the whole thing, the only thing that mattered to him was that she would be able to live inside the fake world.

Hanako goes as far as to lock Nene away, so that she can’t find a way to leave the fake world before it’s ready, completely taking away her freewill and asserting his own.

This, dear readers, is very much treading into yandere territory, and it only gets worse from here. 

During the same arc, Nene manages to have a heart-to-heart with Hanako. She conveys her wish of wanting to live the next 90 years in the real world, and Hanako relents, finally sending her and everyone else back to the real world. It appears he’s learned his lesson, and everything goes back to normal until the next arc.

But then, we find out Hanako didn’t learn his lesson at all.

Hearing Nene’s wish, Hanako decides the next best course of action will be to swap her lifespan with someone else. And who is that someone else? Why it’s Nene’s best friend Aoi, who conveniently has kannagi blood running in her veins, making her a prime candidate to conduct the severance with-- and thus manually swapping their fates around so Nene lives while Aoi dies. 

This, of course, is all without Hanako consulting Nene on any of this. He already knows how she would feel about the whole thing, and if given the choice he knows she would rather keep her original lifespan, but again he takes the choice away from her.  

I won’t list all of them, because this post is already getting way too long, but these are just some of the big examples of Hanako’s controlling nature when it comes to Nene. He keeps on making decisions for her, not even taking Nene’s feelings into consideration, and he has no intentions of stopping. Literally in the latest chapter, Hanako just outright refuses to comply when asked if he will now stop his “crazy shit” in trying to save Nene without even asking her first.

Allowing Nene to have freewill in her own decisions is something Hanako refuses to allow. He wants her to live, and he will make it happen by any means necessary, no matter what Nene or anyone else has to say about it. 

Tsukasa is the one who calls it out the best:

So to finally answer the question of whether Hanako is a yandere or not...

At the very beginning of this post, I said that a yandere is “someone who initially appears as loving and caring, but becomes violent and possessive over their love interest.”

Hanako, while maybe not typically loving and caring, comes off as caring in the way is very physically affectionate with Nene, always finding excuses to hold her in some manner, and goes out of his way to protect her when there’s danger. And despite all the evidence pointing to him being a bad supernatural, both Nene and Kou decide there is more to Hanako than that and he’s not a bad person. 

However, as the story progresses, we see Hanako become more clingy and possessive over Nene-- to the point that Hanako would rather she has nightmares about him, because then she’s at least dreaming about him.  

He regards her as something that belongs to him, and doesn’t allow Nene to make her own decisions, not even granting her the luxury of information in regards to her own lifespan. If it was down to Hanako, Nene would be locked away in a fake world against her own free will.

Then, when he begins running out of options, Hanako turns to attempting to kill someone else in Nene’s stead, so that she may take their lifespan.

And although it didn’t work out, Hanako has more or less admitted he won’t be afraid to do it again (or perhaps something even worse).

So do I think Hanako is a yandere?

Yes. 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Sam Harris

Published: April/May 2024

This article was adapted from a transcript of the November 7, 2023, episode of the author’s podcast, Making Sense.

We have witnessed extreme moral confusion since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Some of it has been just frank anti-Semitism, but much is actual confusion. Most people in the West still don’t understand the problem of jihadism. We often speak about “terrorism” and “violent extremism” generically. And we are told that any link between these evils and the doctrine of Islam is spurious and nothing more than an expression of “Islamophobia.” Incidentally, the term Islamophobia was invented in the 1970s by Iranian theocrats to do just this: prevent any criticism of Islam and to cast secularism itself as a form of bigotry. Islam is a system of ideas, subscribed to by people of every race and ethnicity. It’s just like Christianity in that regard. Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam are both aggressively missionary faiths, and they win converts from everywhere. People criticize the doctrines of Christianity all the time and worry about their political and social influences—but no one confuses this for bigotry against Christians as people, much less racism. There’s no such thing as “Christophobia.” As someone once said (it was not Christopher Hitchens, but it sure sounds like him): “Islamophobia is a term created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In any case, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are. We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others. What could turn ordinary human beings into suicide bombers, and what could get vast numbers of their neighbors to celebrate them as martyrs, other than their entire society being oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power? So, in the case of Israel, many people imagine that the ghoulish history Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.

Now, there are many things to be said in criticism of Israel, particularly its expansion of settlements on contested land. But Israel’s behavior is not what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do.

These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians on purpose, not as collateral damage, and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to Hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.

If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.

It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without being confused about the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel but to open societies everywhere. My friend Christopher Hitchens was extremely critical of Israel and openly supportive of Palestinian statehood. But he wasn’t even slightly confused about the problem of jihad.

There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the past forty years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that an undercount.1 Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews. There have been eighty-two attacks in France and over 2,000 in Pakistan during this period. Want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, which is a transformation that can happen very quickly—just as quickly as new beliefs can take root in a person’s mind. You just need a wider Muslim community that doesn’t condemn jihadism but tacitly admits the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.

In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these facts. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, Paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

When one asks what the motivations of jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society, if only they were given the chance. Secular liberals imagine that jihadists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove he was doing anything for religious reasons.

Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if a white supremacist goes on a killing spree in a Black church and says he did this because he hates Black people and thinks the White race is under attack, this motive is accepted at face value without the slightest hesitation. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate Islam every time. The game is rigged.

Do not mistake what I’m saying now for anti-Muslim bigotry. I’m talking about the consequences of ideas, not the ethnic origins of people. Not a word I’ve said, or will ever say on this topic, has anything to do with race. And the truth is, I’m not remotely xenophobic. I’m a xenophile. The Middle East has produced some of my favorite parts of culture—some of my favorite foods, music, and architecture. Despite my better judgment, I absolutely love the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Everything I’m saying about the problem of jihadism is about the problem of jihadism—the triumphal belief by some percentage of the world’s Muslims that they must conquer the world for the one true faith through force and that Paradise awaits anyone who would sacrifice his or her life to that end.

Of course, many religions produce a fair amount of needless suffering. Consider the pedophile-priest scandal in the Catholic Church, which is something I’ve written and spoken about before, I hope with sufficient outrage. One can certainly argue, as I have, that Catholic teaching is partly to blame for these crimes against children. By making contraception and abortion taboo, the Church ensured there would be many out-of-wedlock births among its faithful; by stigmatizing unwed mothers, it further guaranteed that many children would be abandoned to Church-run orphanages, where they could be preyed upon by sexually unhealthy men. I don’t think any of this was consciously planned; it’s just a grotesque consequence of some very bad ideas. And yet the truth is that there is no direct link between Christian scripture and child rape. However, imagine if there were. Just imagine if the New Testament contained multiple passages promising Heaven to any priest who raped a child. And then imagine that in the aftermath of an endless series of child rapes within the Church, more or less every journalist, politician, and academic denied that they had anything whatsoever to do with the “true” teachings of Catholicism. That is the uncanny situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam.

The problem that we must grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Qur’an, in the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.

There are many, many verses in the Qur’an that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Qur’an; there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident; it’s in the Qur’an and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.

Worse, in my view, is the moral logic one gets from the doctrine of martyrdom and Paradise. If you take martyrdom and Paradise seriously, it becomes impossible to make moral errors. If you blow yourself up in a crowd, your fellow Muslims will go straight to Paradise. You’ve actually done them a favor. Unbelievers will go to Hell, where they belong. However many lives you destroy, it’s all good.

Again, most of this horror has nothing to do with Israel or the West. In 2014, six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar. These jihadis came from outside of Pakistan; there was a Chechen, two Afghans, and three Arabs. They murdered 145 people, 132 of whom were children. They burned a teacher alive in front of her students and then killed all the children they could get their hands on. They didn’t take any hostages. They had no list of demands. They intended to die to achieve martyrdom. And they did die, so they got at least half of what they wanted. It is very difficult for secular people to understand how this behavior could be possible. They assume only madmen would do this sort of thing.

But that’s the horror of it—you don’t have to be mad to be a jihadist. You don’t even have to be a bad person. You just have to be a true believer. You just have to know, for sure, that you and all the good people will get everything you want after you die and that the Creator of the Universe wants nothing more than for you to kill unbelievers. Here is what a supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said when interviewed about the school massacre:

Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does. Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.” Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet … They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”]. Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169–170] that they are not dead. You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.

My point is that we have to take declarations of this kind at face value, because they are honest confessions of a worldview—and it is a worldview that is totally antithetical to everything that civilized people value in the twenty-first century. This problem is much bigger than the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.

Taking Anti-Semitism Seriously

I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive. This follows directly from my views about organized religion in general. So, obviously, I don’t think there should be Muslim states either—or Christian ones, for that matter. However, there are over twenty countries in which Islam is the official state religion and over fifty in which Muslims are the majority—and there is exactly one Jewish state. Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.

In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust, was denied entry into Cuba, the United States, and Canada and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then systematically murdered.

I’ve never taken modern anti-Semitism very seriously. I think I’ve done exactly one episode of my podcast on the topic. I’ve studied it. I understand its roots in Christian theology—despite the fact that Jesus, his apostles, and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. I’m a student of the Holocaust. And I’m well aware of the anti-Semitism that existed in Europe and the United States at the time. Read David Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews to understand how widespread anti-Semitism was in America, even as Jews were being killed by the millions in Europe. And, of course, I’m all too aware of the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam—and of the way it has been compressed into a diamond of intolerance and hatred throughout the Muslim world by the modern influence of Nazism. There’s some very depressing history there for anyone who wants to read it.

And I’ve been aware that year after year in the United States, no group has been targeted with more hate, and hate crime, than Jews. This is something that many Americans aren’t aware of. As I said, the American Left would have you believe that “Islamophobia” is a major concern. Vice President Kamala Harris is now heading a commission on “Islamophobia” in America, as though that’s the problem we’ve been seeing recently—just a massive outpouring of hatred for Muslims in America by non-Muslims. Has that ever happened?

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Jews were targeted far more than Muslims. And that has been true every year since. According to FBI statistics, though Jews are just over 2 percent of the population, they receive over half the hate in America and five times the level that Muslims do (and I think it’s safe to say that much of this hate comes from Muslims themselves). Jewish schools and synagogues have always incurred greater security costs than non-Jewish institutions, and for good reason, because the threat to them is greatest.

While this status quo has been despicable, I have always believed that it was tolerable. And I say this as someone who has received death threats for two decades, and many of these threats are often explicitly anti-Semitic. Even given all this, I have felt that anti-Semitism, as a real threat to Jews, certainly in the West, was behind us. I can’t say that now. In the past few weeks, with Jews being openly reviled and threatened all over the world, in the immediate aftermath of the most shocking atrocities committed against them since the Holocaust, I’ve begun to think that anything is possible.

Incidentally, if you ever wondered how you might have behaved had you been a German on the morning after Kristallnacht—if you’ve ever wondered whether you would have just gone about your business or done something to resist the slide of your society into absolute depravity—more or less everyone on Earth is now getting the chance to see just that. There was a mob chanting “Gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House. We have Jewish students in Ivy League universities cowering behind locked doors in fear for their physical safety. All university administrators, Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of the Palestinian cause—without taking a moment to understand what actually happened on October 7, or understanding it and not caring—you are all now part of history.

The outpouring of anti-Semitism that we have witnessed since October 7 really seems to mark a new moment, both in the United States and globally. And for the first time, I now worry that my daughters will live in a world where their Jewishness will matter to people who do not wish them well, and they will be forced to make certain life choices on that basis, choices that I never had to make. Apart from being a public figure and having to deal with disordered people of every description, I have never been concerned about anti-Semitism for even five minutes in my life. I now feel that I have been quite naive. That’s putting it charitably. I’ve been utterly ignorant of what has been going on beneath the surface.

Of course, the boundary between anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and, yes … babies; and who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields; who are killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents; who burned people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace,” decapitated others, and dragged their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is great.”

If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics who, again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as a religious sacrament; if you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.

What is more, you don’t even care about what you think you care about, because you have failed to see that Hamas, and jihadists generally, are the principal cause of all the misery and dysfunction we see—not just in Gaza but throughout the Muslim world. Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews. A rational government in Gaza that cared about the fate of its citizens could have made something beautiful—or at least not awful—out of that strip of land on the Mediterranean. But Hamas has spent billions of dollars on terrorism. The suffering of Gaza is due to the fact that it has been run by a death cult, against which Israel has had to defend itself continuously. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel—that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide”—happens to be true.

But now we have college students at our best universities tearing down posters of hostages held by Hamas—some of whom are Americans, and some of whom are children—imagining that they are supporting the Palestinian cause. It boggles the mind. We have LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas—when they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza because Hamas throws anyone suspected of being gay off of rooftops. They’re directly supported by Iran, where gay people are regularly hanged.

We’ve got feminist organizations such as CodePink going all in for Hamas and accusing the Israelis of genocide. Do they understand how Hamas treats women? Did CodePink support the women of Iran who were thrown in prison and even killed for daring to show their hair in public? Do they realize that women are treated like property throughout the Muslim world and that this is not an accident? Under Islam, the central message about women is that they are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives. Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want as long as these theocrats are Muslim.

If anything good comes from this outpouring of hate and moral confusion, it will be the end of identitarian politics of the Left. A friend of mine was just at an art opening, where they were passing hors d’oeuvres, and someone she knew came up to her and asked if she had any food in her teeth. And my friend said, “No, your teeth are perfectly white and beautiful.” Unfortunately, the woman herself was Black and considered the association of the terms white and beautiful a microaggression. She got greatly offended and stormed off. What, did she want brown teeth? I know nothing about this person apart from this anecdote, but I guarantee you that this prodigy of social justice is completely confused about Israel and Hamas and jihadism. This is the sort of person for whom words are violence but massacring women and children with knives, or burning them alive, is a completely defensible response to “oppression.” Most elite circles in the West—academia, Hollywood, the media, nonprofits—have been poisoned, to one degree or another, by this social justice psychosis where imaginary harms are seized upon as though they were existential concerns, and pure evil is easily shrugged off or even celebrated as a moral victory.

What Jihadists Want

The bright line, ethically, between Israel and her enemies can be seen on the question of human shields. There are people who use them, and there are people who are deterred by them, however imperfectly. Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Again, imagine the Jews of Israel doing that, and imagine how little it would matter to Hamas if they did. Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza and has even physically prevented them from leaving so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs. They are using their own people as human shields—in addition to more than 200 hostages they took for this purpose. No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does. However horrible the images coming out of Gaza, it is Hamas who should be blamed for the loss of life there. You’re calling for a ceasefire now? There was a ceasefire on October 6. Hamas broke it by deliberately murdering more than 1,400 innocent people.

Of course, Israel should hold itself to the highest ethical standards for waging war. For two reasons: One, because it should. It is right for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to do whatever it can to minimize the loss of innocent life. And, two, they should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards because the rest of the world will hold them to impossible ones.

Look at these protests we’re seeing all over the world, which began before Israel had dropped a single bomb. Now that there have been several thousand Palestinian casualties, cities across the globe are seething with rage. But Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Muslims in Syria. The Saudis have killed well over 100,000 Muslims in Yemen. Where are the protests? No one cares, least of all Muslims. They only care when non-Muslims produce these casualties—and they especially care when Jews do it. Israel is routinely condemned by the United Nations, and the U.N. could not pass a condemnation of Hamas for the atrocities it committed on October 7.

As I said, I don’t know whether a ground invasion is the right approach. But there is no question that Israel had to act; they have to destroy Hamas, and, whatever they do, noncombatants will get killed in the process. Again, this is Hamas’s fault.

But the problem is much bigger than Hamas. Civilized people everywhere—both non-Muslim and Muslim—have no choice but to combat jihadism. This has been glaringly obvious since September 11, 2001, but it should be much more obvious now. For Israel, October 7 was much worse than 9/11 was for America. There’s almost no comparison. The revealed threat to Israel really is existential. However, in the long term, I think the threat of jihadism is existential for the West too.

This demands a much longer conversation about what to do about jihadism. I happen to think that most of our response to it should be covert. I don’t know why the Israelis, the Americans, the British, or anyone else has to take credit for anything. However long it takes, members of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, al-Shebab, Boko Haram, Pakistani Taliban, and every other jihadist organization on Earth should be made to understand, every day of their lives, that the martyrdom they seek will be granted to them. Jihadism must be destroyed in every way it can be destroyed—logistically, economically, informationally, but also in the most material sense, which means killing a lot of jihadists. We can argue with their sympathizers. And we can hope to de-radicalize them. But we also have to kill committed jihadists. These are not normal antagonists with rational demands. These are not people who want what we want. This is not politics, and it will never be politics. It is a very long war.

Back in 2016, I released an episode of my podcast titled “What Do Jihadists Really Want?,” based on an issue of the magazine Dabiq, put out by the Islamic State. You can listen to that for more detail.2 You can also read the book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, to understand more of my thinking on this topic. Jihadist ideology has nothing to do with Israel, American foreign policy, colonialism, or any other rational grievance, and there is no concession that any civilized society can make to appease it.

We’ve forgotten about jihadism in recent years. But it hasn’t gone away. Whatever one thinks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was surely perceived as a victory by jihadists everywhere—and the implications of that have yet to be felt. In the West, we tend to remain blissfully unaware of Islamic terrorism (which is just another name for jihadism) unless it happens in the United States or Europe. We don’t tend to notice jihadist atrocities committed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India, much less in the dozen or so countries in Africa that suffer them more or less continuously. And we are totally unaware of foiled plots, of which there have been many.

As I said, we also tend to think in terms of “terrorism” or “violent extremism,” and while I use those words myself, we have to focus on jihadism, because that is the underlying ideological commitment.

Now, jihadists themselves are not a unified front. There is a very deep schism between Sunni and Shia—despite the fact that some groups will collaborate across it, as we see with Hamas and the Iranian regime. And there are internecine divisions even among jihadists of the same faith. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban don’t even get along at this point. And that’s a very good thing. Hopefully, we have an army of smart people with the necessary language skills, sowing hatred and confusion among jihadist groups twenty-four hours a day. But jihadists are all united in their hatred of liberal Western values, in their certainty of Paradise, and in their willingness to turn this world into an abattoir for the glory of God.

We cannot tolerate jihadists. We cannot let them immigrate into our open societies. And by we, I mean not just non-Muslims; I mean all Muslims who want to live sane lives in the twenty-first century. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the Palestinians have to rid themselves of their jihadists. And if that’s not possible, a stable peace with the Palestinians is not possible.

But this problem is so much bigger than Israel, or even global anti-Semitism. Spend some time reading about how the Islamic State treats Shiites. Look at the history of terrorism in Pakistan or India. If you want a totally painless way to do this, watch Hotel Mumbai—it’s a great film that depicts the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. If you’ve forgotten, around a dozen jihadists killed over 160 people in Mumbai, many at the Taj Hotel, and the film shows this with brutal realism. And while they killed some Jews too, at a Jewish center, this attack had nothing to do with Israel, America, race, so-called “settler colonialism,” or any of the other factors that Leftist fellow travelers have been fixated on since October 7. Really, this is the least boring piece of homework you will ever be given. Go watch Hotel Mumbai, and once the killing starts, ask yourself how anyone, East or West, Muslim or non-Muslim, can live with these people.

There is an intuition out there that to solve the problems in the Middle East, we must understand them in all their depth and complexity. And for this, the most important thing to grapple with is the so-called “historical context.” But for the purpose of really understanding this conflict and why it is so intractable, historical context is a distraction—every moment spent talking about something other than jihadism is a moment when the oxygen of moral sanity is leaving the room.

There’s no sorting this out by reference to history, because any group can arbitrarily decide where to set the dial on its time machine. In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.” The British were colonialists. Colonialists have some place to go back to. Where could the Jews go back to? There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Most of the recent immigrants—Jews from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries—were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948, in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return? There are displaced people everywhere on Earth, but only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish for their right of return.

Incidentally, if a history of land theft and oppression were sufficient to produce genocidal terrorism, where are the Native American suicide bombers? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? Do you realize how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the Chinese? Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? (I think there has been one.) The truth is ideas matter. It absolutely matters what people believe. Certainty about Paradise, and about martyrdom as a way of getting there, is one of the most potent memetic poisons the human mind has ever produced. Whatever historical, political, or economic context you want to apply to Israel and Palestine, jihadism is real; its intentions toward the Jews, infidels, and apostates are genocidal; and this is a global problem, because jihadism enjoys an appalling level of support throughout the Muslim world despite the fact that it is responsible for far more death and destruction among Muslims than Israel’s acts of self-defense have ever been.

Now, obviously, there are whole populations throughout the Muslim world that are effectively hostages to the religious fanatics who control them—and certainly a large percentage of the Palestinians fit that description, as does much of Iran. But it is very easy to underestimate how much sympathy there is for the jihadist project among Muslims who are not themselves actively waging jihad. And this is a terrible thing to contemplate. When 100,000 people show up in the center of London in support of Hamas, we have a problem. Of course, it’s an open question how many of those people really support jihad. But imagining that very few of them do is pure delusion. We have to win a war of ideas with these people. Because if the future is going to be remotely tolerable, the vast majority of Muslims have to disavow jihadism and unite with non-Muslims in fighting it. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that an open-ended future of pluralistic tolerance might be possible.

Yes, there are many other problems in the world at the moment. There’s the war in Ukraine and the looming possibility of conflict between the United States and China. Some of these problems appear much bigger than jihadism, but they all admit of some rational basis for negotiation and compromise. However bad things get with the Russians or the Chinese, they are not chanting “We love death more than the Americans and the Europeans love life.” Only jihadism has the power to turn our future into a zombie movie. Jihadists are the enemy with whom there is no rational or pragmatic compromise to make—ever.

As I’ve said many times before, the Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior. And if the Muslim world and the political Left can’t stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness fully empowers rightwing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won’t create secure borders, Christian fascists will.

There may be two sides to the past, but there really aren’t two sides to the present. There are two sides to the story of how the Palestinians and Jews came to fight over land in the Middle East. Understanding all that is important—and I think it is important to understand the cynical game the Arab world has played with the plight of the Palestinians for the past fifty years. If there is a stable political settlement to ever be reached between Israel and the Palestinians, it will entail a full untangling of the facts from all the propaganda that obscures them, while keeping the problem of jihadism in view. It will also entail that the religious lunatics on the Jewish side get sidelined. As I said, the building of settlements has been a continuous provocation. But even on the point of religious fanaticism, there really aren’t two sides worth talking about now. Whatever terrible things Israeli settlers occasionally do—and these are crimes for which they should be prosecuted—generally speaking, the world does not have a problem with Jewish religious fanatics targeting Muslims in their mosques and schools. You literally can’t open a Jewish school in Paris because no one will insure it. Yes, there are lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the past twenty years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.

There is a bright line between good and a very specific form of evil that we must keep in view. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with.

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Here’s a partial transcript of what he said:

“Hi, Dad. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” And his dad says, “May God protect you.” “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad. Open the phone, Dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran.] Put Mom on.” And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” “I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” “Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” And the brother says, “You killed ten?” “Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference.] Hold your head up, Father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp … “Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

I would submit to you that this piece of audio is more than just the worst WhatsApp commercial ever conceived. It is a window into a culture. This is not the type of call that would have been placed from Vietnam by an American who just participated in the My Lai massacre. Nor is it the parental reaction one would expect from an American family had their beloved son just called them from a killing field. As terrible as Vietnam was, can you imagine a call back to Nebraska: “Mom, I killed ten with my own hands! I killed a woman and her husband, and I’m calling from the dead woman’s phone. Mom, your son is a hero!” Do you see what a total aberration that would have been, even in extremis?

This call wasn’t a total aberration. This wasn’t Ted Bundy calling his mom. This was an ordinary member of Hamas, a group that might still win an election today, especially in the West Bank, calling an ordinary Palestinian family, and the mere existence of that call, to say nothing of its contents, reveals something about the wider culture among the Palestinians.

It’s important to point out that not only members of Hamas but also ordinary Gazans appear to have taken part in the torture and murder of innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages. How many did this? And how many ordinary Gazans were dancing in the streets and spitting on the captured women and girls who were paraded before them after having been raped and tortured? What percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, many of whom are said to hate Hamas for their corruption and incompetence and brutality, nevertheless support what they did on October 7 with a clear conscience, based on what they believe about Jews and the ethics of jihad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that the answers to these questions would be quite alarming. We’re talking about a culture that teaches Jew hatred and the love of martyrdom in its elementary schools, many of which are funded by the United Nations.

Of course, all this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance-dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight.

Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: At least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades … and from the jihadist side this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to Hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all this sadism—the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people—is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammad himself did.

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) all day long as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London, Sydney, and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them.

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine are important here is present. There are no settlers, blockades, daily humiliations at check points, or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have the same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers.

Of course, we can do our best to turn the temperature down now. And we can trust that the news cycle will get captured by another story. We can direct our attention again to Russia, China, climate change, or AI alignment, and I will do that in my work, but the problem of jihadism and the much wider problem of sympathy for it isn’t going away. And civilized people—non-Muslim and Muslim alike—have to deal with it. As I said in a previous episode of my podcast on this topic: We all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.

[1mpulsee]

// have a rant on Bart having a “parent” figure and also just his relationship with Max M.ercury in general . disclaimer some of this is headcanon and also I haven’t read all of their appearances together + my memory is bad so if some stuff is inaccurate my bad but this is the interp im going with regardless bc it feels right to me lols

// when he leaves the 31st century, Bart never really fully acquires a “parent” . like yes, he has Max M.ercury . and don’t get me wrong, Bart loves him like family and looks up to him in more than a mentorship way . Max was one of the few people in the flash family who willingly took him in at any point, and he always treated Bart like his own family . even though they had their moments (some of which I ignore because sometimes comic writers make Max way too fucking mean to Bart for no reason) he arguably has treated him the best out of any of them, believing in him and defending him from other speedsters (cough Wally cough who said that) who don’t always have faith in Bart . they get along really well despite their vast differences, and they’ve come to genuinely respect each other .

// HOWEVER (as far as I know) Bart never really calls Max his father . he’s said multiple times that Max is ‘more than a mentor’, and it’s obvious that they have a close familial bond . pretty much any time Max shows up, Bart immediately and enthusiastically gravitates towards him . in the recent runs, Bart very brashly goes to Timepoint to find Max because he’s missing, even against Wally’s advice . every single time something bad has happened to Max, it has effected Bart deeply . he either goes into a frenzy trying to save him, or when there’s nothing he can do, he’s inconsolably depressed .

// but even with their extremely close familiar bond, I don’t think their relationship is necessarily parental (or at least not exclusively parental). it’s honestly rly complicated to me writing Bart and I think the characters themselves as well . multiple characters have told Max that Bart is “like his son” and Max is “like his father”, but even then neither of these characters seem to refer to each other as such . it might just be because of the age difference and deecee thinks it would be weird for Bart to basically have an elderly adoptive father ?? but calling Max Bart’s “grandfather” or “uncle” don’t exactly feel right either . (the former being kind of loaded, and the latter the term they use for their civilian cover. in their civilian personas, Max is Bart’s biological uncle which is not true obviously)

// while I don’t think Bart (at least in my interpretation) really has a close attachment to the idea of ‘mother’ and ‘father’, or even Meloni / Don in general (just because he’s barely known anything about them and never really interacted with them at all) I think Max is definitely the person he’d consider closest to a parent, even if I don’t think their bond is just that of a parent and child . I don’t think he’s against coming to see someone as his parent, but for Max, it just isn’t as simple as “he’s my father” . Max has always just been ‘Max’ to Bart, and the only consistent term of endearment we really see Max call Bart is ‘my boy’ which definitely seems pretty parental but at the same time he also doesn’t say anything like ‘son’ . Max does have a canon biological daughter - (which was a whole thing in the impulse comics that I don’t wanna get into here this post is long enough lol) and he uses language with her that’s way more straight up parental, so … yeah, Max and Bart’s bond is hard to pinpoint if you ask me and honestly that lines up with these characters lol .

// all this to say while I think Max & Bart do somewhat consider themselves to have a parent & child bond I definitely don’t think that’s exclusively what their relationship is like . if I had to try and describe it I’d say it’s a mix between Parent & Child, Grandfather & Grandchild, and Mentor & Mentee . Bart in the 31st century doesn’t really consider anybody his parent, and honestly isn’t too bothered by that fact most of the time . he’s happy with what he’s got, but sometimes he does feel a sense of longing for a ‘real’ parental relationship .

// tldr neither me nor these two characters fully know or understand what Max & Bart’s relationship is supposed to be but they don’t really care because they love each other like family and would die for each other . I think just saying “yeah Max is his father” would kinda diminish how these two are so different from everyone else around them and just how complicated the two are and their history with each other is . so it will stay somewhat undefined for me & them .

[darkx-the-dragon-kn1ght]

Pokémon Reborn Screenshot Let's Play: Chapter 13

Hello again, readers! It is currently Spring Break for me, and though it’s not much of a break since I have a lot of schoolwork to take care of, it’s still enough for me to get progress done on this newest chapter a bit faster than I would have otherwise. It definitely helps when my health isn’t taking a strange, sudden downturn for seemingly no reason. Hopefully, my ability to make progress on these chapters will be even further improved in the future. Why is that? 

Well- recently, I figured out a better way to take these screenshots, one that…seems very common knowledge, and thus I am a fool for not knowing about it sooner, but we can’t go back in time to change anything, all I can do is tend to the future. Granted, I haven’t done this method yet, I don’t even know if it’ll work with Reborn or with my laptop- I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but with some of the bugs that have happened so far, who knows at this point. I’ll be testing it for my play session for Chapter 14 after this chapter is completed and posted, and if all goes well, that means progress should be much easier and faster from here on.

Until then, we still have this sequence to go through, and there’s still a Gym to challenge. But before we get into that, let’s go over what happened in the last chapter…though, admittedly, there really wasn’t a ton in terms of actual story stuff.

Xera visits the Onyx Arcade, finding many of the games are offline due to a mysterious system virus. She is also unable to play the other games because she lacks a Coin Case.

Xera’s Noibat is named Decibel and has always been named Decibel, most certainly.

Xera enters the Onyx Trainers’ School with the intention to challenge Florinia, but is stopped by Fern. Fern is insulted that Xera was chosen to help at Obsidia Park over him, believing her to be unworthy of the recognition she’s gotten or of challenging the Gym. 

Fern orders his underlings in the student body to not only activate several gates blocking Xera’s access to the Gym, but to just generally impede her progress by any means necessary by battling her.

Forced to take the long way around, Xera makes her way through the main body of the OTS. All the while, nearly half the students have been riled up by Fern, and Xera is forced to battle her way through them.

Xera encounters a young man in his dorm who is outraged after losing everything to the arcade system virus. In his frustration, he gives away his own Coin Case to Xera, which allows her to do some gambling at the Onyx Arcade.

With the coins she earned at the Arcade, Xera is able to get two Pokémon: Blizzard the Snover and Caldera the Slugma.

Using Caldera’s heat, Xera is able to hatch the Egg she received from the concerned Onyx Ward woman: a Remoraid that she names Bullet.

Eventually, Xera finds herself in front of a gate that won’t open, even when she interacts with the switch. Then, someone new arrives- his name is Hardy, and he’s not only a Gym Leader as well as a technical OTS student, but he also has disdain towards Fern, and thus is more than willing to help Xera get past the gate. 

So anyways, that’s where we’re at. With this, we should be done with this whole second Gym arc, capped off with a climactic battle against Florinia, which I am only a little concerned about! After all, I was able to beat Julia on my first try, I’d like to at least try to maintain that with Florinia. How well will this go? We’ll just have to see!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

[backjustforberena]

I do struggle a little when I see people claim that Rhaenys is a hypocrite for her speech to Alicent. Although they are both women and both are under a patriarchal society their experiences are vastly different which gives an opening for Rhaenys to say what she does.

First of all, Rhaenys got to choose her spouse which was something Alicent wasn’t afforded. Alicent has been pretty much treated like a pawn by every man in her life, who always make decisions behind her back. That isn’t the case with Rhaenys and even decisions that are made that she doesn’t agree with it’s never behind her back?

I don’t see their trajectories to be similar at all for there to be claims of hypocrisy.

It’s definitely something that I struggle with, and, you know, I’m very open and if someone does see that quote as being hypocritical from Rhaenys then I’d love for them to explain that to me so I can try and see it from that perspective. I don’t think it would ever change my mind with my gut feeling of: it’s absolutely not, but I’m sort of endlessly fascinated by other viewpoints and how that conclusion has been come to by them... if that makes sense? 

Criticisms that I’ve seen of Rhaenys, specifically, such as people believing Rhaenys was trying to take Rhaenyra down during that conversation in Episode 02, or people believing she doesn’t love all her grandkids, and the whole debate over Rhaenys not necessarily unequivocally giving her full support to Rhaenyra before Episode 10 and not kneeling at the coronation and all of that - all of those criticisms, I feel don’t hold up. And actually do the character a disservice in terms of complexity because it just distils everything down into being for or against Rhaenyra. 

The emotions that come with Rhaenyra being heir and the events and emotions that Rhaenys goes through during the course of the series, then having to choose sides are sort of disregarded in that pursuit of blind loyalty? That’s how I feel seeing a lot of the things said.

But back to the quote. It did honestly surprise me to see opinions calling Rhaenys a hypocrite. I suppose I was shocked because I didn’t see it as Rhaenys trying to measure Alicent against herself as any sort of example of feminist agency. I don’t believe that Rhaenys was sort of... encapsulating the entirety of Alicent’s life, with that, and that she’s willingly inviting that contrast of: look at you, but look at me. As you say, there are many differences between the pair of them: Alicent didn’t choose her spouse, Alicent still has that paternal influence being exerted by Otto, she’s been kept out of certain choices and decisions. Even in terms of age, experiences, and their standing in the nobility and the trajectory of their class and standing in court... it’s all so different so that to invite comparison soley on the qualities of them living in the same time/place and both being women... I can’t do it. Not broadly, at least.

Just a quick thing, one point that comes out of calling Rhaenys a hypocrite is saying that she toils in service to Corlys and did as he said, in the previous episode, despite not agreeing, over the succession of Driftmark - that’s absolutely misses the point of Rhaenys in that moment. Totally and absolutely, for me. And I won’t go into that (but I would if you asked). 

Overall, for me, the hook in that line is what proceeds it, what invites it, perhaps even more so than the line itself. That’s the context. And that is Alicent saying: “A true Queen counts the cost to her people.” That’s what makes Rhaenys almost scoff and say that line. That’s why we can do the contrast because we can contrast them both within the role of Queen. Queen Consort & the Queen That Never Was, and how they relate to the notion of a true Queen. True power. And made all the more important by this idea of the succession hanging between them.

Rhaenys, during the course of the scene, is trying to see what Alicent is made of, trying figure her out and then, ultimately, trying to unbalance her. It’s a comparison of power, yes. It’s a comparison of position, yes. And a comparison of ambition - Rhaenys once imagined herself on the Iron Throne. Alicent never has because she doesn’t see it as possible for herself. But Rhaenys has spent so much time never really paying attention to Alicent, and this is the scene where Rhaenys sees Alicent as a player, as someone who understands the order of things (albeit not to subvert them, but that’s by-the-by) as someone who sees what Rhaenys’s true wishes would be in order to make that offer. She sees Alicent is wise. Now she needed to figure out what Alicent is going to do with that awareness.

Alicent does toil. I think that that should be something basic we can agree on. Rhaenys, however much her circumstances have been shaped by men or however many opportunities have been denied her by men... I really, honestly, don’t think you could ever say she toiled in service. At any point.

Anyway, I’m going to stop there otherwise I’ll write a whole essay! Thank you for the ask!

[dna4evr]

I’ve never had a size kink (at least not so explicitly) until I started talking to my little girl, but it’s cause she’s a whole foot shorter than me and it makes it extra cute babying her/picking her up/etc. It kind of rewired my brain and I have a very hard time even imagining being with someone much taller than her now. Naturally, it also makes me extremely protective of her cause she’s so small but it’s really adorable and hot knowing she knows Daddy could overpower her whenever He wants and that He just chooses not to most of the time. In the future though I will remind her more of this in person, just to watch her squirm a bit, especially when she acts up; she’s such a nervous little baby and her eyes are so telling… I can look at her and see everything she’s thinking. It’s cute how squirrelly she still gets around me, anxious she’ll upset me or accidentally be a bad girl in some way or another, but these are things a proper good girl worries about so it makes me proud. Bad girls upset their owners and don’t think or worry about it.

When we get in arguments (which of course will eventually not be a thing, but like I’ve said before, she’s still in training) she can be very loud and explicit, but her voice, like her, is tiny, and these conversations always end in her realizing what I have always known: she’s just a scared little girl who needs Dad, so I discipline and comfort her and she feels better. Even though I disapprove of her outbursts it is still always really cute seeing her in real time come to terms with the fact she just needs me to take care of her and that she has to let me do it because I know what’s best for her. I’m unsure why she fights it sometimes, I know social media doesn’t help, which has been a point of contention and something that will be getting addressed later in training, but she should know better still. I also think she wants to be big and strong like Daddy sometimes and so she pushes back against the dynamic but I remind her her biggest strength will always come from accepting she’s my little one, and that she needs to let Daddy lead her. I’m her Owner for a reason and she knows that deep down, but she is still learning to have complete pride in being Daddy’s property. I know I have a lot of work to do with her but I still believe she wants to be the best daughter for me so I am excited to see how training continues; she understands everything I say when I go over it with her but she’s a confused puppy trying her best to learn and retain everything while juggling life so I extend some grace. Will continue to update.

Ps: I’m not oblivious to the idea she may act out sometimes just for my reaction— I know she likes when Daddy is super possessive and she likes feeling small and cared for and wants all my attention, even if she feels like she can only get it to the degree she wants by acting out— but like I said in a previous post, she really isn’t too bratty (as in, goes out of her way to rile me up) so even though I do think subconsciously she may be influenced to act out because of the stimuli she gets from my responses, I don’t think it’s conscious in most contexts, or the main driver. She really doesn’t like upsetting me for good reason and she probably wouldn’t risk it in most instances.

[thigiocamap]

finished watching chobits last night. the ladies at clamp have done it again. i enjoyed it

my partner told me that the manga ending is kind of different though and elaborated on why. i think i do prefer what i know about the manga ending because the anime ending kind of does contradict the actual messages and themes of the story. it’s a shame because i otherwise like what was going on overall

i liked how tightly-knit the cast was. there wasn’t really anyone who just existed for what felt like no reason; even if they did initially, later it came back around and you realized they’re more relevant than they first seemed or there ended up otherwise being a place for them in the web of relationships being explored. it felt satisfying in that way

there was talks on twitter at some point a few months ago about people misinterpreting chobits as a whole in the worst faith possible and missing the point of the entire story and it annoyed me a lot. chobits isn’t a generic harem show with a pervy protag that disrespects women. in fact i would argue that it’s a deconstruction of common seinen tropes like that. it initially appears like it’s going to fall into those tropes, but then you realize the story is about a genuinely good (albeit awkward virgin with no experience with girls) guy learning about the girls around him and caring for them because they are real people and not just unfeeling broads crafted for his own satisfaction. you start the show and roll your eyes because it’s another series that’s gonna be about an annoying guy ogling at boobs and creeping on girls, but even from the very start he tries to be respectful of every girl’s autonomy. he’s just extremely virgin about it

im not saying chobits is groundbreaking for not being as perverted as it could be, but im just saying it’s annoying when people think it IS something like that — especially when it goes against the entire point of the show: you need to love someone for who they are and not what they can provide for you.

anyways, this was my second clamp series after cardcaptor sakura. i still think ccs speaks to me more in terms of everything about it, but it’s kind of like comparing apples to oranges in a way considering the two stories are pretty different in terms of tone, genre, and target demographic — so it’s not the best comparison to make. it’s kind of hard to usurp ccs as one of my favorite anime of all time, too. i liked it, though; i definitely feel like it was a bit more cohesive of a plot than some parts of ccs. both shows are watched for different reasons though (ccs being more feelgood slice of life in most cases and chobits being more plot-oriented), so again, it’s a weird thing to compare. im just comparing it because ccs is my only other point of reference for clamp

im looking forward to watching/reading more clamp stuff. i think my next one may be either magic knight rayearth, xxxholic, or kobato. depends on where my mood takes me…

[asachuu]

(2/10)

Part 1: is there a “perfect” ship?

[List of all parts]

To truly get to the bottom of everything in a sufficient manner, I have to start from the absolute beginning, a bit further from highly specific pairings for the time being.

This is a question you might ask yourself upon simply thinking about this topic and subsequently the BSD fandom as a whole, though it is not limited to any particular piece of media at all. I will give you a short answer: no. In fact, most of the time, you could find criticisms in any ship if you tried, and many of those could be completely reasonable.

Now then, if that’s the case, why have I chosen to point Rimlaine out as a topic of discussion? The answer will be much, much longer than a single word, and you might be surprised to find out that my personal interests in the subject aren’t the only reason, although it goes without saying I certainly know a bit more in this area than other parts of BSD-related content.

For me, the distinction between something I would overlook and something I would rather speak out against is entirely dependent on two factors— the actions of any characters involved in a ship, both when they’re together and standalone, and their canonical interactions. There will almost never be a pairing free of anything we would deem at least slightly unhealthy or simply a bad sign, action or behavior if applied to the real world, especially in media such as Bungou Stray Dogs, the main focus of which is most certainly not on depicting a tale of some pure, untainted romance. However, even so, a vast majority of ships will not be directly labeled as “unhealthy”, no matter who you ask. Whilst I do not speak for everyone here, if someone were to have me explain my own reasoning behind it, it would be the aforementioned— the way the characters spend time with each other throughout the story and the actions they carry out. There is a vast difference between two or more people talking to each other in front of the reader’s eyes, knowing from their words and behaviors they do not mean genuine harm to the other(s) nor is some greater issue at play, and in Rimlaine’s particular case, two people who could only possibly reconcile on shaky terms after one of them had died. Even here, I should be using the word “reconcile” in heavy quotation marks, but I will elaborate on all this later on.

I will provide an example, which, albeit heavily outdated at the time of posting this, will still help me envision this better in one way or another. I’m sure anyone who has joined the BSD fandom has heard of Soukoku— a pairing between Dazai and Chuuya. I would say it’s the most popular ship of the fandom, hence why I’m choosing it in case less involved readers may be here, but I have seen it receive some criticisms over time too. Now, let’s take a look at those for a little while, shall we?

(Important note for the next part: I personally don’t ship SKK and am not trying to “defend” it because of my own personal enjoyment, nor do I believe it’s anyhow healthy myself. Due to this, the following section is NOT going to be taking anything beyond manga chapter 65 into consideration, as the claims originated many years before it, and I would have to make a separate essay if I were to truly shine the spotlight on today’s SKK from my point of view. The main reason I have chosen this very shaky example is listed above— its popularity making it easy to see even without much involvement, and there was a point in time during which it would have made for the best choice to mention, that to which I’m returning for a handful of paragraphs.)

One specific claim I have seen go around a long time ago, far before Stormbringer had even been announced, was that this particular ship isn’t healthy due to Dazai leaving/abandoning the Port Mafia, which could have potentially worsened Chuuya’s mental state after everything that has happened to him in the events of Fifteen (and subsequently the following novel as well, yet that one didn’t exist here), and additionally their current situation being nothing but constant “rudeness” to each other. If you’re someone who has heard me talk about the entire topic of fictional ships before, you may think this is pretty much the reason I claim Rimlaine to be unhealthy. To an extent, it is somewhat true, but once again— there is a vast difference, one that does not require me to go into details about both ships’ situations. Dazai and Chuuya, even back then, were seen to interact in canonical events again, long since that has happened. While I do have a lot of reservations towards them today, especially in light of more recent manga chapters/story developments, I’ve always had at least some of those, but they still had one thing Rimlaine did not— the actual ability to speak to each other in the story again. Seeing as this was circulating around far over three years ago, it was also at a time this was all we had, but back then, we saw that the pair was able to work with one another from the time they spent together without any heavy, deeper issues, and this canonical time between them showed us more than any speculation actually did.

Now, a sliver of my personal opinion is that I see nothing healthy between two characters who constantly go on about how much they hate each other regardless of how genuine it is and how many times they are shown to supposedly “care”, with the majority of their onscreen appearances together being argument after argument, no matter how humorous it may appear to a certain audience— however, I am only mentioning this on a side note as it’s not something that seems almost hidden in the public eye, it’s practically the very core of the SKK dynamic, and due to how extremely obvious it is, there would be no merit in me attempting to highlight those actions themselves. Even so, this brings me to another point, which I believe explains why I’m using a ship with interactions like that as an example of something that differs from Rimlaine, and why I cannot take as much issue with it despite my own thoughts on it.

This is an aspect related to not only these two ships, but also any other works of fiction, which I do feel is a little bit harder to explain in words and could cause quite a lot of disagreement as is, however it is something which goes without saying for the vast majority of people who engage in such content at the same time. This being what we view as “wrong”, and from that point, what I meant by “deeper issues” above.

For many people, perhaps even yourself, it’s not a dealbreaker to see violence in fiction, whether that be movies, books, shows, etc. Now, I am not qualified to claim this as anything beyond personal speculation, given I am in no way a psychology major or anything of the sort, but I do believe it’s because we already know it’s absolutely wrong from our entire lives, which is a lot more emphasized upon. None of us would ever condone the actions of these characters, but seeing as they’re not real and their worlds or lives usually operate under much different, often highly unrealistic circumstances, that fact simply goes without saying and we are still able to appreciate their individual selves— additionally, we will not be the ones to go and carry out the same things as them for a multitude of reasons, be it basic morality, lack of any realistic circumstance in which it would ever be justified or expected, and so on. If that sounds rather strange to you when I put it in such a way, ask yourself this: how many people have you seen enjoy a character such as Dazai or Chuuya, respectively? Now, with that amount in mind, how many of those people explicitly talk about not supporting their actions whatsoever each time they make a post about them? The amount is significantly smaller, right? It’s not because they don’t think those actions would be wrong in our world or they’re outright excusing them, it’s because it’s already established from the place of common sense, and due to the characters’ fictional nature, there are many other interesting things to focus on rather than their crimes and transgressions, which are also often a part, if not the full narrative of the given story, being fully guaranteed to be a feature of their lives from the start. This, however, gets far more complicated in other issues, which will be relevant down the line.

Just as with everything in the world, there are some instances which are deemed more “controversial”. As many will have vastly different opinions on where to draw the line, myself included, with this point being an extremely nuanced one that is simply impossible to properly condense, the following is my shortened perspective only.

Nevertheless, the term I used can apply to far more subtle things which many may not even notice the first time, but they mainly come in the form of content which perpetuates already prevalent harmful thoughts or behavior that is not deemed “straightforward” or “significant enough” by quite a large number of people. I’m positive many folks have seen such things centered around social issues online, for example, and I’m sure almost everyone has encountered it in some way, shape or form, be they aware of it or not. Even if my next words will sound quite far-fetched on paper, I assure you, it’s not something uncommon amongst fandoms of any kind— I assume you’ll certainly be more inclined to like a fictional character who has committed a lot of violence and criminal activity over a character who, let’s say, would be actively bigoted and/or predatory, with those just being two selected examples. I see this in many fandoms which feature both character types at once, and one always has a significantly larger fanbase than the other. Why is it so? Because, while the former lies within all the reasons stated above, the latter is something which, to many of us, seems entirely wrong for obvious reasons too, yet many people engage in and firmly believe they’re correct and in the right, even receiving support and zero consequences or proper attention far more often than the former— not to mention the large groups of victims with personal experience revolving around such behavior, of which many are taken far less seriously than ones of the former kind. If a perpetrator, or anyone else who might happen to be completely uninformed about whatever type of content is being showcased, is exposed to such things which aren’t painted in any explicitly negative light in the media itself, it may create or reinforce particular views in them, depending on what it is, and on the other side, if it’s the victims themselves or any other person who happens to understand the harm of such issues, many will most likely either not wish to be reminded of their experiences or simply like a character who is in any way linked to them, especially if there is no repercussion for them.

This point, however, doesn’t only revolve around issues of in/direct harm caused to people or various types of prejudice, as one may think. It also encompasses and shapes what others view as “normal” and “acceptable”, which extends to personal dynamics and relationships between people, too. This may look like a very obvious concept already, but for the sake of this essay, I will use another example to fully get this thought across. Let’s say you grew up surrounded by media concerning relationships in which one partner is constantly belittling the other. In every such instance, it is depicted as entirely normal and “the way things are”, not even people around you have much to say about it. You’ll very likely get used to it, begin thinking that’s the way it is for everybody, and if you do wish to pursue a relationship in the future, you might end up in a similar situation. Due to the influence all that media had on you with nobody to truly deny it or go against it, there is quite a high chance you’ll simply believe this is what everyone goes through and the way it’ll always be. You might not even begin to think that something may be wrong with it, even if it potentially makes you feel unhappy, unsafe and whatnot— after all, this is what has been presented to you so many times. If you do realize it, however, there is also a chance you’ll be an outlier amongst many people who will not treat your concerns with any amount of seriousness, having also been exposed to the same things and arriving at a much different conclusion, no matter if they’re personally satisfied with it or not. To some, this concept of influence seems apparent from the start, yet we cannot deny that there are many who would disagree entirely, precisely due to things like this.

On a side note, I must add that this does not mean one cannot create explicit content about unhealthy, violent or otherwise harmful, triggering and provocative matters, and if we are to look at another side of it, a lot of it can even bring awareness to these issues instead of promoting them or normalizing them. Most of it comes down to how it’s portrayed, if anything is said about it by the creators themselves and how they view their creations, but also the thoughts and takeaways of the viewers themselves— those will naturally never be a single monolith, yet if only a small minority come out of your work thinking the content was about anything I listed above, not acceptable, everyday things that one can easily overlook, perhaps this work should be assessed once more.

Anyhow, this brings me back to the “deeper issues” phrase I have used before. In the case of Soukoku, not only are they not meant to be portrayed as any kind of romantic relationship in canonical events at the time of me writing this, but their arguments and violence are both heavily out in the open for anyone to see and understand that this is not supposed to be a depiction of a healthy friendship/partnership at all, yet simultaneously leaning more into the fictional, chaotic and dramatized aspect of things that leads many to believe this is simply not how it should look in real life— but this is not real life, it’s fiction, and additionally, neither of the two characters seem affected by it on a level that would start raising many questions about whether it is acceptable to show support for, or what such a thing implies.

As for Rimlaine, however…that’s a much different story, one which requires its own set of details.

[Part 2]

[goodreadsviadiya]

From The Ashes Part 2: Resistance and Reclamation

Hey everyone! I’m back with part 2 of my mini series about “From the Ashes” by Jesse Thistle! If you haven’t already, I highly recommend going and reading it! It covers a short synopsis, and my thoughts and feelings from the book! If you’re interested just click here!

Resilience

After reading “From the Ashes”, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book more about resilience than this. Jesse has been through so much in life, more in his first 20 than most people will get in a whole lifetime, and he has lived a life full of struggle after struggle. I feel that Jesse’s story is so compelling because, unlike many others where the characters stay strong in the face of any and all adversity, Jesse fails. It is so utterly human, to not be able to resist against the world beating you down over, and over again.  No, it isn’t that Jesse stayed strong, throughout his journey, but that he had the courage to try after hitting the lowest point in his life. 

From being homeless for well over a decade, suffering with his severe addiction on the streets, to nearly losing his leg and having to relearn how to walk Jesse has persevered through much more than the majority of people could even imagine. It was at the worst time in his life, that he decided he wanted to make a change–that he wanted to live. “If I can just make it to the next minute, I thought, then I might have a chance to live; I might have a chance to be something more than just a struggling crackhead. [pg. 313]” Jesse chose to live and to better himself, despite how painful it may have been at the time. Pushing through months of intense withdrawal and rehab and therapy, Jesse got his GED, and after 2 long years Jesse graduated AA.

Jesse on his struggles with homelessness and addiction.

Jesse is able to reconcile with his Grandfather, the two of them growing close right before his passing. Jesse had come to terms with his childhood, and the harsh way his grandfather has raised him. After rehab, Jesse starts working, he maintains his job and is eventually able to pay off his $3000 worth of debts, given a clean slate. This feels like a turning point in particular, Jesse is able to turn over a new leaf and make peace with his past. After all that, Jesse is admitted to York university and in 2015, at the age of 39 Jesse obtains his Bachelor’s of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, and his Masters of History the next year from the University of Waterloo.

“Whatever the reason, I came to the realization that I’d earned my way here and that I had the right to chase my dreams. That even I deserved a second chance. 

 I thought, I belong in university, just like everyone else. [pg. 324]”

It is after all Jesse’s hardships and struggles, that he is able to love himself, and understand his worth as a person, that his life and experiences are important to share with the world. It is in persisting through all his hardships that Jesse is able to forgive himself, and move forward with his life. 

Reclamation

Watching Jesse grow as a person, and reclaiming his Métis identity is incredibly inspiring. He goes from someone who was shamed, and was ashamed of his identity to proudly and openly declaring it, advocating for his rights and the rights of all Indigenous people. It is beautiful to see Jesse come to understand and appreciate his Métis heritage after coming to terms with who he is and how his identity has shaped his life, and him as a person.

Jesse grew up in a predominantly white area, and was thus subject to constant belittling and racist remarks because of his ‘other’ appearance. For his brown skin and dark hair. “Then he said, ‘Figures,’ coughing and holding his ribs. ‘You’re just a dirty Indian, like the rest of them.’ ” “ ‘You’ll probably die drinking like they all do.’ The crowd shifted from my side to his, and I saw my street friends laughing and pointing at me. They believed it too, They all believed it. [pg. 86-87]” This is one of the many examples of people looking down on Jesse in life, trying to reinforce negative stereotypes, and making it seem like there’s no other way for him to live. 

Jesse starts to feel shameful about the heritage he once wore so proudly on his sleeve, it becomes a point of embarrassment for him, something that he tries so desperately to not let define him. Jesse starts to distance himself from his Métis identity, it was no longer a part of himself he loved, something that reminded him of his mother and his family he held dear. “‘No,’ I blurted out. ‘We’re Italian.’ The lie came from nowhere, but I thought it might keep me safe or included somehow. ‘We have some Indian way back,’ I went on. ‘But my skin is dark because we have Italian in us—see. [pg. 78]” 

In trying to separate himself from his identity, Jesse had become incredibly self loathing, with internalized racism towards himself, and those who showed pride in their heritage. “For as long as I could remember, too, he’d been proud of being what he called ‘Native’ and found creative ways to express it. I made fun of him and his friends, [pg. 128]” He holds a certain level of disdain for his brother, for being so comfortable in his own skin, but it all stems from his underlying desire to be like them. Jesse lashes out in jealousy, not understanding how other people can love something about themselves that Jesse only views as a source of embarrassment. “I was jealous of Josh when we were little, and I was jealous of Jerry now. [pg. 129]” 

It is only after all his hardships and joining university that Jesse gets the opportunity to explore his heritage. He started taking Indigenous history classes to learn about his people, who they were, who they are and who that makes him. He gets to return homelands in Saskatchewan, and reconnect with his mother's family. “‘I’ve been waiting a very long time for you to get interested in who you are,’ she said. ‘A lifetime actually.’”  Jesse is finally able to overcome his internal biases against himself, and is able to love and accept every aspect of himself. He now speaks out publicly about issues affecting the First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities in Canada, and is an assistant professor at the University of York, in Ontario. 

To hear Jesse, check out him talking about intergenerational trauma and how he works to ensure that it never effects his children.

[nightwingshero]

4, 7, 13, 17, 24 + Wren x Leon?

Thank you, love!!!

4) Sensitive or insensitive

I would say sensitive. Wren especially. Touch is her love language and she thrives on it when she allows people to get close enough to do so. And as for Leon, I feel like even if he wasn’t sensitive, Wren would work hard to get him to the point that he was. She can be such a devious little thing.

7) Foreplay? A lot or a little?

I think this really depends on how much time they have, because if they’re aiming to squeeze something in with a quickie, there really isn’t time for a whole lot. But when they can take their time, they definitely like to build up to the moment for as long as their self control will let them. Leon especially.

13) Location turn ons (public, outside, bed only, etc)

I think that Wren would probably be more eager and willing with the idea of public sex than Leon would be, but of course that’s not saying it never happens. When it does, it is typically outside or the very rare public bathroom. Depends on the situation. I will say that Wren absolutely loves the idea of being bent over Leon’s bike and they have definitely witnessed just how roomy the backseat of Wren’s Jeep can be with the right position. When they’re inside Wren’s apartment or Leon’s hotel room, the bed isn’t used nearly as much as one would think. Leon likes to lift Wren up on other surfaces or against the wall, and Wren does enjoy being on top while Leon is on the couch.

17) Dom/Sub dynamics? Who’s dom, who’s sub?

They definitely switch it up, but I will say that as the years go on, the scales do tip a bit in favor of one over the other. So, the first night they sleep together, the night after surviving Raccoon City, Wren is definitely more in charge in that situation. She kind of leads. But over the years, it actually changes a bit and it’s Leon that takes charge and dominates most of the time. It goes back and forth during (assuming it’s not a quickie getting squeezed in, because then it’s just Leon taking charge), so that Wren does have her time to shine, but it a lot of times it will end with Leon dominating.

24) What happens after? Cuddling? Make space? Does someone tend to leave right after?

Wren tends to have trust issues and has this thing where she is always afraid that she’s not enough. I don’t want to say she has an abandonment issue, it’s more that she just believes everyone will leave her because she can’t trust them to stay or she’s not enough for them to stay. So there’s also a bit of fear of commitment as well. This has nothing to do with anything Leon has done, it’s honestly childhood and previous relationship trauma at it’s finest. So leaving right after is a big no no for Wren. Staying is part of the aftercare but it’s also so important in terms of supporting her as a partner. And Leon doesn’t leave immediately after when they hook up for the first time, but he does leave and they don’t see each other for about 4-6 years later, so that doesn’t necessarily help, though she doesn’t blame him for that, it’s not his fault. Wren does have some underlying fears that pop up from time to time because things are kind of hard when they have their own things going on. Sometimes it’s harder to meet frequently depending on what they’re working on. But they both make sure they have the proper time to spend together after sleeping together or seeing each other because it’s more than just sex for the sake of sex, they love and care about each other and staying is one of those precious things they have where it feels that the world they live in doesn’t exist in the bubble they create. Hitting it and then leaving would be hard for Wren and honestly, they both try to get as much time together as they can get. So lots of cuddling and pillow talk to catch up and feel like a normal couple.

[villanize]

a repost / rehash of an old ramble-y info dump i did for misha on his old blog. it's something i reaaallly love since it has a lot of in-depth talks of his character so i wanted to save it here and expand more on it.

details about:

sixth generation heir to the roche family; a well known family of mages that specialize in electricity magic. youngest sibling out of 6 total. 

born & raised with the intent of being the heir. forced to train as a mage since youth but eventually became obsessed with the desire of obtaining this power. more or less, he’s finally accepted this as what he wants to himself rather than what’s expected.

hated the idea of living by his family ideals over his own but he quietly sucked it up and kept quiet about this until after the moment he became the heir.

studied hard, trained hard and as a result was very spoiled which influenced a lot of how he is now.

lives by a very ‘for myself’ kind of mentality, trust in people is very low, even his family.

and onto the ramble-y portions:

misha is someone who sets these impressively large goals for himself. he’s always seeking to expand his horizon and push his limits because he strongly feels he is capable of doing it but when it comes to the time let’s say he finally does this.

he would celebrate it for a whole two minutes before going “well now that i did it, i need something new”

to him it’s all about the journey and that’s where he has the most fun with his duties but when he finally reaches that point of achieving something he panics. he wants these things with his whole being but when it happens it’s like hah?

i think it’s a lot of how he was raised too. a very ruthless environment. he has a really rough family in that he can’t view any of them as such. i’ve always imagined they were all raised to go against each other.

at some point they stopped being his siblings and more someone who might get in the way of him obtaining what he wants the most. and this isn’t just one-sided on his part, i feel to some extent they also are the same.

a younger misha finally gets a hold of producing electricity, ecstatic and he goes to share but all he gets is ‘okay, you’ve done it so what? is that all you got?’ sort of vibe i feel like.

and this mentality is what clung as he’s grown. perhaps it’s kinda gotten worse to where he’s always forcing himself to do new things so he has a vast majority of skills and abilites under his belt. but the moment he hits a wall, there’s no denying he’s gonna fall into this despair because he sees it like… if i can’t continue to advance i really have no use.

which is even funnier because misha is someone who absolutely loathes self doubt because he’s very confident in himself. so its like how can i actually be this weak?????? then stfu i'm not weak at all i can do great things back to but i need to do even more greater…..

i'm not sure how he’ll develop out of this thinking but it’s such a large staple to his character.

he always wants more. he is never happy long term with anything. he does have some people in his life who i feel is able to influence him into like feeling good about what he does but also that’s just the part of him that’s weak for compliments and hearing the verbal of confirmation of yeah ur amazing

it amplifies his ego and makes want to go even further to hear those same words again!!

[girl4music]

The problem with “preferences” though is that it implies that it’s a choice how someone identifies.

And it isn’t…

When you “prefer” something, you’re saying that you have options. That you have the ability to choose.

Transgender people do not “choose” their gender.

They can choose their pronouns. But good luck getting a cisgender to understand the difference between “woman/man/nonbinary” and “she/he/they”.

The amount of times I’ve had to explain the difference between identification and expression/presentation to other cisgender people is honestly really ridiculous.

Going back to the topic. Yes, I wish transgender people were not treated like “the 3rd gender” option. You see this show up on documentation forms all the fucking time: “male/female/transgender/other”.

It should be cisgender/transgender/other if it has to be that simplified. Implying that there is a difference between a male/female and a transgender person is not only insulting, but it’s downright discriminating.

They ARE a man or woman! They’re just not assigned the gender they identify as at birth. So they’re referred to as “another option” on documentation forms as if gender ever is fucking optional. It’s not!

For non-binary people and genderqueer or gender noncomforming individuals - there is options…

But they’re not gender identity options.

They’re expression/presentation options.

Yes, they can absolutely choose their pronouns.

But so can EVERYONE regardless of gender identity.

I identify as cisgender female.

I still very much like to be referred to as a they/them as well as a she/her because gender neutrality still matters to me personally even if I am cisgender because it’s safer and more inclusive for people that are not. I choose my pronouns even as a cisgender person because it protects transgender people, not because I have “preferences” as to how I identify.

I do not. I am female. End of.

I really do think more cisgender people need to learn the difference between gender identity and gender expression and/or gender presentation because your pronouns are absolutely optional. Your clothing and appearance is absolutely optional. Your gender is not!

We’re still doing shit like mistaking drag/dress up play for gender identity or sexuality and it’s infuriating.

It should not be that fucking difficult to wrap our heads around it. Especially not in this day and age where it’s established that gender is not binary.

You can pick how you want to be referred by or as. You can even pick how you want to be perceived by or as.

What you can’t pick is how you fucking feel inside. That’s inherent. It’s part of your natural self core.

And so I hate when people ignore/disregard the fact that transgender people are MEN and WOMEN.

Fuck sake… I even hate the fact we have to use the term “transgender” at all to identify these people because we don’t have to do that with cisgender people. They get to be called MEN and WOMEN automatically. There’s no need to point out the fact that their gender is based on assignation at birth.

Yeah, well, this should be the case for ALL GENDER IDENTITIES regardless of how they identify or how fluid and on a spectrum their identity might be. It should be pointed out all the time for everyone.

Gender identity is based on assignation at birth.

If a person goes against that assignation at birth…

It does not suddenly make them less of a man or woman than a cisgender person who is fine with that assignation at birth because it’s how they feel inside.

For those that don’t identify as the assigned at birth gender binary altogether… that might be different. But I absolutely do not think this is acceptable for trans individuals who struggle to even be looked at as a human half the time, never mind a man or woman.

And this whole topic is something I’ve been heavily digging into ever since that mindfuck of a day when somebody told me that I can’t be bisexual if I would be attracted to and interested in dating a transgender or non-binary person. I’m pretty sure I fucking am because I would date both someone of the gender binary and someone not of the gender binary.

Hence “BI-sexual”. I have a dual attraction. I am attracted to both people that identify as what they were assigned as at birth and people that do not.

And that’s it. It’s that fucking simple. Really it is.

And just to make it clear to everyone.

My preferred pronouns are she/her.

But I am absolutely fine with they/them.

It’s gender neutral and gender neutrality should be a Universal standard concept by this point in time. There should be no difficulty in trying to understand why a person wants to be referred to as a they/them regardless of what their gender identity is or isn’t because we’ve used these pronouns far longer than we have used binary-specific pronouns. It’s prehistoric.

But let’s be more aware of and sensitive to trans individuals that don’t like the pronouns they/them and be more understanding of the reasons as to why not. These people have spent their whole lives being misgendered by inaccurate binary-specific terms only to be misgendered by non-binary-specific ones.

after having an entire hour long conversation with my coworkers about what "degendering" is, and the importance of using trans people's pronouns when you know them- rather than always defaulting to "they/them" no matter what- and still getting "they/them"ed by people I trusted not to fucking do that to me, I have decided that the name and pronouns circle of introductions for new additions to the group will now include the very clearly stated boundary that they do not use "they/them" pronouns for me.

your move, cowards!

[astrolovecosmos]

Vertex: What We Can’t Control

Vertex is a point located in the right-hand side of a chart that represents the intersection of the ecliptic and the prime vertical. In astrology, it is considered an auxiliary or extra Descendant. Some astrologers refer to the Vertex as the “third angle” of a chart.  It is associated with wish fulfillment, awakenings or realizations, the idea of destiny or fate, and some use it for moments that are life changing such as meeting your spouse, a death of a loved one, birth of a child, etc. My focus isn’t on predictive astrology and because of this I don’t use Vertex often in my own readings. Vertex can be popular in synastry but I also don’t typically incorporate it into those charts. I analyze it from the perspective of how we approach what we can’t control, realizations, and our view or approach to wishes and “fate”. 

Vertex in Aries: There is a pull or call to be a leader in some fashion. This person may also feel like they are constantly fighting against “fate” or has a focus on making their own destiny. This person can feel like they are always falling into situations where they are forced to lead, fight, or assert. Defining the self may be important to feeling fulfilled. Self-expression and honoring the importance of the individual can help them feel more stable in a chaotic world. 

Vertex in Taurus: Anyone familiar with that scene from Frozen 2 where Olaf goes “we’re calling this controlling what you can when things feel out of control”? That is the first thing I thought of for Vertex in Taurus. The fear and frustration surrounding what they cannot control can be real. In terms of fate many describe this position as being about finding inner security and being more independent. For many Taurus placements there is the reoccurring theme of learning to overcome fear of the unknown, let go of control, to find flexibility, but most importantly to cultivate inner stability. With Vertex this individual may find themselves falling down a rabbit hole of unpredictable fate, but none of that should matter as long as they understand the power they hold in their own actions and decisions. 

Vertex in Gemini: Here we see someone who tries to get a handle on the unknown or their own destiny via learning as much as they can about the world, themselves, the occult, science, etc. Communication is also important to them in easing anxieties or feeding curiosity. They love to theorize or talk hypotheticals. Here we almost see a reflection of their polar opposite Sagittarius - there is a desire to find meaning in the world. Communicating their needs, fears, and wants can be helpful with feeling fulfilled or like they are on the right path. 

Vertex in Cancer: All of the water signs have a powerful relationship with the idea of fate and Vertex. Here we see themes of strong intuition, attachment, or maybe even psychic abilities. There is a close tie to their fate, whether they are making their own destiny, getting hunches about what path to take, or have world swallowing doubt and fears. Their relationship to the unknown, the instability of life, and to ideas of destiny are deep and felt strongly. With Cancer there is a focus on protecting and nurturing the self and others. They need to be careful of focusing too much on taking care of others or taking on their feelings. Reexamining family, making a new family, or dealing with family cycles or trauma may be in the cards for them. Attending to the inner child or wounded self is important in making themselves sane in such a crazy world. 

Vertex in Leo: Individuality, creativity, self-expression, and empowerment are themes surrounding this Vertex. To become the best version of yourself could summarize this placement when talking about destiny. To adapt or cope with a world that is outside of their control they must create their own world or path. To stand out and/or lead the way is what will help them feel most fulfilled in life. Authenticity is a buzzword now-a-days but that trait or way of being is a necessity for Vertex in Leo as they plummet through the universe. Feelings of grandeur, uniqueness, power, or nobility may go through them sometimes. While they need to be careful of not letting this go to their head or tripping them up - these feelings of power are important in shaping their own future and self. 

Vertex in Virgo: Much like Taurus there is a fear of the unknown or not being in control. To find inner stability could be a struggle. The focus for Vertex in Virgo is to find a way to feel purposeful, needed, or useful. This gives them a sense of direction and stability. This Vertex prefers routine, predictability, and structure. They may be overly practical in terms of fate - believing there are no other influences that determine their life other than them. Similar to Vertex in fire they can have a “I make my own destiny” attitude. Vertex in Virgo may have a pull to work on their intuition. The Vertex sits on an axis like all other points in a chart. The opposite sign is the Anti-Vertex which some astrologers believe to be how we shape our fate or what we have to offer in relationships and life. With Virgo Vertex and Pisces as the Anti-Vertex there is an opportunity to hone their intuition. On the subject of helping others or finding meaning - it is listening to their feelings and hunches that might lead them to how they can do this. 

Vertex in Libra: Trying to see their fate in other people or believing other people are their fate is associated. Learning to create their own destiny or standing on their own or standing out can be a lesson surrounding this Vertex. Finding peace by connecting with others and feeling less alone is also associated, especially in terms of dealing with what cannot be controlled or foreseen. Cooperation and adaptability are strengths needed to feel whole. 

Vertex in Scorpio: There is a lot to be said about willpower here. This person likely is a strong believer in making their own destiny. Strong premonitions and hunches can lead them into believing in a higher power or feeling in tune with the spiritual or unknown. Scorpio is pulled to master their turbulent emotions and intensity as well as conquer and understand the mysteries inside themselves. It’s about learning self-control but also when to unleash. To transform and do all of the hard work in the background so that when life throws you curveballs you are ready. They master themselves, master their life, master the universe. 

Vertex in Sagittarius: It is through faith in themselves, the universe, or that everything will turn out okay that this person gets through the unpredictability of life. There can be a desire to find meaning, especially through spirituality, religion, or a unique philosophy. Sagittarius is a sign that chases truth and by chasing it they can make sense of the world. Being in the role of teacher and student helps them feel right in the universe. They must always be searching, learning, and exploring. 

Vertex in Capricorn: In a world they can’t control this person can face a lot of challenges. They can be tempted into acting authoritative or controlling. However respect and self-authority are important for this person to feel more stable, concrete, fulfilled. To lead others with a level-head and patience is the best route for them. Even better is to focus on their own success and lead by example. This placement is prone to a highly realistic and sometimes negative view of the world and possibly the idea of destiny. This placement can bring about big rewards and depth when they listen to their heart and to loved ones and when they focus. 

Vertex in Aquarius: Aquarius is known for not fearing the unknown and embracing the unpredictable. When Vertex is in this sign there are lessons about acceptance, tolerance, cooperation, and communication. It is the craziness of people and the harm people can do that gets them wanting to become a hermit or to leave the narrative. There can be a temptation to hide away from intimacy, passion, and attachment. The Futurama “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” meme is for them. Being boxed in by the idea of “destiny” might not appeal to them. To feel fulfilled in life is to feel connected and belonging. Embracing all different types of people and relationships can help them feel more sure of the world, of humanity. 

Vertex in Pisces: This person likely is a strong believer in fate and destiny. If you are one who believes in psychic abilities, this could be a strong indicator for some. This person should be careful of getting lost in wild dreams or a big picture that doesn’t include themselves or include others in their lives. Fate may have big plans for them but it is through their loved ones and how they can help others that they feel most fulfilled. They may feel like life is always throwing them into situations where they are forced to help or to empathize. Learning discernment and protection is important. They don’t need to help or heal everyone, in fact it is in their choice who to help that might make them feel the most sure and solid in life.