#where he wonders how much violence he embodied and to what extent and why he did it. and regretting it.

[6-2-ansalewitofhate]

i have many thoughts abt gabriel but my brain is mush rn.

[ethereaiin]

Jinx | genshin impact

synopsis; you've been a magnet for spirits all throughout your life spared without a moment's peace. your meeting with him was fate itself finally fulfilling an unspoken wish, though you wondered if there was a lot more in store for you than just mere friendship.

features; you, chongyun and a bit of xingqiu.

[modern au] 

extra; originally a 2 shot.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

      To you, silence was a rarity.

       The world, as you knew it, was rife with noise and chaos that no one other than yourself seemed to be aware of. Amongst wandering the same plane as the living, the dead could speak and it was only you who heard their voices. Your head was constantly filled with their screams and soon enough, peace was something you could only dream of having a moment of.

       From childhood, you were subjected to visions of the unseen and the voices of the dead that spoke of things you could never truly understand at the time. Your mother and father never refuted the things you claimed you saw and instead they only smiled down at you with a look of misplaced pride. To them, you were the culmination of all their and their family’s efforts to recreate the glory that once belonged to your family name.  

       It was no secret that your lineage was famously infamous for its connection with all things supernatural. Mediums and spiritualists used to make up a better part of your kin and although they were now a dying breed, you were one of the few born in the newest generation who were naturally gifted with the ability to commune and attract the dead.

       The so-called ‘gift’ your parents often revered you for was nothing short of a burden.

       It was because of this gift there was a constant stream of voices and spirits around you, and in turn, your mind was never truly at rest. You couldn’t sleep most nights and the dark circles that lined the underside of your eyes were only a small testament to the countless nights you reluctantly spent awake. The accompanying migraines were the cherry on top of your growing list of problems along with your almost crippling addiction to painkillers that definitely would have raised your physician’s brow if they’d heard about the amount you ingested in a single day. Still, somehow your pallid complexion and lifeless gaze never seemed to discourage your parents from pressing you into embracing your abilities and rambling on about the honor you’d one day return to your family name.

       Aside from your unwanted ability to attract things not of this world, you attempted to live a relatively normal life- whatever that meant for someone like you. You went to school like any other teen your age, though your days usually consisted of dozing off in the back of the class or staring at the floating figures roaming about your desk. You often forgot that normal people were not privy to the voices of the dead and you’d usually find yourself talking back to them aloud. It was this reason alone that you didn’t have many friends, though you never seemed to mind the lack of living company. If anything, you thought of your solitude as a blessing in disguise. There wasn’t anyone to question your odd behavior nor did you ever feel the need to explain the constant odd occurrences that would happen around you.

       Still, despite your intentions of not socializing with anyone to avoid burdening them with your problems, you somehow managed to make at least one friend.

       Well, you wouldn’t go so far as to call him your friend. Not only was it extremely presumptuous of you, but you also couldn’t wish companionship with you onto anyone. Yet, Xingqiu, in spite of all your claims that he was nothing more than an acquaintance, assured you that the relationship you two shared was most definitely friendship.

       You were more than well aware of his true intentions. It was obvious after your first meeting with him that he was more interested in your rumored predicament than he was in you. Much like anyone who held intrigue in the supernatural and all things strange, he wanted to see if the rumors were true; if you were really able to call forth the spirits of the dead like everyone said.

       While it was still a mystery to you how the rumor was somewhat accurate to the truth of your situation, you didn’t think too much of it. Most people were skeptics and so they only concluded the rumors about you to be just that. Nothing but rumors. The few people who did believe them, most of them being classmates who were witnesses to the strange things around you, avoided you like the plague. That was the extent of it all other than Xingqiu’s casual prying that you’d deflect with practiced ease in a change of subject. You would say your life was easygoing and days droned on with little to nothing major happening.

       Until you ruined it all with one minor slip-up.

       Most of the strange things that happened around you could be chalked up to nothing more than coincidences. Of course, if anyone put a little more thought into it they’d see it was all connected to you in some way, but all of the incidents that happened in public were minor. Whether it was a desk moving slightly, a person getting their shoulder touched, or an inexplicable breeze; all of it could be rationalized as pure coincidence.

       That was until you made the mistake of communing with a particularly violent spirit while still in school that things took a slight turn for the worse.

       You were smart enough to make sure to wait until the after-hours of school to begin your séance, even double-checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone occupying the hallway your class was in. While you never really liked making an effort in talking with spirits that would do you harm, this one’s antics were beginning to intrude on your comfort zone and was bringing too much awareness to its existence. Not only did it like pushing your classmates as they leave or enter the class, but it also enjoyed pulling harshly on chairs and incessantly knocking on the thin walls. When its activity was beginning to pick up a little too much over the course of a month, undoubtedly due to the energy you unconsciously fed it with, you knew it was time to step in. It was tied to the school and so your chances of baiting it back home where a communion wouldn’t be seen by the public eye were slim. It didn’t help that it was stubborn on top of its knack for violence. At the time, you knew your only choice was to take a chance and speak to it where someone could accidentally overhear you, or leave it to wreak more havoc and potentially still expose you on a larger scale. At least if someone saw you and another rumor leaked out, you still had some room to deny the claims and keep your secret intact. The moment you stepped back into your classroom after checking the others in the same hall, you made your choice.

       The conversation you had with it was rough at the start. It was always like that when it came to remaining spirits of the dead which was why you hated speaking to them in the first place. Throughout your exchange, it loudly protested against giving in to your demands to control it, and just when you were close to convincing it to leave; the door of your classroom swings open and it’s then that your world metaphorically shatters into tiny bits of nothingness.

       You can clearly remember the look on Xingqiu’s face as he stood in the threshold of your classroom’s door. His amber colored eyes were wide and his lips gaped into an expression of surprise. He obviously didn’t expect to see you lounging about in your classroom well after school already ended and you didn’t expect him to burst in through the door as if he were ready to fight whatever lied on the other side. Your reaction to his added presence was instantaneous and so was the spirit’s. The sound of crashing desks as it made its way towards your friend in the doorway was loud and almost unbearable. No matter how much you screamed for it to stop and even attempting to grab at it as you tried to manifest its physical form, there was no intervening. Your powers, untrained and imperfect, could do nothing for you and the moment your fingers slipped right through the spirits translucent form, you fully realized the extent of your mistake.

       The thought that ran through your head at first was ‘why was he here?’ You hated yourself for thinking of ever blaming the victim in a circumstance that you technically caused. If it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t have been a spirit tied to the second place you frequent the most and if it weren’t for you Xingqiu wouldn’t have been pinned to a wall by an unseen force. All of this was caused by you and the second thought that ran across your mind was self-deprecation over your less than ideal choices as you hurriedly made your way towards your friend’s writhing form. Before you could even touch him or even attempt to once again use your abilities in to once again try and pry the spirit off of him, the figure suddenly disappeared; bursting into thin air as if it were never there to begin with.

       “Xingqiu, what happened?” The sound of a new voice lit with a tinge of worry but still remaining steadily composed, attracted your attention, and your gaze lifted away from the sight of your friend to meet the new presence of someone you didn’t know.

       At the time, you didn’t realize that this person’s existence would one day become so important to you. You didn’t think about how his mere presence was enough to drive the never-ending whispers of the decease to a halt or how you no longer could see the shadowy figures lurking in your peripherals. Instead, your thoughts were messily scattered between assuring Xingqiu’s safety and making up an excuse as to why you were trying to reason with a ghost as if it were human. The peace you were craving for since the day you first heard the wail of a lost spirit was right there, embodied in an unknown sixteen-year-old boy, and you couldn’t even see it at that very moment.

       Xingqiu, unfettered by the assault, merely held a knowing smile on his lips as he picked himself up from the classroom floor. You would have thought he would have been afraid like so many of the others that unknowingly interacted with the spirits. You thought he would have been afraid of you. He was smart. Smart enough to put two and two together to come to an astounding conclusion that the rumors were right, or at least held some truth. He had to have been aware of what you were doing alone in the classroom and he must have heard your shouts for the spirit to stop when it charged towards him, yet he said nothing.

       At least, that’s what you hoped for.

       “You. . . you can see them, can’t you?”

       It was hard to remember what his expression was at that moment as your eyes were trained on the floor in a desperate attempt to disassociate yourself with the downward spiraling situation you were in. You couldn’t bring yourself to deny the claim as he saw you. He knew and you knew he knew. Denying at this point would have been foolish and if the silent stare of his friend who now stood next to him told you anything, you were definitely in something akin to an interrogation. Xingqiu has always been stubborn, especially when it came to your situation and now that he had something to go on, you knew he wouldn’t back down until you gave him answers.

       That was the day you finally told someone of your strange gift. Although your parents loved to go on and on about your abilities, you have never spoken about them aloud to anyone. You wanted to bury it deep within yourself and act as if it never existed to begin with as a sorry attempt to create some kind of normalcy for yourself. Saying it out loud in that quietly buzzing classroom made it feel all too real. Explaining your magnetism for the dead to those two silently staring boys made you realize that maybe you were never meant to live a normal life. It was a cold realization. One that made your body feel heavy and your fingers tremble at your side as you swallowed down what felt like a thousand needles.

       The empty feeling you felt in the pit of your stomach slowly engulfed you.

                                                      *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

      Contrary to popular belief, you were not all that knowledgeable about the world beyond your own.

       You were aware of the basics; the floating figures always lurking around you were the spirits of the dead and you alone were the only person able to see them, and the constant voices were their cries to return to life; a wish no one other than gods could grant. Your parents never explained much of anything to you other than the expectations they held in your abilities and what they hoped you would do with them in the future. Most of it pertaining to you profiting off the grief of others which you considered to be completely immoral. No matter how much your parents claimed you were 'wasting' your gift, you could never bring yourself to use it the way they wanted you to.

       It was because of your refusal to budge in your stance against them that you essentially refused to learn anything from your grandmother; the only other person in your family to have the same abilities as you, and the one who pressured you the most to give in. You knew from the start that you were seen as nothing other than a new source of money to your family, the greed was clear in your parents eyes and your grandmother hadn't differed from them. She wanted you to become a psychic like her, which consisted of bringing people into a small dark room while she 'channeled' the spirit of their loved ones before charging them thousands of dollars for a few measly seconds. Those people's misery was real and to know that your grandmother wasn't helping them out of the goodness of her heart but rather out of selfishness was more sickening than you originally thought. It was cruel the first time you saw it and you never went back to visit her ever again after that.

       All of your life you believed it was in your best interests to just ignore that part of you. To bury it deep within your heart never to surface again until the day you died. You didn't like the part of you that differed from the rest of the world and you strived to reject it in order to save yourself a headache. Though that part of you that you desperately wanted to ignore was easier said than done. After all, you can't bury dead people who have no body. Nor could you shut them up.

       Your confrontation with both Chongyun and Xingqiu essentially forced you into their friend group. Their knowledge of you was far too much to leave unsupervised and you were sure the mischievous look on Xingqiu's face couldn't have meant anything good. While having friends wasn't something you were ever against, you also couldn't deny the loneliness you experienced since the start of the rumors circulating the school. The obvious avoiding of contact with you done by your classmates still hurt no matter how much you told yourself it didn't. Frankly, their offer was something akin to a shining light and you gladly took it. You were delighted with the outcome, the shared lunch with both boys plus their friends, whom you never met before, was refreshing and felt new, but most importantly; you felt normal. Though the closer you got to the both of them, Chongyun more so than Xingqiu, you noticed things.

         Chongyun was different from you. You could tell the moment his eyes met yours the first time you met in that wrecked classroom afterschool, and again when he ran into you in the hall the next day. He was different from you because there was still a brightness in his gaze that had yet to be snuffed out.

       You couldn't accurately call him the cheerful type, but he was far more amiable than you. The brightness you saw in him not only pertained to his stellar personality, a feat you were witnessed to during many lunches alongside him and Xingqiu, it applied to the purity he seemingly wore like a badge of honor. To you, he appeared nothing short of untouched by the unseen evils of this world; the same evil that writhed and crept in the deepest pit of your being.

       Maybe for that reason alone you felt inexplicably drawn to his presence.

       Around him, you noticed that world seemed to fall a little more quieter than what you were normally used to. The silence of the dead was indeed deafening and the lack of their being around you made rooms feel emptier. At first, it was hard adjusting to the peace he brought you; something you couldn't believe you were thinking when you were first searching for a way to gain it. Your interest in him only continued to grow knowing that he too was apart of the same world as you.

       How could he appear so unfazed by it all? How could he continue living on in a world where it wasn't occupied by just the living, but the dead as well? How had he not been crushed by the weight of it all? You thought he was strong to have seen what you've seen and not feel as if human life was so pathetically insignificant and carry on with a perceived unbreakable resolve.

       While you both were apart of the same world involving the supernatural, your lives couldn't have been any different. He was raised as an exorcist; trained from birth to deliver people from the clutches of unseen evil and you. . . You were never raised to see the good in others. Your family was the prime example of that.

       There was a part of him that you couldn't help but see yourself in. Of course, you could never be as radiant as him, it was merely only a 'what if' scenario you often thought of. If your parents were anything like his, thinking only for the good of others, would you be just like him? Though the thought always ends short at that. There was no way you could be like him; to see the world through eyes unblinded by the ugliness of humanity. He was witness to both sides, the good and bad, yet he continued to believe in what he thought was right against all odds. He was stronger than you because where he would have the will to stand strong against your parents, you could do nothing more than meekly refuse.

       Your initial admiration for him might have been the reason why you began looking at him more closely. It was a vain attempt to understand just what it was about him that exuded strength when he appeared as if any little thing could knock him over. When he learned of the inborn link you held to the supernatural, he was quick to tell you of his. As impassive as his face appeared, you could clearly see the excitement he spoke with when it came to exorcisms and the pride in his eyes when it came to the subject of his family. He spoke as if there wasn't anything he wished to hide from you and that hopeful side of you that wanted to cling to the small connection you two shared hoped that he felt the same.

       Maybe it was because you essentially laid out your life story to two strangers that he felt the need to share his own, but you liked to think that there was a possibility he too was looking for someone who could truly understand the world he lived in. To the both of you, there couldn't have been anyone better suited to the role than each other.

        There were sides to him you were witness to, sides you would never give up for the world. The twinkle in his light blue eyes and the slight twitch of his lips when he was close to giving into one of Xiangling's antics, among others. These were moments you treasured. Each of them were stored away in your mind to recall again another day. He was your personal sunshine; the one person you could rely on to always say the right things and although you could never tell him that aloud, mainly out concern for embarrassing him and unintentionally triggering his condition, you like to think that you'd get the chance one day. For now you'd count on actions to convey the unspoken things you weren't brave enough to say.

       As the days pass with you and him side by side, you only wonder what's instore for the future. For once you found your small slice of heaven. The visions and noise stops when you're next to him and although his ability of warding off spirits did nothing but peeve him, you couldn't be happier. He was the normalcy you sought for; the silence you yearned for and the reprieve you never knew you needed. Next to him, for just a moment, you think you could become something of a regular girl.

       You could wait for him for all of eternity if you had to. One day he'd realize the secretive smiles with reddened cheeks and the slight graze of your hand against his were not accidents and meant far more than just mere friendship.

[lo-lynx]

Laurits/Loki as a queer character in Netflix’s Ragnarok

Spoilers for season one of Netflix’s show Ragnarok!

I binged the first season of the Netflix show Ragnarok yesterday, and felt compelled to write something about it. This is somewhat hastely written, so I apologise if the arguments are not as well thought out as they could be, but I wanted to write something. So here we go:

In the Netflix show Ragnarok we meet the two brothers Magne and Laurits as they move to the Norwegian town of Edda with their mother (Ragnarok 2020a). The audience and the characters soon realise that this town is not quite normal, and something mysterious is afoot… It becomes clear that Magne has been bestowed with some sort of magical powers and has been put in the role of Thor in the battle between Norse gods and giants. However, it is less clear what role Laurits is supposed to play. In this text I will claim that he is the Loki to Magne’s Thor, and that is especially interesting in regards to the queerness of his character.  

So, first of all, why do I think Laurits is Loki? I think the first point that should be made here is his and Magne’s physical descriptions.

Here we see Laurits sitting furthest to the left, with a green jacket, and Magne sitting to the right of him (with blue jeans and a red t-shirt). Magne and Laurits very much look like how one would imagine Thor and Loki, especially a contemporary audience who has seen the Marvel version of them:

But even beyond Laurits’ looks and brotherly relation to the Thor character, there are parallels between Loki and Laurits. There is his slightly deceptive and trickster like nature, such as when he plays pranks on Magne (for instance by messing up his essay for class when he was supposed to look over the spelling) (Ragnarok 2020a, 22 min). Then there’s also his affinity with the Jutul family, who are actually giants (the name seems to be a play on the old Norse word for giants, jǫtunn). The Loki of Norse myth is often associated with giants as well and might be giant or half-giant (Hume 2019). In the series it is also hinted at several times that Laurits has some sort of magical connection to the giants, for instance at the school dance (Ragnarok 2002b, 31 min). It is also hinted at that the father of the Jutul family, Vidar, has had an affair with Laurits’ mother Turid previously (for example: Ragnarok 2002b, 11:30 min). This makes me wonder if Laurits’ parents are in fact Turid and Vidar, making him half giant… If that is the case, he would have a sort of double cultural heritage, that of humans and that of giants.

Another cultural aspect that is interesting to look at is the parallels between the Loki of myth and the culture of the indigenous Sámi people in northern Scandinavia and Russia (Laidoner 2012). For one, the land of the giants seems to somewhat resemble the description of the Sámi peoples land, in regards to geographical location (north, on the borderlands). Similar to how Sámi was (and are) seen as “other” by Scandinavian people, so were the jǫtunn seen by the æsir (the gods). Laidoner also sees parallels between Loki and historical Sámi shamanism (noadi). She writes:

Loki’s potential links to the cultural world of the Sámi might perhaps first and foremost lie in his combination of being both a jǫtunn and (possibly) an áss and the fact that he seems to lack a home and a clear cultural background (…). This certainly makes him a very untrustworthy outsider among the æsir who, irrespective of the fact that their own ancestry goes back to the jǫtnar, frequently show hostility towards them. Loki’s jǫtunn background, and the possible connection between the Sámi and the jǫtnar whose headquarters seem to have been placed in an area that corresponded to the Sámi territories, allow us to place the focus of the following discussion on Loki’s potential affiliation with Sámi culture, where ideas of symbolic soul travels, cosmic oppositions and ambiguity seem to form a natural part of human existence, something most clearly reflected in the noaidi-tradition. It is difficult to overlook the fact that many dualistic ideas of the same kind are also embodied in the Loki figure. Besides being borderline jǫtunn and áss, a curious relic of Loki’s possible connection to the Sámi-world can perhaps be found in his everpresent duality. This duality is shown in several contrasting qualities, such as existing in both male and female form and being a father and a mother, representing aspects of both good and evil (to the extent that such clear distinctions existed in pre-Christian times), being a causer and resolver of problems, a thief and a bringer of valuable objects, all of which again seems to be in accordance with the functions of a noaidi. (Laidoner 2012, 69)

So, as we can see, Loki crosses borders between both cultures and genders, and both of these aspects make him seem untrustworthy. We can also see a parallel here to how indigenous people have been seen and are seen still today. Now, to return to Laurits, we can see some of these aspects here. Laurits move between different worlds, from the luxury of the Jutuls and the popular kids at school, to his rather less glamorous home-life. As I mentioned above, I also think there’s a possibility of him being half Jutul. But he also most definitely plays with gender borders.

I have previously written on this blog about characters moving between genders, for instance regarding Varys in ASOIAF/GoT and Alex in the “Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard” series by Rick Riordan. As mentioned in the latter text, in that story Loki is presented as genderfluid for similar reasons as I outlined above with his changing of sex/gender. In the analysis of Varys, I wrote about how he was perceived as a transgressor of both borders of gender and ethnicity, with being a eunuch from “the East”. (I there relied on texts about the historical eunuchs in for instance Ancient Greece (Llewyn-Jones 2002; Nikoloutsos 2008)). Similar to what Laidoner writes about Loki, one can see that the fluidity of Varys is connected to his movement between different gender expressions as well as cultures. Here I want to briefly touch on some more theoretical background that might be useful when understanding the crossing of borders with gender and ethnicity. Emma Bond writes about the experiences of trans people who also crosses borders of nations, and how they are seen as transgressors in double ways (2018, 71). She further writes that those who permanently inhabit this liminal space between borders, this site is often experienced as a place of alienation and violence (2018, 97). So, throughout these different examples we can see that people who cross borders of gender and ethnicity are seen as suspicious, and perhaps doubly queer (in the sense of non-conformity to norms of sex/gender/sexuality, which is of course also bound up with norms of ethnicity).

In the show, Laurits is seen crossing gender borders several times. One clear example is during the school dance, where he shows up with eyeliner, skinny jeans, and his mother’s old shirt (Ragnarok 2020b, 22:30 min). At the same dance it becomes clear that he has somewhat of a crush on the popular boy Fjor Jotul (who might be his half-brother if my theory is correct… but I’m also not sure if the Jutul family is actually related in the way they claim…) (Ragnarok 2020b, 24:36 min). This is of course also a break with gender norms, that dictate that men should be attracted to women. Then in the last episode of season one Laurits shows up to the school’s celebration of the national day dressed as the school’s headmistress Ran Jutul to mock and criticise her (Ragnarok 2020c, 31:40 min). Here he cross-dresses, perhaps in a similar way as the mythological Loki has done at times. He also plays the role of the trickster very well. Throughout the season it has been somewhat unclear on whose side he is on, but here at the end he helps the “good guys” (mainly his brother), but of course in a mocking manner. This illuminates the dualistic nature of Loki that Laidoner describes (2012).

Overall, Laurits can be seen as portraying several aspects of Loki. He is a trickster, but also a somewhat fluid character in regards to his heritage/culture and gender/sexuality. He moves between different spaces, inhabiting the liminal space between borders of good/evil, feminine/masculine, etc. This portrayal of a queer character is very interesting, and I hope in the event that the show is renewed for a second season it will explore this further. I should however mention the risk of showing a queer character as a deceiver, this could of course play into stereotypes about queer and/or trans characters. This is something that I write about in the previously mentioned text about Alex from the Magnus Chase novels. But I also think this can be portrayed well and interestingly if the audience is shown a contrast between how Laurits is perceived and who he is. A similar element was most definitely present with Magne in season one. So overall, this portrayal of a queer Laurits/Loki is quite interesting and promising.

 References

Bond, Emma. 2018. Writing Migration through the Body. Springer: Cham

Hume, Kathryn. 2019. “Loki and Odin: Old Gods Repurposed by Neil Gaiman, A. S. Byatt, and Klas Östergren.” Studies in the Novel, (51)2: 237-308.

Laidoner, Triin. “The Flying Noaidi of the North: Sámi Tradition Reflected in the Figure Loki Laufeyjarson in Old Norse Mythology.” Scripta Islandica 63 (2012): 59–91.

Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. 2002. “Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)”, in Eunuchs in antiquity and beyond, ed. Tougher, Shaun, 19-50. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales.

Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. 2008. ”The Alexander Bromance: Male Desire and Gender Fluidity in Oliver Stone’s Historical Epic.” Helios, (35)2: 223-251

Ragnarok. 2020a. New Boy. [TV-show] Netflix, 31st of January.

Ragnarok. 2020b. 541 Meters. [TV-show] Netflix, 31st of January.

Ragnarok. 2020c. Yes, we love this country. [TV-show] Netflix, 31st of January.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 134 Review

Thank you. Thank you so much. This means so much to me.

(Ofc this chapter is called “In the Depths of Despair.”)

Sigh.

So, I guess I have to have an opinion on this chapter now.

For a while there, it looked like SNK had made the right choice.

Eren was the asshole. He was insubordinate, ungrateful, uncooperative, and above all else, a fucking sociopath. Cool, got it. One and done.

But then his friends started talking about how it was really their fault he’s doing this.

Ok, that’s fine. They’re desperate to stop him, so they’re just saying whatever they think will ingratiate themselves with Eren and help talk him down. Dynamics like that are very common in abusive relationships.

Now we arrive at this chapter, where even random people are saying Eren is a victim *as he is murdering them!*

It is patently absurd that Eren is having a warranted or natural or reasonable reaction to what he’s been through.

If Eren were a better person, he would have known that mass murder against the Eldians was wrong because mass murder is wrong. Unfortunately, Eren is a fundamentally amoral person. The only moral compass he has to guide him is a childish belief in “you hit me, so I get to hit you.”

He’s said as much on multiple occasions. He has said, “If someone tries to take my freedom away, I will take their freedom away.”

Instead of being the better man and ending the killing, his solution was to kill more people than them, faster and on a larger scale.

I think the clearest picture of Eren’s worldview was given when he spoke to Historia. He said the only way to end the cycle of violence was to destroy the whole world.

That is Eren’s deeply felt belief: there can be no peace or coexistence; the only way to win is to be the last man standing.

This mindset is so natural to him that he will even kill his friends for opposing him.

He told them that they were free to oppose him, and he was free to fight back. That’s how he justifies killing them to himself. They have the choice to oppose him, so if he fights back and kills them, it’s their fault they died, not his, because they could have made the choice to flee and live, but decided to stand and die.

In reality, the alliance is fulfilling a moral duty to protect life, while Eren is an asshole who has killed billions.

The series wasn’t kind to Eren about that. He was depicted as a cheering child as he murdered everyone. The Rumbling was not white washed either. The take away was obviously that Eren’s decision was not the product of a sound mind.

And yet.

Now I have to wonder if the series is seriously trying to say the Rumbling embodies some form of justice.

There are multiple layers to this issue, so let’s start at the surface level.

So in what is obviously a ham-fisted attempt by Isayama to lecture the audience about morality, a Random Commander Guy filibusters about the ills cast by the Marleyans on the Eldians and how this has rebounded back at them.

It is generally considered good writing for characters to get their just desserts. If someone sells drugs to kids, you expect something bad to happen to them. If someone helps a kid cross the street, you expect something good to happen to them.

What’s different between a generic case of just desserts in a story and this chapter in SNK is that the dessert is typically delivered through some nebulous, karmic force, rather than a vengeful twerp with God-like powers.

When the drug dealer’s car blows up, it’s karmic fate, not revenge.

The car doesn’t blow up because one of the kids devoted his life to exacting revenge, it’s because the car just blows up for no reason, or because something completely unrelated to the dealer causes a bomb to be planted in the car, or the dealer brought it on themselves by getting caught up with terrorists.

People may or may not deserve to suffer, but it’s fine to show people suffering if you’re just trying to make a point about how people should act.

Eren’s a different case. For several reasons.

To help untangle why, let’s think about the death penalty.

The death penalty is an example of retributive justice. Put simply, it’s the idea that retribution can be morally just.

The Rumbling is immoral precisely because it is something a supporter of retributive justice would emphatically NOT support.

Most supporters of the death penalty would justify it as an act by a legitimate societal authority. Eren is not that.

Eren is not an authority figure. He does not speak for the Eldian people and has no right to exact this genocide on their behalf. No one made him King of the Eldians. It’s not his place to decide what’s in the Eldian’s best interest.

Also, killing people because “it’s what the scumbag deserves” is usually justified because it’s a sentence for a crime handed down in a legal process.

Rights can be taken away, but not arbitrarily. Transparency is an important part of this. Acts that are a crime are public knowledge, as well as the prescribed punishments. The criminal law is also supposed to apply to everyone equally, not selectively. To say nothing of the law itself being duly enacted by a legitimate governmental authority.

The same principles apply to the process by which a right is taken away. The process must be laid out in a law that was duly enacted by a legitimate government authority, applies to everyone, and is publicly known.

Eren’s process, of *fucking* course, is nothing like this. Eren has no legitimate authority. He’s a Guy With an Opinion who bumbled into attaining absolute power, and now he’s acting on that Opinion.

He not the government punishing a convict. He’s a guy with a gun shooting people he doesn’t like. The Rumbling is not just retribution, it’s just murder.

Commander Guy says that if they knew this would happen, they would have acted differently.

That’s a good point.

Why the fuck do they deserve to die, then?

To some extent, everyone’s worse impulses are kept in check by the knowledge that there will be consequences if they act rashly.

But it’s not just that.

Laws are public knowledge for a reason: it’s fair. If you know your act is a crime and that performing said act will result in a certain punishment, then by committing the act anyway you have tacitly accepted whatever punishment will be meted out.

The moral onus is placed on you.

This is why knowledge that you are committing a crime is necessary to be convicted of a crime.

In principle, the case with the Marleyans is the same. Is it fair to punish someone for an act they did not know would carry that punishment? No.

They may know the act was immoral, but that is not the same thing as knowing it will lead directly to their death.

And needless to say, but you only deserve to be punished for an act if you deserve to be punished for that act. The Marleyans do not deserve to be punished for that act.

There are multiple ways a wrong can be righted. There are punitive ways, in which the perpetrator is harmed outright. There are also restorative ways, in which the victim is compensated for the harm done to them, usually at the expense of the perpetrator.

I have already explained why Eren lacks the authority to pass judgement on the world, and that the process by which he made his decision was completely illegitimate, but it needs to be said that this punishment is totally improper in itself.

Wiping out humanity is purely punitive. To use the obvious analogy, I don’t think any sane person would argue white people deserve to be punished for racism. Supporters of racial justice usually talk about restorative, rather than punitive, forms of justice, like reparations.

The Rumbling does not make the Eldians whole again. It does not restore their trampled dignity. It is purely an act of vengeance.

Casting it as some kind of deserving retribution is crazy.

Oh, and, you know, suffering is bad, so retributive justice is wrong even disregarding everything I just said.

You could theoretically believe life is a miracle, but that people forfeit that right if they act wrongly…it’s not something many people would support.

If Dino!Eren had been depicted as a random force of nature that visited ruination upon humanity, we could have potentially gotten a good story about how hatred leads to no good outcomes. Like how Godzilla is a metaphor for the ills of nuclear weapons.

Instead we get a nihilistic tale about two sides punching each other until one keels over dead. And somehow the one that keels over deserved it.

What makes it nihilistic is that you could easily reverse it. What if right before Eren destroys Fort Salta, aliens invade the Earth and help the Marleyans.

Now the Eldians are on the verge of annihilation and *Eldian* Commander Guy gets his turn to say “Woe is us who surrendered to hate. We deserve this.”

There is no right side or wrong side. No deserving side or innocent side. The Eldians were cheering for genocide the same as the Marleyans. The difference is the Eldians had a God on their side.

The morality of this series is just all over the place.

The Alliance and Eren are equally sinful, but now Eren is an agent of karmic destiny and his victims “deserve it.”

There isn’t much to talk about this chapter besides that.

Armin still hopes to take Eren alive, but good luck with that.

Eren can manifest other titans from his body, which is cool I guess, though it’s pretty clear this power only exists to give the Alliance things to fight.

There were a lot of allusions to parenthood this chapter. The baby and the cliff. Reiner’s mom realizing how shitty she’s been. Historia’s pregnancy. The Commander Guy saying it’s the fault of “us adults.” The numerous shots emphasizing the kids at Fort Salta.

Child abuse is a common theme of SNK. And not just parental abuse, but societal abuse, too. Children are the victims of individual foibles and broader social ills, like racism and police brutality.

The cycle of violence at the heart of the series’ conflict is bad for everyone, but the story emphasizes that it is bad for children in particular. It harms them, and leads to a world that is worse off for them.

If there’s one takeaway from SNK, it’s that we should think of the children. Adults shouldn’t just take care of their kids, they should fix broader social issues, if not for themselves then for the children’s sake.

It’s a fucking insult.

Historia’s pregnancy is all but confirmed here. There’s no way it’s fake. There may have been motive to fake being pregnant, but there is no fucking way she’d have a reason to fake *birth*.

I always leaned towards the pregnancy being real, so that didn’t get to me. What gets me is that Historia is just…there. On Paradis. On the sidelines.

Not only was Historia, who is the only likable female character in this show now, impregnated, she’s also been MIA most the last two story arcs.

I had thought Isayama was saving her for the finale. Surely, Isayama understands that if you sideline a major character for no reason, they have to come into play at some point, I thought. Surely.

Characters are tools; they exist to be used. So use them.

But no, it seems Historia is legit not going to be a thing in this final battle. My dreams of the domineering boss saving the day are dashed.

But what really messes with me is how shafted Historia has been since basically the end of the Uprising Arc.

Historia’s only contribution to the plot after Uprising, but before the pregnancy was making the disastrous decision to make the truth of the world public, which paved the way for Paradis society to become radicalized and back Eren’s coup.

She has done nothing other than that.

Obviously her pregnancy will have thematic importance, but at this point the best Historia stans can hope for is that she’s the main character in the epilogue.

I’ve always assumed the pregnancy was the product of a loving relationship. For all his incompetence with Historia, I was willing to assume Isayama would not force her to carry a forcibly impregnated child to term.

And you know that even if the child is the product of rape, Historia will still have to say she loves and accepts them as her child and will raise them lovingly, with no regard or acknowledgement of the trauma of having to raise a child born out of her being raped.

Because the theme of the story.

All life is a miracle.

All children deserve to be loved.

Even if it was rape.

Except it’s more complicated than that, and I’m terrified to think that Isayama may not understand that.

So for now, I choose to presume that Historia is pregnant because she loves someone, decided to have a family with them, and we’re being led to believe she was raped for shock value.

But arguably more important is what this means for the queer audience.

Historia’s first love interest was another woman.

She’s queer. A lesbian. A dyke. What have you.

Now you’re telling me she either loves a man, or was not only raped, but has to love and accept the child that results from that trauma?

And for what?

So we can end the manga on a speech by Historia moralizing about the value of posterity?

Historia stands at the nexus of two subjects in this manga: the value of posterity and the denigration of queer people.

It is very homophobic of this series to pair a queer character with a dude to affirm a message about the value of children and motherhood.

As if queer people can’t have children.

We seem to be headed down that path.

It didn’t have to be like this.

Queer people can have children through artificial insemination. And artificial insemination is conceivable with Paradis’ current level of technological development.

Isayama is choosing to do this because queer people are not a part of his vision of a world where people, especially children, are able to live free.

That’s very sad, because it shows how empty SNK’s morals are.

So who’s the slave here?

Who here is truly free?

The ones who are free are the ones who aren’t reading Attack on Titan anymore.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 019: Hey Google, Play “You Say Run”

Previously on BnHA: All Might plus ultraed a bunch of thugs but then the three Big Bads converged on him and nearly ripped him apart. Deku ran back to try to save him and nearly got his own self killed. Then Bakugou fucking Katsuki, Todoroki motherfucking Whatever His First Name Is, and Kirishima goddamn Same Deal as Todoroki showed up at the last fucking second to save the day.

Today on BnHA: Todoroki is a beast. Bakugou nearly gives me a heart attack. All Might is hurt and almost out of time and in no condition to be fighting the enemy. All Might fights the enemy anyway. All Might fucking demolishes the enemy, and sacrifices damn near everything to do it, and it’s the single most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my fucking life.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 31 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.) 

oh damn, Todoroki is so maddeningly excellent at life that he can control his quirk to the extent that he stopped just short of freezing All Might in addition to Noumu

mighty fine job there, Elsa

OH THANK GOD All Might took advantage of that to loosen Noumu’s grip and now he’s hopping out of there

but he’s still fucking hurt! the guy was fucking clawing at his old injury, and even before that happened he was already close to his limit. I really don’t like this at all

now everyone is just staring at Facepalm. like, fuck you, dude

“WE DON’T LIKE YOU”

Bakugou still has his hand on Kurogiri’s neck. just blow him the fuck up already. of course you pick now of all fucking times to go all lawful fucking heroic

Noumu’s just sitting there in Kuro’s void all

his expression literally has not changed once since his first appearance, but it’s amazing how all it takes is the right context, and just like that it becomes hilarious

“you’ve pinned down our way out” yes he has! but for whatever reason, he’s not going for a killing or even a disabling blow! and it’s making me fucking anxious!!

and now Bakugou is monologuing like fucking Peter Pan hlkhsakdh. “OH THE CLEVERNESS OF ME”

listen Baku, that’s great that you’ve figured all of that out and all, but I’m serious now, you had better blast this guy sometime today or this is all about to get extremely fucking dire again

now he’s recalling when he first tried to attack Kurogiri at the outset of the surprise attack, back when he nearly blasted him and Kuro was like “that was close.” except that as far as Bakugou’s concerned, he might as well have said “BOY THAT WAS CLOSE, IT SURE IS GOOD THAT HE DIDN’T HIT MY WEAK SPOT RIGHT OVER HERE.” apparently

it is pretty clever tbh but omg I just want him to stop dragging this out already. my heart can’t take

he’s telling Kuro that he’ll blow him up if he decides he’s doing anything fishy. I’m sure that’s going to pan out

seriously Bakugou, it’s football season now in the U.S. and I just watched the Packers come back from a 20-0 deficit, after their quarterback fucking died in the first half but was then somehow resurrected. I’m just not in a mood to underestimate anyone right at this moment, least of all a bunch of shounen villains whom the author has clearly invested a great deal of time and thought into, and who are thus quite unlikely to just die here a mere 8 chapters after their introduction

ughhh

Facepalm is acting entirely too calm for the heroes to not be on their fucking guard right now

aaaaaand now he’s telling Noumu to “take out the explosive brat”! :’D

haha! bitch if you fucking try anything I will go out and buy like 50 mouse traps and wait until you’re sleeping and then stick those things all over all fourteen of your creepy superfluous possessed fucking hands

so now Noumu is hauling his ass back out of the portal... and his arm and leg are literally crumbling, WOW

son of a bitch I’m glad Todoroki’s on our side

Deku and All Might are watching this and wondering what exactly Noumu even is, which is quite a reasonable thing to be asking yourself at this point

oh, great. apparently he has hyper regeneration too and can regrow his limbs and repair all of his injuries in an instant! so that’s just fucking great

does Todoroki have a limit to his ice powers? we don’t know of one yet, at least. hey bud, can you just. freeze him again real quick there

or if you really want to be a dear, maybe try freezing Facepalm since he’s clearly the ringleader in all of this??

now All Might is heroically leaping into the fray once more

and now it occurs to me that Bakugou and Todoroki (and Kiri) may in fact be acting so frustratingly complacent because they, unlike Deku, aren’t aware of just how close All Might is to his limit, and just how fucked they’ll be if that actually happens. as far as they know, All Might doesn’t have a limit. he’s fucking All Might. why would he?!

so in fact I can’t blame them, because they’re not aware of just how close to the knife’s edge they’re actually walking right now

nnnnnnnnngh something is happening with Bakugou, something or someone is approaching him and it’s probably Noumu!! 8|!!! I’ll have to scroll down in order to see but I’m worriiiied sob

[peeks through hands]

um. what the hell just happened

it looked like something was disintegrating for a second there in that FWSH panel but other than that? I got nothing

(ETA: I’ve read this chapter like 4 times and I still don’t know what was going on in that panel, honestly. everything else is pretty clear now though)

whatever it was, it was too fast for any of the kids to follow. even Kacchan has no idea how the hell he suddenly got where he is

I personally have a guess

MY GUESS IS CONFIRMED

ALL MIGHT IS SO FUCKING GLORIOUS. THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY SON’S LIFE!! PLEASE MARRY ME!!

now Facepalm is sarcastically praising him, as villains do

this is the second time he’s mentioned something like this now. I’m starting to get the feeling it has something to do with whatever his motivation/backstory is. you know, what with this being the first arc with bad guys, as of yet I have no idea what BnHA’s Villain Redemption Policy is. but I have to say, I can’t see myself ever liking this nutjob. so he’d better not try to pull any Vegeta/Byakuya/Itachi/Mukuro type of shit, that’s all I can say

and now he’s ranting about how it’s ~not fair~ because when bad guys do bad guy stuff violently, it’s bad, but when good guys do good stuff violently, it’s fine!

there are so many logical holes in this argument!! but!! it’s also one of the themes I was lowkey hoping the series would explore, and it looks like maybe it will, so this is pretty exciting!

but his argument here is just so fucking wrong, though. like dude, you really can’t see how All Might’s “violence” is just a little bit different from you and your friends’, Mr. “LET’S KILL SOME CHILDREN HAHAHA”?

lol now All Might’s calling him out on his bullshit and basically saying that he knows full well this psycho isn’t a Mukuro-type. I fucking love this

and now these four boy scouts are feeling empowered

I LIKE THEIR FIGHTING SPIRIT. THE ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE “WITH ALL MIGHT SUPPORTING US” PART IS SECRETLY FLAWED!!

and now All Might’s telling them to get out of there because he knows, sob

jesus christ Deku are you seriously pointing out all of All Might’s weaknesses right now in front of the fucking enemy

I get that he’s worried about him but dude!! some discretion, you know???

thankfully All Might cuts him off, but the damage is probably already done

Facepalm is now instructing Noumu and Kurogiri to go after All Might and says that he’ll handle the kids 8/

hey so Todoroki, maybe now you might want to try freezing this dude’s ass?? like what are you waiting for though??

fuck me, All Might has “barely a minute left” now. this had better be like one of those Dragonball Z minutes that’s actually 15 episodes long. or else we’re really in a bind

and now he seems to be powering up to do something...

oh my god

okay, can I just say, I’ve seen a LOT of anime eyes in my day. magical eyes, cursed eyes, eyes in all shapes and styles and every last color of the rainbow. but All Might just may have the coolest fucking eyes I’ve ever seen

and I’ve actually thought this ever since we first saw them in his Skinny Steve form. there’s just something so cool about the black eyes with blue irises combo. it doesn’t look like any other character I can think of, and it just works for him. I’m unfortunately at a complete loss for how to explain just why I like it so much, because I always read these chapters so late, and my brain’s not up to the task. but anyway! the point is that he’s awesome and this closeup is crazy intense and is giving me life right now

even everyone else watching is just blown the fuck away by the sheer badassery he’s suddenly radiating at this moment. THE SYMBOL OF PEACE IS ABOUT TO FUCK SOMEONE UPPPPPPPPPP

HE’S PUNCHING NOUMU AND HE DOESN’T SEEM TO BE CONCERNED AT ALL ABOUT THE SHOCK ABSORPTION, AS THOUGH HE HAS SOME SORT OF PLAN NOW

OH WOW

HE’S LITERALLY JUST PUMMELING THE EVERLOVING SHIT OUT OF HIM

WELL MORE LIKE THEY’RE PUMMELING EACH OTHER I GUESS

WOW. GOTTA SAY, THAT IS ONE OF THE MOST SHOUNEN THINGS I’VE EVER WITNESSED

ohh SHIT, All Might says that since it’s “absorption” and not “negation”, it implies that he must have a limit

and now he’s basically saying “oh, you built this thing to be badder than me? well then in that case I’ll just have to be EVEN BADDER”

ALL MIGHT IS FUCKING CRANKING IT UP TO ELEVEN AND IT IS GLORIOUS

BUT HE’S ALSO DYING STILL

DON’T DIE ALL MIGHT

A HERO’S ALWAYS READY TO SMASH THROUGH TROUBLE OH MY GOD

HE IS LIKE THE LIVING EMBODIMENT OF SHOUNEN

OH MY GOD NOW HE’S SAYING THE THING

THE NONSENSICAL THING THAT I’VE BEEN KIND OF ROLLING MY EYES AT THIS ENTIRE TIME BECAUSE IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE

AND TO BE HONEST IT STILL DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE

BUT...

...I THINK ALL MIGHT MAY BE STARTING TO WIN ME OVER ON THIS ONE

my GOD that was satisfying to see

(ETA: you guys. YOU GUYS. I watched this scene like a half a dozen times in the anime. it. was. so. cool. like honest to god one of the single coolest and most badass things I’ve ever fucking seen.

so what I didn’t realize is that BnHA is one of those newfangled anime that actually runs in seasons, instead of starting one day and then just never stopping ever again. I have seen so many good series brought to their knees by attempting the latter. it drains the budget, necessitates all kinds of obnoxious and pointless filler, and ends up forcing things to be unbearably dragged out. but by condensing BnHA’s first two arcs into one 13-episode season, the anime sidestepped all of these pitfalls entirely. the animation has been gorgeous, and they only animated what was in the actual canon! no fucking filler omg.

and the soundtrack. GUYS. I had no idea the OST was going to be this fucking good. and just, when it gets to this scene, and the production values just jump up ALL THE NOTCHES, and the music starts to swell, and All Might is being so cool and THROWING ALL THE PUNCHES, and the fucking SKY is getting dark for no reason at all except that EVEN THE SKY IS INTIMIDATED BY HOW BADASS HE IS, and there are all these wind effects and camera angles and I’m losing my mind, and then ALL MIGHT SAYS. THE. THING!!! and then KAPOOOOOW

just. it fucking floored me. like I wanted to cry almost. my adrenaline was so ramped up I was practically ready to do backflips. that shit made me want to go out and save the world.

I fucking understand plus ultra after that, man. I get it now. it’s like my third eye has been fucking opened. universe tell me your secrets. oh my god)

the kids are staring in shock

there is literally smoke clearing. from the flurry of punches. they were punching so furiously that somehow there was smoke

All Might punched him over 300 times in like, 10 seconds. damn, All Might. that sounds like the kind of hyperbolic thing I would say to describe something like what you just did. only you actually did it

goddamn

so now only Facepalm and his convenient friend with the convenient escape power are left. I wonder what will happen next chapter lmao

BONUS:

JIROU!! ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITES!

she has such a weird power and I fucking love it

unfortunately her power is incompatible with all iPhones manufactured since 2016

“she looks like she’d play bass” yessss

did I mention that I love her?? and I ship her with Momo lol

[sagemoderocklee]

How do you see Sasuke and Gaara's relationship as friends/evolved towards friendship?

i love this question anon! thank you! i hope i can do it justice, because i definitely feel that Sasuke and Gaara have a lot of potential in relating to one another. They are both incredibly similar, i’d say more so than Naruto, and while they do have a lot of differences, I think ultimately they share more common trauma and mental health issues than not. 

Which is why i wish the potential friendship wasn’t glossed over or just reduced to bad jokes from the fandom about gaara being jealous of sasuke 

now it’s been a while since i’ve done a full rewatch, but i think the first thing that should be pointed out is that gaara picked sasuke. during the chuunin exams, he saw sasuke as an equal before he ever so much as fought sasuke. he overlooked naruto, he underestimated lee... but he picked sasuke. he saw sasuke, he saw the look in his eyes and he knew. he knew they were the same--they were both deeply scarred from their childhoods of abuse, neglect, violence, betrayal... Yashamaru, the only person Gaara had in his life who he thought loved him, tried to kill him; Itachi, the person Sasuke idolized, his older brother who was perfect and wonderful, killed their entire clan and then tortured sasuke. 

they both had a deeply violent trauma inflicted upon them from a very young age, and they both went to a very dark place. both were also shown to be somewhat similar as children--both kind, both warm, both caring, both loving. I would argue that prior to the trauma, they were both on a path towards becoming incredibly soft, gentle men--a fact which does play out with Gaara and to an extent Sasuke (look at his relationship with animals). Naruto, though he has gone to a dark place too, reacted differently to his trauma. He became loud, he became a trouble maker. He wanted to be acknowledged, so he acted out. Gaara and Sasuke were not on a path towards acknowledgement.  

Sasuke wanted vengeance for his clan--something that he was told to seek out by itachi himself. Gaara, though it’s less explicit, wanted vengeance for himself. 

I think in his choice to love only himself and to kill as a way to prove his existence, really speaks to a similar perspective that Sasuke had. He needed to be the strongest, he needed to be the best--but for Gaara, Yashamaru was already dead. He couldn’t do anything to his father, the Kazekage, which is where the blame should be placed--his father and the council. But he can’t do anything to them, and he can’t just destroy his entire village though he obviously did try. Gaara’s actions, his reactions, everything about his breakdown and subsequent change after Yashamaru’s betrayal and death speaks to feeling trapped, feeling like he had no other options, feeling helpless. 

I think Sasuke also felt helpless. 

Sasuke was forced to live in the Uchiha compound even after the massacre. He had to relive the trauma he’d faced over and over again. He was forced to walk the same streets where he’d found the bodies of every one of his family members, he was forced to live in the house he’d found his parents... over and over again. every single day for years. 

That sort of repetitive trauma creates a sense of helplessness, and pushes him harder to follow the path Itachi laid out for him. He’s desperate to kill itachi, which makes him an easy target for later manipulation. 

Gaara’s repeated trauma wasn’t just the abuse from the village, which is obviously something he does share with Naruto, but specifically the five other assassination attempts on his life (something that Naruto does not share). Obviously, those other attempts would have similarly resulted in the deaths of those five other ANBU who’d been given that task. But those attempts on his life are not only singularly traumatic for Gaara in that the attempts are being made at all, but they also rehash the horrible betrayal from Yashamaru and his subsequent death. They remind him time and again that his father hates him. His village hates him, his uncle hated him, his mother hated him. I think, in many ways, the violent deaths around Gaara, caused by him, are a rehashing of that trauma caused by Yashamaru. While Gaara was trying to embody what Yashamaru said, what his mother supposedly named him for (ware o aisuru shura, “self-loving carnage”), I think too he was trying to relive that trauma out of confusion. 

we don’t have a lot of onscreen time with Gaara from this time. the number of onscreen deaths at his hand (4) don’t really paint a full picture, but i would argue that almost every person he killed was worth killing in some way or another. look at how he brushed off Naruto early on or Lee at the start of their match, I don’t think Gaara killed people who he felt didn’t matter. In the Forest of Death, he killed those three Ame shinobi because they had the scroll and because ultimately they were in the way of obtaining it, but also because the leader of that trio made it clear he thought he was stronger than Gaara. In the grand scheme of things they didn’t matter, but he had an objective--the scroll--and they were an obstacle, and ultimately it was a writing convention used to show that Gaara was dangerous. Obviously it’s hard to say for sure, but while I think that while Gaara was killing sort of haphazardly, seemingly without reason or care, that he ultimately always did care and there was always some logic in his own mind for the deaths. 

anyway, all this babbling is me leading back to my first point: Sasuke and Gaara share more trauma and mental health issues in common than is ever explored in the series. 

i think the moment that really for me is vital in this discussion is during the Five Kage Summit/Sasuke vs the Five Kage when Gaara and Sasuke come face to face for the first time since they were twelve. 

Gaara’s response is not to try to kill him or capture him, it’s to try and talk to him. It’s to try and relate to him. Because he does relate. He does empathize--obviously Gaara is missing a lot of pieces because he doesn’t know what’s happened or why Sasuke is attacking them. He doesn’t understand that Konoha and every other nation is at fault for so many wrongs in the world.

But he cares. He empathizes. He understands where Sasuke’s at, and I think in some ways he does see himself in Sasuke even though it’s been years since he, himself, reacted violently to the external world. I think he knows he could still be in that dark place, that it was but a moment from the universe that allowed him the chance to change. 

Sadly, I think Gaara, as a character, had the potential to be more than just another person to buy into a system of militaristic power, but it was wasted. He listened to Naruto, and he decided that he’d follow that same path; he’d forgive an entire village and the shinobi in it who went along with his abuse, he’d continue the system--like my own personal headcanons are that Gaara is far more radical and revolutionary than he’s presented in canon. I think that he made a choice when he was very young and inexperienced and still coming to grips with the life he’d led, the trauma he’d endured, and didn’t fully know what he was getting in to. 

But once he does, he works tirelessly to do right. Obviously for the first few years, especially before his death, he’s fighting against stigma and fear and is still really young--I don’t think he knows yet how to be the Kazekage fully or what radical thought really is. He has to work with the council and do his best to present as non-threatening as possible. Then after his death, I think he’s got a little more room to work with but not that much, and then the war happens a few years later. After the war, I think that’s when he really starts to get the chance to see Sasuke’s revolutionary and radical perspective on the shinobi world. 

So anyway, back on track... 

Gaara sheds a tear for Sasuke during that scene because they share so much in common. Gaara is a painfully empathetic character, but this is also because he does see himself in Sasuke. 

I think Sasuke would remember that. 

I don’t imagine that they can be friends until after the war, but I think that Sasuke does remember that moment; he doesn’t remember much of that day, running too high on more trauma and mental/emotional stress, having a breakdown, etc, but he does remember that moment. Gaara was the only one who didn’t want to kill Sasuke. He tried to reach Sasuke. 

So, Sasuke doesn’t go back to Konoha--which like good--he travels. 

He visits Suna. 

Gaara welcomes him. He doesn’t act scared, he doesn’t act weird or skittish. He’s not extra careful around Sasuke. He greets Sasuke as though they are friends which Sasuke is sure they never were, and he invites Sasuke to stay at the Kazekage estate instead of one of the hotels in the village or even the shinobi housing compound which does have a wing for visiting foreign shinobi. Nope. Garara invites him into his home, allows him to join him and his family for dinner--it is incredibly awkward because Temari and Kankurou do not have the same perspective on Sasuke, and maybe Shikamaru is visiting and feels even MORE awkward than the other Sand sibs. 

But Sasuke was welcomed. He was treated like a friend. 

Sasuke is not a character I’ve spent as much time thinking about and hcing, but I do tend to think of him as closed off, guarded. a man of few words because he just doesn’t feel safe divulging information about himself--whether it’s his feelings or his past or whatever. I also imagine that, after everything he’s been through, Sasuke hates being confused and he hates second guessing peoples’ intentions. 

He’s been used by so many people in his life, and I think Gaara’s kindness would read as a red flag to Sasuke instead of something genuine. 

But Sasuke isn’t afraid of Gaara. So he finds Gaara in his study, late that night after dinner, when everyone else is asleep, and he asks outright, “What do you want?” 

Gaara is confused as fuck. “What do you mean?” 

“What do you want from me?” 

Gaara probably gets that little crease between where his eyebrows should be. “I don’t understand.” 

“Why are you being so nice? I used to be a criminal.” 

Finally he understands. But Gaara isn’t exactly good with explaining his own emotions either, so it’s probably a difficult discussion. “You were a victim of your village, as much as I was once a victim of mine. I have no reason to be cruel or unkind, because I understand you, Uchiha Sasuke.” 

Sasuke doesn’t really know Gaara, so he doesn’t know if he can trust Gaara, but the words definitely strike a chord in him. Someone else understands him. Someone else empathizes with him. It’s enough. 

Sasuke leaves the next day for other lands. 

But whenever he’s near Suna, he stops by for a visit. 

Gaara always welcomes him. He’s always happy to see him in his own way. They talk sometimes about shinobi life in a hidden village, about Naruto’s progress on becoming Hokage (both of them feel like he’s got a lot of work to do), on political matters that Gaara should definitely not be talking to Sasuke about but that’s fine Sasuke won’t tell anyone. Sasuke shares some of his ideas, Gaara likes some of them. Sasuke’s perspective helps Gaara to acknowledge his own past and the horrors he endured thanks to his father and his village. He accepts that he doesn’t need to forgive the wrongs done to him. In turn, Sasuke finds that kindness can be as revolutionary as anger. He’s not as afraid to be vulnerable. 

Gaara’s the first person to know how Sasuke feels about Naruto. 

Gaara doesn’t really know much about romance, but he’s seen his villagers, his sister and Shikamaru, he’s even seen Kankurou once or twice smitten with a local girl but he was too afraid of commitment to pursue. He encourages Sasuke. 

“Naruto has fought for you for a long time,” he says. “From what I know of him, of his determination to bring you home... I would say he loves you.” 

Sasuke doesn’t tell Naruto that he and Gaara are friends. He still doesn’t really get it sometimes, he doesn’t always trust it especially when he hasn’t seen Gaara for a long time. But he always finds a reason to stop by Suna, he always finds time to stay at the Kazekage estate at least for a day to catch up with Gaara. 

I imagine they have a very quiet, soft sort of friendship. One built on mutual understanding and empathy, compassion and kindness, and unrelenting honesty. I imagine they grow close over the years of infrequent visits and political discussions and sometimes heavier discussions like their past traumas. 

[braindamageforbeginners]

Male Fragility and Male Pattern Baldness

14 months, two weeks, one day post-dx

This week, in addition to The Donald, the big news has been... Gillette shaving products. You might know this company for the various shaving-based products they make, or the catchy slogan, “The best a man can get.” Which sounds a little weird and unintentionally homoerotic, but I dislike bleeding when shaving, and, for travel purposes, they have the market for disposable razors.

In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed and Cadet Bonespurs still not being called for using the word “pussy” on a live mic (okay, so, even if we want to accept the idea that men talk to each other in the locker room - we don’t, it is the most uncomfortable and awkward environment imaginable - you don’t repeat it in polite company, and YOU DO NOT REPEAT IT IN A TAPED INTERVIEW), it has come to light that America has a problem with massive, throbbing male egos that go unchecked until they inevitably screw up and alienate so many of their victims that Americans vote in loads of sensible, moderate people (previously known as “women,” but that was also when we voted based on gender and class lines instead of a person’s public record). Gillette then changed its slogan to “The best a man can be,” which, I have to admit, is almost as good as “The Most Interesting Man in the World” for aspirational marketing aimed at men. The goal of all this was, presumably, to start a discussion on toxic masculinity and gender roles. Now, I may have some misgivings about this conversation being helmed and instigated by a company with a definite financial and cultural stake in the (patriarchal) status quo, but it’s still a talk we need to have in society. My reaction of vague misgivings and semi-apathy was nothing, however, compared to white men on the Internet. They used all caps to rain impotent fury down upon this perceived slight, that, maybe, we should have a discussion about how framing masculinity only as it brutalizes and disenfranchises others isn’t such a good idea. As someone who’s had his country club privileges revoked but still gets passing privilege, I’d think it’s a discussion worth having, especially if you’re under the rather idiotic impression that your good health and luck will last forever. Now, even though I still stand by the idea that Rousseau was right, and that most of us are mostly-good; at the same time, when you’re forced into a position of vulnerability, people you thought you knew well can reveal themselves to be utter assholes. Yes, pain, torture, and crippling may reveal my inner nature to some extent, but how you treat me in this period is a much more revealing test of your character, dear reader. So, I’m fully prepared to discuss this whole “how you treat the least among you” idea, with the acknowledgment that, as the least among you (sort of), I am fully in favor of toppling the patriarchy and rebuilding it with something less creepy and predatory.

Then I got Rogaine. Full disclosure, Mother Dearest actually got it for me, because I still wear my hair in a rather severe mohawk to cover up the weird, radioactive/thin patches that were scalded off by the nuclear fire (undergoing cancer treatments is like puberty - you change pretty dramatically, physically, and you’re left looking almost, but not quite, like you used to, which is disconcerting to see in a mirror). Normally, the word “regrowth” is not a good one for a brain cancer patient, but, since everything else in my life has been completely upended and vivisected, I figured, “Why not?” In a weird way, even though I’m not in a position I’d wish upon someone I despised (well..), I don’t feel terribly emasculated. After all, how many rounds of chemo and radiation have you gone through? I know I can take a severe beating and get up afterward; even if that beating comes in the form of neurosurgery, radiation, and chemo (I realize my framing of that in terms of violence is probably typical of the problem, but we’re working our way toward other, more humorous topics).

If ever there was a physical embodiment of the sort of mindset that would fee attacked by Gillette’s rather flaccid suggestion we sort of talk about problems with traditional masculinity; it’s Rogaine. First of all, it comes with all these warning labels on it - I am not making this up - saying things like “Not intended for women” or “Not for use by women” (that last one is verbatim). It doesn’t actually go full-blown Alex Jones manthrocyte (or whatever male virility cure he’s hocking this week), nor do the words “male jelly” or “He-Man Woman Haters Club” appear on the box, but it’s amazingly close. What’s especially delightful - to me, anyway - is that a female friend of the family (who has issues with hair stress-related hair loss) is the one who recommended it. However, I am trying to be somewhat more sensible about what I put in myself these days, so I did some quick Internet research (that’s enough to make me an expert on the subject, I figure), and it’s a vasodilator - it’ll open your blood vessels (I still haven’t pieced together how that leads to increased hair growth, but I’m willing to take some things on faith). Apparently, you’re not supposed to take it orally. Which opened up a whole new set of questions, like, 1. What was the study where they found out someone was dumb enough to drink hair tonic? and, 2. If you do drink it, is that some sort of suicide warning? Bearing in mind that this is just the packaging - which, again, I get it’s targeting insecure middle-aged men and/or those of use who want our youthful appearance back while we’re still actually youthful; both of which are vulnerable to suggestion and hesitancy, and maybe they’d turn back at the thought that maybe someone would think less of them for using feminine hygiene products (supposedly, army medics have used tampons to seal wounds in combat, so even the most-feminine of feminine hygiene products is helpful to all genders under the right circumstance), let’s go on to what’s inside the box. Which is a series of bland-looking bottles that are perfect for not indicating someone is insecure about baldness. And an applicator. Let’s hold for a moment. In most medical products - even the CBD/THC oils I take (orally, but maybe I should try them on my hair) the “applicator” is either a glorified eye-dropper or more-glorified Q-tip (side-note: you don’t see Q-tips exclusively marketed to women, even though their most  common use is as a mascara applicator)(this is true; you’ve probably been sticking them in the wrong orifice for years). Not so with Rogaine. This comes with - depending on how you look at it - either a miniature turkey baster (perfect for basting Cornish hens), or a Cyclopean eye-dropper. In other words, there’s virtually no way you could screw up where you stick this thing and apply it nasally (again, I’m sure it’s been tried, and they rewrote the warnings and repackaged it). It is, in short, not only catered to male insecurity, it’s designed to completely idiot-proof (I guess they got that one right, most intelligent people wouldn’t be fooled into thinking that fancy, medically-worded hair tonic works)(normally, neither would I, but the woman who recommended it is smarter than me, so I’m willing to try it). It’s the perfect product for Homer J. Simpson.

After drizzling this stuff onto your radioactive-seared flesh, you’ll notice a slight tingling sensation. Either that or just the sensation of something liquid-y runnning over your scalp, I have a lot of scars, so it’s hard to tell. Then... nothing. Admittedly, I’ve only been using it for a few days, Apparently, you have to use it for a month or two before seeing results, at which point you’re either supposed to discontinue use, or, for the truly brave, drink it. Again, I just went 12 months straight with chemo, it’s not like something as minor as not seeing results will be a major deterrent.

For those of you wondering how I do it - go the full 12 rounds of chemo, radiation, and surgery, knowing I will eventually have to repeat it, and eventually lose - that’s how. You have to be able to look at every miniscule step on the path (and not much further ahead) and chuckle at how extraordinarily weird and fucked up it all is. And realize you want to be around to chuckle at the next weird, fucked up moment, even if you have weird, striated baldness on one side.

[samosoapsoup]

POINT OF NO RETURN

ART FORUM

Alex Kitnick on the discontent with museums

“WHEN DISCONTENT WITH MUSEUMS is strong enough to provoke the attempt to exhibit paintings in their original surroundings or in ones similar, in baroque or rococo castles, for instance, the result is even more distressing than when the works are wrenched from their original surroundings and then brought together.” This is Theodor Adorno in his great essay “Valéry Proust Museum,” first published in German in 1955, a moment of reckoning and reconstruction. Though Adorno doesn’t specify why the attempt to return and repatriate is more upsetting than the original rift and reassembling of modernity, it is clear that we are in a similar moment of discontent again today—and that we, too, must consider our desires and the effects they might produce.

In May this past year, the director of Florence’s Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, announced a proposal to return a number of the museum’s religious paintings to churches (if not to the exact ones the paintings came from, then at least to similarly Christian places of worship). At first glance, this seemed like a not-terrible idea; after all, I have seen Caravaggio’s Inspiration of Saint Matthew, 1602, tucked into its nook in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome and felt that awed feeling of witnessing a thing where it was meant to be seen, in situ. Schmidt had apparently absorbed all the postmodern lessons of site specificity, about what is lost when something is picked, pried, or stolen from its original context. (“To remove the work is to destroy the work,” I could almost hear Richard Serra say.) But as I thought more about his proposal, the deep anti-modernism of the gesture struck me: The idea, after all, is not simply to relocate the paintings but to change their natures, transforming them from secular things worthy of contemplation into devotional images deserving of worship. Even if Schmidt is somehow historically right—in other words, even if he is being faithful to how artists intended their work to be seen—he is nevertheless revoking the experience of modernity that has descended upon these paintings.

When a painting was taken off the wall of the church and brought into the gallery of the museum, we were asked to look at it differently than the artist intended. Broken out of its original lifeworld and turned into a fragment (this is the original crime Adorno speaks of), the artwork became secular, a relic of another time and place, patched together with relics from other times and places. (“It would be an act of madness to enter a museum, kneel down before a painting of the virgin to pray for a soldier missing in battle, lighting a candle and leaving an offering on the floor near the picture before leaving,” Philip Fisher noted in 1975.) It is lost and adrift, yes, but it is also transformed, and here we find the other edge of the sword: One begins to draw connections the artist never imagined. That is the quixotic, heady power of the museum, the birth of which, one might go so far as to say, demands the death of the author. No works made before 1860 were meant to be contemplated in quite the same way—as Foucault reminds us, Manet was the first painter to imagine his paintings in the museum—but nothing that goes into it can resist its power. In this sense the museum is akin to the commodity system, another modern invention: Artworks confront all other artworks within its space. Inside, they change orientation, speak differently, take on new lives, assume new values. The viewer is charged with wondering about their potential, purchase, and power.

To describe the Uffizi plan as anti-secular and anti-modern is not to say that every repatriation shares these characteristics. In general, stolen things should be given back, and the past few years have seen many struggles for restitution that are undeniably just. In 2018, scholars Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy of the Collège de France released a brilliant report, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, urging the return of plundered African objects to their native lands: “African cultural heritage can no longer remain a prisoner of European Museums,” Macron’s Twitter account proclaimed. It is hard to argue against this move even if the proposed return is to some extent symbolic, and one might ask if European museums are not also attempting to divest themselves of a troubling colonial history: While France is much less likely to give back all the resources it plundered over the longue durée of colonialism, the return of objects might still pave the way for other forms of remuneration and justice; in their report, Sarr and Savoy note that restitution opens the “question of building bridges for future equitable relations.” Importantly, they are just as invested in the experience of confronting the objects themselves. As Sarr and Savoy put it, “To fall under the spell of an object, to be touched by it, moved emotionally by a piece of art in a museum, brought to tears of joy, to admire its forms of ingenuity, to like the artworks’ colors, to take a photo of it, to let oneself be transformed by it: All these experiences—which are also forms of access to knowledge—cannot simply be reserved to the inheritors of an asymmetrical history, to the benefactors of an excess of privilege and mobility.” If repatriated objects are unlikely to return to their original contexts, Sarr and Savoy insist, they must be displayed in necessarily “unoriginal” ways—in other words, in a museum.

The museum reveals the artwork’s potential precisely by negating it.

A LOT HAS CHANGED in the past forty or so years. If the postmodernism of the 1980s considered the museum to be in crisis and contemplated its “ruins,” today many see these same institutions as frustratingly intact, as bulwarks against change, citadels to be stormed. (Even ten years ago, the Left’s critique of museums was simply that they had transformed from civic sites to experiential fun houses. “The late-capitalist museum” was understood to be a space of spectacle, not BlackRock lucre.) Where an earlier generation of artists associated with institutional critique pointed to the museum’s genetic incoherence, as well as to the incursion of corporate interests, today the museum itself stands as a purveyor of systemic and symbolic violence. “The very foundation of the museum is carceral and colonial, and thus ableist,” artist Carolyn Lazard claimed in a recent interview. “Once we abandon the solidity of the museums’ justifications for existing, we might be able to invent new forms and new models of making.” Lazard is not alone in their thinking, but plans of attack have taken different approaches. In a recent exhibition detailing the role of slavery in the British empire and its afterlife in institutions of contemporary art, artist Cameron Rowland mortgaged the mahogany doors and handrails at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, installed by the extravagant George IV—thus making a strike against the host institution, while at the same time acknowledging, by staging the exhibition, that the artist is bound to it. (Even as the institution’s hardware remains intact, its value is drained—the site becomes indebted.) And many others, artists and art workers alike, have occupied the museum in similar ways, sometimes to drain it but just as often to reenergize it. One of the most affirming aspects of the protests against Warren Kanders’s trusteeship of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which sprang up around the 2019 Biennial, was how many people claimed the institution as their own and insisted that their voices be heard there too. While the ultimately successful campaign to oust Kanders from the board neither erased his tear gas from the world nor purified the institution, it did mark an ethical position that had potentially political effects: For who, more people might ask, would want to break bread with a person like this?

Needless to say, we cannot undo the history of the museum, but neither should we invest blindly in its current state of affairs; we have to recognize it for what it has done, what it is capable of, and what it might do. Contra Adorno, the museum is no longer a mausoleum: His claim that the museum only exists out of “historical respect” has ceased to be the case. Indeed, the museum today is expected to be a center of attention and an active agent in culture to satisfy the “needs of the present,” but as much as it tries to stay up-to-date, it cannot help but deploy its age-old techniques—and this is not wholly a bad thing. After all, the museum is one of the few devices that can make the royal democratic, the private public, the sacred profane. It can switch contexts and create distance. It can bring things to light.

I am trying to argue here for the possibility of a productive alienation, a salutary anti-immediacy. In a sense, the museum reveals the artwork’s potential precisely by negating it: “Works of art,” Adorno insists, “can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction.” This is not quite as perverse as it sounds. Art is different than reality; it is one way of thinking about it and contemplating it. In his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky noted art’s strange-making powers, its ostranenie, its ability to defamiliarize. The device of art, however, resides not only in its objects but in its institutions—in other words, the artmaking, strange-making device par excellence may be the museum itself. And this strangeness, my substitute word for autonomy, is what grants the museum its privileged position not outside, but adjacent to, life—a place where life might be seen, queried, and discussed.

But must modern museums sit on endlessly growing piles of capital in order to do this work? Each expansion the museum makes not only creates room for more art but also builds a structure ever more costly to maintain—indeed, its incessant territorial expansionism might be one of its most colonial traits, apart, of course, from the encyclopedic museum’s mission to universalize (and centralize) by plunder. Hito Steyerl has written powerfully of what she calls the “poor image”—a digital file that is circulated, amended, shared, and cared for by many. What it loses in quality, in resolution, she claims, it gains in history. Now might be the time to imagine a “poor institution,” a place infiltrated by many that values community over control. What would a “poor” Whitney look like? A “poor” Guggenheim? A “poor” MoMA? Might they keep exhibitions up longer and dig more deeply into their permanent collections, enfranchise educators and dock executive pay? In other words, change structurally instead of signify differently? This is not a plea for populism, to pander to the people, but rather a call to recognize the many invested in, and identified with, institutions. Discontent with museums is productive. Unless we reimagine them radically, they may well become the baroque and rococo castles in which much art was first housed.

https://www.artforum.com/print/202101/alex-kitnick-on-the-discontent-with-museums-84657

[rickthaniel]

The Sound of Silence in Planet of the Apes

I feel like nobody’s talking about War for the Planet of the Apes. The critics are talking, and the box office is talking, but the people are silent, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. War is, in my mind, the peak moment of series that has blown past every other competitor in the realm of PG-13, nine figure budget blockbusters. DC, Marvel, Mission Impossible and F&F, they all generally fall short of Apes for story, scale and substance. Exceptions exist, like this own year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming and Wonder Woman, but on the whole the rest just doesn’t measure up. Not since The Dark Knight has a film of this scope and caliber done so much so well. So why isn’t anyone talking about it? After a lot of thinking, I have a theory. It’s the reason I believe these movies aren’t getting the vocal attention they deserve, and it’s the thing that makes them stand out so starkly from the monochromatic backdrop of modern Hollywood: Planet of the Apes is quiet.

You see it in the calming vistas and beautiful establishing shots. You hear it in those frequent moment of jungle noise and nothing else. The idea of sound and silence is the driving thematic force through the whole trilogy, and with this idea as the series’ philosophical cornerstone, Apes transcends the hollowness of its contemporaries and sets itself in a whole different league.

To really break apart Apes’ use of sound and silence, I want to look at it through a few lenses, and I want to start by talking about silence in the special effects. Before going to see War, I rewatched Dawn with my brother who’d never seen it. When we got to the climax battle, the duel to the death between Caesar and Koba on the tower, and the battleground itself began collapsing beneath them, my brother said, “Huh. That looks expensive.” He was referring of course to the scene itself, the animated amalgamation of girders, pipes and apes, all bending and contorting in a giant computer-generated fireworks display. It looked expensive. And it was.

But the whole movie was expensive. At well over $200 million, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is in the VIP box for film budgets. The CGI aura emanates from every shot, but it wasn’t until that tower fell that my brother took notice. In a world where every film with a noteworthy effects budget uses it make as many star cruisers and laser blasts, as many explosions and faceless robots, as much noise, as possible, Apes uses its quietly. It builds believable characters in a believable place. And that’s enough.

It’s no secret that Hollywood is suffering from effects-fatigue. It’s the reason Valerian bombed while War did so well financially. Those explosions and collisions that Luc Besson dazzled us with in 1997 do nothing for us now. We expect them, and not excitedly. No matter how many aliens you model on screen, or how many missiles you shoot, the wow factor is gone. So, Matt Reeves went a different way. He took that money and built a world with it. A world that doesn’t look expensive. And he filled that world with a compelling community of characters. When everyone else was competing to see who could make the most noise, Apes created a beautiful silence.

That silence that carries over into the trilogy’s pacing, which is the next piece I want to talk about. While all three have been marketed as action films, none of them really are. Rise is a disaster movie with only one real action scene to its name. Dawn is a post-apocalyptic drama that raises the ante to two fights in the film’s second half. War has elements of a war film, sure, but its equal parts western and prison story at the same time. Every chapter is a distinct piece. That’s what happens when the narrative dictates the franchise, instead of the other way around.

Look at the virus subplot in Rise. That virus is the most important plot device in the whole series, bringing about both the rise of ape society and the fall of man, but we only see it on screen to the extent that it affects Caesar. It’s his story after all. The global spread of the disease and the ensuing downfall of civilization is relegated to a motion graphic in the ending credits, which sounds absurd, but that’s where it belongs for the purposes of the narrative. The same thing happens in Dawn when the human colony contacts Woody Harrelson’s extremist military base. The plotline is there through the whole second chapter, but we don’t see it brought center stage until War.

By deftly weaving these arcs, Apes successfully dodges the trap of cliffhanger and instead creates a compelling, interwoven story. A story with a quiet momentum. It never rushes itself or loses focus, but it also keeps everything in frame. Even the dialog has a calm, peaceful pace. When Caesar speaks in Dawn, we feel how difficult it is. The language doesn’t come naturally, and he constantly struggles to find the right words. The trademark fast banter and witty quips of the blockbuster are replaced with slow, careful dialogue, the noise replaced with silence.

Lastly, I want to talk about how Apes uses silence as a narrative device. From the very beginning, the shifting fortunes of man and ape hinge on their polarized methods of communications. When Caesar learns to speak, it’s through sign language. And when he builds his brotherhood, his family, he uses the same foundation. Everything from school lessons to council meetings are conducted in silence in the ape society. It’s not about being the loudest. It’s about what you have to say.

The humans, on the other hand, shout and riot. The soldiers in War start the day with organized battle cries. Gary Oldman controls the chaos of his city in Dawn with a megaphone and a stirring speech. They talk and shout and eventually, all too ironically, lose their voices altogether. All their noise ultimately amounts to nothing, merely embodying the chaos, violence, and madness that defines their downfall. The apes, on the other hand, say something. The difference is, they say it in silence.

There’s a lot more that sets War for the Planet of the Apes and its predecessors apart, like the methodical development of Caesar’s character, and the genre-bending nature of the franchise as a whole. I also know that for all my praise, these movies aren’t perfect. But I do honestly think, at a time when so much in the theater looks so similar and so empty, that there is something unique and important about Planet of the Apes. The fact that I felt more in three lines of subtitles in War than two hours of noise in anything else is incredibly significant. And I hope people start talking about it. Because it matters, it really matters, that there is a movie out there with a $150 million budget that wants people to sit down in a theater and read.

[aion-rsa]

How Mulan’s Main Antagonist Almost Breaks the Disney Mold

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains MAJOR spoilers for Disney’s Mulan. You can read our spoiler-free review of the film here.

A recurring visual motif in Disney’s 1998 animated Mulan is the titular warrior staring at her own face, rendered unfamiliar by makeup and wondering at how to reconcile the image of that stranger with the truth of herself hiding inside. The film’s core “I Want” song, “Reflection,” articulates this ambivalence, this sense of carrying two selves, with lyrics like: who is that girl I see / staring straight back at me / why is my reflection someone I don’t know. The Mulan (Yifei Liu) of 2020, however, doesn’t have to peer at her own blurred reflection in a pond. Instead, those alternate selves are made flesh. She confronts her reflection in the faces of her sister Xiu (Xana Tang), and to a much greater extent the Rourans’ warrior-witch Xianniang (Gong Li): the two potential futures available to her. Throughout the course of the film, Mulan forges a new, third future that she makes reality. And she probably couldn’t have done it without her main antagonist: Xianniang.

From Xianniang’s first scene with Böri Khan, the antagonist is presented as the cautionary tale for what could have been, had young Mulan not heeded her father’s advice to hide her qi as she reached womanhood: Xianniang was exiled from her home for refining her qi, a privilege granted only to men, so that by the time the Rouran commander found her, she was “a scorned dog.” Böri Khan gave her a way to direct her anger and betrayal at her own people, with the promise that, when he ruled China, she would have what she most wanted: a place where her powers would not be vilified, even if that place would only exist under his totalitarian rule.

The promise of this dark future is the chain with which he leashes Xianniang, despite them both knowing that she is more powerful than him by leagues. When he calls her a witch, she grabs his throat and corrects him: “Not witch—warrior.” Yet he laughs at the notion of calling her a warrior, because they both know that a woman cannot name herself with such an honorable title; she must be named by others. The only option is a slur.

The most breathtaking example of this society’s casual sexism comes at the training camp, when Mulan-as-Hua-Jun shows off his use of qi while sparring with Honghui (Yoson An). Later, Commander Tung (Donnie Yen) gently scolds him—for hiding his ability. “You need to cultivate your gift,” he says. “Your qi is powerful, Hua Jun. Why do you hide it?” As a man, Mulan is chided for not utilizing her advantage, while as a woman she would be exiled for daring to do so.

Even her father Hua Zhou’s narration belies the tricky nature of qi: “The qi pervades the universe and all living things. We are all born with it. But only the most true will connect deeply to his qi and become a great warrior.” Only those who use their qi can be true, but only men can use their qi. Women are trapped from the start, with no chance to fulfill that trueness.

All of this lays the foundation for Mulan’s four confrontations with Xianniang—which, interestingly, map onto the four virtues of the film.

True

While the new Mulan adaptation uses the same story beats as the animated film in revealing Mulan’s true identity, they come in a different order, granting our warrior protagonist agency over this pivotal moment in a way she never got in the 1998 film. Instead of getting wounded and having the doctor discover her body beneath her armor, it is Mulan’s bindings that stop Xianniang’s deadly arrow from piercing her heart. Hua Jun dies, but Mulan lives.

Yet even before what was supposed to be a killing blow, Xianniang shames Mulan for lying. “Your deceit poisons your qi,” she snarls in disgust when they first fight—of course she immediately recognizes Mulan as another woman taking on a mantle not offered to her. Twice, Xianniang gives her the opportunity to identify herself; twice, Mulan says, “I am Hua Jun, soldier in the Emperor’s army!”

“Then you will die pretending to be something you’re not,” says the Rouran warrior, who bears the slur of witch by embodying everything that her own people accuse her of being: otherworldly, powerful, unpredictable.

Despite representing opposing sides on the battlefield, Mulan clearly recognizes some solidarity with the other woman. Why else would she willingly return to the Imperial Army as herself? She could have pulled the arrow from her bindings, readjusted her armor, reclaimed her helmet, and ridden back as Hua Jun, having miraculously escaped death. Instead, inspired to finally fulfill the third virtue stamped on her father’s sword, she presents herself in all her courage and vulnerability.

And they call her an impostor and cast her out.

Loyal

Though I briefly theorized that Xiu could have grown up into Xianniang, making her and Mulan sisters, in actuality, having Xianniang be older than Mulan makes her story even more compelling. There is a dearth of older women in fantasy stories, and in Disney tales they are very deliberately siloed into specific roles: Anyone over “marriageable age” is dead (mothers), evil (stepmothers and/or witches), or supporting characters lacking their own arc (fairy godmothers). Obviously, Xianniang falls into the evil category, but the sympathy woven into her story elevates her beyond her peers. Even if you could identify with Maleficent not getting invited to Aurora’s birth, or felt a twinge for the Evil Queen chasing after beauty via her magic mirror, we are taught that these women are past their prime, that they are pathetic for competing with their younger replacements.

Xianniang has no need to compete with Mulan; she was already a prodigy in her youth, rich in her power, and she was crushed for it. She has seen the consequences of trying to fit into their society by men’s standards. That’s why Xianniang invites Mulan to join her, because she sees the younger woman as someone to mold to her own vengeance, to replace Böri Khan as the catalyst for reshaping their future. “Join me,” Xianniang says, the tropiest of moments yet still aching with authenticity as two women trying to find a way forward together. “We will take our place together.”

But Mulan, who has known the camaraderie of men like Honghui and Tung (even if they cast her out) and who clings to the promise of her father’s unfaltering love, rejects Xianniang. “I know my place,” she says, “and it is my duty to fight for the kingdom and protect the Emperor.” And there is something troubling in that a woman will choose the patriarchal society that rejected her over creating something new by allying with a woman who has already trod her path. Yet neither is Xianniang’s destructive plan tenable. Mulan chooses the loyalty she knows, imperfect as it is, over a potential new loyalty, even if it sees her for who she truly is.

Brave

When the two meet again, Xianniang sits on the Emperor’s throne, and Mulan finally believes her: “You were right,” she tells the warrior-witch. “We are the same.”

“With one difference,” Xianniang says sadly. “They accept you, but they will never accept me.”

But buoyed by Honghui and her friends’ willingness to follow her into battle, Mulan believes that they can still change the tide. “You told me my journey was impossible,” she urges Xianniang. “Yet here I stand, proof that there is a place for people like us.”

Unfortunately, this is where what had been an affirming, feminist dynamic falls prey to worn-out tropes in which the older woman gives up. “It’s too late for me,” Xianniang intones, and transforms into her falcon form—not to escape, but to lead the way for Mulan to save the Emperor from Böri Khan, and to seal her own fate.

Devotion to Family

Xianniang is not Mulan’s blood, but they are nonetheless bonded by their mastery of qi. Xianniang is not Mulan’s sister, but she is a role model. When she tells Böri Khan that a young woman from a small village is the sole resistance to his plot, she can’t help smiling at the irony of it. And when he scoffs, “A girl,” she is quick to correct him, not with her violence over the use of the word witch, but with calm certainty: “A woman. A warrior. A woman leads the army, and she is no scorned dog.”

When Böri Khan sees this warrior for himself, before even allowing her to engage him in their first and only face-to-face fight in the film, he takes the coward’s way out: shooting an arrow at her, to swat her away like an inconvenience rather than treating her as an equal.

Are we at all surprised that Xianniang takes the arrow intended for Mulan, and then dies in the young warrior’s arms? “Take your place,” she whispers in her final words, before speaking the woman’s name like a spell, like a blessing: “Mulan.”

In that moment, Xianniang is the fairy godmother quietly stepping offstage after magicking the carriage. She is the evil queen who brings about her own literal downfall by stumbling off a cliff. The wonder of having an older woman in a fantasy story does not last if she dies in the end, doubly so if she takes herself out so that there can be only one female warrior because our mainstream storytelling still too often believes that women can be powerful, but only as exceptions to the patriarchal rule, and only for as long as they are young and traditionally beautiful and never challenge the dominance of men. Women can be powerful, but only in the ways borrowed from traditional masculinity: as soldiers, as comrades to other men, as defenders of the rightness of patriarchy. 

Mulan’s fight with Böri Khan is inconsequential, even as she uses qi to defeat him, because the movie’s most important figure has already died, and in the most demeaning fashion. What’s insidious is that their culture still wins out over two women allying together. Mulan carves out her own place in the world, but it is a singular role; it does not leave room for someone like Xianniang, who is considered too far gone to save. It’s ironic how the writers built an entire complex character out of Shan Yu’s falcon from the animated film, but in the end she is reduced back to a symbol.

I already made the joke in my review that the inevitable 2040 remake will hopefully make up for some of this movie’s stumbles. Hopefully, by then, viewers will not just get more than one woman in the movie, but both women will make it to the ending credits.

Mulan is available now on Disney+. More details on how to watch it here.

The post How Mulan’s Main Antagonist Almost Breaks the Disney Mold appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3jVTGqR

[100ssarahmeg]

Sarah (11/18)

This week I will write an actual 100, as I am failing miserably at the form. In the meantime, here is the quick roundtable talk that I wrote yesterday morning, while wearing a delicious hotel robe (and drinking my complementary espresso):

Queer Residue

Epigraph, seen flickering across the bottom of a Canadian TV screen:

George Conway yesterday explained why he turned down an appointment in the U.S. justice department by saying that the Trump administration “is like a shitshow in a dumpster fire.”

This past Tuesday, smoke from the Camp, Woolsey, and Hill Fires burning in California made its way to Michigan, the state where I now live, a turn of events that for me recalled the day in December of 2016 when Cesium-134 from Fukushima reached the coast of Oregon, the state where I then lived. Perhaps it is in both the content and the syntax of that sentence that we can begin to feel the two related topics most preoccupying me of late: not location, but dislocation(including the dislocations of the present tense), and not direct, immediate encounter, but forms of relation that happen at a remove, and forms of intimacy that are predicated on distance or remoteness themselves. What happens when we indirectly find ourselves meeting an event that conventional wisdom would insist that we have missed (or that nominally has missed us)? What does it mean to encounter an ongoing disaster in the form of its belatedness, its aftermath, its residue? What kind of relating is this? And how might the answers to such questions – or even the simple posing of them – help us determine, to quote from the proposal for this panel that Astrida and Cate wrote, “how to find livable worlds amidst conditions and inheritances that are often abhorrent and unlivable”?

In trying to make sense of the livable and the unlivable (or of the living and the non-living), I have found myself thinking a lot about extinction, which I’m coming to understand as one of the many preoccupations that yokes queer theory and ecocriticism at the same time that it holds them apart. In his recent article in the Queer Inhumanisms special issue of GLQ, Neel Ahuja reflects that “perhaps queer theory has always been a theory of extinctions.” Mel Chen and Dana Luciano, in the introduction to the same issue, insist that queer theory emerges from an understanding that “queer survival [is] far from a given,” and argue that “the primary catalyst for queer thought in general…[is hence] a desire to persist in the face of precarity.” In The Modernist Art of Queer Survival, Benjamin Bateman writes, “cast as survival’s foe, queerness encounters an almost impossible dilemma: remain queer and risk extermination, or conform as best as possible and extinguish itself” (2). It seems, in other words, that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between queerness and extinction (something made legible not only in the content of these thinkers’ claims but in the presence of totalizing terms from which queer theory so often strays away: “always,” “primary,” “in general”). In much ecological discourse, extinction (whether understood as an event or a process) marks the undoing of life; by contrast, queerness – as both a condition of being and a condition of thought –insists upon the ways in which becoming and extinction are themselves not opposed. Queerness, then, may in fact be an extant extinctness, or mark the exstance of the extinct.

To put this another way: Whereas in ecological discourse, to ponder extinction is at least in part to ask what comes after life, in queer theory, extinction is a term that often displaces or even stands in for life itself. What does it mean to worry after the extinction of that which is already survival’s foe? If queer existence is never reducible or identical to queer life(where life serves to indicate certain kinds of normative, vitalist presumptions of health, longevity, reproduction, etc.), then what does queer extinction mean? Is such a phrase frankly redundant? Among the many queer things about discourses of queer extinction, I would suggest, is that they may lead us to wonder about the afterlives of beings that have never been alive, at least normatively speaking, in the first place.

Now might be the moment to turn to the etymology of the word extinction, which has already been indexed, however implicitly, in the language of the quotations above. In a recent article comparing rhetorics of extinction to rhetorics of apocalypse, Marc Redfield insists that “extinction means disappearance without residue” and goes on to remark that “[t]he word is interestingly tautological: extinguois a third conjugation verb based on stinguo, which itself means to extinguish or put out, which in turn means that the ex-prefix adds almost nothing, just a little extra death: extinguo– to quench, extinguish, kill, destroy. The ex… is an x of excessive withdrawal, the mark of an extra extinguishing.” For Redfield, extinction is a name for full disappearance; for queer theorists, whose work and existence are entangled with extinguishing, it may be that extinction is itself a mode of emergence, a gerund; queer thus becomes a name for the strange persistence – the remaining – of extinguishing. What might it mean, then, to understand existence and intimacy as themselves somehow always residual, or to ask what it means to be intimate with residue itself? (What follows are three quick meditations on fire that may help us begin to think through such questions.)          

I. We might remind ourselves that among those working to extinguish the Butte County Camp Fire, over 200 are inmate firefighters, participants in a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation “volunteer” firefighting program. In exchange for their labor, they earn $2 a day – and an extra $1/hour when actively fighting fires – as well as time off their sentence. Upon release, they are ineligible to seek work as firefighters. Theirs, in other words, is a practice of extinguishing that itself has no future, but which also indexes the material persistence of the past. Former California Lieutenant Governor candidate Gayle McLaughlin is not alone in calling the program “slave labor,” and in understanding the entangled practices of mass incarceration as one afterlife of legal chattel slavery. What does it mean, we might ask, that the residual presence of slavery – this nominally extinct American institution – is itself made responsible for extinguishing California’s flames?

II. The residue of fire – both as it burns and as it is extinguished – is, of course, smoke, and its constituent particulate matter. So too, then, our bodies – to varying degrees, based on varying degrees of proximity and remove, and with varying degrees of violence – themselves become residual. According to an article in The New York Times about the acute violence of the current fires, “[t]his week, some around Paradise said that when they inhaled, they could feel the particles cutting their throats.”Reflecting on the longstanding pollution of California’s Central Valley in a lecture on Nature Poetry After Nature, Nathan K. Hensley reminds us that “aerated agricultural chemicals and particulate matter generated from dairy farming…combine into the thick and often visible atmospheric pollution that makes living in Fresno the same thing as dying in it.” Says Juliana Spahr in “poemwrittenafterseptember11/2001”: “the space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and titanium and nickel and minute silicon and particles from pulverized glass and concrete.//How lovely and how doomed this collection of everyone with lungs.”

III. Given that I am an English professor, my final meditation revolves around a work of literature – one that itself might be deemed residual, given that its moment in queer ecocriticism seems definitively to have passed. I refer here to “Brokeback Mountain,” a text that featured prominently in foundational work in the field (including the introduction to Cate’s co-edited Queer Ecologiesvolume), but which has been less commonly taken up of late.Famously, the scenes of tenderness between Jack and Ennis in Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback” happen via the materiality and the figure of fire, often in ways that index the extent to which the men’s intimacy with each other is predicated on – and routed through – impossibility and extinction themselves. (We might recall here that a fire burning is always also a fire extinguishing itself.) In one of the earliest episodes on the mountain itself, Jack, in his dark camp, [sees] Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.” Shortly thereafter, in one of the most famous scenes of intimacy in the text, Jack and Ennis share liquor and stories around a campfire, the present progressive verbs of the text indicating the dilation of time. To the extent that there is any futurity here, it comes from the act of “tossing another stick on the fire,” from a kind of queer ongoingness that is neither productive nor reproductive; the scene embodies an intimacy both incandescent and fragile, one predicated on the burning away of material, and one that, in the context of the story at least, can never amount to a nominalized life.

Importantly, the flicker of a flame – this most ephemeral of images – becomes in the story the image that endures, like particulate matter, ultimately serving as a figure not of life, but of afterlife – not of extinct or extinguished intimacy, but of intimacy as or with extinction itself. In the opening scene of the story, which takes place after Jack’s death, Ennis, alone in his trailer, stokes a fire around the chipped enamel pan holding yesterday’s coffee – the flames here serving not to warm but to rewarm, just as (later in the passage), the sliding panel of the dream “rewarms that old, cold time on the mountain.” As many observers have noted, this scene – where Ennis is companioned only by Jack’s present absence, by the apparent impossibility of embodied relation, by the nominal extinction of their love – is perhaps the most erotic of the entire text. If, throughout the rest of the story, Ennis has difficulty envisioning or inhabiting the possibility of a queer life, then the alchemical erotics of this scene make it clear that he isintimate with the difficult beauty of queer afterlife, relating belatedly to something that could not be experienced (or lived) in and as its own time.

And here, somehow, I have come full circle – perhaps, like Jack and Ennis, “caught in [my] own loop.” For how do we make sense of what it means to relate intimately to things that, for many of us, cannot be experienced in and as their own time – whether it be the possibility of queer life, the particulate matter of a California wildfire, or the institution of legal chattel slavery? How do we ethically inhabit the imbrication of our daily lives with (or predication of our daily lives on) nominally extinguished or extinct phenomena? And how might queer theory – which perhaps owes its existence to extinction – or queer ecology - which, as Cate (in her recent rereading of Jane Rule) would have it – comes “after the fire” – help us begin to make sense of all of this?

[phaelosopher]

New Post has been published on http://www.phaelosopher.com/2017/01/22/dividable-americans-not-trump-americas-greater-weakness/

'Dividable' Americans, Not Trump, Are America's Greater Weakness

Donald and Melania Trump take their first walk as President and First Lady.

It has been quite the new beginning for 2017. Now let us get accustomed to what seemed like the most unlikely of outcomes; i.e., the election of Donald J. Trump as president of United States of America Corporation, who managed to make it through the inauguration. Perhaps it was never in doubt, but it sure seemed that way.

I am not writing this as a Trump supporter, nor as a critic. To be either would be a giant waste of time and energy. As I have written on numerous occasions, the individual who plays the role of “Commander in Chief” is a focal point of public attention, with all the indicators and trappings of power, but he takes orders and implement policies and directives that originate from sources other than the American People.

You may find it hard to believe, but the President does not serve The People. If anything, he oversees their “management,” on behalf of those “behind the scenes” functionaries. The last president that dared attempt to take actions that would benefit the American People, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His killing, November 22, 1963, which seemed so senseless and cruel to me just 3 days into my 12th year on this planet, was a sad day indeed.

November 22, 1963 ~ one sad day for a 12-year old boy… and for the world.

I am not saying that the president does not serve The People to suggest that we have no power. Quite the contrary. Not only do we have power, we are the Power that makes things happen in this world… not just Americans, but The People of Earth. We use language, cultural, ethnic, and other factors, like religion, to emphasize our differences and even justify hostilities. They make it easy to dismiss or overlook so much that we have in common.

How does this behavior qualify as *being* the change that you seek?

Yes, there are people who simply want to take from the “rich”, but what we don’t realize, is that we are “the rich”. What is being taken from us ~ to the extent that we allow it ~ is hope, imagination, health, and our opportunity to grow and evolve in conscious awareness of the Amazing Power that is Within each of us. 

I just finished reading The Secret Science Beyond Miracles (1948), by Max Freedom Long. It is an amazing treatise on the work, philosophy, and science of early 20th Century Kahuna culture in Hawaii. These people were the healers, sages, and wise men and women of their communities. They had a working knowledge of who they are, and their connection with both ancestral spirits (consciousness), and the Aumakua or “High Self”.

When you read what the Kahunas did routinely, day in, and day out, before the “Christianization” of Hawaii, you have a clue of powers that are vested in all Human Beings. Fire walking was just one of many amazing practices that were commonplace in Hawaii. But just as Hawaiians were induced to turn away from their working traditions to adopt new religious customs that did not work (Kahunas facilitated healings that modern medicine still can’t begin to fathom), so have we been taught to turn to the human “authority”, whose motivations are generally more for his or her institution’s gain, than for yours or mine.

A Constant Vying for Your Attention

Why do you think there’s such a constant and incessant push by corporations to get your attention or gather information about you? It’s because bringing ideas to your attention, acceptance, and adoption makes them real, makes them spread and grow.

We’ve been groomed and conditioned to be great workers and consumers… followers who need “heroes” and “leaders” to “look up” to. We’ve been taught to believe in a false inequity, created by force. Then, taught by abusers, we equate “force,” coercion (another form of force), and the use thereof, with authority, “civilization,” “freedom”, “truth”…. even love.

So it’s no wonder that certain “clans” of people, who have maintained cooperative relationships for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and who are well prepared and experienced to exploit the minds of multitudes, have shaped our worldview, relying on our proclivity to trust, as the indigenous people of the Caribbean did when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, looking for new sources of gold so that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella could fund their wars, and decided that he could use force to subjugate these people.

I have mentioned this title from time to time, but it stands mentioning here, A People’s History of the Unit ed States (PDF download), by Howard Zinn (1980 Longman), brilliantly documents instance after instance of deliberate, willful actions that, like a plague, infected, and then devastated the lives, cultures, traditions, and histories of millions of people. It will soon become evident that Columbus was the instrument, not the instigator, of these actions, just as POTUS has also had to jump through hoops set by current-day counterparts.

Obama Campaigned Against GMO But Signed Law to Protect Monsanto

Last year (2016), Barack Obama signed the DARK Act into law, which in essence, directly dishonored the People’s mandate that food products that involved genetically modified components be labeled. It struck down a law that passed in Vermont, and preempted labeling laws in Connecticut, Main, and Alaska, seed labeling laws in Vermont and Virginia, and prevented other states from adopting such legislation in the future.

And we just accepted this???

Mr. Obama’s action is actually easier to understand than the public’s non-reaction. He protected Monsanto from the consequences of The People’s inevitable awakening to how they have been systematically fucked over by institutions that they trusted were operating in their interest. Monsanto hasn’t operated in the public interest, but it was reasonable believe that the U.S. government agencies, like the USDA, EPA, CDC, etc., were. (I won’t include the FDA… I doubt anyone still believes they operate in the public interest… well, “Flat Earth” theory is making a comeback.)

Where were those people who were in the streets of Washington D.C. the other day breaking windows and burning cars, when Mr. Obama’s action was an affront to all to them, and Hillary Clinton would have continued the policies?

New problems created, none solved by calculated, organized, destructive acts.

This is not to say that Mr. Trump is inclined to repeal the DARK Act, since he hasn’t been required to offer an opinion about it.

Source: The Organic & Non-GMO Report.

Protests and acts of violence maintain tension and divisiveness, which tend to elevate the perceived need for security and harsh or “tough” responses instead of discussions about issues that need new approaches. The GMO debacle is just one of many.

International Old Boy’s Club

Mr. Trump is an “outsider,” but he’s an outsider who is on the inside. He would have had to be in order to be acceptable by the people/organizations that Washington actually works for. Notice how Israel was just fine with his election. President-elect Trump even insinuated himself into the U.N. Security Council condemnation of Israeli settlements on the West Bank (See Dec. 2016 Story), giving an indication that he would be more “pro” Israel. Never mind that Mr. Obama was directed (also in 2016) to send an $3.8 billion donation to Israel for 10 years, to do what they please, which generally means spending money on weapons that, among other things, they use against Palestinians on the Gaza Strip.

Donald Trump and Israel P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Trump has already invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit Washington in early February.

To his credit, Mr. Trump was the only candidate, among the Republican contenders and in the runoff with Hillary Clinton, who offered anything approaching sentiment that could be construed as desiring to establish peaceful relations between Israeli and Palestinians in the region. Everyone else babbled “tough talk” about “enemies” and vigilance, totally deaf, dumb, and blind to atrocities that Israel has been party to, like the false flag attack of the U.S.S. Liberty June 8, 1967, that left over 200 people either dead or wounded.

But then, that’s the larger web at work, because evidence is that factions in Washington, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, were complicit in the operation.

When you look at what has been done, and is being done, some of the policies that the government agencies are behind, such as:

insane vaccination schedules,

no inclination to cut back or remove mercury preservatives in vaccines,

fluoridation in water supplies,

more shots required as condition of entering public school

GMO and pesticide use on crops,

standard cancer treatment regimens (chemotherapy, radiation, etc.)

chemtrails in the atmosphere, and

many other initiatives, too many to list here,

May actually be how they “manage” the larger population.

As such, Monsanto may actually be providing a service of population management for United States of America Corporation. Mr. Obama’s signing the DARK Act into law, after it was passed by both the Senate and House of Representatives, would simply allow the company to know it won’t be subject to any indemnification efforts when the wheels of this great travesty finally fall off the bus.

We are so ready to point fingers at each other, demanding change in the other, without looking in the mirror.

The problem with this is that it cuts both ways.

What we seek, expect, or demand from others, we must also be willing to give. More specifically, we must be able to embody. If you know that your life matters, then it is your responsibility and opportunity to demonstrate that this knowledge is active, by showing others that you value their life too. If you know that all life is sacred, and every human is a Gift, then look for that Gift within yourself. As you exercise it and share it, you’ll start noticing it in others. Strength will come, because it will be much harder to divide, when “enemies” become friends.

Videos

Here’s a short glimpse of Howard Zinn. If you don’t read his book in its entirety, just familiarize yourself with some of the scenarios that he chronicles. It’s not the history that you learned in public school (after getting up-to-date on your shots).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuLLUFXQKEY

Trace Amounts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6yFujShISI

Alone With My Thoughts ~ Episode 14 ~ A New President and the Space/Time Continuum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ynRAvJgIk