#this got long I apologize

[sailforvalinor]

A quick analysis of why Ezra and Thrawn are each other’s perfect nemesis (especially for those who aren’t as familiar with Rebels):

The reason that Thrawn is so dangerous is, of course, not just because of his analytical mind or brilliant battle tactics, but because he takes the time to know his enemy. He understands what all art historians or anyone in the liberal arts can tell you: that art is one of the clearest windows into a society, and studying a society’s art can tell you just as much, if not more than a history book can. Thrawn always takes the time to throughly understand his enemy before he fights them, and that includes the Jedi Ezra Bridger.

The problem is, however, that Ezra is not a typical Jedi. It stands to reason that what Thrawn knows about the Jedi comes from the Jedi Generals in the Clone Wars, who abided by very standard military tactics—and to a point, having fought in the Clone Wars, Kanan Jarrus, Ezra’s master, often used those tactics, and passed some of them on to Ezra. However, since he primarily fought in a small rebel cell, Ezra was primarily a guerrilla fighter. Even when they went on to join the larger Rebellion, Kanan and Ezra often avoided their larger full-scale battles in favor of smaller ops that catered to their talents, only joining large battles when it was absolutely necessary to turn the tables. And though he was a commander, it was actually fairly rare that he led troops into battle like the Jedi generals in the Clone Wars.

Additionally, while early on in his arc he shares some similarities with Anakin and Luke (especially in his struggle to figure out how to protects those he loves without falling to the Dark Side), it becomes apparent by the end of Rebels that he is on the path to becoming a Jedi like Qui-Gon Jinn or Yoda—that is, a Jedi very in-tune with the Living Force. Though he possesses many of the more physical talents we associate with the Jedi—heightened senses, strengthened physical abilities, skill with a lightsaber, etc—his talents have always tended towards the more cerebral (e.g., he was receiving extremely vivid visions of the future while struggling just to levitate an object). One really interesting thing about Rebels is that it often chooses to represent the presence of the Force with a high-pitched whistling sound, one that Ezra quite often seems to hear and let guide his decisions. He is also very prone to receiving extremely vivid Force visions. But the ability he is most known for, especially in Ahsoka, is his ability to connect to living beings. If you were wondering why such a deal is made over the Loth-Cat in episode one, it’s because Loth-Cats have become somewhat of a motif for Ezra, just like the purrgil—they seem to be always around him in Rebels, and serve as a sort of barometer to the audience as to how strong Ezra’s Force abilities are. In season one, they would just pop out and hiss at him every once in awhile, but by season four, they’re all over him—if he stood out in a field and held still for too long he’d just be buried in cats. The same goes for other creatures—he befriends the purrgil early on in the show, and is able to enlist their help in the finale. He’s also so in-tune with the Living Force on his home planet of Lothal that he is approached by Loth-Wolves, mysterious, spiritual beings who weren’t thought to exist outside the realm of myth, and shown a way to use a hyperspace corridor to travel to the other side of the planet.

However, this ability doesn’t just extend to animals—it extends to people, too. It’s like someone poured everything into his charisma stat. He makes friends everywhere he goes, so easily it’s like breathing, and people naturally gravitate towards him and want to help him. (It’s probably why he has made such good friends with those adorable rock people—he just can’t help being forcibly adopted wherever he goes.) The reason he is able to beat Thrawn in the end of Rebels is that he calls in every single favor from all the people he recruited to his side throughout the past four seasons, and when you see everyone on screen—former Imperial cadets, smugglers, deposed military leaders, space wolves, space whales, Clones, etc—it’s then that you realize just what an inspiring leader he is. If Ezra can get Hondo Onaka of all people to join Rebellion, you know he’s got something special.

Not to mention, since Ezra has spoken to and been indirectly trained by a Force being (the Bendu) and was the first on-screen Jedi to discover the World Between Worlds, it’s quite possible that he understands the Living Force better, or at least in a very different way, than most Jedi within the Order did.

To sum it all up, Ezra is just so different, so unconventional, both as a military leader and as a Jedi, that Thrawn, for all his military prowess, doesn’t know what to do with him. He is absolutely unpredictable, because he always abides by the will of the Force, something Thrawn is completely unable to get access to or understand. I always think of them when I see this meme:

because it’s almost quite literally what happens in the Rebels finale. Thrawn has pulled off a seemingly infallible maneuver, the Rebels are completely pinned-down, their resources are maxed-out, and he knows they will not risk the deaths of civilians. Ezra gives himself up, and he thinks he’s won. But then what does Ezra do? He summons a flock of purrgil who drag him, along with his entire Star Destroyer, into hyperspace and jump to another galaxy. How on earth could Thrawn have even predicted that? And even if he had known Ezra’s plan, what could he have even done?

That’s why Thrawn is so eager to kill Ezra in Ahsoka. Something tells me that he’s been hunting him in these ten years we haven’t seen them—because he knows that this one man is far more dangerous than anything waiting for him in the galaxy he is preparing to invade.

[pheonixkenny]

Since I’ve been playing the SP video games a lot lately I thought I’d introduce you to my New Kid! Her name is Alex. I thought I’d give her a gender-neutral name to go with the whole “ambiguous gender” thing she’s got going on. (I’m ignoring “Dovakin” because that’s not a name you give to a girl.) And yes, I said “her”, my new kid is a girl. I based her a lot on me, since the new kid is basically a self insert character anyways. So I gave her my gender, sexuality, religion, even made her look kinda like me. I have a lot of headcanons for her that I’ll list under the cut.

Alex has selective mutism, so she doesn��t talk much. She does know ASL, but none of the other SP characters do, so that doesn’t help her communicate with them. She carry’s around a notepad and a pen with her to write what she wants to say. She also just texts people to talk, even if they’re only a few feet away.

She’s friends with pretty much everyone in town, but the people she’s closest to are; Wendy (because she knows her true gender and didn’t out her. So she trusts her.), Kenny (they bond over being the only people in town with real superpowers.), and Butters (the first friend she ever made in South Park. Plus, he’s a sweetheart.)

Like me, Alex is a lesbian. Her and Kenny like to talk about hot girls together.

She does eventually trust Kenny with her real gender identity. She figures she owes him that since she knows his big secret. (He’s immortal.) Kenny’s kinda surprised and it’s a little awkward at first because he doesn’t really hang out with girls who aren’t his little sister, but he eventually realizes she’s still the same person she was before and they fall back into their regular dynamic. (They have a brother/sister dynamic after that. Since Kenny does say you remind him of his sister.) Besides, he kinda gets it. He played Princess Kenny, Alex can be King Douchebag if she wants to.

Part of the reason why she hid her gender from everyone (besides the government.) is that she just wanted to play Stick of Truth with the guys. It looked fun.

She does like to do some girly stuff with Wendy too though, since she doesn’t get to very often. So once in a while they’ll turn on a rom com or princess movie and give each other makeovers. (Though Butters is sometimes also down for a good princess movie.)

She doesn’t tell Butters about her gender identity. She likes him but the boy is not great at keeping a secret.

Even though she doesn’t show it, she cares deeply for all her friends. They’re the first ones she’s ever had. (It turns out online followers are different than real friends.)

Doesn’t know how to feel about Eric Cartman. On the one hand, he did bring her into the Stick of Truth game and taught her a lot in it. On the other hand, he did kidnap her parents, so she’s pretty mad about that.

If/when the South Park gang get the government off her back for good. (I know they probably could. I doubt there’s anything these guys can’t do at this point.) Alex gets the most emotional that anyone has ever seen her. It actually kinda freaks them out. She then comes clean about her real gender identity since she doesn’t need to worry about being tracked. Everyone kinda reacts with an “ah, that explains some things.” attitude. Cartman’s really the only one who has a problem with it.

[aldermos]

You do commissions?

Hiii

To be real honest,, not anymore. I've monetized my art a couple times now, and each time without fail, I got into real bad art blocks.

So now I'm mostly going into this like, basically providing free content 💀 i welcome requests more than anything,

With requests, I want to reiterate that I'm heavily selective on what I choose to draw and I'm not budging when it comes to it. I'm pretty strict with accepting them; so if i end up not doing a request, please don't take it the wrong way. This is not to say that I hate requests// i've just had a couple bad experiences w/ them.

But yes do feel free to send requests through asks, please just be wary of the above 🙏

and to be absolutely concrete: i'm not taking requests that contain/align with nsfw, proship, terfs, racism, zionism, fetish, etc. 🚫

[ironlvngs]

𝐈𝐂 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊 𝐈𝐕 

— interrogations, part 2. 

     the last time that link was in this position, he had mentioned only one student by name — just for fun, for a little prank to piss him off, thinking it would come to nothing. not long ago, that same student was arrested, with link left wondering how much influence he had over that. did it matter, what he had told the cops ? or did it have nothing to do with it ? however, this time, he went in with full intentions to really throw a couple names under the bus. 

   they took a seat as instructed and was introduced to a new face they hadn’t seen before — agent murray. agent brown had been with them before, in the last interrogation. link declined their offer for a cup of coffee, and put on their best face — something told them they would need it. 

“can you talk about your time capsule video? give us some context for the clip that was leaked?”

     and now, link was really glad he didn’t say anything that he would have found funny in 50 years... but not so funny, the week after he sent it in. they shrug their shoulders, a small smile beginning to light up their features. “ what can i say ? i maybe said some things that were insensitive... things i shouldn’t have said. about greer, about this school. the truth is, i was just in a vulnerable position. ” the tone of their voice changed, to something more raw and genuine, and the smile that they had put on began to strategically fade — a sad boy, who really just missed their best friend. “ — i guess i had been drinking, and missing greer a little extra. i was mad at ogden for not taking care of one of their best students, and i took it out on the school. that’s all that was. ” 

"were you aware that greer morrison had submitted a video at the end of last year?”

     he could see murray’s eyes narrowing at him at the question — link could tell, they assumed he would have known. because apparently, it was already known that link knew pretty much everything there was to know about greer. but in all honesty, that clip surprised even him — the context of it was even more chilling for link, considering... — he was pulled out of his thoughts, remembering he where he was. “ no, not really. seeing her face again was... it brought up a lot of feelings for me. i just wish she would have reached out to me a bit more, you know ? about her boyfriend. if he really had anything to do with this, i just can’t help but feel like maybe i could have done something to prevent this — greer used to tell me everything. or... so i thought. ” part it was truth, really. but the other part was amping up his own arc in this story. 

“had you ever heard of anything regarding THE NAIVE NEWCOMER using steroids?”

     “ — maybe. i heard rumours, every now and then... but you know, people always talk. especially at ogden. i wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not. why ? is it true ? ” his curiosity wins and he asks, but he didn’t receive an answer. instead, they move on to the next question. 

“had greer brought up breaking up with him ever? or anything of the sort, like she did in her video?”

     and how was he going to play this one ? link had to think fast, because he was beginning to worry that any wrong thing he may say right now could immediately point the fingers to him as a suspect. “ look, i won’t sit here and pretend that greer was the best girlfriend just because she was a close friend of mine. but as far as i knew, she didn’t have any intentions of breaking up with him. so, while not so surprising that she said that... it was never really brought up to me. ”

“do you have any reason to believe THE GOLDEN GIRL would want to leave ogden college?”

     to link ? there were so many reasons — a long fucking list of reasons. it might have more to do with him projecting. though, he couldn’t play this one off easy; he did imply in his video that he thought greer left because she couldn’t stand it here anymore. link lets out a long sigh, more for show than anything. they lean forward, making eye contact with the two agents. “ i’m gonna be honest with you guys here... if i answer this question, i wouldn’t be able to help but make it personal. i’ve always wanted to leave this place, but mostly because it’s tied to some... some family history that i would much rather leave behind. ” appealing to a person’s emotionality was always a winner in link’s books — even if having this conversation made them internally want to gouge their eyes out. “ there are some... some people here that that constantly remind me of the things i had to go through when i was young. and if it wasn’t so hard to do so, i would have left so long ago. but you know, i...— ” he lets out a scoff, leaning back in his chair. “ — i never had money growing up. the only reason i’m here is because of a scholarship. i’m hoping to get out of here as soon as i have a degree and a career to chase after, just to leave these memories behind me. greer was a close friend of mine, and i often shared these personal things with her. we used to talk about how fun it would be to go to other states together ” he looks away with a small, soft smile — feigning reminiscing on some memories with greer. “ so, i projected everything i felt about being here onto her when she was reported missing because.... because that, to me, felt easier than to admit that she might be.... well, i hope you won’t make me say it out loud. ” and just for that extra effect, link sniffles his nose a little, looking down at his feet. “ so to answer your question, i don’t think i can. i would just like to believe that she ran away, rather than any other alternative. ”

“you said some people remind you of home... what do you mean by that?”

    and link was certainly hoping they would ask, so that he could exact a perfect vengeance on booker for the way he made him look, and for taking his camera — he knew it was with him. “ — i shouldn’t say. everyone knows him as the hometown hero, but no one knew him like i did. you probably wouldn’t believe me if i said booker wells wasn’t as pristine as everyone thinks he is, would you ? ” of course that was rhetorical, and totally up to them. but the bait would be easy to catch, after the set-up with the sob story. if only he gets his words right. “ well... whether you believe me or not, it is what it is. you asked, and i’m telling. i think... it started to become increasingly obvious that he began to look down on me and my whole situation with money and my family — which was beyond my control, but i guess that some people can’t look past that. ” link was just hoping at this point, that at least one of them would relate to this. “ — actually, could i be a bit ballsy right now ? i think it may be worth your time to look into him. it might be hard to believe, but he’s really not as innocent as he looks. i hope you’ll trust me on this. ”

“and why haven’t you said anything about him before?”

    link begins to let out a scoff, “ seriously ? it’s terrifying enough doing this now — my not so great past and little to no money going up against beloved town hero ? just... i thought i could trust you both not to think of this as any malicious act. i’d do anything to help greer’s case. ”

"what do you know a student named charlotte fletcher?"

     “ charlie ? not much. we might have had a brief fling a while back but... we don’t know each other that well. it fizzled pretty quickly. ”

"and her relationship with greer?"

     “ — i knew they were friends, but greer never spoke about her much. she wasn’t a topic of conversation for us. so, really, i don’t know much about her. ” link shrugs. it was a bit of a lie, but even if he and charlie weren’t on the nicest terms, he could tell she might be on their list of people to watch. link wasn’t in the business of snitching — or, well, he definitely was... depending on what you did to him. or if snitching would be beneficial to him. and in this case, it wasn’t. 

"how about juliette hastings-villiers? her relationship with greer?"

      though, they couldn’t help themselves here. “ — it was odd. everything that greer did, juli wanted to do the exact same thing. ” link knew that juli had her doubts about link and, well, it would look better for him if he made her look suspicious first. “ — a little creepy, if you ask me. i guess i tried to keep my distance. ”

[skyartworkzzz]

Like The Other Ones

HI YES IM FINALLY DONE HOLY SHIT

OKAY SO this was based off on my own gameplay of COTL, I noticed that everytime Id put food orders in, Narinder would usually be the one to prepare them And honestly? We love a malewife in this house so I dig that for him, ma guy is a skilled cook <3

As I wrote down the dialogue, it just got deeper than I expected SO HERE YALL GO WITH A FULL ASS COMIC ABOUT THEIR RELATIONSHIP, ENJOY!!!!

This shit took me weeks Ill go recharge my soul now brb-

EDIT: I DECIDED TO PUT A UNDERCUT Tab so yall dont have to scroll too much in order to read and see other posts ure welcome 🤼‍♀️ <3

[lululawrence]

You Should Be Here With Me

A 2024 Advent Fic by lululawrence

Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson | 34k | 26 Chapters

The festive period is a traditionally hectic one in the world of Premier League football, and this year is no different. A lot is riding on how Manchester United is able to come through the fixtures in the coming weeks.

Louis and his teammates know all too well the pressure that is on their shoulders. They need to prove, not just to fans of the club but the entire league, that they still have what it takes to be a team worthy of fighting for the top of the table.

Throw in the fact that Louis is all too aware that he's not getting any younger in a profession that demands your peak physical fitness year round and the incredibly fit Harry Styles, who is part of the club's social media team, and this year's festive period might just be the most important one yet.

🎄1 🎄 2 🎄 3 🎄 4 🎄 5 🎄 6 🎄 7 🎄 8 🎄 9 🎄 10 🎄 11 🎄 12 🎄 13 🎄 14 🎄 15 🎄 16 🎄 17 🎄 18 🎄 19 🎄 20 🎄 21 🎄 22 🎄 23 🎄 24 🎄 25 🎄 26 🎄

NOW COMPLETE!

[typing-catastrophe]

jealous!ford x reader headcanons

pre relationship:

depending on his current mood and state of mind, his reaction to someone showing romantic interest in you ranges from:

1) heartache,

feels like he doesn't deserve you, that he isn't good enough for you, he's not your type and also he is too old for you

self-esteem on the floor, feels like a kicked puppy seeing you flirt with someone else

over 2) mild annoyance; 'what's so interesting about them?'

what could they possible give you? why are you even talking to them, you already said you aren't interested in them

to 3) almost hostile towards the other person

all in all just one big mess of feelings

he's not good with them okay

confused and frustrated by his emotions; spends a lot of time overthinking them, in order to rationalise and understand them

too insecure and doubtful to tell you about his feelings, but too easily agitated to not be jealous when someone comes up to ask for your number

tells himself he has no right to feel that way, and yet...

in relationship:

protective and maybe a little possessive. maybe a bit more than a little. okay, a lot

definitely a lot more than he shows

(related to the first points pre-rls) very rare reaction: amused. god complex activated. who do they think they are? do they really think you would be interested in them? tch, please.

when he sees a guy flirting with you, he will come up behind you, put his arm around your waist and stare the guy down

the scene where he intimidates the bus driver, just to any shady guy who won't leave you alone.

insecurities, so soo many of them

'You could have anyone you want. Why would you wanna be with me?' *

that man was bullied his entire youth, never had a proper relationship and holds so much trauma and shame - it's the glue that holds him together at this point

ford is deeply afraid to loose you

through something supernatural or otherwise dangerous yes, but also trough some stupid mistake on his side and interpersonal problems

he is afraid he will mess up one day. then you will start seeing him as someone not worthy of your love and find someone better

it is one constant battle between his low self-worth and his god complex/admittedly somewhat inflated ego

-------------------------------------------------- thank you for reading <3 reblogs are appreciated

a/n: longer piece with this trope will follow soon(ish), stay tuned :P poor ford, doesn't know how to feel his feelings appropriately (same dude, same) * 'jealous' by eyedress

[baepsays]

INTRODUCTION — being together with stoner!suguru

WASTED AND ABSORBED .01

saw something about stoner suguru mention so let me draw a picture here using my own two cents Cw: usage of weed, cigarettes, no pronouns but fem oriented reader, mentions of NSFW stuff, mdni

stoner!suguru who at first was very opposed to the concept of weed, he used to be one of those cigarettes and cigars and whatnot over weed type of snob. then he met his partner who on surface level doesn't look like it but gets high on almost daily.

first time he tries weed with his partner he gets really giggly and touchy and it wasn't that long into your relationship so you guys hadn't even said I love you's yet, but poor thing high off his ass off of only 2 puffs from a single joint, just blurts out how much he's down right pathetically in love with you that he's willing to even try weed for you.

this turns into a heavy make out session with you just at first kissing softly, sitting beside eachother, passing the same blunt—to tangling your fingers in his loose locks and getting on top of him, barely hovering over his lap, one of his hands on your ass the other pulling you somehow closer and deeper by your throat. eventually he just pulls your ass (literally) on his lap, the hand on the ass now groping and kneading, another roams around your waist until it goes up your shirt and just starts rubbing circles around your back.

and when you think oh i know where this is going ~ well, he passes out then and there on the floor of the balcony where you guys were smoking, with a huge grin on his face and his hair a mess, sprawled around his head.

Next day he barely remembered anything and said oh well he wouldn't want to do that again (even if it felt really good). but still gets high with you when he comes over to your place that week and again just confesses his undying love for you with a dopey grin and rips his hair tie off his hair then throws it away from the balcony. his reason being that he'd rather have you keep his hair in place by pulling on it. and starts talking about this new kind of tea he found which reminds him of your perfume and how he is actually always thinking about how he wants to just bite you and leave marks all over when he's sometimes spacing off and you ask him what was he thinking about so hard. more than half of the time it's about wanting to bite you.

he didn't know he already said I love you to you while he was high, and how he always starts yapping way more than what he normally does, breaking his cool mysterious guy persona. someone might even say Satoru has definitely rubbed off on him the way he starts talking about anything and everything, especially related to you maybe even a miniscule detail. when he is high, he usually starts with "you know. I am so disgustingly in love with you. it's insane." after silently exchanging a joint with you and letting the weed get to him. so when you found out accidentally one of these days where he got high and told you about his elaborate plan for a date that Sunday to finally tell you that he loves you, all you did was smile and nod. you told him a month after that date that he actually told you 'I love you' the very first time you guys got high together.

safe to say suguru is a changed man who loves getting high with his partner on their balconies on weekends or on nights after a particularly shitty day where all he needs is to get his mind to shut up and just look at his partner, kiss them silly and touch them all over.

a/n: dividers by @/omi-resources

SERIES MASTERLIST . next>

To check out more of my stuff click this.

[zuzu-draws]

Cranky post war 'bito :> his grump is truly when his Uchiha side shines!

[ryllen]

hanging around sebastian is automatic code to become a mom friend

[foolsocracy]

[corporealchaos]

Some of you have never been an Unspecified Businessman from Texas who realizes that your wife cheated on you when you stare into your daughter's eyes and see the eyes of the Amazon Prime delivery driver looking back at you, so you cope by quitting your job and moving to an entirely different continent, where you become a Holiday Inn bartender with a boss you claim to hate even though you have a bowling date scheduled with him two days after you start working there—

And it shows.

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[xxplastic-cubexx]

Snap: *draws a Megaman-inspired Magneto*

Me: ...Perfect modernization.

wait now that its not 3AM i can do you one Slightly better

bonus:

[cecoeur]

How do you sleep at night? No one to hide behind Betrayed every alibi you had You had every chance to make amends instead you got drunk on bitterness And you still claim that you're innocent, it's sad

[bubblybloob]

Opposites attract.

Lefty.

Righty.