#violence inherent in the system

[suzilight]

Monty Python - Repressed Citizen

Citizen: Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses not some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can't expect to wield Supreme Executive Power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you! Well if I went around saying I was an Emperor because some moistened bent lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away.

King: Shut up!

[cynicalclassicist]

I just like seeing that meme.

And yes, monarchy is inherently bad, violence in the system and all that.

[interstellar-lamb]

Language says a lot about a culture. Like how Dutch has one word for smile.

And this many for 'punch'

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

MEENAH: MODS, K-E-EL )(AUL )(IM!

ARANEA banned CRONUS from responding to the memo.

[books-apples-socks]

(...) Silver had terrible hard work getting up the knoll. What with the steepness of the incline, the thick tree stumps, and the soft sand, he and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays. But he stuck to it like a man in silence, and at last arrived before the captain, whom he saluted in the handsomest style. He was tricked out in his best; an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his knees, and a fine laced hat was set on the back of his head. “Here you are, my man,” said the captain, raising his head. “You had better sit down.” “You ain’t a-going to let me inside, cap’n?” complained Long John. “It’s a main cold morning, to be sure, sir, to sit outside upon the sand.” “Why, Silver,” said the captain, “if you had pleased to be an honest man, you might have been sitting in your galley. It’s your own doing. You’re either my ship’s cook—and then you were treated handsome—or Cap’n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!” “Well, well, cap’n,” returned the sea-cook, sitting down as he was bidden on the sand, “you’ll have to give me a hand up again, that’s all.” (...) Silver’s face was a picture; his eyes started in his head with wrath. He shook the fire out of his pipe. “Give me a hand up!” he cried. “Not I,” returned the captain. “Who’ll give me a hand up?” he roared. Not a man among us moved. Growling the foulest imprecations, he crawled along the sand till he got hold of the porch and could hoist himself again upon his crutch. Then he spat into the spring. “There!” he cried. “That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.” And with a dreadful oath he stumbled off, ploughed down the sand, was helped across the stockade, after four or five failures, by the man with the flag of truce, and disappeared in an instant afterwards among the trees.

[sulfurrrr]

Caitlyn's storyline is super interesting to me bc I think even though she has a lot of sympathy for the undercity, the biases she was raised with lead her to view it as one separate entity that is inherently different from her, rather than a group of people who all were systemically forced to pursue lives that are vastly different from hers (and this mindset is, in part, what's led Jinx to become a symbol of Zaun).

That subconscious mindset is why Jinx murdering her mother so easily led to her hatred and violence. If it had been someone from Piltover she very easily would have been able to see how isolated the attack was, or understood what led to it—but because it was Jinx, and because Zaun, in her eyes, has a history of directing extreme violence towards Piltover, to Caitlyn this is a unified attack from Silco's agent—and, by extension, the undercity as a whole— against Piltover (more specifically, against her mother).

That's why she said "It's her blood in your veins." She thought Vi was different and "not like them" because to her, while Piltover is, of course, nuanced and deeply flawed, Zaun has always been one separate entity to Caitlyn—and, from what she's seen of the undercity (under silco's leadership) Vi isn't "like them."

Jinx, however, is. Moreover, Jinx, as Silco's number one agent, the perpetrator of all the violence she's seen (against piltover), and the face she's been chasing since the beginning, is, in Caitlyn's eyes, the violent and destructive undercity Caitlyn always heard about personified.

And, by treating her like she is, Caitlyn's unknowingly propped Jinx up as Silco's successor and leader of Zaun—which, with the turf wars leaving so much violence and destruction, is exactly what the undercity wants and needs, so they rush to reinforce this narrative in the hopes that it'll come true and give them back some stability.

[bestworstcase]

i do think it’s thematically important that the maidens are inherited in this specific way, it’s not an accident that when the narrative sets down the rules the potential violence is not just remarked upon but given emphasis and used explicitly as justification for the aura transfer machines. nearly everything ozpin does is rooted in keeping the maidens within his control—selecting candidates in anticipation of their deaths, giving the branwens bird forms to identify maidens when the line of inheritance jumps the tracks, chaining the maidens to these vaults, etc—and his greatest adversary in this endeavor is the maidens themselves, because the magic preferentially selecting maiden-killers is, in effect, the magic fighting against this control.

why does the magic transfer itself like this? it will not be controlled. throughout the years ozma and his allies have devoted enormous effort to dictating the Final Thoughts of anyone who receives this power in order to maintain control over it (& their abject failure in this regard leads to the invention of the aura transfer machines); meanwhile the magic binds itself to "random" heirs if the candidate its host has in mind is unsuitable, and prefers to go to ozma’s enemies when it can.

(and do mark that. the person in the maiden’s Final Thoughts is explicitly only a suggestion, one the magic can and will disregard if he or she is unsuitable. ozpin et al believe that these candidates are only rejected if they are 1. male or 2. too old, but none of them can read minds; and as ozpin says, maidens choose themselves. it’s just as likely that there are additional disqualifying criteria, such as the candidate being coerced or just not being spiritually compatible. there’s no reason to think that KILLING A MAIDEN couldn’t be a disqualifying act if the magic were unwilling.)

of note in this regard is that cinder breaks amber’s aura (orange) before using the beetle to draw out the magic (golden):

which matters because the magic is attached to aura and separates at the moment of death; as i said in the last post, the grimm beetle is successful because it respects the magic’s own rules. cinder breaks the outward projection of amber’s soul and then shoots her in the back (symbolically, killing her) and then claims the magic as she begins to die. had she walked up and slit amber’s throat here instead, she would have almost certainly inherited all of the magic too. the grimm beetle thumbs the scales a bit but in the context of the magic’s rules, it’s playing ball.

whereas:

when cinder uses her arm to drain raven’s/penny’s auras, she doesn’t gain any portion of the spring/winter maiden’s magic, nor do either of them suffer lasting harm in the vein of amber (coma) or pietro (holes burned through his aura).

so there’s nothing special about grimm that allows them to violate the magical rules. all evidence suggests that the ATMs don’t work for this purpose either: as soon as amber dies, the magic rips free, and cinder’s grimm arm can harvest aura but not magic. it follows that in the event of a complete aura transfer, the magic would detach from the donor aura as soon as the donor died, leaving the recipient with two souls and no magic. there is a degree of wiggle room (under particular circumstances you can convince the magic to begin separating before the previous maiden is fully dead) but you can’t outright cheat.

which is the whole point. you can’t take a maiden’s magic without killing her and you can’t circumvent the maiden’s agency by stealing the soul of its host. the maidens are unbound by death. and i think there’s a literal causal relationship between how ozma treats the maidens and how they choose their hosts—he can’t use them as weapons without losing them, or outright delivering this magic into salem’s hands. nor can he hoard them or hide them away forever because he can’t dictate their final thoughts.

[kishimotomasashi]

I think I said this elsewhere already but Madara's less like Sasuke in which he was dealt an exceptionally terrible injustice that opens him up to the reality of what the system he lives in truly is, but more like Naruto in that he's aware of the suffering it causes and also suffers as a result, but his worth and conception of self relies so much on playing by its rules that he can never actually go on with truly radically changing it

[buttonloops]

moral OCD part 2

the conclusion I've tentatively reached is that the important thing is being a kind and decent person to the people around you.

that it's a whiny privileged take to be too fastidious to use the power available to you

that all living things hustle for survival and eat each other to do so

that it's not evil to be a manager or a landlord instead of an employee or a tenant, that it all depends on how you treat people.

I think it's possible to play the game according to the current system and chase material success while also, idk, supporting increased worker's rights and environmental protections even when they impact The Bottom Line.

I still feel morally weird about the stock market and the prison labor and the complicity of it all

But even if I did give everything away and go live in an off grid shack, genuinely what would that even accomplish? I'd be largely miserable and also intolerably smug, and I know i said I'm not Christian but also it's baked into my brain and pride is also a sin

I just.

Still struggling with this.

Still wondering how you construct an internally consistent set of ethics without going mad or becoming intolerable

[pochapal]

had a migraine all day then sat in the shower for almost an hour rotating life is strange thoughts in my mind and now the headache's gone and i'm also mad

[scrollboss]

Shoutout to any long-time visitors of the ScrollBoss site who get why this Golden Axe tribute is the first new pixel art I'm posting this year. The violence inherent in the system never seems to end...

[freesidexjunkie]

i think the anarcho-syndicast commune is my favorite bit in Monty Python bc that's how i imagine i look to my family members at thanksgiving dinner every year

[eclecticelectriceccentric]

mfs will support wars then be like ‘violence isn’t ever okay’ 😂 bitch you already condone violence you just don’t recognize it as such at the level of the state

[celticculture]

[musical-chick-13]

*puts my head in my hands* The reason that so many of us say, "I don't trust people who say that all men are evil no exceptions you should never interact with any of them for any reason" ISN'T because we are coddling abusive men, it's because we a) don't want to get into bioessentialism territory, and b) are WELL aware of your history of using this rhetoric to blame women who are abused by men because "Well men are horrible, what did she expect, she brought this on herself."

[iphigeniacomplex]

love you arthurian fiction forever and ever. i was tearing my soul apart thinking oh would setting my grail quest in the united states to put it in conversation with specifically american narratives be too....bold.......meanwhile theres a book out there from 2012 where mordred gets exiled to canada and falls in love with a computer program that is maybe the ghost of alan turing and there might be russian political intrigue as well. and it has three and a half whole stars on goodreads