#this also to say that even if OP had meant only Japanese Chinese and Korean people

[the-microphone-explodes]

Okay cool I guess we’re just doing racism but progressive now.

Also to boil down a vast majority of people (because Asian doesn’t just mean Japan, China, and South Korea) to boba and EDM is certainly A Choice.

[slotumn]

I hate western fans who refuse to take the eastern cultural contexts of eastern media into account, and I also hate western fans who act like they know so much better about eastern cultural contexts or ~the original Japanese text and its intent~ than other western fans they disagree with, when in reality they're both about as ignorant as each other.

The latter is frankly what a lot of Rhea liker (+Edelgard disliker) contingent of the fandom, especially a lot of the people who replied to my OP, does. Yes the English translation has problems. But how the fuck are they so confidently claiming all the things you're claiming wrt the ~intent of the original text~ when they don't even speak Japanese or know kanji or are familiar with any other Asian languages from the Sinosphere (Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc). Just fucking say you don't like a character/route/writing and translation direction and leave it at that, stop leaping to make statements about the ~real intent~ of the ~original text~ when none of you can even read the original text or even have much interaction with the eastern fandom and their takes on the text

As for the actual original post here, "erm actually divine right of kings and mandate of heaven is different--" I'm not fucking saying they're the exact same things, however if you really wanna get into it you better also tackle how Divine Right also had academics who claimed that a tyrant was not a rightful king and could be removed, or that Mandate of Heaven could and was often used for "might makes right" or post hoc justifications.

My point is that at any rate, both philosophies rely on the existence of a transcendent divine force to explain why a ruler gets to rule (regardless of if it's expressed through "the people" or if a ruler is said to be chosen because they're chosen), which I personally, in real life, consider to be wrong and bullshit explanations because I am atheist and materialist. I also think both were often used more to justify political actions rather than guide them— there's a saying in Korean, "it's an earring on an ear and a nose ring on a nose."

However in the context of a fictional universe where this divine force actually literally exists, then this so-called divine right and mandate of heaven, with their reliance on the existence of said divine force, are (both) valid and objective correct framework(s) for that world's politics. But only for one(1) character who is in fact divine/chosen/etc as I've specified.

Anyway I would like the "this is what the ~original text~ REALLY meant" westoids in the reblogs/replies to shut the fuck up and stop attaching themselves to my posts just because I have some unorthodox takes and interpretations or whatever. Like I didn't outright block those guys bc occasionally they bring up some interesting points but damn I literally said I don't give a fuck about those kinds of reaching ass interpretations and "erm ackchually" shit and these westoids still don't fucking get it

Okay fine another hot 3H take

Divine right of kings and Mandate of Heaven is correct in-universe but only if the king actually has literal divine powers, aka Byleth.

Not Dimitri and AM even if he has archbishop!Byleth's blessing, he's still not the one with actual powers of Sothis. Not Edelgard, who doesn't want it anyway. Not Claude, who doesn't want it nor rules over Fódlan on that basis anyway. And probably not any potential successors Byleth would have either.

In the 3H world the divine right of kings is for one person and one person only, and that's Byleth whose claim to being chosen by divinity/actually being divine is literally correct. But it's factually and morally wrong if anybody else claims it. This is my unironic take as a toxic Byleth stan.

[wumingfoundation]

On #QAnon: The full text of our Buzzfeed Interview

Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed just published an article on this #QAnon conspiracy bullshit titled It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters. The piece features quotes from an interview we gave via email. Here’s the full email exchange.

--

Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?

We started writing Q  in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of  activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows.

Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective "bandit", like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home.

The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis' book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web.

This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.

I've been reading up about it, and it's largely believed that it's underneath the book's narrative it works as handbook for European leftists? Is that a fair assessment? I've read that many believe the book's plot is an allegory for 70s and 80s European activists?

Although it keeps triggering many possible allegorical interpretations, we meant it as a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. We often described it as Blissett's «playbook», an «operations manual» for cultural disruption.

The four authors I'm speaking to now are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo correct? The four authors of Q?

You are speaking with three of the four authors of Q, and you're speaking with a band of writers called Wu Ming, which means «Anonymous» in Chinese. In December 1999 the Luther Blissett Project committed a symbolic suicide - we called it The Seppuku - and in January 2000 we launched another project, the Wu Ming Foundation, centred around our writing and our blog, Giap. The WMF is now an even bigger network than the LBP was, and includes many collectives, projects and laboratories. Luca aka Wu Ming 3 is not a member of the band anymore, although he still collaborates with us on specific side projects. Each member of the band has a nom de plume composed of the band's name and a numeral, following the alphabetical order of our surnames, thus you're speaking to Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1, Giovanni Cattabriga aka Wu Ming 2 and Federico Guglielmi aka Wu Ming 4.

Can you tell me a bit about your background before the Luther Blissett project?

Before the LBP we were part of a national scene that was – and still is – called simply «il movimento», a galaxy of occupied social centres, squats, independent radio stations, small record labels, alternative bookshops, student collectives, radical trade unions, etc. In the Italian radical tradition, at least after the Sixties, there was never any clearcut separation between the counterculture and more political milieux. Most of us came from left-wing family backgrounds, had roots in the working class. Punk rock opened our minds during our teenage years, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s Cyberpunk opened them even more, and inspired new practices.

When did you start noticing similarities between Q and QAnon? I know you've tweeted a bit about this, but I'd love to get as many details as I can. I feel like the details around QAnon are so sketchy that it's important to lock in as much as I can here.

We read a lot about the US alt-right, books such as Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a Basilisk or Angela Nagle's – flawed but still useful – Kill All Normies, and yet we didn't see the QAnon thing coming. We didn't know it was growing on 4chan and some specific subReddits. About six weeks ago, on June 12th, our old pal Florian Cramer – a fellow veteran of the LBP who now teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam – sent us a short email. Here's the text:

«It seems as if somebody took Luther Blissett's playbook and turned it into an Alt-Right conspiracy lore. Maybe Wu Ming should write a new article: "How Luther Blissett brought down Roseanne Barr"!»,

After those sentences there was a link to a piece by Justin Caffier on Vice. We read it, and briefly commented on Twitter, then in the following weeks more and more people got in touch with us, many of them Europeans living in the US. They all wanted to draw our attention on the QAnon phenomenon. To anyone who had read our novel, the similarities were obvious, to the extent that all these people were puzzled seeing that no US pundit or scholar was citing the book.

Have there been key moments for you that made you feel like QAnon is an homage to Q? What has lined up the best?

Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time – like we did for the LBP – weird "origin myths" are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 – the year Q was first published, by the way! – and becoming Q. QAnon's psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP's set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia...

We can't say for sure that it's an homage, but one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er, "fan fiction" inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else.

There will be a lot of skepticism I think that an American political movement like QAnon could have been influenced by an Italian novel, how do you think it may have happened?

It's an Italian novel in the sense that it was originally written in Italian by Italian authors, but in the past (nearly) 20 years it has become a global novel. It was translated into fifteen languages – including Korean, Japanese, Russian, Turkish – and published in about thirty countries. It was successful all across Europe and in the English speaking world with the exception of the US, where it got bad reviews, sold poorly and circulated almost exclusively in activist circles.

Q was published in Italian a few months before the so-called "Battle of Seattle", and published in several other languages in the 2000-2001 period. It became a sort of night-table book for that generation of activists, the one that would be savagely beaten up by an army of cops during the G8 summit in Genoa, July 2001. In 2008 we wrote a short essay, almost a memoir, on our participation to those struggles and Q's influence in those years, titled Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise. A copy of Q's Spanish edition even ended up in the hands of subcomandante Marcos. It isn't at all unrealistic to imagine that it may have inspired the people who started QAnon.

Have you seen anything in the QAnon posts that leads you to suspect any activist group in particular is behind it?

No, we haven't.

You think QAnon is a prank? Without some kind of reveal it's obviously hard to see it as that. If you think it was revealed that QAnon was actually some kind of anarchist prank, would it even matter? Would its believers abandon it or would they just see it as a smear campaign?

Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There's no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank, but who's pulling it on whom? Was the QAnon narrative hijacked and reappropriated by right-wing "counter-pranksters"? Counter-pranksters who operated with the usual alt-right "post-ironic" cynicism, and made the narrative more and more absurd in order to astonish media pundits while spreading reactionary content in a captivating way?

Again: are the original pranksters still involved? Is there some detectable conflict of narratives within the QAnon universe? Why are some alt-right types taking the distance from the whole thing and showing contempt for what they describe as «a larp for boomers»?

A larp it is, for sure. To be more precise, it's a fascist Alternate Reality Game. Plausibly the most active players – ie the main influencers – don't believe in all the conspiracies and metaconspiracies, but many people are so gullible that they'll gulp down any piece of crap – or lump of menstrual blood, for that matter. Moreover, there's danger of gun violence related to the larp, the precedent of Pizzagate is eloquent enough. What if QAnon inspires a wave of hate crimes?

Therefore, to us the important question is: triggering nazis like that, what is it good for? That camp is divided between those who would believe anything and those who would be "ironic" on anything and exploit anything in order to advance their reactionary, racist agenda. Can you really troll or ridicule people like those?

It's hard to foresee what would happen if QAnon were exposed as an anarchist/leftist prank on the right. If its perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the LBP), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one? In plain words: which narrative would prevail? «QAnon sucking anything into its vortex» or «Luther Blissett's ultimate prank»?

In any case, we'd never have started anything like that ourselves. Way too dangerous.

[stephaniecandywilliams]

Hwarang Female Character Appreciation Post #2

Post #1: Aro

(Oh god it’s been so long since my last post OTL sorry guys... and since Sooyeon is such a personal favourite I’m so PRESSURED to write this post well OMG)

WARNING: LONG POST + there will be an abundance of the repetition and variations of the words “cute” and “adorable” XD

I am back with my second installment of my series of meta for the main female characters of the drama Hwarang!!! Giving you all the goodness of female characters who break stereotypes and steal hearts!!! ;) This time, it’s my personal favourite female character of them all, the one and only... Kim Sooyeon!!! (I love this gif so much omg thank you op <3)

I have to admit, at first I was REALLY critical and judgemental of Sooyeon’s character (IM SO SORRY BB OTL) because we were only given the information that she’s friends with Aro and that she’s the younger sister to playboy Sooho and love interest of cool guy Banryu at the start of the drama. My mind immediately conjured up the mental image of the stereotypical nice daughter from a rich family, quiet, elegant, well-mannered, boring, background material. BUT OH MAN SHE SURPRISED ME

She’s the VERY EPITOME of bubbly, cute and endearing /heart eyes/ She can be very manly, shy, playful,funny, lovey-dovey, daring, petty, romantic, relatable, ALL AT ONCE!! She’s a very multi-faceted personality that draws us in and keep us hooked, not just for her love line with Banryu, but everything that she does <3 <3 (get ready for the onslaught of gifs coming right up!!!)

Ah~ the legendary first meeting of the two love birds ^~^ LOOK AT THAT CHEEKY LOOK OF PURE SATISFACTION ON HER CUTE FACE WHEN SHE SQUEEZED HIS BUTT, and not to mention how her expression froze as Banryu turned around XD this shows how much she’s not a pushover and that she would get back and seek revenge on her brother whenever she gets the chance ;3 i guess Sooyeon is a very HANDS ON person ;)))) (pls get used to my bad jokes, i won’t change anymore hehe) I still remember her adorable squeak when she retracted her hands in light speed and hugged herself XD not to mention how her first reaction in panic was to slap Banryu and immediately regret it (ah so cute)  

and after she used a FUCKING VASE to knock her furious brother Sooho out cold and hanging off a fence, she fuzzed over Banryu’s face where she slapped instead of caring about her brother XD we could all SEE THE AMOUNT OF WORRY IN HER FACE UGH AND BANRYU IS SO IN LOVE HAHAHAHA

After that whole fiasco and Sooho losing his memory of that night (no thanks to Sooyeon and her trusty vase ;)) she was even nice enough to write to Banryu to make sure her brother didn’t get angry and cause trouble. (ISN’T THAT LIKE THE NICEST THING EVER??? if it was me I’d just lay low and maybe disappear out of shame :’)) she got a infamous reputation around town as “the girl who got her chest molested” but she still worried about Banryu (getting killed by her brother) more than herself XD

This scene is getting on my nerves on HOW CUTE IT IS UGH~ Sooyeon actually shows up to the night club- I mean Okta to look for her lover boy /swoons/ (and not to mention with that gift of red wine which was expensive AF) judging by the way we see her barge into Sooho’s rented room and walking back out, we could see that she’s basically trying to find Banryu by walking into every occupied room to try her luck XD if that’s not the most badass, daring thing that someone could do, I don’t know what qualifies @~@ she finally finds a fuming Banryu and pulls him aside (I have no idea how she has the guts to pull him when he looks like he could murder somebody ;_;) the two lovebirds were enjoying some(miniscule) alone time when KIM SOOHO BARGES IN AND LANDS A PUNCH ON BANRYU’S FACE (he finally remembered that night Sooyeon apparently got molested (molested somebody hehe)) 

The funny thing about the next thing that happened is that we see Sooyeon getting shocked by the sudden attack, but it doesn’t stop there. Second by second just by the look on her face we could tell she’s getting angrier and angrier, until she just makes a split second decision to sacrifice her expensive gift and just use the heavy wine bottle to hit her brother on the back of his head (again). Even funnier, she just lets go of the bottle until it hits the ground with a clear resounding breaking sound (she’s so cool how to be her omg) she then pulls Banryu up and just walks over her brother’s unconscious body with Banryu XD

MAN I hold this conversation SO DEAR TO MY HEART <3 <3 it’s just so precious and protective of Sooyeon seriously

“If my brother does anything to Banryu you have to tell me right away!” said Sooyeon in a grave and serious tone. “Even if I do tell you, what are you gonna do about it?” Aro questioned. “Then I will, oh I tell you what, climb over this wall and end my brother~” Sooyeon answered, aggressively gesturing a neck-slice, “you’re dead Kim Sooho, I’m not gonna stand here and do nothing.” her eyes glinting murderously. Shocked by the words, Aro asked, “Are you really the Sooyeon that I know??” Sooyeon fired back confidently, “I protect my man.”

OMG I CANNOT EXPRESS HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS CONVERSATION UGH it’s this conversation and what Sooyeon had expressed here that made me fall deeply in love with this character /sobs/ why is she so precious 

Ah, this makes me think of the sweet times being with siblings XD this can’t get more real than a real sibling relationship, and I applaud the producers for including this amazingly realistic interaction between these two :3 

Yes, they fight. Yes, they get really physically brutal with each other. But Sooyeon finally told(screamed) her brother the truth and stopped the situation from worsening. ^~^ She’s really honest, I’ll give her that. She clarified everything and left no detail out, even the part about grabbing Banryu’s butt. Owning up to something like that needs a lot of guts, even towards a family member.

Oh and how could I forget the amount of trust she puts in her crush??? She’s courageous and adorable and all, but she does get blinded by love sometimes (a LOT of the time XD) But judging by the limited contact that she could get with Banryu in that ancient time period, and how they started off getting to know each other by letters, it’s quite easy to understand why she isn’t weary of what Banryu is doing in the Hwarang house. 

Up until the most recent episodes, she still did not show any sign of fearing their opposing family backgrounds, and that is simultaneously a good thing and also a bad thing. The relationship can blossom under the ignorance of threats, but when the problem really emerges to break them apart, it’ll result in serious heartbreak.

THIS SCENE BROKE MY HEART UGH. Sooyeon was waiting outside Banryu’s house, excitedly adjusting her hair trying to look good in front of him (LOOK AT HOW CUTE SHE IS), but Banryu just walked past her. She was SO IN SHOCK and started crying, and I STARTED CRYING TOO I AM SO WEAK FOR HER MY POOR BABY... T.T 

Even when her brother tried to get back at Banryu for making her cry, she didn’t let him go after Banryu. If she was sassy enough she could just let Banryu get beaten up, but she didn’t, and held on to her brother as strongly as she could even while she was crying her heart out... 

Oh man. This was when it was announced that Banryu was going to go along with the others to protect Princess Sookmyung. Sooyeon was so worried about  Banryu’s safety. Meeting Aro at their usual place (the short wall where they both put up ladders to talk to each other XD), she cried and cried, saying how Banryu could make such a decision without talking to her about it first :( the funny thing about it is that Aro’s going as well but Sooyeon wasn’t worried about her at all XD

Then Sooyeon wiped away her tears and made a grave decision. She wants to give Banryu a snip of her hair for him to remember her by. Why is it serious and not creepy at all? Because in the olden days, in Chinese culture (it extends to Japanese and Korean culture but maybe not completely on details) it is a token of serious commitment in a relationship, where the woman gives the man her hair as a sign that she would wait for him to return from their separation. But the fact that Sooyeon still decided to give him such an important token when all of them know how serious it meant, really shows how determined she was to wait for Banryu. 

THIS SCENE IS SO CUTE AAARGH!!! Sooyeon actually wraps up a cut section of her beautiful hair in an elegant pouch and handed it to Banryu before he leaves for the escort mission, and how she worriedly asks if it was burdensome makes me go “aawwww”~ I can still see the slight awkwardness between the two of them though, the kind of awkwardness when you like each other a lot but aren’t well acquainted enough that you could be comfortable in front of them yet. 

AND YOU KNOW WHAT MY LITTLE DARLING BABY WENT AND DID?? SHE KISSED HER LOVER BOY ON THE CHEEK THAT’S WHAT!!! ASDFLJALS;DFL;

I REALLY love how she took the first step in most of the stuff they encountered, the first fateful meeting (butt grab), the first letter she wrote him, the first gift (liquor, which didn’t really become a gift but rather a weapon), THE FIRST KISS /screams/ and Banryu finally gets the guts to pull her in for a real kiss /swoons/ AND THAT KISS IS THE REALLY SMALL AMOUNT OF TIMES I’VE ACTUALLY SEEN GOOD KISSING IN A KOREAN DRAMA OMG most of the time the female leads would just pause there and stare with their enormous eyes in shock through the whole kiss XD

and that wraps it up until the things that happened up until episode 14 (I think I’ll make another post on Sooyeon when the series ends, since I love her so much XD)

Ah seriously I spent half a day typing this XD (if it adds up the days this has been in my drafts, I think it’ll be over a week), but I love Sooyeon so much this post deserves nothing less than PERFECTION <3 <3 (jk I know it’s not perfect, there’s SO MUCH MORE TO TALK ABOUT ON HER PERSONALITY) somehow I wish that there’ll be a spin-off series that has Sooyeon as the main character, but I kinda know that it’s not possible... (I can still dream can’t I? /sobs/)

p.s.: I have no idea when the next parts will be up (for Princess Sookmyung and Queen Jiso), since I take REALLY LONG to type up each post T~T but thank you for reading!!! Love Hwarang with me!!!