#this is me asking people to watch death vote
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sashayed · 2 days ago
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I haven't said as much about electoral politics this year as I have in previous cycles, because I am exhausted like everyone else and have nothing new or helpful to add. That is still true, so caveat lector I guess lmao!!! Happy American Election Day Fellow Sufferers!!
I have been experiencing an internal backlash the last few years to my extremely Sorkinpilled D.C. private school upbringing -- my childhood spent as a kind of convent schoolgirl in the faith of The System Is Good If We All Participate, which of course has a uhhh let's say generously a minimal engagement with the ways in which many of us are by design shut out of participating. I don't think idealism is necessarily childish, but I think MY idealism certainly has childish qualities, an undergirding of 90s feel-goodism, of civic participation as a subtle ego stroke and of voting -- although I would never have consciously put it this way -- as a way to feel superior to people who don't vote.
Lately there has bubbled up in me a sludgy, adolescent fury at this whole stupid country that has made it very very hard to feel like I should do even the bare minimum. For these people? AMERICANS? The ones that not only want Donald Trump to be president but saw what happened the first time and were like, We love this, do it again but worse? Whatever, fuckos. "I hope you people get your dearest wish and it chews you to death slowly," I may have thought.
I have also thought: why is it so controversial to ask elected officials to stop funding a genocide? Why are we treating people who make that ask, who are watching the current administration directly fund death on a mass scale and objecting to that choice, as if they are being babies and just need to get over it? How are they supposed to get over it? Why is anybody over it?
Anyway all this means that I, a known chipper door-knocker and caller of congresspeople, have been pretty low-key this current cycle. I think that is OK. I don't want to make this a big dramatic confessional about how I didn't write enough postcards or whatever. We all get exhausted and this was my turn.
But it has also been an illuminating cycle in that it's made it clear to me how much at my big age I still want politics to make me feel good, and when they don't, I still have the urge to throw a lil tantrum about it! I can get very superior and intellectual about how right-wing operatives manipulate their voters emotionally WITHOUT EVEN NOTICING that I too have been manipulated, in my case into the feeling that nonparticipation is a kind of revolutionary act.* Just absolute "I threw it on the GROUND" logic happening inside my head. "Maybe if I don't vote I will be doing Quiet Quitting, which is uhhhhh anticapitalist." I'm not a part of your system!!!
Anyway, I am trying to have self-compassion about it, and one way for me to do that is to project my internal experience onto a theoretical reader. That would be you, my imaginary friend who clicked on this post for some reason even though you have already decided not to vote! I just want to tell you that I am more sympathetic to your point of view than I have ever been in my whole life, and I'm sorry I have historically been a glib, holier-than-thou asshole about it in ways that may actually have made you MORE resistant to civic participation.
And you're right: it doesn't make that big a difference whether I personally vote or not, or whether you do. But if there are hundreds of us, and I think there are, then each of those people individually do starts to matter.
I guess I would humbly request that you and I both pay attention to what people who need help are actually asking for. I would ask that we both notice who wins when we abdicate this single responsibility. I would remind us both that participating in the electoral process is not some kind of weird either-or with participating in decentralized community building and mutual aid, and the best people we know do both. Isn't it interesting that somehow, insidiously, without even consciously becoming aware of this belief, we have started to think that you can only do one or the other? Who is telling us that story? Who does it serve?
Anyway. I took the stupid 90 minute round trip to my polling place which was VERY hot for some reason and I stood in the stupid line and some babies waved at me and I cast my vote for Kamala Harris and I'm glad I did it in the same way I'm glad after I do the dishes or take a stupid shower. Doing work doesn't always feel like anything. I also saw a really wonderful small black and white dog that I thought was a cat on a leash. I would not have seen that dog if I hadn't gone to vote. So politics can still make you feel good!!!
*I mean all this analysis is cute and everything BUT ALSO i did switch antidepressants twice in the last year, an astonishingly grueling process that almost made me [affect the trout population]. Could these things be related? hmmmmmmm, don't understand the question, won't respond to it.
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minaharkerdailymirror · 2 days ago
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Mina stroked his face gently, "Yes Armand, I know you completely."
She wrestled with a few things in her mind, and it was time to tell him her story, "You already know the early times for me. You know about the anger I felt for what he did. No one is born into this world with an easy birth. And when I came into it, I was very angry."
A tear slipped out, she wiped it way, "You already know about the dark hunters who tortured the vampire to tell me the Great Laws just because they could. It was such a shriveled weak thing from the years they starved it, kept it filled with dead man's blood...chained down in a basement. You remember how I told you I killed the vampire and their leader? They tracked me down soon after, beat be bloody. I have....whip marks on my back still from one holding a belt. Called me a traitor to my kind. I faked being dead, never saw them again. I don't even know what happened to them. Probably died on some random hunt somewhere. Most hunters don't have a good shelf life."
"And you know about the kids, those two things took most of my sanity, I think. Or what was left of it. I've made a lot of bad decisions Armand. People died because of decisions I made, or didn't make."
It would just be easier to show him. She pulled off her shirt and left it beside her.
"I was a nurse during world war 1 and world war 2," she told him and took his hand, "Monsters were attacking to those sorts of feeding grounds, so I'd hunt at night." She pressed a scar on her hip, "That was from a grenade." Another on her shoulder, "This one from a nazi I killed. He thought he would surrender to America, he thought he had the knowledge that would get him a pardon. But as I looked at him in my company all I could think was 'how the hell could you do that to another human being and expect to get away with it?' So he didn't. She showed him the map of her body, explained each scar and where it came from. It wasn't the playful flirting that was last night. Her story was drenched in blood, so much death. While he'd tucked away from the world, Mina had been integrated in it, watched it change around her.
Not every story was as noble as killing the nazi. There were a lot of cases where it was no good decisions. She made the best one she could at the time only to find out it wasn't. Naiveté, anger, pride, arrogance, it all factored in.
Hell, sometimes she made the wrong decision because she was just so despondent and depressed that she just thought she was waiting to die.
The history she stood on the corners of; Getting the right to vote, and The Great War, and then World War 2 and Korea, and Vietnam....watching countries separate and form and dissolve. Watching her friends and loved ones born, grow, die, or were wiped out in epidemic such as the Spanish Flu and AIDS
SO many that wanted to be old taken away young....and she was still here. Maybe for him and it was fate. maybe she was just stupidly lucky.
"No one knows these stories," she told him, "No one, except you."
The men she was often with would ask, and they may know some. But she never told anyone every single scar.
"I'm so tired of fighting," she told him quietly, "I want to grow a garden with my husband and run a gallery by the water. And if that's all we do for an eternity, I would be so happy that it would be with you."
The guilt weighed in her gut as she processed what he told her. She hugged him tightly. A breakup after 77 years, Mina couldn't imagine 77 years.
When he told her she was his choice and he wanted to be her husband, Mina felt the tears well up again and she kissed him lovingly, "I want to be your wife more than anything. I love you. You deserve to be loved. Frankly by someone far better than me but I love you with everything. I want to be your comfort. I'm so sorry I pulled you back there to that place."
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davidtennantgenderenvy · 1 day ago
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A Letter From An Ex-Conservative To Her Parents On November 6th, 2024
Mom and Dad,
     When Trump got shot this summer, I remember you saying that this was all because the Left wouldn’t stop calling him Hitler. How we needed to “turn down the temperature” and stop “inciting violence.” I don’t think you understand that when people compare Trump to Hitler, it is not, in fact, just because they do not like him, but because he uses Hitlerian rhetoric on a regular basis. Obsessing over an imagined past version of a country that never truly existed. Saying that (insert frequently dehumanized other) is “poisoning the blood of the nation.” Before Hitler began the Final Solution against Jews, what did he say he planned to do? Deport them, until he realized it was too costly. I don’t think you understand that Hitler did not start putting people in death camps the second he came to power. Trump is currently in about the same position Hitler was in in the 1930s. Is it going to take him putting undocumented people in gas chambers for you to believe me? 
     You might think that I’ve only come to my current conclusions about Trump because of the lies of “the mainstream media”, which, as I’ve said numerous times, I don’t even watch. But it’s actually been largely due to the things Trump himself has said. I understand that you don’t like Biden calling Trump’s voters “garbage”, but the language Trump uses to describe his political opponents is at least as disturbing. He’s disparaged fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.” He’s proudly boasted about being the president who got Roe V Wade appealed, regardless of the estimated thousands of women who are dying because the medical treatments they need fall too close to the legal definition of abortion. A massive portion of his campaign advertisements are explicitly anti-trans. He thinks Palestinians should be moved off their land because it would make “great beachfront property.” He regularly speaks positively of and rubs elbows with the most disturbing members of the alt-right, such as Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes. He’s a bully. (you voted for a bully. Remember when I was bullied?) And if Kamala’s plans are incoherent, which admittedly some of them are, Trump’s are even more so. He doesn't have a plan. America is just another failed business to him. 
     I don’t think you’re bad people. But I do think your party is bad. This is far more than just one guy. My journey has been less one of changing any of my beliefs than realizing that the Republican Party never represented those beliefs to begin with. It is the party of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, of stripping the oppressed of their means to succeed and then asking them to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Your precious Reagan was a racist. There’s recorded evidence. His policies were racist. He enabled denial and misinformation about AIDS until it was too little too late and millions had died. And you proudly display his book on your shelf, right next to Rush Limbaugh and Pat fucking Buchanan. Your son is a gay man. How could you. 
     Being a conservative, whether you think so or not, is inherently about preserving the status quo, about making sure things stay the way they are, that the people who are down stay down, and crushing anyone who tries to make things better. I didn’t vote Democrat because I am one. I voted Democrat because it would be easier under one such administration to push this country in the direction of equity and liberty. Project 2025 was intended for the next conservative administration. Trump may deny involvement, but the foreword of one of the sections was written by none other than his own vice president. And with the House, Senate and Supreme Court all red now, it’s going to be easier than ever for him to pass any portions of it he likes. 
     I’m writing you this letter so that you know that if a nationwide abortion ban gets put in place, if schools and parents who support their children’s gender affirming care (which does NOT mean surgery) start getting investigated (which some already are), if Israel continues bombing Gaza until there’s nothing left, if billionaires continue to take up larger and larger percentages of the nation’s wealth, if immigrants who’ve lived and worked in this country for years start getting deported in droves because they couldn’t get the right paperwork, that it’s on you and people like you, even as you continue deny the very real damage done in Trump’s first presidency, the awful, awful people who felt empowered because of him. I tried for a while this summer to see if I could change your minds, but all it did was screw up my mental health and make me realize something truly painful: that you aren’t the people I thought you were. Not when your reaction to police shooting students the same age as your own daughter with rubber bullets because they don’t want their university to be complicit in a genocide is “well, what are they supposed to do? They’re the police.” Not when a man can say immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation and you still vote for him. 
     It breaks my heart that you and so many people I love have been so deeply conditioned to vote against their own best interests, to think that a government that actually helps its people without actively harming others is a childish, fanciful expectation. I think I truly believed to the depths of my soul until last night that this wouldn’t happen. That we were better than this. That we wouldn’t reelect someone who objectively ran a terrible campaign, who conducts himself with boorishness and indignity, who genuinely, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, represents everything that made me scream "Fuck America" out Laura’s car window this summer. But why should I be surprised America likes fascists? My own parents certainly seem to.
     But I hope you’re happy with your lower grocery prices, I guess. Which we probably won’t be getting anyway, because that’s not actually what Trump’s policies are going to do. 
     You sold out my friends, and entire marginalized communities, for cheaper groceries. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for that.
Lauren
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impossibleprincess35 · 5 hours ago
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Since you're an American, what are your thoughts on the comparisons of the Duchess and the Death Watch to the election? I read one of your stories and you compare them to alt-right politics in the U.S. Thx!
Heyoooooo, thanks for the ask! I'm going to go TL;DR, so please forgive me and feel free to wish you'd never asked. :)
So, I've never been a Trump voter. Never. It's been a major point of contention with close family and friends, and in the 8 years since his first campaign, it has been eye opening watching people blatantly fall for fascism in the guise of security and strength.
And so, during the pandemic, dealing with so much misinformation and seeing so many people subject others to danger to make a point about their "freedom," when I rewatched "The Clone Wars," the Mandalore storylines hit so much harder.
A lot of times, when people are hating on the Satine character and blaming her for Mandalore's fall, what I see is a lack of acknowledgement that Death Watch was so hell-bent on getting their way that they had to stage incidents to make her look weak and unfit as a ruler. They weren't starving. They weren't exiled from their system. They got a moon. They had political representation with a governor. They had resources. But instead of using everything at their disposal to do better and to evolve as a people, they used it to stage bombings, attacks, and incidents that only hurt their own people and undermined their own system.
But what Death Watch did so well was they spun a narrative that is so false that even FANS believe it.
Like, we're supposed to see that they're domestic terrorists.
But people are out here like, "Fuck Satine, she's the worst."
Oh, okay.
As an American, I've seen two viable, suitable female candidates who have lost to Donald Trump, a piece of shit grifter, a convicted felon, an impeached dirtbag of a human being, and BOTH of these women have lost.
The bar is so high for them, and it's so low for Trump.
And I see that with Satine Kryze and Pre Vizsla.
The damning theories about Satine committing genocide on her people and white-washing them of their history and culture are assumptions made from information given to us on the show by Almec, who turns out to be as corrupt as Pre Vizsla and Tal Merrik, and inferred from the animation choices made due to budget constraints; but those things are held over Satine's head and her reputation as though they are gospel. As though she herself confirmed them.
Meanwhile, Pre Vizsla is out here running an entire terrorist group that intends to destabilize Mandalore's peaceful government just to reassert themselves as strong warriors. He has shown us who he is. He shows us every time we see him on screen after his reveal as the leader of Death Watch. He commits himself to it. He has gaggles of lackeys behind him putting him up on a pedestal, enabling him.
But Satine's always the villain, and always to blame; nevermind the fact that she has proven herself to be a resilient leader who put her people above all else, including her own desires, and she fights to keep them out of the fray between the Republic and the Separatists. More than anything else, their stability and their independence is her top priority.
And I guess, for me, I see strength in Satine's diplomacy, strength in her kindness, strength in her restraint; so when I see people who only acknowledge strength in name calling, in divisiveness, in threats of violence, like Pre Vizsla and Death Watch, I'm instantly reminded of the crowd of American politics who believe that we must bully our way around the world.
The bar for women, especially women of color, is set so high that it's unattainable; but the bar for men is so low it's in hell.
And as an American who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, and who was genuinely thrilled to imagine a Harris/Walz administration, I've found myself annoyed by the remarks about her that I've read. The claims that she's not tough. That she couldn't hold her own with a room of world leaders. Because I don't see that. And I'm heartbroken to see that the popular vote wanted brute force and displays of bully behavior instead of a steady, calm hand to bring us together as a nation.
Worst of all, I fear the very possible outcome that, much like Mandalore, Americans are sacrificing their liberties for what they believe is security (ie. the xenophobic hate and the border talking points, lower grocery prices, etc.), but like Ben Franklin said, they'll lose both and deserve neither.
And in Mandalore's case, the people were scammed into believing that Satine failed them, when really, the attack on Sundari was an inside job - and when the flames of fear were stoked, the people turned on Satine, on peace, for the safety they believed Death Watch was going to bring them.
And then their asses got glassed by the Empire.
I look at what's going on around me, and I'm disappointed because I'm a dumb optimistic bitch who believed Americans were better than this. And there's a lot of blame to go around, but the vibe is off and things do not feel right. My gut tells me that the game was rigged - that Madam VP Harris was meant to fail from the word go, because the right aligned themselves to win at all costs, even at the costs of their own nation.
But Jyn Erso said it best: Rebellions are built on hope.
So, hopefully we don't get glassed..?
Jesus, how do I even end this post?
I'm sorry. I know you're wishing you'd never asked. <3
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arckade · 2 months ago
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The Gracious Moonlight's Champion
Blessed By The Moonlight Herself
or
POV : You're one of the many people Soimay brutally fucking slaughtered
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moxie-girl · 6 months ago
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Star Wars clone wars-era tumblr dashboard simulator! this meme format is so old sorryyyy
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🌳 treehuggr Follow
hate hate HAAATE that holoblr is so core-centric and you’re expected to post in basic or people just comment asking you to translate. I should be able to post in shryiiwook.
⬜️ senatesux-deactivated00192…
Hey, your choice of Shyriiwook as an “exotic” language to post in ties inherently into old colonialist views on Wookies and I need you to be aware of that, if it wasn’t intentional. Many people on the holonet these days…
Read More
🌳 treehuggr Follow
hi! op here. I’m a wookie.
🪐 outer-rim-4lyfe Follow
HELPPPPPP
#core holoblr users stop assuming everyone is human challenge
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🛸 fuckthatoldman Follow
ok but whys grandmaster yoda kinda… 🥵🥵
🧑🏾‍🚀 sora-the-explora Follow
Everybody on here claiming to be attracted to GILFs is lying except for this guy
#everyone unfollow me i wanna be alone with them
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5️⃣ 55555555 Follow
some of the ppl posting on here against clone rights are so funny like do you have any idea how many clones are on holoblr?? have fun losing like all ur followers lmao
#what do u think we’re doing between deployments??? just standing around waiting to fight????? #clone rights #cloneblr
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🌃 coru-ssant Follow
I sure hope my pet piece of flimsi is doing well! good thing I left my apartment window open so he could get some fresh air while I was at work :)
🌃 coru-ssant Follow
by the stars this can’t be happening
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🧋 bubble-tea-bounty Follow
⚒ keldabekisses Follow
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#anyways vote vanilla extract for mand’alor it’s what jaster would’ve wanted #mandalore #mando discourse #<- for those of u who have it filtered
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🦾 hero-with-many-fears Follow
anakin skywalker is 22??? he should be at da club….
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🌌 posts-from-a-darker-galaxy Follow
so was anyone gonna tell me they found out the chancellor is a sith or was I supposed to learn it from a CNL skit???
🌝 pizzathehutt Follow
posts that make you read op’s url
🚀 hyperdriven Follow
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#op if you go asking at enough temples eventually a sith might answer
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bleue-flora · 7 months ago
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You’d be right of course.
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Awesamdude - [Foolish, Sam & Q being unhinged-read the chat ;D]
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Sapnap - [c!Dream rebuilding c!Tubbo’s house after c!Tommy burned it down]
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Tommyinnit [Dream: no more killing, Sapnap: immediately kills Alyssa]
Sooo much lore….
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and I mean… it’d be fitting narratively speaking…
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homoquartz · 1 month ago
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hi!! if you would like to join me in being angry, please consider this new gem of journalism bestowed upon us peasants today:
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(Article link is here)
In case you doubt it, yes, that is correct. Major studios will now assemble panels of racists, homophobes, transphobes, and misogynists to dictate how much us squirming pathetic little brown queers get to be represented on screen.
They were already doing this, but now they're comfortable saying it outright. As I have said before, THIS SHOULD ALARM YOU.
This post is long so the rest is below, backed up with data:
Disney is tacitly admitting that they canceled The Acolyte because they would rather alienate their marginalized fanbase than their rabid, genocidal straight white male one. And you can be damn sure this is also why the likes of Netflix and HBO Max are so comfortable discarding highly acclaimed queer shows like Warrior Nun, Our Flag Means Death, the Owl House, and Dead Boy Detectives.
The only shows about marginalized people allowed to go on are the ones that, against all odds, become hit successes (eg Heartstopper), at which point their earning potential outweighs their sin of being brown or gay. I want to emphasize that these shows must be breakout hits - shows that perform on par with straighter, whiter releases aren't given this grace.
These companies are going to obscure the reality of their actions by talking about profits and public image, but rest assured they would find a way to justify this even if the vast majority of viewers were brown and queer. Because it's about maintaining power. It's part of a nationwide surge against inclusion.
Do you remember the IGN article that just came out that revealed Disney's insistence that Riley be made to look "less gay" in Inside Out 2?
Do you remember the Autostraddle article which crunched the numbers to show that queer shows are cancelled more often and earlier than others?
How about GLAAD's breakdown of queer shows cancelled last year? Here's a snippet of the data:
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❗️Both Autostraddle and GLAAD have found that 1 in 4 queer shows are axed. This is DOUBLE the rate for streaming shows overall, which is just at 12%.
Variety has a data breakdown here. What's interesting is that Netflix is actually pretty moderate with its cancellations, yet the majority of cancelled queer shows belong to Netflix.
I had a harder time finding data for shows featuring leads of color. If anyone has links, I'll add them here.
In conclusion:
They are banning our books. They are cancelling our shows. They are silencing our stories. You know why.
You can help in a few ways. One is to stream as many cancelled shows centering POC and/or queer people as you can. Another option is to cancel your streaming subscriptions and vote with your wallet (this is what I have done).
There's also a bunch of petitions for cancelled shows I strongly recommend signing. Pick a show and google it plus "petition" and it will turn up.
You can go to Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB and 5-star your chosen shows, as well as each episode.
You can message the streaming services on social media requesting renewal. Reaching out to influencers in spheres related to this topic, as well as media outlets, is also a good idea.
Finally and most importantly, talk to your friends and family. Ask them to do something. Ask them to tell people. The more people who stand against a hateful status quo, the less powerful it becomes.
I believe this can be turned around if we make enough noise. These streaming services should revive their queer shows, market them properly, and support them like any other show.
I sound silly now, but watch this space in two years.
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jewishvitya · 4 months ago
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Sometimes the conversations about voting in the US feel like...
Person A: "I just watched this man fund the deaths of tens of thousands. I know some of their names, I watched their stories, I watched their tears and cried with them, I watched their deaths and felt sick with horror. I don't think I can stomach giving him the power to do more of that, even if the other person will do the same and more."
Person B: "yeah, and for me it's also very personal. My family members were killed in these attacks. I'm still struggling with the grief of it. And now I'm supposed to vote for the man that enabled their murders. I feel completely abandoned by the world. I'm being told there's no option to save my people, I should give up on them, and - while the genocide against us is ongoing- help the rest of you."
And instead of meeting this sentiment on the human level, instead of having compassion and understanding, the response is... calling people psyops, yelling at them that they're Trump supporters, minimizing Biden's part in this, or sometimes making charts and infographics.
Like, this?
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I'm not arguing against this. I don't know the details of every line, so I'm not saying this isn't correct. I wouldn't know, my understanding of the US political system is very incomplete, I'm not trying to argue facts.
But I see people feeling like they're standing in front of two options, being told "this one murdered many children and will continue if given the opportunity. The other one wants to do the same, and kill even more children. Now hand one of them the gun."
And they're being yelled down in response when they say this is too unimaginably horrible.
Even if I'm assuming that everyone doing this is also spending energy yelling at Biden's party to change course and do better, this is... hard. And really disturbing to me.
"Look, here's my chart that shows how your friend's family is dead anyway."
I told a friend that asked for my opinion, Israel is hoping for a Trump victory, the Israeli government feels that Trump would allow them even more freedom. I'm not telling anyone to choose inaction, because I do feel it's worth preventing, if this is what my government wants.
I just can't imagine seeing someone grieving the horror of so much death and suffering that the mind can't comprehend the scale of them, and telling them off for being "one issue voters."
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strnilolo · 1 year ago
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clumsy girl
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summary: matt’s girlfriend is rather clumsy.
warnings: cursing, use of y/n, kisses kinda, jokes about death, idk what else. lowercase intentional
an: i kinda don’t like this one guys. BUT this won the vote so ask and you shall receive.
an2: i do have some requests guys and im very sorry that i haven’t gotten to them, its just hard for me to get motivated unless i have a really good idea for a fic and can play it out in my head. but i will be working on requests i promise.
|navigation|
you and matt are sat on the couch together, aimlessly scrolling through your phones. matt leans his head on your shoulder before giggling slightly, sitting upright next to you.
“look at this video, isn’t this funny?” matt moves his phone in front of you, scrolling to restart the video.
you watch as different clips cut across the screen, laughing lightly to yourself. the video had been a compilation of matt saving you from falling, hitting your head, hurting yourself, etc.
“you’re so clumsy, huh? always need me to save you” matt smirks at your annoyed expression.
“i am not that clumsy, matthew, you’ve probably tripped and fallen more times than me” you roll your eyes as you sit back against your teasing boyfriend.
“well.. what about that one time at dinner, or the time you almost tripped up the stairs?”
matt went on and on about the different times he was your ‘knight in shining armor.’
two months ago
“okay guys now we’re going to be decorating the cupcakes and our lovely mother is going to be trying them and rating them 1-10” you listened patiently as nick loudly addressed the camera, informing the viewers of our next step.
“oh shit” your tube of icing dropped onto the floor right as the clip began rolling. you quickly bend to the side to grab the tube as matt reached his hand to cover the corner of the table, protecting your head from bashing into it. sitting up, you thank matt for his help before continuing to decorate your cupcake.
currently
“oh my god, i actually do remember that. people were making edits for weeks” the two of you laughed at the fond memory, before matt began to speak again.
“do you remember the time you almost fell down the stairs during our house tour?”
“oh please don’t remind me” groaning at the embarrassing image in your head.
several months earlier
“okay so now y/n is going to lead us upstairs to the room we share” matt followed behind you, talking to the camera as the vlog went on.
“oh fuck!” you grip onto the railing, feeling yourself slip on the wooden staircase.
“jesus y/n-” you feel matt’s hand on your back, steadying you on the stairs before he releases his grip, allowing you to continue up.
“you have got to be more careful, you could’ve killed us all” nick laughs from behind matt, dramatically grasping onto the rail.
“whatever, thanks matt” you smile at the boy, playfully rolling your eyes.
“okay guys so we made it upstairs, barely, now to show you where i sleep” matt faces the camera towards you as the four of you continue to vlog a tour of your shared living space.
currently
“jesus, that was embarrassing” you cover your face with your hands in attempt to hide your blush.
“no it wasn’t, you just don’t want the world to see that you’d die without me” matt pulls your hands from your face, playfully placing kisses around your forehead and cheeks.
“i guess i would die without you, huh?”
“a very painfully and stupid death, yes” the two of you laugh at the memories, enjoying the little amount of quality time you’re able to get.
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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 2 months ago
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Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 12: Please Call Me Only If You Are Coming Home]
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A/N: Only 1 chapter left!!! 🥳 Be sure to vote in our final poll, which will be pinned at the top of my blog per usual 🥰
Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍
Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon™️, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes.
Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.
Chapter title is a lyric from: “Homecoming” by Green Day.
Word count: 5.8k
💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜
Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🥰
“What the hell do you need that for?” Cregan says to Helaena in the next aisle over, sounding alarmed. You are raiding a Kwik Stop just outside Colusa, California, following Route 20 west towards the Pacific Ocean. But when Helaena replies, her voice is perfectly soothing, lyrical, too serene for the way the world is now.
“It’s not for me. It’s just in case anyone ever finds themselves in need of one.” And this makes sense, even though you can’t see what it is she’s taken off the disorderly, ransacked shelves; Helaena is always picking up trinkets to keep stowed away in her burlap messenger bag until their utility becomes essential.
Cregan is relieved. “Oh, okay, gotcha. Whew, you almost gave me a heart attack there, Miss LaeLae…”
Ice is stretched out and dozing on the cool tile floor. Luke and Rhaena are keeping watch by the front of the store. Aegon is standing by the decommissioned Icee machine and showing Daeron which route he’s marked on his map and why.
“Why do I need to know this?” Daeron is asking.
Aegon snorts. “In case I get killed, dumbass…”
Fluttering pieces of paper hang taped to the glass doors of the empty refrigerators: Don’t go towards Sacramento; People in Santa Rosa killed my brother for his car; Andrew Lounsbury, if you see this we are headed to Aunt Sarah’s house, meet us there! Meanwhile, in your own aisle, Aemond is watching you as your fingers flit through packages of Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers and Life Savers Gummies, separating the trash from the ones that haven’t been opened yet. His expression is wary, uncertain. “What?” you ask him.
“Are you…okay?” Aemond says, low enough that no one else will hear.
Of course you aren’t; you keep walking into rooms and looking for Rio, and he’s not there. But you know what Aemond means. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Did I hurt you? Are you…” He steps closer, the blue of his eye gleaming with attentive, penitent concern, sins he is certain he must have committed. “Are you sore, are you bleeding at all?”
You smile, just the ghost of a curve at the edge of your lips. “No, really, I feel fine.” And in your body, this is true. There is a tension that has vanished from your muscles, a softness in your bones, not shards of glass shifting beneath skin but living things like the branches of trees, flexible, green, damp life awash within.
“I was trying to…you know…take it slow and be super gentle, but then…by the end…”
“Aemond, you did everything right.”
And he exhales all the iron-heavy dread he’s been carrying around since he woke up this morning to find you already gone—showing Aegon how to flip Bisquick pancakes as Cregan browned them in a skillet in the woodstove downstairs—and you realize how much you’ve scared him. “I’m really sorry about…” He touches his chin restlessly. “I should have asked you if you wanted me to pull out, I just got, uh…kind of…distracted.”
Your smile grows; now you can feel it in your eyes, warm and luminous. “It’s alright. I did too.”
He is hopeful. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t have told you to stop. And anyway, I think we’re safe.” But of course you’ve lost track of the days, and in your dark trance of grief and Tramadol you were entirely unaware of the rhythms of your body, pangs of desire or clear ample wetness, biological cues, primal timekeeping.
“Cool,” Aemond says, now trying to sound casual. “And next time…are you thinking that I should try to…maybe…just to be sure…?”
You shrug, then tell him the first thing that comes into your mind, that flashes in your skull like lightning bugs at dusk. “I’m thinking that life is too short and too rare to put effort into preventing it.”
Aemond’s eyebrows go up, but he doesn’t seem disappointed. “So we’ll see what happens.”
“If you’re onboard.”
“I’m totally onboard. I just want to take care of you. I…” He glances down at his palms—open, clean—and then looks back up at you. “I’ve never had anything that felt right before. Not my family, not myself, nothing. But this feels right. And it’s where I want to be forever.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” And this is what everyone thought: Jace, Baela, Rio. But you make the oath anyway, a hollow promise that echoes like a windchime.
“Me either,” Aemond vows.
You turn to leave the aisle and your backpack hits the shelf, knocking something off the top and onto the tile floor, where it lands with a thump. You gasp, and people come running; but it’s only a box of Honey Buns that was stashed somewhere too high for you to see. “It’s nothing,” you assure them. “We’re all okay, no need to get excited.”
“Death by Little Debbie,” Aegon says, chuckling nervously, his heart still racing.
You pick up the box and think of Rio with abrupt, violent clarity: he’s playing with French-speaking kids on the beach outside Djibouti City, he’s drinking cans of Guinness with you under a full moon on Diego Garcia, he’s reaching out from the pier to pet finless porpoises in Chinhae, he’s bleeding to death on a floor in Winnemucca, Nevada. Your vision is blurring with tears; your throat is knotted and scalding.
“I want him back,” Aegon says softly.
“I know. I do too.” You open the box of Honey Buns and pass one to Aegon first, then distribute the rest. There are only six total. Helaena tries to give hers to Cregan, but he rips it in half so they can share; Aemond insists you take the last one. You eat it wordlessly, sugar melting into your bloodstream.
“I think I saw a minivan down the side street,” Luke says as he chews his Honey Bun, waving his binoculars with his free hand. “It’s probably out of gas like all the others, but…”
“We’ll check it out,” Aemond replies, and everyone follows him as he departs from the Kwik Stop.
It’s a green Kia Carnival with a zombie trapped inside: once a young man in a Nirvana t-shirt, now a ghoul that paws at the glass with its oozing hands and licks the windows, long animal drags of a decomposing tongue. But the fuel cap is still closed, and while the van is turned off you can see the keys dangling from the ignition.
“Think there’s any gas left in the tank?” Daeron says brightly. The Targaryen beach house, following the indirect route you must take to avoid the cities, is about 250 miles from where you are now in Colusa. That’s two weeks on foot, or as few as five hours by car.
Rhaena goes for the driver’s side door. “Let’s find out.” She yanks on the handle to discover it’s locked. Cregan uses his axe to shatter the window, and the zombie tumbles gracelessly out onto the pavement, rancid skin and necrotic muscle ripping from its bones. As it crawls towards the siren call of fresh meat, Ice barks viciously and Cregan swings his axe. The blade slices easily through the monster’s skull, and its flailing, murderous limbs go still.
Rhaena reaches through the broken window to unlock the doors, climbs into the driver’s seat, and turns the key in the ignition. There is a blessed sound: the thunder of a living engine. “Half a tank!” Rhaena cheers.
Aegon gags as he opens the passenger’s side door. “Oh, it reeks so bad…”
“We’ll roll down all the windows,” Aemond says curtly.
“There are organs on the floor! What the fuck is that, a liver?!”
Aemond gives it a cursory glance. “Looks like a spleen.”
“I don’t want to sit near a spleen! I don’t even know what a spleen does!”
“Then throw it outside somewhere!” Aemond snaps. “You’re thirty years old, you can’t clean a minivan?!”
Aegon grumbles as he uses sheets of Burger King coupons from the glovebox to toss zombie guts into the grass. Aemond wipes down the hard surfaces with antiseptic. Luke keeps watch and Daeron shoots down several zombies as they lurch out of nearby houses and towards the Kia Carnival. You ask Helaena for the box of 9mm bullets in her messenger bag and she gives it to you. You load your Beretta M9, stow the remaining bullets in your backpack, and take aim at the approaching zombies to make sure you still know how to get into the rhythm, that you can still be a killer when the circumstances require it. You are out of practice, but you’re beginning to feel more like yourself again. Aemond brought you back. They all did.
When the minivan is as clean as possible, everyone hurries inside and Rhaena drives west on Route 20 under the afternoon sun. At the intersection with Route 53, Aegon directs Rhaena to follow it south around Clear Lake, then to take Route 29 west through rolling hills that were once filled with vineyards, wineries, music, weddings, horse farms. Now the land is hushed, and wild, and dotted with silhouettes that sway drunkenly and swipe at vultures when they try to gobble tattered strips of putrid flesh that unravel from bones like the bandages of a mummy.
The Kia Carnival rides Route 175 west and then Route 101 south, where the earth turns dry and rocky and barren, reminding you of northern Nevada and piling stones of heartache in your belly. In a place called Pieta—an old 1800s railroad depot, according to a plaque mounted just off the road—Rhaena slows down to get a better look at something that doesn’t make any sense. There is a souvenir shop of rocks and gems, now long out of business, and in a shed beside the main building hangs a gruesome specimen that you can see through the open doors. It has two arms and two legs, but it’s not a zombie. Its flayed flesh is a vibrant, healthy red; parts of the thighs and chest have been carefully carved away like cuts of meat are sliced from beef cattle. It is suspended on meat hooks. It is being butchered.
Cregan notes uneasily: “That ain’t an opossum or a bison.”
“I think it’s human,” Aemond says, horrified.
“Guess we’re not stopping for the night anytime soon,” Rhaena quips, then floors the gas pedal.
One of Aegon’s mixtapes spins in the CD player. From the speakers flows Somebody To You by The Vamps.
~~~~~~~~~~
“Do you see anyone now?” Aemond asks.
Luke speaks without looking away from his binoculars. “And for the fourth time, my answer remains no.”
After a night’s rest in a cabin at Camp Liahona Redwoods in Sonoma County, you followed California State Route 1 down the coast of the Pacific Ocean until the Kia Carnival finally ran out of gas just south of Olema, a small town founded in the 1850s. A ten-mile hike has brought you to the cliff where the fabled Targaryen beach house is perched with a few hours left before sunset. The ailing daylight is golden, the wave crests glittering, gulls cawing as they swoop through the salt-lashed air. From the road that twists like a snake through the slopes of Bolinas—thick with redwoods, Douglas firs, oaks, cypresses, tall grass that whips in the wind and tufts of eucalyptus—Luke is searching the property. It is less a house than a mansion, a museum, a monument, a work of art: sharp rectangular lines and glass walls, balconies, fountains, a pool, a garden.
Cregan whistles. “A place like that has to cost a million dollars.”
“Try fifteen million,” Aemond says distractedly, and Cregan gawks at him.
“Well, from what I can see it looks safe,” Luke declares, lowering his binoculars. “No zombies.”
“You really think they’re in there?” Daeron asks eagerly. “Mom and Criston?”
“Yeah, kid,” Aegon says, squeezing Daeron’s shoulder; but his voice is morose, like he knows he has surrendered to something, a path of least resistance, a hostile planet’s gravity. “Of course they are. Let’s go say hi.”
At the end of the driveway, the five-car garage is open. There is an Alfa Romeo, a Porsche, a Ferrari, a Ducati motorcycle, and a white Chevy Tahoe, which Aemond says belongs to Criston. And there are other items of interest mounted on the walls.
“Yes!” Daeron says as he runs to a quiver full of arrows for his compound bow. Aegon lifts a golf club out of its bag and makes an imaginary putt, getting reacquainted with the feeling of his hands on the grip.
“This is an iron,” Aegon says when he catches you watching him. In the shade of the garage, he pushes his neon green plastic sunglasses up into his windswept hair. “It’s metal all the way through and gives you good control over the shot. Drivers are for long-distance, and wedges and putters don’t have enough power. But an iron is just right.”
“Are you going to teach me how to golf?”
Aegon grins, his first real smile all day. “You think you can handle it, SunChips?”
“I don’t,” you answer honestly, and he laughs.
“If you teach me how to shoot, I’ll teach you how to golf.”
“An unfair trade! My skill is useful.”
Aemond knocks on the door that connects the garage to the main house. “Mom? Criston?” There is no response; all of you wait for one, listening intently through the crashes of waves and reverberating gull shrieks. Ice begins to pace agitatedly and nudges Cregan’s hands. He looks at Aemond, half-fear and half-sympathy.
“No,” Aemond says. “No, she��s wrong.”
“She might be,” Cregan replies, steady and ever-agreeable. Helaena is wringing her small, gentle hands. Everyone is watching Aemond to see what they should do next.
He pounds on the door again, this time with a closed fist. “Mom, we’re home! Mom? Criston? It’s me! It’s Aemond!”
Still, there is no answer. Aemond tries the doorknob, and it turns unimpeded. It is unlocked. He opens the door, peeks inside, and then crosses through the threshold. The rest of you trail him like he has eight shadows, the last in the shape of a wolf.
You step into the living room: wide open windows, the ocean breeze breathing through the house. The air tastes like sand and saltwater, sun and blue skies. There are three-story glass walls that overlook the water, a staircase leading up to the next floor, pristine white couches, black end tables topped with vases full of dead flowers, grey marble floors, bejeweled golden crosses that glint cruelly in the bloody late-afternoon light, family photographs on the mantle of the fireplace. There are many pictures of Aemond, and some of Helaena and Daeron as well. You don’t see a single photo of Aegon. He notices you scanning the snapshots in the frames and looks away, ashamed.
“Mom?” Aemond calls, his voice ricocheting through the vast, open space, clinical like a hospital or a morgue. “Criston?”
“Grandpa?” Helaena says meekly. Cregan is clutching his axe and peering around vigilantly. Ice whines and paces, her strange yellow eyes glowing like flecks of gold in a stream. Rhaena tries to soothe her with ear scratches; Ice begins to howl, low long mournful sounds.
You catch Aegon’s attention when he glances at you again. “This isn’t right,” you whisper. “If they were here, they would have heard us by now.”
Aegon turns to his brother. “Hey, Aemond…”
And then there are footsteps from upstairs, slow and shambling. Everyone looks, and it appears at the top of the steps like a mirage or a night terror, like a wrathful god glaring down from Mount Olympus. Long, filthy strands of white hair hang from what is left of its scalp. Its gore-stained teeth are bared. Its eyes are cloudy like the poisoned atmosphere of another planet, one gasp enough to singe your lungs and infect your bloodstream. The snarls pour out ragged and rasping from its disintegrating vocal chords. The man was wearing a suit when he died, and the pale blue shirt is now splattered with crimson and bits of rotting flesh. The black leather shoes on its feet clop as the zombie descends the staircase with staggering, unnatural steps, its decaying arms grasping for the mortals who wait below.
Daeron says numbly: “Dad?”
Aemond’s eye is wide and dazed. Ice is growling. Helaena is screaming and fleeing towards the wall; Cregan embraces her and she clings to him. “Aemond? Buddy?” Cregan shouts. “How do you want to handle this?” And what he means is: Do you want to kill it, or should someone else? Do you need time to process what’s happened? How can we help you?
“Aemond?” you say. You touch his arm; he doesn’t react. Rhaena draws her Ruger but doesn’t shoot yet. She is looking to Aemond for permission. Luke is standing in front of Rhaena and forcing her backwards as the zombie nears the bottom of the staircase. Now you can smell it: dark wet rot, spoiled meat, blood and oily fat and organs putrefying in a threadbare patchwork of flesh.
“Dad!” Daeron wails, and he’s covering his face with his hands because he knows what this must mean for the rest of his family too.
“Aemond?!” Rhaena yells. “Aemond, what do you want us to do?!”
You reach for your M9 as the zombie’s leather shoes settle on the marble floor. This seems to shake Aemond from his paralysis.
“No,” he says. “I’ll do it.” He grabs his Glock and aims, but his finger hesitates on the trigger. And you can see the ghosts of the people who have died by his hands lurking in the crystalline blue of his remaining eye: Alys, Jace, Baela and her baby…and now Viserys Targaryen too.
In the lull, in the indecision, Aegon roars and swings his golf club. The metal head collides with the zombie’s skull. Weak corroded bone collapses; blood and brains the color of black mold leak out onto the polished marble.
“It wasn’t enough, huh?!” Aegon screams, then hits the zombie again. The corpse crumples to the floor, but Aegon isn’t done yet. “You couldn’t just fuck everything up when you were alive, you had to keep torturing us from beyond the grave, you sick bastard, you selfish prick, what is wrong with you?!” He whacks the carcass with his golf club again and again. “I hate you! I hate you! You deserved so much worse than this! We crossed an entire goddamn country, and Jace died, and Baela died, and Rio died, all so we could get back here, and now it’s all for nothing because you’ve destroyed everyone you’ve ever touched! I fucking hate you!”
Aegon strikes the zombie one last time—the skull is a pulverized soup of gore and bone fragments—and before anyone can reach for him, he has bolted up the steps to search the rest of the house. You find them in their final resting places: bones in the hallway interspersed with gold rings and a medallion of Saint Irene of Thessaloniki, bones in the shower pierced with stainless steel surgical screws from hip and knee replacements, bones in the master bedroom entangled with shreds of a bloodstained silk nightgown and long locks of auburn hair. Daeron is sobbing, and Cregan takes Helaena outside to the garden to calm down, and Aemond wanders through the rooms in shock. You don’t know what to say to him; you remember how nothing anyone said made a difference when Rio died. But Aegon is furious. He tears away from everyone and goes to his bedroom: racks full of CDs, neon green blankets, an acoustic guitar propped in one corner. Then he ravages his hiding places—inside drawers, under his mattress, on tiny shelves he carved into the walls behind golf and Green Day posters—and collects mint tins. Then he pours out the white powder inside onto his desk and arranges it into lines like contrails behind airplanes, like wagon trails across the earth.
You try to stop him. “Aegon, wait, please don’t—”
“Get the fuck out,” he hisses, and for the first time you see the cold reptilian sheen of something like hate in his eyes. “You don’t have to pretend to love me. I can be alone. I’m used to it.”
“Aegon, I’m not—”
“They’re gone. You can leave too.” Then he slams the door and locks it.
~~~~~~~~~~
While Aegon is upstairs getting high and Helaena is downstairs inventorying supplies in the massive walk-in pantry, the rest of you use shovels from the garage to bury what is left of the bodies in the backyard, unceremonious shallow graves, the soil too rocky for anything more elaborate. Rhaena uses her jagged sliver of slate to mark stones with their names and a few kind words about each of them; but Viserys’ stone is left blank. Then Rhaena returns inside to help Helaena prepare for dinner, while Daeron inspects the perimeter of the house with Cregan and Ice. Luke uses a telescope near the pool not to gaze up at the rising stars but to study the neighboring properties.
Aemond murmurs as he stands in front of the four graves: “I should have gotten here sooner. Maybe I could have saved them.”
“You still have a family,” you say, begging him to believe that there are things worth living for. “You have Aegon and Daeron and Helaena, Rhaena, Luke, Cregan. And you have me.”
Aemond stares out over the Pacific Ocean. The sky above is red and lavender, fire and dreams. “How do we get to Diego Garcia?” He is only half-joking.
“Well you just find a boat and row about 10,000 miles that way.”
He sighs and drags his trembling fingers through his hair. It has always been his job to know what happens next, and now he doesn’t. Gulls squawk and wheel in the air. His right cheek glistens with tears.
“I never saw the ocean until I joined the Navy,” you say, and Aemond looks over at you, curious but not wanting to react in the wrong way and scare you into going quiet again. He’s always mining for details of your past, and you’re endlessly evading him. But perhaps you have been too secretive. He wants to know these things because he wants to know you, and you have no idea how long you’ll be here to shed your mysteries. If a story dies with you, it dies forever.
“Really?”
“Yeah. My mother…Mama, I always called her Mama…she went to Virginia Beach a few times while I was growing up, and that was her favorite place in the world. But she never took me with her. She’d go with my aunt or my oldest brothers. So when I got to basic training on the shore of Lake Michigan, that was the closest thing to an ocean I’d ever seen, and it absolutely amazed me.”
“Lake Michigan,” Aemond repeats, trying not to sound like he’s mocking you.
You smile. “And then of course I ended up in some more impressive places. But compared to Soft Shell, Lake Michigan was a whole different planet.”
“Soft Shell?”
“Like softshell turtles. They’re one of those animals that are so ugly they’re almost cute. We have a lot of them in Kentucky. Well, we used to. Maybe people ate them all when the food ran out.”
“Soft Shell, Kentucky,” Aemond says. “What was it like? I mean…I know you left, and I know you had good reasons…but I’ve never been to Kentucky. I’ve never really been to Appalachia period.”
“It’s beautiful. You get all four seasons, and you’re out in nature all the time, and it feels old, like hardly anything has changed there in thousands of years. You feel connected to the earth. I loved the forests and the mountains. I don’t think I realized how much I loved certain things about where I’m from until I’d been gone for years. I didn’t leave because I had to get away from Kentucky. I left because I had to get away from who I was when I was there, you know? Someone lonely and helpless. But how my family was isn’t Kentucky’s fault.”
“No,” Aemond muses. “I suppose not.” You begin walking together back towards the house.
“Ready for more bad news?” Luke asks, and gestures for you and Aemond to peer through the telescope. Aemond lets you go first, and immediately you see what Luke means. There are zombies in the surrounding hills, and not just a few. There are hundreds, stumbling around aimlessly and posing no current threat; but you are not safe here.
“We don’t have enough people to defend ourselves,” Aemond says once he’s taken a look, tapping his chin in that way that he does when he’s fearful but trying to hide it.
“No, we don’t,” Luke agrees.
“And there aren’t many natural resources here to subsist on. Even the fishing prospects aren’t great without a boat or a pier.”
“Right,” Luke says.
You wonder if Aemond is thinking the same thing you are. He might not know what has to happen next, but you do.
~~~~~~~~~~
The dining room table—large enough to seat twenty—is illuminated with candles, meticulously arranged with china and silverware, and cluttered with canned soups from brands you’ve never seen before: Amy’s, Pacific Foods, Health Valley. There are cases of Perrier and San Pellegrino to drink, and bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild red wine. Everyone else is here except Aegon. You are just about to go find him when he comes rushing down the staircase and into the dining room. He is wearing clothes from his closet here: a salmon pink polo that emphasizes his sunburn, khaki shorts, a white puka shell necklace, Sperry Bahama sneakers. The left shoe just barely fits over the bandages still protecting his healing left leg. There are fingerprints of white powder on the front of his shirt.
“Oh, look!” he announces. “Isn’t this precious? A family dinner?”
“Aegon, please sit down,” Aemond says briskly.
“Come on, it’ll be just like old times. We have all four of us kids, and then…Rhaena, you can be my dear departed Grandpa Otto, you just have to scowl at everyone…and Luke can be Criston.”
Luke is confused. “What—?”
“No no no! Don’t worry. It’s a very easy part. All you have to do is gaze worshipfully at Aemond and talk about how brilliant he is. There’s really not much to it, and honestly you do a lot of that already. And then…” Aegon floats by you, skimming his palm down the length of your hair. Something about the weight of his hand gives you goosebumps: careless, careful, fleeting, intimate. He sighs: “My beautiful, tortured mother.”
“Aegon, sit down,” Aemond orders.
“Father!” Aegon cries out suddenly, spotting Cregan at the head of the table. Cregan looks around the dining room, baffled. “You’ve joined us! How unusual! Did your Titanic replicas spontaneously combust? Did the world end? Well, actually, it sort of did…”
“Buddy, I have no earthly clue what you’re trying to—”
“Now this is a tough part,” Aegon says forcefully. “Patriarch of the Targaryen dynasty, big shoes to fill! But don’t worry, I’m here to help. I’ll give you your lines. All you have to do is repeat after me, okay?”
Cregan studies him and does not assent.
Aegon slams both palms down onto the table. “You’re so fucking stupid, Aegon. You’re a humiliation, Aegon. Why can’t you be smart like Aemond, or sweet like Helaena, or obedient like Daeron? Why did my firstborn child turn out to be such a fucking waste?”
“I’m not going to say that,” Cregan replies quietly.
“Say it,” Aegon seethes.
Now Daeron is weeping between spoonfuls of Amy’s tortilla soup straight from the can. “I want to go home.”
“We are home,” Aemond says.
“This isn’t home anymore, Aemond,” Daeron sniffles.
Aegon is still trying to feed Cregan lines. “Have you found a wife yet, Aegon? No, of course you haven’t. You’ve got hands like a rat and a disposition to match. You’re an overgrown vermin, you’re a plague to every house you enter. Who would fuck you out of anything but greed or pity?”
“Aegon, please stop,” Aemond pleads, wincing and rubbing his forehead.
Helaena folds her arms atop the table and rests her head on them, hiding her face. Luke and Rhaena keep their eyes downcast. Daeron reaches for a bottle of red wine, but Aegon swats his hand away.
“Nope. Illegal. You’re not 21.”
“Aegon, seriously, I’m so over that joke—”
“Shut up. You can’t even get a tattoo without parental consent.”
“Our parents are dead!” Daeron shouts. “They died terrible deaths and they’re never coming back and you’re making everything worse!”
“Then get rid of me! Put me out on the street and I won’t be anyone’s problem anymore! I’ll get murdered or eaten and it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you!”
Helaena breaks down sobbing, and before Aegon can register what’s happening Cregan scoops him up off the floor and throws him over one broad shoulder. Then Cregan lugs him upstairs as Aegon struggles and yowls and punches at Cregan’s back, all in vain. You can hear a lot of commotion and then finally Cregan reappears, sweat beading on his brow but otherwise composed.
“I tied him to his bedframe with an extension cord,” Cregan says. “I don’t think he’ll be making any more trouble this evening.”
“Thank you,” Aemond replies, defeated.
“If he’s going to be up there all night, he’ll need water and food,” you say. “And enough blankets to make sure he’s warm.” It gets chilly when the sun goes down here, as low as the 50s. You grab two bottles of Perrier off the table and stand to bring them upstairs to Aegon, but Cregan gently takes them out of your hands.
“I’ll make sure he’s well supplied, Miss Chips,” Cregan insists, and you are convinced he thinks he’s doing you a favor. He doesn’t want Aegon to have the opportunity to upset anybody further. And yet a part of you is undeniably disappointed.
Aegon has been gone for ten minutes, and you miss him already.
~~~~~~~~~~
In Aemond’s childhood bedroom, a huge, impersonal, spartan space, the very few pieces of furniture all in the same color scheme of white and navy blue, you cannot say anything to bring his family back to life, or his friends, or the possibilities of what his life might have been before the dead began to walk. But you remember what he did for you when Rio died and you were sinking in dark, numb despair, and so you take Aemond’s hands and place them on your body—skimming under your t-shirt, circling around your waist—offering yourself like a sacrifice that you both desperately need, like a shot of antivenom that will only buy you hours. He draws you into his lap, and beneath your palms and your lips and your thighs, you can feel him coming back to you, filling up with light like a horizon at dawn.
“I’m still here,” you whisper as he throws you down onto the bed, eases himself into you, carries you away like a ship coasting out into open water. I don’t ever want to be anywhere but here.
Aemond holds you after, ensnared in sweat-damp sheets and entwined fingers, and he confesses: “I knew it was possible that they might not still be alive. Logically, I knew that. But it was like I never allowed myself to feel it. And now it’s…it’s…it’s all at once and it’s too much. I can’t fathom that I’ll never see them again. But I don’t even have time to mourn. I need to figure out where we’re going next.”
“Aemond?”
His lips to your forehead, his voice a drowsy murmur: “Hm?”
“I have to tell Rio’s family what happened to him.”
He pulls back to look at you. “You want to go to Oregon?”
“What if Odessa really is safe?”
At first he is bewildered; then he begins to consider it. “Criston’s Tahoe is in the garage. If we siphon the gas left in all the vehicles, we might have enough to get us halfway there.”
“That’s a lot better than none of the way there.”
“We’ll all have to vote on it. The trip will be dangerous.”
“Everything is now.”
“Almost everything,” he teases, his hand sliding down between your legs, taking you far away again.
~~~~~~~~~~
In the morning, you find Aegon at the cliffside smoking one of his Marlboro Golds, slow meditative drags, eyes bloodshot with lack of sleep. That’s alright. He can nap in the Tahoe. Rhaena won’t need his directions for a while; you’ll stay northbound on Route 1 for 200 miles before cutting inland as you near the Oregon border.
You sit down on the sandy, shrub-strewn ground beside Aegon and wait for him to speak. It takes a while, but you don’t mind. You’ve always had patience; you’ve always been a better listener than someone who fills silences.
At last Aegon says: “I don’t want to be like this anymore.”
“Then stop.”
He smirks bitterly, glaring out into the sunrise, orange light like fire on his sunburned face. “You make reinvention sound so easy.”
“It’s not easy. But it is simple. You decide to get out, and then you do it. You don’t let anything convince you to give up or change course. The only way out is through.”
“I have a proposition.”
“I’m still not interested in fake dating you.”
He cackles. “No, it’s something else.”
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
Now Aegon is serious. “I don’t ever want to split up again. Not in a year, not in ten years, not in twenty. Never.”
You smile as you watch the reflection of the dawn in his eyes, murky faraway blue like oceans all across the globe. “I didn’t know you thought so highly of commitment.”
“I want to take care of you until you die. I want you to take care of me until I die. And that’s as far as commitment goes with me.”
“Deal.” You offer Aegon your hand.
He shakes it. “Deal.”
Two hours later, Criston Cole’s white Chevy Tahoe is loaded high with supplies—including several of Aegon’s golf clubs and his acoustic guitar—and heading north on Route 1, a Fall Out Boy song from one of Aegon’s mixtapes blaring through the speakers:
“When Rome’s in ruins
We are the lions, free of the Colosseums
In poison places, we are antivenom
We’re the beginning of the end…”
You rest your head on Aemond’s shoulder and wait for the sapphire-and-gold Bay Area to become the misty, primordial emerald green of the Pacific Northwest.
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spectralreplica · 1 year ago
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Uhhhhhhhh Sburb AU!! This was more of an excuse to classpect and make sprites, so don’t ask me questions about plot details because I put like zero thought into it. Tsumugi probably had something to do with setting up the session, and she’s hiding her real title and the fact it’s not her first session. Baby Kiibo is a robot baby because I thought that was the funniest option.
Drawing with anti-aliasing off really brings me back...
Classpect thoughts under the cut if you really want:
Immediate caveat: I mention speculative stuff here like unconfirmed active/passive class pairs and inversion theory. If you don’t like those things or otherwise disagree with the titles I gave people that’s fine but just know I’m not super interested in debating about it and won’t reply.
So, to start out with I wanted to make the 8 of them a session, so I needed no overlaps in class or aspect and one Time + one Space. I also wanted to have Kaito and Kokichi as opposing aspects. In general, I think of a Title as kind of the end of your assigned character arc, so depending on your level of maturity/introspection at the start, it can seem either really obvious or really unintuitive. I tried to base them off of the hypothetical chapter 6/survivor versions of characters, since those (plus maybe the chapter 5 deaths) of the ones that get a full arc in DR canon.
Immediately Tsumugi seemed like a deadringer for Space, not so much because of the literal physics-related stuff but because of its associations with creation/narratives and setting things up for other people to act. I made her Sylph of Space here, but that's a facade. She's actually a Muse of Space who participated in past session(s) and wants to watch how things play out.
Based on the Extended Zodiac description, Kaito or Kaede has to be time, but Kokichi CANNOT be Space by any stretch of the imagination. I made her Heir of Time with the interpretation of Heir as someone who invites change/influences of/through their aspect. Time is also associated with music and death, which is both fitting and a little mean. (I can also see Kaede as Breath outside of having to have someone be Time.)
So moving onto Kaito and Kokichi, I was considering Hope vs Rage (belief vs doubt, possibility vs restrictions), but 1) Rage is defined partially by hatred of lies despite otherwise sounding Kokichi-ish (that alone could be interesting, with the possibility of a negative/reverse title or else giving him Hope and Kaito Rage for the unexpected swerve........) 2) I really wanted to give Hope to Kiibo. So instead I went with Heart and Mind (emotion vs logic, intuition vs planning, identity/motivation vs action/decisiveness).
Kokichi is Thief of Mind for taking away other people's decisions for his own purposes but also for generally "stealing" things (e.g., the Mastermind Role, narrative importance in general, along with literal items) through his own cleverness. Vs Kaito, a Knight of Heart, who uses his constructed identity as a weapon to face challenges. I'm also a fan of inversion theory, so I think at low points they'd both trend towards Page of Heart (grows powerful late in the narrative based on his own ego/identity) and Rogue of Mind (taking choices/agency/logic away from people for their own good), respectively.
I always wanted Kiibo to be Hope since 1) Ult. Hope Robot 2) big on possibilities/faith but can be a little self-centered. I went with Bard at least partially to make a "guess we know whether he has a dick or not now!" joke, but I also think "inviting destruction through Hope, inviting destruction of (false) hope" is pretty spot on for chapter 6 Kiibo. Like, as the camera/audience surrogate, he's been forced into passively leading the others to despair, not to mention how the audience takes him over to destroy the hope of ending the show. But Kiibo ends up reversing this and helping destroy the audience's faith in Danganronpa, destroying the whole academy in accordance with the vote. (Sidenote: I wonder if Kiibo gets taken over by Horrorterrors and goes grimdark? Or if he's just really, really susceptible to orders from his Exile)
Shuichi, Page of Void, was another one that immediately came to mind. Like, "starts off weak but becomes really strong/important by the end" is Shuichi's thing! Also, counterpart to Kaito's Knight. And Void is all about secrets, mystery, etc. From the Extended Zodiac: "Where others might be compelled to go out and seek answers, the Void-bound lean more toward casting doubt on what is already considered understood. They don't take much on faith and would rather live in a state of confusion- than believe something that might be untrue or bow to intellectual authority... At their best, Void-bound are wise, intuitive, and vibrant. At their worst, they can be dismissive, indecisive and apathetic." 
I had considering Light, for seeking out knowledge/truth, but Shuichi's character arc ends on "fuck you, I refuse to play. You all get nothing more from us" and learning to live with ambiguity, so I think he's way more Void. But, again, inversion would be Thief of Light, so selfishly taking away knowledge/importance from others.
Speaking of Light, I made Miu Mage of Light. Mage is like, active Seer, seeking out knowledge for yourself (vs advising others) and Light is luck, knowledge, and also importance/plot relevance. As an inventor, Miu keeps innovating and figuring things out, plus she's very motivated by her own importance to the world. She wants to be seen more than anything else and loves being smarter than those around her. Also: "At their best, the Light-bound are resourceful and driven. At their worst they can be fussy, pedantic, and insensitive." Inversion is Heir of Void, so "inviting change via hiding things" or "changing what's kept secret", which suits Miu when plotting murder.
Finally, Maki is Prince of Blood. Blood is trust, bonds, relationships, stubbornness, duty, obligation (vs freedom, change, choices) so "someone who breaks bonds/destroys relationships" but also "someone who destroys using/motivated by duty/relationships". Like, Maki is inherently a fracture point in the group because of her talent and then directly breaks the group apart and sabotages her relationships with the others in chapter 5, but also she's deeply motivated by her bonds to others in all of her destructive actions (protectiveness for orphanage/friend, love for Kaito). This sound super negative, but I think this is also the Maki who commits to destroying the institution of Danganronpa in chapter 6. Sometimes you have to be decisive and cut bad relationships out of your life.
Inversion would be Sylph of Breath, so "healing via change" or "encouraging growth towards freedom", which you can argue is sort of the way Kaito wants her to go? But she just doesn't. Idk, for better or worse, I think Maki is very aware of who she is and how people related to her, so even at her worst she's true to herself, vs, say, Kaito or Kokichi, who act "ooc".
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curiositysavesthecat · 3 months ago
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How fucked up are the fics you read on AO3? — the death penalty one would mean you read something very messed up, while the “I would be completely fine/I would get a medal” ones would mean you only read wholesome fluff!
*This poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. If you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please check our pinned post).
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hazzabeeforlou · 3 months ago
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i had a question and i hope that it doesn’t sound rude. do you feel ashamed being in the fandom and being a shipper at 32? i ask because i am 27, and have been in the fandom since 2012, off and on. i haven’t rly been in it actively for the last two years or so, but when i want to come back, i feel embarrassed. i also don’t think i could handle the stress of it tbh! lol. i hope you are well <3
I was going to answer this yesterday but then remembered I had a 7 hour drive today and didn’t want to stay up later than I already was. Because I’m an adult, with (now one) previous multiple jobs, a pet, rent, vehicle, three post high school diplomas, and student loans, and there are many things in my life I get ashamed of, like when I answer “you too” when a cashier tells me thanks for shopping or when I let a whole bag of celery go bad in my fridge without ever cleaning or eating it. Shame? At my tax dollars funding death weapons and family members voting for strong men? Sure. Latent homophobic internalized shame from my upbringing? Yeah, sometimes.
But life is too fucking short to be embarrassed or hold shame about a FANDOM. Listen, I “ship” Johnlock, or Merthur, but Larry wasn’t a ship for me it was a discovery of queer joy. Like I’m so sorry but baby Larry was real. 100%, actually, seriously legit, like how else do you fucking explain any or all of that. We watched two boys fall in love with each other and okay we don’t know the devil or the details but we have how many albums and interviews, jokes made by media personalities etc, plus the fact that now, this many years later, their solo stuff is still haunted by a nauseating back and forth, these odd lyrical choices that are echoed in the other?
Yeah it’s not a ship. It’s a thing that happened, that we witnessed, and by virtue of it happening and us witnessing it something about gay love became dreamable, reachable, attainable, soft and puppy and exciting and wild. Their secret sign language and mimed blow jobs and jealous looks and touches when they thought there were no cameras, all those things made queerness not just something you saw on Glee. Not just something your parents talked about while wrinkling their nose up about ‘those people.’ It’s a generational thing, the world has moved on, we don’t NEED Larry anymore. And that’s okay. But we don’t need it because it happened. Not to be a brat but you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
And yeah, we wrote fics about highly characterized and publicized versions of Larry, often inserting our own traumas or fantasies, creating a kind of gay mythos around this witnessed event from the periphery, from the lens of the consumer, the only lens we have. But I’m not ashamed of that. You think stories are only ever written about people that don’t exist? At some point you have to acknowledge that in our world, celebrities are the deities of our popular imagination. I could write a thesis, but before I get into the weeds, suffice to say Harry and Louis have created a world of what can be, unburdened by what has been.
Yk? Anyways. Hope this made you feel better. And hope you come back to visit from time to time. I’ll be here.
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7thedisasterdyke · 2 months ago
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Kamala has already supported KOSA (Project 2025). She has told us she is going to continue to murder babies and families. She wants to turn Gaza into real estate for white supremacists. She invited right wing goons to speak at the DNC. The Biden admin just funded alt-right chuds in Venezuela to riot because Biden thinks the socialist cheated and thinks Venezuelan Trump won instead. As a queer, indigenous person, I know Kamala will be just as bad as Trump for my rights if not worse because she wants conservatives to vote for her. The Democratic party and AIPAC has ousted progressive dems in their primaries and replaced them with obedient right wing Dems. The Biden admin sends weapons to nazis in Ukraine who killed 14,000 Ukrainians who protested against the Right wing coup that Obama supported a decade ago. Obama is responsible for many innocent deaths (but y'all treat him like a celebrity saint). Obama and Hillary had Gaddafi killed. Libyan had it all. Obama ordered a drone strike on paramedics rescuing people from the wedding he just bombed (they call it the Obama two tap). Anyway, you can keep defending the Dems moving 3 clicks right because it's better than 10 clicks right with Republicans, and saying it's an evil system, but you're helping to enable it. If we get Trump, it's nobody's fault but the Dems. I actually thought Kamala would be better than Biden. I was wrong. I'm not gonna vote for anyone who is responsible for murdering children and selling the rights of marginalized people (including myself) to Republicans. You can say "Oh but she said 'trans rights'" all you want but this is my 4th election and Dems keep supporting transphobic dems and anti-abortion dems and they parade them around like the good guys. The marginalized people you claim to support are all screaming at you to not support these right wing Dems and join them on the left. You don't get to sell them out for your own comfort. Your rights aren't more important than mine and vice versa. We've been asking you to move left with us since at least Obama turned out to have lied about codifying Roe and decided bailing out his bank buddies was more important. But we're watching you move right. We will survive either way but the dems want you to use scare tactics because they want to be the ones at the wheel of the fascist machine. So if you don't like it then don't participate. Don't play their game. They both play for the same team. They want your consent for nuclear war against made up enemies. It's sick. Stop believing their lies and supporting them. Supporting Kamala is the same as supporting Trump. You're just voting for aesthetics. Lots of liberals have already lost their way anyway and say they'd rather be fascists than socialists. Human rights begin on the left and the dems have never been left of center. Ffs liberals pulled out of a pride fest because of Palestinian inclusion. Lots of them already are self admitted zionists. Do you want to belong to a political party that openly supports white Christian supremacy cosplaying as judaism to avoid criticism? The two party system is white supremacy and they are using a black woman to play identity politics with people who only see her as color and refuse to see that she's a tool to them. Anyway there's room at the leftist table. Or you can keep going to the right until you no longer remember what you stood for.
I'm not gonna lie, sending one big chunk of text with no space for me to breathe between paragraphs is tough for me to read, but I'm going to anyway, because I foresee I'm gonna get quite a few of these.
So I'm going to go through this one point at a time:
Support of KOSA: sadly true, but that's an easy thing to change minds on. Not like she's the only one in the senate who wants it passed on either side.
Continue to murder babies and families: I can't tell if you mean the border or Gaza, but in either case, Trump will do many times worse.
Gaza into WS real estate: no she doesn't. She's been more outspoken in favor of an end to the genocide than any other presidential candidate in modern history.
Invited right-wingers into the DNC: first, I don't think she personally invited them. Second, even if she did, she still needs to pull Trump supporters and marginally right-wing independents to vote for her. We want a better society for everyone, after all.
Venezuela: the "socialist" has a proven track record of human rights abuses, and other than that, I don't know enough about the country to speak further on the subject.
Just as bad for queer/indigenous as Trump because she wants the right to vote for her: seriously, this is just point 4 worded differently. The purpose of an election (in the US) is to make yourself palatable to as many people as possible so you can beat the massive core of voters each party has. Also, again, we're trying to make a better society for everyone, right?
Dems/AIPAC ousting progressives in primaries: sure, AIPAC has a large amount of money to outspend progressives, and even still, the only actual "ousting" I've heard of was Cory Bush.
Biden sending weapons to Nazis in Ukraine: ok look, I'm sick of leftists parroting Russian propaganda. The government of Russia is authoritarian and right-wing, Trump idolizes Putin, and Putin has allied himself with Kim Jong-Un, who Trump also loves. Also, a few far-right nationalist groups fighting to maintain their nation (alongside non-far-right troops) is to be expected. And respectfully, I don't care how Obama was involved, because that's irrelevant to Russia literally invading.
Obama having innocents killed: yeah, duh, he was a US president in the US Empire's Military Age. That doesn't mean anything, and Harris was never even part of his administration, so your point is just a complete non sequitur to begin with.
"Defending Dems moving 3 clicks right when it's better than 10 clicks with Repubs": would you rather have the 10 clicks? Like, actually. Democrats are already right-wing. Harris's policies would work to move the country left, actually.
"If we get Trump, it's nobody's fault but the dems": actually, no, it's the fault of people who try to persuade the minority of far-left democrats to not vote for the best possible option.
Dems keep supporting transphobic/anti-abortion dems: yeah, sure, I'll give you that one, because guess what? They're more easily convinced to vote in their trans constituents' best interests regardless. They're more likely to vote to maintain abortion rights because they're more likely to listen to those constituents.
Marginalized people screaming at me to join them on the left: I am on the left. Incredibly far left, in fact. I'm just not stupid enough to think that we have enough people to change things. Want me to vote third party? I think I'd rather go with the safer option for marginalized people and pick someone with any chance of beating Trump.
I'm a sellout: no, I'm really not. I just understand that the system is overwhelmingly rigged against the non-establishment picks.
Dems want to be at the wheel of the fascist machine: better the one who has a chance at turning it around than the one who'll turn up the throttle.
Don't like it, don't participate: this isn't like a boycott. If every left-winger decided not to participate, Trump would almost certainly win by default. We "play their game" because without the game's existence, Trump's devoted followers would have already had every minority expunged from the country.
They both play for the same team: they're not even playing the same game! Trump and his Republican lackeys want to eliminate the concept of voting entirely, wants to end freedoms for all minorities, and wants to establish theocracy. Democrats want to maintain the democratic system, establish more rights for minorities, and make life better for Americans. This is also my answer to "Supporting Kamala is the same as supporting Trump": it's just not true.
Lots of liberals are self-admitted Zionists: believing Jewish people have a right to the chunk of land the Jewish ethnoreligion originated from, in this world with borders, where they can be unequivocally safe from the historic oppression they have faced for the last several thousand years in... is a fairly common sentiment. That is Zionism. There is a difference between believing that, and believing that they should be the only ones living in that specific region that was inhabited when they got there, which is Kahanism. In order to figure out, in a way that makes as many people happy as possible with the outcome, what to do with Israel, we need someone at the helm of the US who is not Kahanist. Trump notably supports Kahanists. Harris, notably, does not. At least not publicly. Do you know how hard it is to keep a secret as a presidential nominee?
The two-party system is WS: YES! It is! But we're not going to beat it from the outside because, and this is important, they have the power to silence us if we get too loud, and they will absolutely use it. The US has the third largest military in the world by active personnel, at 1.3 million. Do you think we would be able to train enough people to beat that? Think we can afford enough fighter planes to defeat 4 of the top 5 air forces in the world? Until the answer to that is yes, I'm going to keep voting in US elections for the lesser of two evils, because I'd rather fight them, than the trigger-happier alternatives.
"You can keep going to the right until you no longer remember what you stood for": also known as "doing anything a different flavor of leftist doesn't like".
I'd like to end this with a series of open questions:
Did you know that, of the third-party candidates for president, only Jill Stein has any chance of winning enough states?
Did you know that she's only ever won Massachusetts?
Did you know that the Claudia de la Cruz can only win by write-in?
Did you know that Cornel West isn't even on enough ballots to win?
I've seen leftists calling for votes for all three.
Final question to everyone voting "third-party or not at all":
Which one of them will beat Harris in every state?
Have a good night, and stay whelmed.
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shan-yee · 12 days ago
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𝚆𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙱𝚘𝚏𝚞𝚛𝚒𝚗 𝚋𝚘𝚢𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚟𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝙰𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚗 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚐𝚎 [ 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝘆 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁 ; 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 ] ๏𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 = Death. ๏𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚜 = 700 ๏𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚜 𝙰𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚗 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚐𝚎 = Alien Stage is a series of MVs featuring humans in a sort of musical battle royal after the earth is invaded by aliens. The goal is to be the last survivor on stage by winning the alien votes, only one can survive at the end. ๏𝙰/𝙽 = Just saw the final round and yeah, i was sure that you know who would die- and i’m in my Wind Breaker era soooooo —How many times did i used « will » in this headcanon…?
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——— 𝐒 𝗨 𝗠 𝗠 𝗔 𝗥 𝗬 • • •
𝐈 :: 𝙐𝙢𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙮𝙖
𝐈𝐈 :: 𝙉𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙞
𝐈𝐈𝐈 :: 𝙎𝙖𝙠𝙪𝙧𝙖
𝐈𝐕 :: 𝙎𝙪𝙤
𝐕 :: 𝙆𝙞𝙧𝙮𝙪
◌◍┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈⿻*.·
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┏━━───༻༺───━━┓
╰─► 𝐈 ・ 。゚☆ 𝗨𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘆𝗮
┗━━───༻༺───━━┛
⇰ Sorry for my Ume stans but he clearly wouldn't have the heart to fight against his friends and watch them die one by one for the entertainment of these filthy creatures.
⇰ Umemiya has the heart of a big brother as we can see in the manga, with Choji for example, where he tried at all costs to bring back the “good side” of him.
⇰ He will prefer to sacrifice himself and give a chance to those he considers his family, not even taking into account the trauma he could cause them by giving his life for them.
⇰ He will die in the first round and won't even bother to grab his microphone.
◌◍┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈⿻*.·
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┏━━───༻༺───━━┓
╰─► 𝐈𝐈 ・ 。゚☆ 𝗡𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗶
┗━━───༻༺───━━┛
⇰ Just like Ume, Nirei doesn't have the soul to fight against his own people, mainly due to lack of confidence and fear.
⇰ I could see him having the will to live but being terrified once on stage in front of his opponent and the crowd, even more so if the person he has to sing against is Sakura or Suo, whom he considers as brothers and protectors.
⇰ He’ll surely try to sing but his voice will deviate into an unbearable sound which will annoy the spectators, leading them to not vote for him.
⇰ The more he sees the votes for his opponent increase, the more he will find himself unable to produce a single note and will broke down in tears on stage.
◌◍┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈⿻*.·
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┏━━───༻༺───━━┓
╰─► 𝐈𝐈𝐈 ・ 。゚☆ 𝗦𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗿𝗮
┗━━───༻༺───━━┛
⇰ The case Sakura is a little more complicated than the others, for me it could be a potential winner but only if certain elements align.
⇰ Let's imagine that there are other participants than the Bofurin, Sakura will make sure to win at all costs but will refuse to use manipulation or low blows, compare to some.
⇰ He wants to win but can't bear to get his hands dirty any more than they will be at the end of his rounds. His determination and fair play will be what seduce the aliens and destabilize his opponent.
⇰ But if unfortunately he finds himself against Umemiya or Nirei his first instinct will be to refuse to sing. Facing Ume, the leader will ask Sakura to win and if the boy refuse he’ll ensure to be disqualified. Nirei will have no chance even if Sakura refuses to sing, he will annoy the aliens so much that they will vote for the other boy just to see the blond get executed.
⇰ The death of his loved ones will motivate him to win at all costs.
◌◍┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈⿻*.·
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┏━━───༻༺───━━┓
╰─► 𝐈𝐕 ・ 。゚☆ 𝗦𝘂𝗼
┗━━───༻༺───━━┛
⇰ I think I'm going to surprise no one but Suo clearly has what it takes to win the Alien Stage just with his imposing aura that will captivate the spectators.
⇰ I don't really like to say this but I have the impression that behind his big smile and his kindness towards his friends could well hide a dark side who would push him to betray his friends if he found himself face to face with them.
⇰ Nirei would surely be the only person to make him doubt but as said earlier he would be eliminated in any case which leaves the victory to Suo.
⇰ I imagine Suo with a smooth voice and a captivating charm emanating from him on stage and he would surely become the darling of the aliens—especially the females—.
⇰ He will not hesitate to use the weaknesses and traumas of other participants even if it means disgusting those close to him.
◌◍┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈⿻*.·
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┏━━───༻༺───━━┓
╰─► 𝐕 ・ 。゚☆ 𝗞𝗶𝗿𝘆𝘂
┗━━───༻༺───━━┛
⇰ For me Kiryu would be the second potential winner, after Suo the master of manipulation and lies.
⇰ As we saw in the manga, he can be very cold and serious, which leads me to believe that for X reasons, he would be capable of turning against his friends.
⇰ The audience would be attracted to his unusual style and cheerful personality which would be reflected in his music.
⇰ A bit like Suo, I see him having a slightly deep voice which would surprise the aliens and accentuate their curiosity.
⇰ I tend to think that Suo would win but I also think that Kiryu could have more than one trick up his sleeve that would push the creatures to vote for him at the last minute, who knows.
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𝘚𝘰, 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘷𝘰𝘵𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 ?
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