#this is the same guy that did that oh ha ha nazis are bad if u didn't know type piece

[wifelinkmtg]

TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT

So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"

The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?

And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?

INTRODUCING: THE DITCH

There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.

And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?

So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.

Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?

There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.

Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.

There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.

Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.

And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.

There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...

SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]

We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?

Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)

In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.

So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.

Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:

Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?

Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?

SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU

There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.

The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.

There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.

A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.

Do you get it now?

ENDNOTES

It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.

I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.

I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

"Putting your hand over your heart isn't a part of a Nazi salute!"

Not the original salute no, but it is part of the salute being used by Neo Nazis. So here's a link to a video comparing them, showing his gesture was identical to a Neo Nazi salute.

https://www.reddit.com/r/france/s/2bdn5cuvf6

"Even the ADL said it wasn't a Nazi salute!"

The ADL can be wrong just like any other group of people can. You people hate their stance on hate speech, so why are you magically in agreement with them just because they support your worldview?

"It was so bad that it couldn't have been a real salute, Hitler would have killed him for mocking him!"

Bad salutes are still salutes, just as bad insurrections are still insurrections.

"He was symbolically throwing his heart to the crowd!"

Here he is doing it a second time while facing away from the crowd.

"He said his heart went out to the crowd!"

Yeah so he could have some deniability for idiots like you to cling to and defend him with.

"Kalama did the same gesture!"

She waved and pointed. You're just blind. There's something wrong with you if you can't distinguish a wave from an actual Nazi salute. Here's them being conpared side by side.

https://x.com/tify330/status/1881512417387040998

The sad part Is, if you saw this back in 2012, your immediate thought would have been "Oh my god Elon Musk did a nazi salute!", but Trump has so successfully brainwashed you, conditioned you, and groomed you, that his richest and most vocal supporter can preform a blatant Nazi salute, and you'll deny the obvious evidence before you to defend him, ignoring everything before your eyes and ears, because you've been made incapable of acknowledging the evilness, or the nature, of your cult.

It should have been obvious when he showed up to the Madison Square Garden rally in a custom black MAGA hat that used a typeface that was associated with the Hitler and the Nazis, the font the Nazis regularly used as a sign of nationalism that Hitler chose as the as the font for the cover of his autobiography.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-maga-cap-text-has-eerie-resemblance-with-hitlers-nazi-font-6903216/amp/1](https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-maga-cap-text-has-eerie-resemblance-with-hitlers-nazi-font-6903216/amp/1

You guys are REALLY bad at taking hints due to your programing.

"Trump, who is nothing like a nazi and never talks about nazis or white supremacists except to disavow them, brainwashed you into thinking Elon Musk isn't a nazi" sure is an interesting take.

Anyway you're putting a lot of words into my mouth and the ones you're quoting that are actually mine explain pretty well why what Elon did isn't a nazi salute, so I'm not going point by point and addressing your nonsense (especially the "nazi font" shit. Jesus do you even hear yourself?)

What I am going to address?

"Here he is doing it a second time while facing away from the crowd"

There were people behind the stage behind him. I don't know if you can see them during Elon's full speech but here's the same setup from when Trump was at the arena

You can clearly see the white star bunting that's behind Elon in the clips of him doing the "salute". The stage is in the center of the arena with people all around.

I'll also explain why I trust the ADL here, again, because apparently you either didn't see it or, more likely, your leftist brain selectively edits everything that doesn't conform to your warped world view.

The ADL is a partisan left wing group that constantly calls conservatives, but especially Trump and his allies, nazis, racists, white supremacists, anti-Semites, and every other ist and phobe under the sun. They rarely let a chance to lie about the right go by. The fact that a group like that is saying "that wasn't a nazi salute" means a lot, because they're going against the talking points of their own ideology in favor of a person they hate. When a group, even a partisan hack group like the ADL, goes against their interests and the interests of their allies in favor of a person or a group they normally can't stand, that gives their words a lot of extra weight.

She waved and pointed. You're just blind. There's something wrong with you if you can't distinguish a wave from an actual Nazi salute.

Yes. That's the point. She waved and pointed. Elon symbolically "threw his heart" to the crowd. Neither were nazi salutes. Both could made to look like one out of context. The media only cared about doing it with Elon.

I don't expect any of this to get through to you, because you still think J6 was an iNsUrReCtIoN. But maybe one day, after you grow out of this weird leftist phase, you'll look back and remember this and feel as silly as you should.

[spottheantisemitism]

"what if the X-men were black?" is a racist, antisemitic and anti-intersectional screed that 2013 tumblr fell in love with

Published in 2013 this made rounds of OG tumblr and made Bobby of Pencilscratchins draw all her Jewish X-men characters as brown.

Erik because he has Romani heritage (which is realistic and based and accurate to some comics).

Anon go kick rocks with your colorism! YOU read holocaust testimonies!

Also fun fact Nazi Germany did not understand black and brown the way Americans do so it was based on ethnicity and not color, a brown Jew and a pale white passing Jew were seen as one and the same to the Nazis

Guess which article she linked

It's this one!

But said Kitty was Latine because "the quintessential X-girl of the 70s shouldn't be white"

Kitty already is a queer woman of color because she's Jewish. Jews are POC. Bobby what the hell? Are you implying she's only coded non-white because she's Jewish or Mutant? what the hell?!

(BTW Bobby left Tumblr around Covid but if you send her hate asks because of this essay you'll end up on spot-the-antisemitism blocklist for harrasment)

Where did she get this "Jews are white and should be race lifted?" stuff? Why from Orion!

Top paragraph is fine!

antisemitism is written the gentile way that supports a racist eugenicist, off to a bad start.

Sexism is not covered? OH explain Storm's arcs of misogynoir or Jean's and Maddy's arc of going insane because she has the power of a god but is forced to be housewife and marry her sweetheart and have kids

Ableism is not explored? I'm sorry what about XAVIER'S ENTIRE ARC OF ABLIEST SELF HATRED AND OVERCOMING IT IN THE PREQUELS? The first class all being rich talented codedly disabled kids going to a prep school for the gifted. Disabled people really liking non human passing characters like Nightcrawler (and hating Xavier since he's too assimilationist to many). I'm sorry why do people fall for such blatant lies? the mentor of the X-men is literally canonically disabled and Orion has the GALL to claim ableism is not explored.

_ Genosha is half fall of south Africa Apartheid and half the establishment of the state of Israel hence why the metaphor is so messy and problematic

_ Yes that number is deliberately "like the holocaust but worse" because Morrison likes their holocaust appopriation

_ Why didn't you mention it's an allegory for Gay conversion therapy torture because Bryan Singer is gay?

_ Yes Legacy Virus is Mutant Aids good job on your media literacy finally kicking in Orion

It's racism AND antisemitism but your "antisemtism doesn't exist in america" ass doesn't get that

I do hate "mutie" as slur and the way Kitty thinks it's comparable to antisemtic and anti-black slurs and USES them to make a point, so yeah something Orion and I agree on.

The sequence used is of Stevie Hunter the human ally character who like Xavier started teaching after she became disabled. She IS used as prop here to say Kitty is right in calling her the n-word (Claremont is racist sometimes).

But Orion can't tell her apart from Storm. Buddy if you can't tell the ONLY two black women in this comic apart, you're the racist.

OK they're both props but it proves you never actually read the comics or you can't tell fictional black women apart neither of which is a good look

(Cole also points out the Kitty and Magneto are not White but Jewish he is dogpiled and called a fake fan for this (see below))

Keep Shyminksy out of your mouth you racist fake fan

OH NO! I hate this!

So you decided to go with the colorist idea that the man is darker and the innocent girl in need of protecting is lighter. Gross colorism worthy of a Hollywood action movie where the black guy dies

"Local black man can't related to white disabled teens facing ableism and makes it about racism so he can relate to it" is giving gamergate chud energy to me

If you can't see why a Russian man is almost killed by a mob of xenophobic red blooded Americans and HAVE to make this about anti-black racism that's on you and your misunderstanding of the way Russians were hated during the cold war.

Oh you are race swapping x-men while shitting on Psylocke who the result of basically the same idea? How hypocritical

Dwayne McDuffe does have a point but your quote does not utilize his point in any way.

Then DON'T raceswap Wolverine if he becomes the angry black man. Think before you can X-men racism and tokenism WORSE with your race-swapping

NO THEY DON'T strawman rejected

Ah yes! Magneto, famously a very white man whose childhood was full of white privilege/ Sarcasm

One of the co-authors of the website has the gall to double down on calling Magneto white:

"as a REAL fan you're fake fan, antisemitism doesn't exist and Holocaust survivor Jews are white" - this racist defending his token black friend's racist screed because some guy called Cole DARED call Orion on his bullshit

*"I didn't like that the X-men were about white passing and invislbe disability so I made about anti black racism" also "judiasm is just a religion" canard

**Again leave Shyminksy and Morrison's good takes alone

***Yeah you get Luke Cage, that's how you get the racism of bad Luke Cage comics. You ain't inventing the racist wheel here

Orion I hate your take, I hate your misunderstanding of antisemitism and ableism that makes the two main factions tick, I hate your self centerness, I hate your racist and antisemitic co-writer making excuses for you and I REALLY hate that this did to the 2013 X-fandom what Lily Orchard did to the 2019 Steven Universe fandom and we can still see people using your bullshit arguments today

Oh and Cole? thank you for your service you're the real hero of this story, hated and feared for daring to call out the establishment

[beardedmrbean]

Zoomer Huey, I tend to see people saying why Gen z don’t have sex much.

Holy

Fucking

Shits

These journalists surprisedly have WORSE self awareness than there boomer relatives

Here a hint https://x.com/swannmarcus89/status/1762582001507323991?s=46

And gender dynamics are…nuked in the fields they are surveying. Women and girls are told that all men are predators and misandry is left unchecked

Also, why Hollywood act surprised about the sex abuse?

We all heard about the casting coach, and how suspiciously people from working class backgrounds like Micheal Jackson (yes his dad had his music connections. But essentially mj was a slave and was arguably was the first black child star unless I’m missing someone) and Walt Disney (though not as bad) are painted as monsters while the actual monsters are protected for decades

I mean look at Judy Garland, she was a sweet person and she did help the LBGT in Hollywood and supported the civil rights movement

But her “crazy” behavior makes more sense because she was sexually abused at a extremely young age

And she not the only one, Shirley Temple, the boy who played at the first LA Dennis the Manis

Oh and the Peter Pan actor (a lot of people leave out the part where ALL of Hollywood basically says he can choke and die because he was “too” Disney)

But sorry about the Gen stuff, but the false rape accusations, maybe if you guys didn’t view men (especially white ones) the same way Nazis viewed the Jews while saying all the working class men were Weinstein.

My Gen would have more sex

Entertainment industry has been like that since the beginning of forever, probably less so when women weren't allowed to participate but still a thing I'm sure.

As for Judy Garland it was nice to see people come out swinging in her defense when someone tried to start shit over well

She was not in control of her carer, saying no was not an option for her with this, but dumbasses that can only think in terms of today's standards never think about that.

Jay North (Dennis the Menace) did ok, so did Shirley Temple, plenty of others not so much, more recently we can look at Drew Barrymore and RDJ who both had fairly public meltdowns and problems.

Drew was ruined since her first film was ET and Spielberg takes care of the kids on set, going beyond the legal requirements.

Bobby Driscol was the Peter Pan VA top of his Wiki article.

Robert "Bobby" Cletus Driscoll (March 3, 1937 – c. March 30, 1968) was an American actor who performed on film and television from 1943 to 1960. He starred in some of the Walt Disney Studios' best-known live-action pictures of that period: Song of the South (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1949), and Treasure Island (1950), as well as RKO's The Window (1949). He served as the animation model and provided the voice for the title role in Peter Pan (1953). He received an Academy Juvenile Award for outstanding performances in So Dear to My Heart and The Window.

He just fell into the child actor pit, where he wasn't "cute" anymore couldn't get gigs and couldn't adjust to not being in the spotlight, the way he went and nobody knowing is awful to think about still.

Jackie Coogan, on the other hand was a different story.

His parents sucked and as a result there's a series of laws named after him California's Coogan Law all about protecting the earnings of child actors from their parents. % goes into a trust iirc.

He ended up OK in the end though

The false accusation thing, #me too hurt women because #believe women was taken advantage of to such a degree that even this coming out to light

has still probably not cleared up for the trooper, and men are opting to not mentor women because of not wanting to risk a false accusation, everyone screams about how rare they are, to which I say so what, why should they assume the risk even if it's minor

Former VP Mike Pence came out and said he won't be alone with a woman that's not his wife in order to ensure that there is no possibility of someone making a claim of impropriety.

And he got this response

Why is anyone going to put their neck on the line when something like what he said is going to get this kind of response.

Maybe instead of crying about how rare false accusations are they should focus on shaming the people making them and coming up with solutions to keep them from happening.

You know instead of blaming the victims of the false accusations.

All this and so much more going on that isn't in this ask goes to the I don't blame people for not having as much sex, it's actually kinda nice too, fewer std's this way.

I went on a couple tangents, hope that's ok

[jedi-enthusiast]

Honestly I’m so confused why people are so upset that Israel was included in Eurovision, like…my dude it’s literally a music contest for a bunch of countries---that Israel has already been included in before---not an actual political statement.

It’s literally insane to me, especially with how people were treating the Israeli contestant---protesting her, forcing her to change her song, other contestants saying shit like “talking to her doesn’t mean I support Israel,” etc. etc.

And I feel like that’s a reoccurring thing with all this mainstream pro-Palestine bullshit: y’all don’t actually care about Palestine or want to help anyone, you just want “good person points” socially, but don’t actually care about your impact.

You'll post shit like "stan Hamas" and ignore the fact that they're literally a terrorist organization dedicated to killing Jews, and that they're literally hurting Palestinians too, as well as the fact that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is only ongoing because Hamas keeps breaking the ceasefire and won't give back hostages.

But you'll ignore all of the organizations that actually help Palestine because they're run by Jews/Israelis, or even just supported by Jews and Israelis.

(And how much do you want to bet that the same people who cry- "Hamas is only doing this because of Israel's actions regarding Palestine, so it's justified/reasonable/understandable, etc." -would never say that if it was a group like, say, ISIS that was kidnapping/killing/waging war on Americans because of the US's actions in the Middle East?)

You'll harass random people on college campuses just because they're Jewish, even though they clearly have no fucking say in what a country on the other side of the world does, and barricade yourselves inside a building and be shocked when you're suspended or expelled for property damage/harassment/etc.

But you won't volunteer at any organizations that are dedicated to helping Palestine, or donate money to those organizations, or donate food/clothes/etc., or actually do anything besides whine and cry because you helped destroy a campus building and your college doesn't want you there anymore.

(Hell, 99% of y'all don't even bother volunteering for your own communities, so I know you're sure as hell not volunteering to help anyone else's---again, you just want the "good person points")

Everyone that was so gung-ho about "oh yeah, let's punch Nazis!" a few years ago are now spouting Nazi rhetoric.

Everyone that preached that bigotry is never ok, even if someone from a minority does something bad, are now the same people chanting- "Jews are shit!" -and spreading blood libel.

Everyone that was calling for solidarity between minorities and oppressed groups are now the same people ostracizing Jews because they won't condemn the only country that will actually protect them- (or rather, they'll condemn the Israeli governments actions, but won't stand side-by-side with antisemites or say that Israel should be destroyed).

Everyone that said that it wasn't okay for people to be racist towards poc because some of the BLM protests were getting out of hand/violent are now the same ones going- "oh, it's fine to be antisemitic because these disgusting Jews Zionists aren't agreeing with me on everything."

Everyone that was posting shit about being aware of misinformation and doing your research before posting something are now the ones that have no idea what Zionism actually is, don't even know which river and sea their chant means, has no clue what Israel has actually done to Palestine and is just calling it a "genocide" as a buzzword despite all the evidence stating otherwise, etc.

Like...you guys are really just proving that you don't actually have morals beyond what's socially acceptable.

"Never harass random Muslim/gay/trans/black/etc. people just for a cause or because they did something you didn't like...unless they're Jewish, then you can stalk them on campus and be physically violent towards them."

"Bigotry is never okay, even if someone from a minority does something you don't agree with or something awful...unless they're Jewish, then spread blood libel and call for the "final solution" all you want."

"Not everyone from the US/Republican states/Christian churches/etc. agrees with what their government/state/religious leaders are doing, so it's not fair to blame and ostracize them for it...unless it's Jewish people or Israelis or, G-d forbid, Jewish Israelis, then you can hate them and blame them for everything!"

Like, genuinely, fuck off.

You aren't good people, you aren't "making a difference" or "on the right side of history," you don't give a shit about morality or justice or doing any good for anyone---all you care about is your fucking popularity and the social norm.

So keep your stupid, hateful, misinformed hands off of the I/P conflict---you've proven that y'all clearly can't handle having opinions on it.

[hel-phoenyx]

Domhildr belongs to @soupedepates, Meili to @azeler and Oli to @thal-ent

Modern AU shenanigans

I do not look fondly upon my high school years.

It's not a period of my life I like to remember. and no, it's not like I had problems or anything. Never been bullied, never been dragged into shady business per se, at least not the delinquent kind. I had friends, even if those friends were in two different groups for. Several reasons. I had no difficulties whatsoever in class, even ranked top most of the time.

But god was I insufferable. Sometimes I wonder how Domhildr and Oli could put up with my self-inflated ego. The others certainly did a lot to encourage it.

I think the only thing that kept my head not too far from the ground was the fact I had to fight for the top rank. I still remember the classes, the tests, everything. When we didn't take the same options, it was good, I had miles between me and the second-ranked ; when he was there, I had to work for my shit.

It's weird to think he became my friend. That he was our friend.

No, not in this way. Weird in a good way. Like, in class we would have heated debates on slightly different answers, especially in philosphy and geopolitics. He was a die-hard right-winger, while I started to understand, because of them, that maybe free market was a bad thing. Both of us were still influenced by traditional upbringings. Loaded families.

Yet outside of class we would just talk about our days, families and other things. I would complain about the date of last maths test while he joked about such feeble things not stopping him. and then Oli and Domi would just yell at us to "stop flaunting the top-rank bullshit on us". Even though Oli were themselves good enough in class.

I had kind of a rivalry going on at the tme, and it got my head out of the gutter. Didn't help that we kinda crushed on the same guy. Not realising it, both of us were idiots (and probably raised in same kind of gay-no-way families) but it has to have played a role in the peculiar nature of our relationship.

And then he left school for the army. And I went into politics. And we lost contact.

I do not look fondly on my high school years. But I have to admit, recieving a message from him in the middle of my thesis kinda made me happy.

That's probably why I called upon the two others. To discuss. The message, and what happened afterwards.

Oli and Domhildr are bot sitting at the table at our café. We would reunite here, to talk about crushes and classes and art and jobs. And more often than not, politics. Domdom stopped wanting to punch me when I started talking about last time I kicked a Neo-Nazi in the balls. Good times.

But today we are not here to diss neo-nazis. We're here to talk about Meili.

"So, starts Oli. You say he sent you a message ? You ?"

"I mean, I'm probably the only one with the same phone number."

"Bullshit. I haven't changed mine since I got it. And I'm pretty sure Domi only switched once."

Domhildr nods, a big smile on her face.

"I knew there was something between you two. I mean, the whole academic rivalry was pretty homoerotic."

"Oh com'on, I have plenty other people I'm homoerotic with, you don't need to add Meili to the roster."

Their faces are unconvinced. Great. It's Kriss's teasing yet again.

Can't say I'm not used to it, tho. I have so many crushes. Had, too. I fall in love too easily with my friends. Luckily I don't have many.

My prosthesis hurt, as some sort of reminder. Yes, sometimes I am attracted to the wrong people. And the fact we made up kinda is worrying for my mental health, but to be honest I needed that introspection.

"Anyway. Yeah, he sent me a text, said he wanted to meet up. Apparently, army didn't work out. Didn't understand how before I saw him."

"Wait. You SAW him and you didn't warn us ?!"

"I knew I would never hear the end of this, so, no. Plus, he wanted to see me alone."

Domhildr laughs a little teasingly.

"Ooooh, someone got a date~"

"Or he just didn't wanted to show everyone from the get go the leg prosthesis and the amount of burns in his body, hell, he couldn't even open his right eye."

And I guess he contacted me because I lost my hand in high school, so he knew about it. And knew I wouldn't get too judgemental or pityful. Disabled power.

That shut up the two birds quite promptly. Domhildr even has the audacity to look shocked.

".... Well, shit, when you said army didn't work out, I didn't think THAT way."

"And yet. He's a war veteran now, and a high-ranked one. He just started a cursus in international politics, you know, the one I ditched for history. I did tell him about that, and he joked about getting something I wouldn't have."

Joke did fall flat, tho. Not like I've taken it personally, I mean, i am a PhD student, right now. More like he didn't put a lot of heart in it. I don't know what he saw on the front, but hell must it have traumatized him.

"War veteran, huh, said Oli, pensive. I take it he's still a right-winger."

"Yep. Couldn't believe his ears when I told him I voted far-left. Didn't want to start drama around politics, tho, so we kept it at that. He got pretty tame on human rights issues, by the way."

"Cool, so I won't have to punch him when I see him. Do we have a date, by the way ?"

I shrug.

"I'll ask him later. That could be good, indeed."

[this-acuteneurosis]

I kind of want to get you started on mind tricks. cause like weak minded to strong minded dynamic and the blur away, but also the sith back in the day were for SURE a Caste system of force sensitive rulers and non force sensitives, and the jedi were their ENEMY off and on for thousands of years, cultural bleed through and dynamics of their own power systems but Ben we are not the droids you are looking for go away so I dont have to kill you, versus Qui hey I want this thing trade it for me.

Alright, Oct anon, it's been a while, but I have not forgotten you definitely forgot this ask in my drafts for who even knows how many months but it's found again, whoo!

It's taken me a while to get this together partly to try and arrange my thoughts in a logical order but also...

Guys, I really, really care about the use of agency in stories. Like, I've ranted about it in relation to droids, I've explained some of my problems with it in the context of the thematic changes between the OT and the PT, I stew over it constantly in my brain, it's a central theme of many of my own stories (including DLB).

I really don't like mind control, and not just in Star Wars.

Now, just because I don't like a thing doesn't mean it doesn't have a place in story telling. As a device, mind control/manipulation can be useful or important to a plot. To a theme. Overcoming it can be powerful or cool (Ella Enchanted-I prefer the novel personally, Tanjiro in Demon Slayer: Mugen Train), watching someone succumb to it can be agonizing (Frodo in Return of the King, anyone? Princess Euphemia in Code Geass?).

So, what is the point of Mind Tricks (and that naming choice, "trick," making it sound almost...harmless) in the Star Wars story, and maybe in the universe?

I feel like in its initial reveal, the mind trick was supposed to a) convey how "magical" Jedi were and b) get the plot from point A to B. Obi-Wan waves his hand, someone believes something hideously untrue, move along move along, don't think about it too hard.

Like, literally, audience, please. Don't.

Luke uses it in RotJ for pretty much the same reason. To convery a) Luke is well on his way to being a "magical" Jedi now (oh but wait, there's more character growth he needs!), and b) Luke needs to get into Jabba's palace and why would they let him in? Because he says so, so we will take him to Jabba now. Move along, move along.

I don't like the implications of this power existing, and as an adult who has been in situation where I have to report to higher powers, the disregard of the consequences of these things are a bit darker if I look too closely, but like...move along, I guess. It's fine as long as we're only using these powers on space nazis and slavers. Right?

Except then we get more movies. And cartoons. It's fine if Obi-Wan mind controls a person into not smoking, right? Smoking is Bad and Obi-Wan is Good.

Only.

Only...

Who taught Obi-Wan to use mind tricks?

Ah yes, my old nemesis.

To all you Qui-Gon fans out there, you may wanna leave. This analysis is probably not for you.

So like, Qui-Gon Jinn. Qui-Gon "I'm friends with the current Chancellor and thus an obvious, notable representative of the Jedi Order but I don't get along with my higher ups" Jinn. The thing you have to understand about my opinion of him is that, as a young, first time watcher of TPM, I liked him. He was funny, irreverent, direct. He was wise, or at least seemed to know things no one else did. He was a maverick, ready to go against all orders and advice for what he knew was right. And everyone around him was just stuffy and uninformed.

And to be fair, he wasn't wrong about everything. He's set up to be sympathetic. He's trying to treat with the gungans and they won't listen? Well he and Obi-Wan are right, the Trade Federation does go for the gungans. The Order says there are no Sith? Oops, wrong on that one. The Council makes the ambiguous assertion Anakin is "too old" to train. We've seen the OT. We know "too old" is nonsense.

But like, what does Qui-Gon do when he's thwarted?

He takes away people's agency.

Oh, you don't want to help us, Boss Nass, political leader? Cool, well I'm gonna undermine you in front of your entire court and you're gonna give us a whole ship (that we won't return) to help us defend a people you've been in an active war with for centuries. Oh, my currency doesn't work on this planet? I think it will mister small time junk dealer with a gambling problem (jokes on you for that one, sir).

This to me is a huge red flag in a story that is about literal slaves. I know people will defend the above examples. It was necessary. There were lives at stake.

You wanna know who would have suffered if Qui-Gon had been able to con Watto out of that part?

Anakin and Shmi.

Worthless (or event mostly worthless) currency on a planet where you have to buy water is literal death under the right circumstances. And who do you think Watto's going to reduce rations on. He's got cash flow problems? What's the quickest way for him to make back what he just lost? I'll give you a hint, he gambles on them later in the exact same movie.

So like, well before we get to "weak minded" or anything dubious like that, there's this awkward question of, "Why are the good guys always using powers to make people do things? And not worried about the consequences?"

And like, if we go back to simple story narratives, and trying to move things from point A to point B, that's fine I guess. I enjoy the OT. I'll move along.

But if you ask me to stop and think about it.

Well...

[rat-rambles]

Last thiugh on I gave no mouth and I must scream I promis

So my personal vendetta with this whole little trend is the people being like " oh you have no media litercy this you have no media littercy that" witch for the record is a very boring argument, but the thing is that people will say that about people finding AM sympothic becuse they don't personaly find him sympathetic. Witch to be super fucking clear sympathetic and forgivable arnt synonyms guys. The reason this drives me crazy is becuse there is a few things that are true we all read the short story I have no mouth and I must scream they where written by Harlan Ellison.

He wasn't like a very good person fairly good writer sure probably not who we should be seriously takeing moral philophy form go read his wiki if you need a summery. But he ment as the author for AM to be seen as a person as a bad yet sympothedic person this is the same guy where in the game one of the 5 litterly worked for the nazis and he's sympothedic this milage for sympathy in that regard is pretty far. Mind you everyone is the hero of there own story and he did bad things and had big feelings obvously he'd be the first to give the bad robot with big feelings a pat on the shoulder and a cookie.

Now if you personaly find AMs crimes unforgivable you porbaly also find Harlan Ellison's crimes unforgettable and that's fine they are how ever if someone reads the short story and gets thay reading and dosnt have the context for Harlan's crimes there not doing a bad media literacy for comeing to the intended conclusion. Actually if you missed that point witch I've seen alot of people do you have in fact done a good media literacy and if you saw what was ment and rejected it then you've done a great media litercy good job gold star.

People like to weponize this talking point to feel like there the smartest person in the room saying "wow you have no media litercy" is just a academic way to go 😝 stupid. It's werid when the bg3 and hazbin fandom has spoiled me with robust media litercy seeing those little controversy was a reap shock to the system.

[talenlee]

Alethic Value

I am so sick of the only stuff I enjoy being slice of life bullshit! These past few seasons of anime have not had anything I found even slightly enjoyable that isn’t, somehow, at its base level, a grounded story about a real space told with animation! Why aren’t I watching things where people use laser swords or have shapeshifting raven powers or creep around in dungeons?

Oh, because I tried all those things that include those ideas and I think they’re bad? All of them? That’s rough. Shame. Maybe the people who make anime should get around to making anime I like again.

This isn’t about the anime that are bad and yes, I did try Dungeon Meishi and no, I don’t like it, but this is rather about the realisation that I have a feeling and a preference about the anime that I like to watch and in this moment I am frustrated by the play space of these stories in terms of their unvaried alethic value.

But hey, you may ask, what’s alethic value? What a weird turn of phrase. Does it come from somewhere? Well, yeah, it comes from Greek, which is one of the uniform languages of smartypants and academic terminology. In philosophy, Alethia is used to refer to the idea of truth or disclosure — and here’s our first pause because the person who popularised that term is Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is a dude with a lot of complicated ideas but also any time he comes up I feel the need to share that that guy was a Nazi. This can be upgraded depending on the scenarion into ‘Nazi, well,’ or ‘Nazi, but’ but I feel like if I don’t mention that Marty Heidy’s A Naughty Nazi I’m leaving something important unsaid in the conversation.

Anyway, Alethia isn’t just ‘true’ness, in the philosophical discussion, it’s something else, a secret third thing, but I’m not going to get bogged down in that even though we’re talking about ontology which is a discipline that owes a lot to Martin Heidegger who got promotions at university by reporting on the Jewishness of various people who were directly above him in the organisational structure. Ontology is the philosophical consideration (because it feels weird to call it ‘study’) of being. Like, anything being. The fundamental concept of things existing.

Ontology’s heavy, but don’t worry, we’re not using it, not properly. We’re driving by ontology’s house and throwing a brick, it’s fine.

Anyway, there’s this literary scholar, Marie-Laure Ryan. In her writing about fiction and literature, she has this text called Ontological Rules, in which she describes categorical approaches — a playful approach really — to the consideration of types of stories. It’s a lengthy list and it’s super interesting, including a consideration of the individuals involved — are you literally only using real verifiable people who existed in your story? What kind of natural species exist? Are the natural laws available but subjugated periodically?

But the thing is, the top layer of all of this is a consideration of the alethic values of the world. Alethic values in this context, discusses the idea of the modalities of truth. That is to say, how does the world of the fiction engage with the reality of the primary world. This conversation gets really interesting and weird because of course, reality is as we understand it not subjective, but functionally it is subjective. If I put aliens in a story, that doesn’t necessarily mean the story isn’t historic fiction if I believe that aliens are real and the reader believes aliens are real. But if aliens aren’t real (at least not the way the story is representing them) then suddenly we’re left with a story where the modality of truth has to kind of dial into a mean from a communal whole that nobody can necessarily connect.

If you believe in magic, stories about wizards might well be historical fiction, to you.

Heck, Star Wars represents itself as historic fiction and modern day Jedi believers may well consider it to be the same.

What makes this extra complicated is that there are a lot of normal unrealities that everyone believes in. Hey, what’s Australia like? Wrong! Unless you’re Fox, hearing me say this, or one of the small number of Australian readers I have. But you have a way of seeing Australia represented in your mind and that representation is based on an assumption about what is real that may be just factually wrong.

But here’s the big thing about alethic values as boundaries on what ‘reality’ can include in the context of the storytelling of a universe: We don’t like when alethic values sequence to one another.

If you’re playing Skyrim and someone has a book in that world about hey, these are the stories of the seven starskalds in their space horses that cruise through the skies and travel from world to world and encounter all sorts of monsters of the week and that, people go ‘hey, that’s bullshit.’ Right? Because somehow, the idea that there is fiction in the universe of the fiction of the game, that fiction itself has to be bound within the parameters of that universe. Because the idea that characters who see unicorns have a vision of what normalcy means creates an entirely different relationship of those fantastic characters to the fantastic. To you, unicorns are bullshit, but in their universe, unicorns are real, and how much can you imagine those people having the ability to dream up the Starship Enterprise?

And there’s also just this idea of nonsense gaps; they don’t need to dream up spaceships right, because they have magic and dragons and just go to other worlds. Even worlds that are meant to have a vibrant fictional world, like again, Star Trek, it doesn’t largely represent theatre and the arts except as emulations of our now. There’s a deep indulgence in (human) history, and like, I get the problems of representing the vastness of that alethic gap, where you have to dream up a guy and then dream up that guy’s dreams?

I want deeper alethic value. I want more variety. I want some cool shows about fuckin dragons god damnit.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[seriousfic]

I'm not sure Ahsoka is even a story

People have been comparing the writing to an AI and... they've got a point there. I mean, stuff happens... barely... but it's like there's no attempt to dramatize or sex things up or impart any excitement or conflict or nuance into the story. Dave Filoni has one move and it's spamming lightsaber fights and starship dogfights constantly.

(Speaking of which, remember in the movies when lightsaber fights would end with SOMEONE dying or at least being maimed? People get IMPALED in Ahsoka and they're there in the next scene like "get some sleep, you need it." Like being impaled by a lightsaber is a cold. Not even a bad cold. They might as well put the lightsabers away and settle things by arm-wrestling, it resolves as much!)

(I'm convinced that Marrok was a studio note added at the last minute because someone realized they had made a show with eight hours of people trying to kill each other with laser swords and no one actually dying.)

I actually read a quote by Timothy Zahn where his idea was that, in their decade-long exile together, Thrawn and Ezra had been forced into an uneasy alliance against an even greater threat. Like, yeah! That's dramatic! That's Something and not Nothing.

When you watch the show, though, it's more like they've just gone off to summer camp. Ezra sees Sabine again and he's just like "hi, how are you?" He's older and he hasn't changed at all. Neither has Thrawn. He's painted his Star Destroyer a bit and he calls his Stormtroopers Nighttroopers now (surely not to sell new merchandise instead of the same old action figures)... other than that, no change in his character whatsoever. Same guy.

Oh, he's teamed up with the Nightsisters, but that just amounts to him getting the obligatory Imperial superweapon. Does anyone really think this isn't going to turn into another plot coupon quest to stop him from using his new toy to destroy the New Republic before it gets destroyed anyway?

I mean, how can you not brainstorm SOMETHING interesting happening with this setup? It's impressive! A kind of anticreativity.

What if Sabine was in love with Ezra, then gets there and finds out he's gotten hitched to a cute Rodian or something. Or maybe he's gone kind of mad with isolation and is using the Dark Side, but doesn't know better in his crazed state?

Or Thrawn could be this Colonel Kurtz figure who's gone around the bend and his Stormtroopers all worship him like a cult leader. Like, right now, what does he even have against the New Republic? Why does he like the Empire so much? What is he trying to achieve? What benefit does he get from challenging the NR over simply suing for peace? It's insane--this one specific character is meant to be a galaxy-killing threat based solely on him as a person, but we know nothing about him as a person. (And he squeaks out a victory over three people, BARELY, and we're supposed to buy that the universe should be quaking in its boots.)

Filoni actually even stumbles upon a good vein of drama. Sabine betrays the galaxy to save her platonic friend. No one cares. Ezra doesn't care, Ahsoka doesn't care--why should the audience care?

Ahsoka trains Sabine to be a Jedi (that's its own rant, by the way), but stops because she worries Sabine will go the same way as Anakin. Jedi are all about nonattachment and Mandalorians are all about clans and lineage. Then, at the worst possible moment, Sabine proves her right, makes the exact same choice that Anakin did to go with saving a loved one over the fate of the galaxy... and Ahsoka just shrugs and goes "eh, no big!"

And I get it. I'm a comic book fan. I don't want to see noble, experienced characters flying off the handle at the drop of a hat and attacking their loved ones because it's their turn to hold the conflict ball. But these characters have no emotions at all! I don't care how good a person you are, if your bestie sells a nuke to Neo-Nazis to get you out of debt, you should probably raise your voice a little.

Also, is the last episode the first time they actually set up that Ahsoka and Sabine's conflict is over this "I'm afraid of her turning out like Anakin" thing? Well after it's resolved? Why? You have eight hours of TV show, you can set this up early on and then pay it off later (not next season, but later).

'Ahsoka has an astral-plane pow-wow with Anakin and gets over her issues' is a decent plot, but you have to actually depict her issues ahead of time, you have to dramatize them in a certain way so we know what the heck you're talking about!

Imagine if in Back To The Future, the first time we saw George McFly was when he punched out Biff and saved Lorraine. You wouldn't care at all, right? It's just a guy punching another guy. We have to know that George is a pussy and that Biff is his tormentor and that he's in love with Lorraine from afar--once we know all that context, THEN it's a triumph for him to punch Biff.

Your show can't just be people punching each other out! It also has to be reasons to give a shit about the punching!

You don't have to spell everything out, but you can't just show Rosario Dawson crossing her arms and expect us to know "oh, she's traumatized from Anakin becoming Darth Vader, she never got over that." You have to put that into words and imagery! Show us her ACTING! Let us RELATE to her! Introduce these people to us and let us get to know them! You can't coast on everyone already liking them because they look like old cartoon characters.

[amielbjacobs]

Shield and Sword Liveblog

Still kind of shocked that this plot point was allowed. A chekist having someone shot under false accusations? I guess the Party line allowed for the idea that Stalin was fucked up in the 60s. But now, somehow, if you say that then Putin and his guys are like "What, you can't even torture several hundred thousand innocent people to death in a mass moral panic? Political correctness has gone too far."

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I love how Johann's entire approach to spying is just that

whenever anyone doesn't want to do some menial task, Johann is like I CAN DO THAT

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The British translator seems to struggle with the translation of the word "chekist" - in some places he turns it into "intelligence officer" or "secret service" or "NKVD" - but then later on there's a weird bit where he just starts saying "the Cheka." (Even though he's still talking about the 1940s.) Which like, if you were going to start saying "The Cheka" with no explanation to the Western reader wtf that means, why not just say "chekist" from the beginning? You can put a footnote and then you won't have to worry about it ever again. This translation is so sloppy.

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Johann is in a German military hospital now cozying up to the Gestapo informants and doing their report-writing for them

and a Prussian corporal just came in who, it's implied, shot himself in the foot to get out of the military

anyway, he's being a jackass and bossing everyone around and hitting on all the women

and one of the Gestapo informants tried to come up to him and ask more questions about how he got shot

and he just

started feeling the Gestapo man's face up and asked him "How did you get past the racial board with ears and a nose like that?'

and the Gestapo man just slunk off

This character is going to turn out to be another Russian spy undercover as a German. Seems like Nazi Germany was 50% Russians by population!

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Everyone is admiring how he is "the perfect Aryan" and he has taken to pointing out that Johann is also the perfect Aryan

(both are Slavs)

How come no one's ever Jewish in these books

The backstory of our second Russian-pretending-to-be-a-German

I love him but also

this is a guy who is 100% getting sent to the gulag after the war is over

he got trapped behind enemy lines and just stole a uniform and papers and started acting as a German, then started like

serial killing German officers basically

and recruited a whole communist cell to support him in that

and then they all got killed and only he survived

and now he's in the hospital as a German officer

and somehow, miraculously, wound up in the same hospital as the other fake German

"I'm a solo act, no chorus" is such a badass line.

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There's a really detailed explanation here, breaking from Johann's point of view, about how Beria/the NKVD command received all these reports from Soviet agents about how Nazi Germany was going to invade, and instead of listening they persecuted the agents for being the bearers of bad news. In this book, Johann almost got purged himself, and was only saved by the protection of his patron.

I'm really surprised all of this was allowed.

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them, but

but also u kinda do, I like it when it's big Fuck Stalin hours

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the censors were going over this book . . .

I absolutely thought Lansdorf was going to be the canon gay character in this book. The way Johann does all of these physically intimate services for this able-bodied older man, who then rewards him with promotions and, in the TV show, constantly calls him "dear" - it does really seem as if Lansdorf is gay and Johann is seducing him in order to further his goals.

Original russian, via google translate:

In the morning, Landsdorf asked to massage his sore leg. And Weiss did it with amazing skill. He had solid theoretical and practical training in the field of massage. Trainers claimed that massage was not only a universal remedy for all diseases, but also a healing balm for the nervous system. Weiss had once attended lectures by a massage therapist, and after training at the Dynamo stadium, athletes often massaged each other. So Johann had sufficient experience.

Johann is the best at everything. I bet he gives great blowjobs too

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This is the point in the show where I realized the Nazis were trying to recruit Soviet POWs out of the concentration camps, which as it turns out is most of the plot of this story. I've sort of gotten used to it over the course of re-experiencing this story three times, but it's still kind of a wild plot point. These are people who are barely alive.

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This is much grimier than Seventeen Moments Stierlitz never went to a death camp, even tho he is literally SS I mean, there are pictures of dead bodies in the Holocaust in Seventeen Moments, on screen but that's always sort of seperate from the actual plot

Johann is visiting a death camp and chatting with a low-level SS man who is dumb as bricks

SS man is bored of the death camp and wants to go out on a date with Johann

his dad was a missionary in Africa who shot at black people "if they didn't behave themselves"

and wanted him to be a priest too

There's a lot of anti-religious stuff in this book

which is a sharp contrast to Seventeen Moments of Spring where we only ever see the Nazis as oppressors of Christianity

which is one of the things that made me wonder if the Nazi regime in Seventeen Moments of Spring is a metaphor for the USSR rather than being the literal Nazi regime

Johann has been assigned to select Russian POWs from the death camps to do Abwehr work and he's looking for people he can use to secretly work against the Nazi regime for him

but this is also such a horrifying task, because like, anyone he doesn't choose will be gassed, right?

I have doubts about the tastefulness of allowing this thriller novel to go to a death camp.

But I won't lie and say that fake torture isn't my favorite trope

👀

In the full scene in Russian Johann says he can't bear to hit the prisoner and the prisoner calls him a pussy

which is also 👀

“I can’t,” Johann repeated. "A weakling," the miner said contemptuously. He thought for a moment and added, "A neurasthenic."

Von Dietrichs manners are queer coded so Johann adopting them is funny

the Nazis have an informant among the Soviet POWs

and Johann questioned him in his guise as abwehr, and then told the Nazi guards to slap him across the face before they release him back into the prison population "to make it look more natural"

which is funny, but I also find it kind of disturbing. Like, I do agree that you shouldn't inform on your fellow prisoners to the SS, but I also don't really feel comfortable judging the decisions of a guy who's starving to death in a death camp, you know? I feel like I, as a guy who has never starved to death in a death camp, don't have the right to judge those people. And it feels especially icky for Johann to judge them when he is currently enjoying the privileges of a Nazi officer. You know? Like, I think we're supposed to think he's sticking it to those traitors by having the informant beaten. But functionally he is a guy using the power accorded by the Nazi state to have a concentration camp prisoner beaten, and he's still our hero and this isn't depicted as a moment of moral failing for him. It's really uncomfortable.

I think I would be more likely to give this scene a pass if it didn't take place in a propaganda story. Like, it's okay for characters in difficult situations to do bad things and for the narrative not to have to spell out for us "this is bad." But the fact is that this is Soviet propaganda; the rules of this book are that bad things will be delineated for the reader. The fact that it's not delineated here is because the creators didn't think about it.

The story is going to explore the moral complexities of Johann's relationship to the concentration camp prisoners more later on, but even at its most ambiguous, it still sits in a place where it's saying that some people starving to death in a Nazi death camp deserve it because they didn't try harder to resist the Nazis.

But I mean. I guess I knew what I expected when I picked up the authoritarian propaganda novel. Did I mention this is Putin's favorite TV show? He credits it with getting him to join the KGB. So that's another crime we can lay at this show's feet, apparently.

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I was beginning to wonder if the subtitles on the show were really as bad as I remembered, or if it was just the cuts from cramming a thousand pages of long-winded literature into a TV show, but in my liveblog I found this:

And you know what? That still doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

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Johann (as an abwehr officer talking to a bunch of Soviet POWs they're trying to evaluate for use as penetration agents): You must give a political evaluation of the Soviet system. Prisoner (sounding depressed): What for? Johann: If you try to go back to the USSR after we parachute you in, the Soviets'll hang you from the first lamppost [for writing this denunciation of the system.] Prisoner: (hollowly) They will anyway.

This is so dark. I feel like this story is not as willing to admit to the mistreatment of Soviet POWs postwar as it is to call out Beria, but it's definitely not ignoring it entirely either. But it makes me wish that we could see Johann try to grapple with the fact that these prisoners are being trapped into an inhuman situation not only by the Nazis but also by the USSR, and that Johann is simultaneously a representative of both of those evils. He is playing both sides of the board, and both sides of the board are ruining these people's lives.

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Another scene from the show:

Nazi officer, about a Soviet POW: "An interesting young man, smart, from a family of intellectuals. He may be useful for long-term work, if we can thoroughly install our values in him."

HOW IS THAT GOING TO WORK. Your values are that he is subhuman and needs to be killed! I mean, is he not a Slav?

I think it was actually Dietrichs who said that, but when I was watching the TV show I wasn't really aware of Dietrichs as a distinct character.

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Johann, who as you'll recall is a chekist posting as Abwehr, is coaching the prisoners on how to survive a chekist interrogation so the prisoners are split into pairs, one interrogator and one interrogatee, and they're mock-interrogating each other

and the protagonist is lecturing them on what a real chekist would say

lmao

this plot has so many people pretending to be other people that it makes following with subs pretty hard

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[boymanmaletheshequel]

Israel has just strip bombed a civilian neighborhood in the sovereign nation of Lebanon and killed at least 500 innocent civilians. This is, yet again, an objective violation of the Geneva convention in its strongest form outside of outright invasion, and yet, the entire world is praising Israel for its terroristic, hitlerian actions. We are witnessing the modern equivalent of nazi Germany moving on from its conquering of Jews in Germany, to conquering the Jews in neighboring countries like Poland. This climaxed in the invasion of Poland that officially started WWII. Israel is about to start WWIII in the same exact way Germany did before them, the victims successfully repeating the cycle of abuse they rose from. It’s no longer the aryans and the Jews, it’s the Zionists and the Muslims. If the rest of the military world doesn’t wake up to what is happening right in front of them, mark my words as a historian, this WILL result in a global conflict that will match the tension and societal destruction of the Cold War, if not of World War II itself, or possibly even WORSE. Israel has nukes, Palestine doesn’t, Lebanon doesn’t. Say, how did WWII end again? Oh right! By a sovereign nation using weapons of mass destruction to completely flatten their opposition under the excuse of fighting terror! Except back then, America was in the same spot as Lebanon, now it’s the opposite. And this time, the bad guys, the nazis, the Yakuza, THEY are going to win, and possibly bring down the entire world with them, in their quest for ethnic superiority. This is a warning we all should be fighting to listen to, an imminent threat of history changing oppression and yet another middle eastern apocalypse, that we must quell. And that starts with arresting Netanyahu, convicting the IDF, freeing Palestine, and HOLDING ISRAEL RESPONSIBLE BEFORE WE NO LONGER CAN. stand with Palestine, stand with lebanon, do not DARE to forget the atrocities of the past, which are doomed to be repeated if you do, and DONT STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS. FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA.

[spottheantisemitism]

Hit pieces

so like you know they guys who were 'NOOO Magneto can't be zionist😭"

One of them is Calina who used to reblog tikkunolamresistance claimed to go to every protest that she helped and Gazan family and they all happily celebrated Hannukah together even though many Gazans have religious trauma and would ABSOLUTELY NOT (Juju has a whole post about this)

Listen I've talked to palestineans, I'm more scared of white people but many Palestineans do not feel safe around Jews

I call bullshit on your saviourism and orientalism and you all celebrating hannukah (Hannukah too the most culturally christian holiday) happily when most Gazans can't even look at a Magen David. It's all too neat all too Norman Rockwell "can't we all get along". How did they fit in your house with your roomate? how did you feed them? Do they all smoke weed?

I mean he HAS (in X-men 2). So has Charles in the comics. So has Jean, she was even executed for it. That said this is a microaggression to make someone not enjoy the thing they like

Cope and seethe that others interpret him differently

Calina ignores basic comic history to suit her needs

seems blind to the irony of this statement when you do the same with literally all other Jews

Oh nOOO him wagging his finger at the ambassodor and telling her to do better means he wants Israel to be destroyed and stop it's wars. He was former Mossad he's telling her tactics are bad and the country is shit at keeping peace

"He's atheist so he sees through the lies of Israel and how they mistreated him" How anti theist of you. that's NOT what he says on panel. you're trotting out the "Israel mistreats holocaust survivors". In claremont's comics survivors are treated really well, sometimes comics don't match up with real life such as a boy has lazer beams or friendship can undo brainwashing.

"he lived their briefly" ah yes a few years is brief. He lived in Israel longer than he lived in Vinnistsya and his toddler daugther had time to be born and raised there before dying in a pogrom. Which WHY he moved to Israel

"he only lived there to track down nazis" NO CALINA, he lived because HE HAD NO WHERE ELSE TO GO. YOU REBLOGGED MY ESSAY ON THAT back when we were friends? don't you remember my talking points, old friend?

"Zionism isn't Judiasm" yes but his Judiasm is only ever spoken of in forms of his allegorical zionist

"I only blorbofy fictional war criminals" Honey you support TOR who suppurted ALL the terror orgs. You very much DO support real life war criminals

you even admit it.

while cannibal mostly writes porn so I thought it was "NOOO you put politics in my smut and actions comics" but Get this

he has a story about a Jewish character leaving to seek freedom in a town that's safe for Jews and Mutants alike in the wild west sounds like a "Put Israel in Alaska" story to me. Sir you 20K words of "zionism is fine if it displaces native americans instead of palestineans"

proof I didn't make this up:

last tag

you made this goy a Jew and had him go on an exodus but bitch about real life Jews? fuck off, hypocrite

nothing these two grifters can say should be taken at face value

[rubberduckyrye]

im an ouma kinnie who cant even be open about it because ill get dogpiled to hell and back for being a n*zi when. he isnt one at all and its such a reach but i digress

Oh my god I am SO sorry for you, anon. Well, this is a safe space for kins of any kind, so I hope you can find some comfort in that. ;w;

Anyway major salt incoming.

As for the whole "Kokichi is a Nazi" thing--like. My god. This old debate. I hate it with a burning passion. It's just--it's just wrong.

Look. Japan uses a lot of similar imagery in their culture to Nazi Germany. The red arm bands used for club leaders in high school. School uniforms resemble what I think is formal Japanese military uniforms (like, non-war uniforms?) They use the same kinds of hats too.

Also. Fandom wake-up call time.

I'm sorry but if Kokichi is a Nazi then wtf is Kiyotaka to them?

Or Korekiyo???

These two have the red armbands and illusion to military attire--something FAR CLOSER to Nazi imagery than a stupid hat with a skull on it that doesn't even have a canon sprite to its name. Why do these guys get a free pass? Is it because Kokichi had the bad luck of being the Ultimate Leader and there was a piss poor fantranslation calling him a Dictator? Because literally the only elements to Kokichi design that you can say are Maybe Inspired by Nazi Germany attire is his hat. Which only just kind of looks like one of the hats worn by Nazi Germany. I never found an exact match for it myself, so idk. Regardless, Kiyotaka and Korekiyo both had WAY more ties to that attire than Kokichi does.

Or if we're going to talk about problematicly-designed characters in general, why is Fuyuhiko getting no hate? He's literally a crimelord--a mafia boss. Why are mob bosses okay? Are you saying that mob bosses don't maim, murder, exploit, or abuse people? Did you know that certain factions of the Yakuza are known for human trafficking? That includes sex slavery. You do know that, right?

Not only is Fuyuhiko properly translated to be a Yakuza/mob boss, but his design has FAR more ties to the Yakuza/mafia than Kokichi has to nazi germany. And the game he's in makes him a sympathetic character to top it off!

And let's not even get into the anatomical horror that is Hifumi. Like if you want to talk about offensive design choices, Hifumi is by far the worst contender as the most offensively designed character. Fucking egg with twig legs, as if that's how fat people work at all!

Anyway what I'm getting at is that the people who don't like Kokichi look for any reason to hate on him, even if the reasons to hate on him would apply to other characters in the franchise. They just want to have a "legitimate" reason to hate him so they can legitimize their rage and validate themselves for attacking his fans. It's disgusting behavior tbh.

NOTE: The only design I think that's actually offensive out of the ones I've listed is Hifumi, solely for his piss poor fat anatomy. Even then, you don't see me going around and harassing people who actually like Hifumi for the fatphobia in his design.

.... I just noticed that Hifumi isn't even wearing SOCKS. nkdjegnjkngkfr

Anyway salt time over.

[beyourownanchor6]

Our beloved hellsite runs on ducttape and chewed gum for real like a macgyver thing

I used to watch Smallville with my mom and I have sincr rewatched it a couple times. It's s bad it's camp.

Oh i used to love the cw superhero shows. I fell out around the time they did the heroes vs. Nazi dopplegangers crossover special, because seeing mt favorite heroes all decked in ss outfits was triggering to me as a Jew.

Yeah i totally get that.

Shooting star is the glee school shooting episode. It's the worst example of them butchering a serious issue but there were many (suicide, post partum depression, eating disorders...). Yeah exactly. It is an interesting documentary though. I found it curious how they barely dedicated any time to mark salling. Like usually a documentary like that would milk the scandal as much as it could, but they barely touched on it.

Lol exactly!! And thank you. Yeah me too i'm wearing them right now! They make me look like a bearded Velma. I like that.

Oh i look forward to rambling about the bike riders! Ooh my favorite marvel characters or ships... i like Spider-Man, the Scarlet Witch, Agatha, Bucky, Quicksilver, both Captain Americas, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, Thor... as for ships, I ship Buck and Steve, mostly, but I also like the thought of most of the guys making out with each other. What about you? And lol i still listen to hannah montana often.

Oh SAME! I'm trying to get back into books without sacrificing much of my fanfic time. It's tricky. And you're right, fanfics are basically endless. Besides, there's the added bonus of "we already care about these characters".

P.s.: are these asks annoying you? Are they too long? Would you rather I dm you?

it really does though, and yet we keep coming back lol.

i think my parents said it got "weird" after a while, and i've definitely stopped other shows for that lol, but maybe one day i'll try it out again.

oof, yea that's understandable. i think arrow was the only one i watched all the way through and i regretted that lmao. they all lost me after a few seasons, but superman and lois has been good all around which was a nice change.

ohhh i completely forgot they did an episode on that! the school shooting ep that always sticks out in my mind is from one tree hill. yea i thought that was weird too. i think since that was so shocking and such a sensitive topic they wanted to steer clear of it? but yea you'd think for the scandal they would've been all over that.

i've thought about writing some fic for the bikeriders, but we shall see! oooh that's a great list! i love thor, bucky, venom, scarlet witch, black widow, hawkeye, echo, both captain americas, and...so many honestly 😄 i think my big marvel ships are sambucky and symbrock, but i did start reading some deadpool and wolverine after seeing the new movie lol

ugh yes!! i told myself i need to catch up on the fics i have open and then make a point to read some actual books. my goal is 20 for the year so i still have 10 to go lol.

not annoying me at all! and i am ok with whatever! i put read more incase it's annoying anyone else lol. but i am good with whatever works for you 😊

[obislittleone]

Hey, I just wanted to be informed about what “from the river to the sea” means? I’ve been looking it up but all I’ve found is free Palestine bullshit. In one of your posts you implied it has a separate meaning so can you please explain if you’d like? Sorry if I’m being rude or anything I just want to be informed.

"From the river to the sea" (Arabic: من النهر إلى البحر, romanized: min an-nahr ’ilā l-baḥr; Palestinian Arabic: من المياه للمياه, romanized: min al-mayeh lil-mayeh, lit. 'from the water to the water') is a political slogan that refers geographically to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which currently includes the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories: the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

At first glance, it has no other connotation to it other than the meaning people are shouting, which is 'Palestine will be free.'

It sounds very progressive and helpful to Palestinians when that's all that's said... but with the additional words that belong to the phrase: فلسطين ستكون عربية

It translates to: from water to water, Palestine will be Arab.

Not 'Palestine will be free', Palestine will be Arab.

Little white liberal ppl are writing these inscriptions on signs and protesting against the killing of Palestinians, but when they do, they don't even understand that they are encouraging Hamas to make Palestine an Arab only state. They claim they want to save lives while literally chanting for the extermination of jews using Hamas Nazi rhetoric.

This, of course, does not mean that all Palestinians are Arab or that there are not Arab jews. However, the notion of Hamas wanting to irradicate only the Israeli government is completely false when their mission was to mainly kill jews and try and take the land by force of killing innocents on October 7th. My friend Hasharon had sent me video attachments of hamas recruits shouting their kill count to one another and saying in their language 'praise allah, for all these dead jews.' They also screamed things on the phone like 'father, i killed ten jews, be proud of me, father, i killed ten of them.' They quite literally committed the exact same attrocities but on a deeply personal level. (Y'know, the same thing that people are condemning Israel of doing... except commiting numerous war crimes in the process.) Obviously, it is too complicated of a situation to take one look at and choose sides. For the most part, I side with Jews as I am one, but we must not forget about our muslim brotherhood in this time. Jews and Muslims are cousins, and they have the ability to live in peace. They have for thousands of years, and the discourse is only now coming from the ways this notion of 'there has to be only one bad guy' is being portrayed in the media.

There is no one bad guy. That would be the easy thing, to say 'oh Israel should be wiped off the planet because they are settlers and have no right to be there and by existing in that land, they are causing Palestinian suffering,' or to say 'Well Hamas is the literal government that Gaza chose for themselves and not only did they use secret tunnels to invade Israel and kill over a thousand innocents, but when Israel responded, their people hid them in hospitals and schools and made Israel look like the bad guy for irradicating terror.'

Do you see how both notions seem to fall on the radical of either side? It's why the conflict not only gets out of hand through the media, but starts to paint a picture that 'if you don't choose the right side you are an evil nasty person and you also deserve to die.' Or at least that's what my anons have been saying, but I digress.

The point is, by going to one extreme or the other, we make even more chaos in an already complex and sad situation.

Very few people in Israel actually believe Gaza should be destroyed, and likewise, I've not seen any of posts from actual Gazans saying they condone the death of others in their name. There are always going to be extremists, because unfortunately, there are some adults who behave like children and think they are of the highest possible knowledge in this world. Being well educated means nothing if you're only educating yourself based on the things you already believe. There's some Jewish wisdom that my grandmother taught me saying: to achieve knowledge is to experience the discomfort of realizing you may have been wrong.

Many liberals are very confident that they have all the answers in this time. I'm not condemning anyone, and I'm not excusing other's behavior either, but I want to make it known that you can't just say something without backing it logically and with context. 'From the river to the sea,' is a perfect example of that.

Sorry for this long rant I've just been wanting to get it off my chest as I've seen even more non arabic people posting the arabic signs around my city and non even realizing what they actually mean.