#which is awful in a different way

[gravedangerahead]

Israeli army battalions and companies often compete in designing the most outrageously racist shirt that they can show off in front of the rest. The Israeli daily Haaretz published some examples and photographs of these T-shirts. One T-shirt for infantry snipers “bears the inscription ‘Better use Durex,’ next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him.” Another sharpshooters’ shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion “shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.’” Several prints depicted ruined, destroyed, or blown-up mosques, revealing a deeply entrenched Islamophobic tendency that is appallingly reminiscent of 1930s anti-Semitic cartoons in Europe. Another design shows a soldier raping a Palestinian girl, and underneath it says, “No virgins, no terror attacks.” Israeli sociologist Orna Sasson-Levy said that this phenomenon is “part of a radicalization process the entire country is undergoing, and the soldiers are at its forefront.” She added: “There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him.” Was Israel simply “morally corrupted” by the occupation?It’s not uncommon for Israeli analysts from the Zionist “left” to try to explain the dominant racism and genocidal trends among Israelis as relatively new phenomena, departures from the good old days of liberalism and enlightenment, or signs of moral collapse. All such explanations have one thing in common: they betray the same symptoms of selective amnesia displayed by those on the right. They ignore the fact that Israel’s very establishment was a result of massive ethnic cleansing, massacres, rape, wanton destruction of hundreds of villages, and total denial of the most basic rights to the indigenous Palestinians who were dispossessed and exiled and those who remained despite all the attempts to annihilate their existence as a people with a distinct identity. During the Nakba, the massive campaign of ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army against the indigenous Palestinians, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, among others, has shown, was premeditated, meticulously planned years in advance by Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, and executed systematically, brutally, and without compunction. As a result, over 800,000 Palestinians were dispossessed and uprooted and more than five hundred Palestinian villages were methodically destroyed to prevent the return of the refugees.

From BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanction by Omar Barghouti

It's one of the three books about Palestine being offered for free by Haymarket Books in this link.

[crystallizsch]

jhgnngggn i’m back to thinking about post-nrc yuusha and jamil--- extremely long ramble below prepare for uh angst??? i guess???

i buried some of these lore in the tags somewhere but anyways-

yuusha and jamil exchanged hair ties when they separated and went off on their own post-nrc as a way to "remember each other by".

they both have different plans for their own futures despite wanting to be "together"— whatever that means. yuusha stayed at nrc working as staff and jamil is out travelling.

at this point though they STILL never officially “dated” but oh they were so so close SO many times to putting a label on it.

“what happened then” <- idk man they’re incredibly stupid. yuusha is still horribly noncommittal and jamil is- jamil. (“…the hell does that mean” <- SHHHH i will not elaborate)

they ended as just "really good friends" (something something on they’re on the spectrum of queerplatonic but they didn’t understand that that was the case) .

━━━━━━✦

at first they did well keeping in touch from a long distance—

yuusha never forgets to check in on jamil, texting/calling whenever possible, she was always the first to initiate.

and jamil still would’ve made the same effort of course, but yuusha always beats him to it. he sort of just expected her check-ins every day.

and he looks forward to that 1-15 notifications that he gets as soon as he wakes up. it does get him going knowing that she was specifically thinking of him at the start of the day.

that wouldn't last though. eventually, the more yuusha met more people and cultivated new relationships, the more she felt herself grow further and further apart from jamil.

yuusha thrives on physical relationships and the majority of the time the only communication and contact between her and jamil is through the phone.

and so the messages from her became less and less frequent as yuusha got more absorbed and interested in her work and other relationships.

don't get it wrong, she still cared about jamil. loved him even, in her own way.

he just became less of a priority.

━━━━━━✦

it was bittersweet to think that jamil finally had the chance to initiate the conversation.

because that meant yuusha had been thinking of him less and he had to remind her himself that— hey he's still there, remember him?— although that's not exactly what he would say. that's a bit too antagonistic and petty. surely, she's just busy. right?

yuusha would respond as if everything was normal. but the usual fondness, the usual warmth, they weren't there. her words through the screen felt dry. forced.

she can use the unnecessary punctuations and emojis she wants but she is not getting past him.

they called. it was nice to hear her voice. but. there's the same feeling of detachment. why are they talking as if this was one of their first times?

yuu, what happened?— is what jamil wanted to ask. but he would also respond nonchalantly. as if everything was normal.

jamil still tried to reach out to her. similar to how she did with him.

but it was to no avail.

their interactions felt too far gone from what they had.

eventually jamil also realized that there was No Point.

if she wasn’t going to make the effort anymore, why should he?

━━━━━━✦

professor yuusha tala walks in to her class which her signature braid and feathered hair tie.

it's lovely having gotten used to working at nrc. her students are surprisingly behaved and she enjoys teasing chatting with her coworkers. surely she isn't missing anything, is she?

and the traveler, jamil viper. he's seen most of the sights, experienced a lot of things. it's like he is slowly fulfilling his childhood dreams.

he ties his hair with the same one he's been using for years. it's a surprise it hasn't snapped yet from how worn out it looks. this really belonged to someone so cheap, huh.

he wonders why he's still using it. he had come across fitting souvenirs that could replace it.

waste of money— jamil convinces himself. besides, this hair tie is fit for every occasion and it's still holding up anyway.

he'll just get a new one when this one finally bites the dust.

if it ever does.

it's really stubborn for a hair tie.

[thermodynamic-comedian]

imagine ianthe's suffering rn. its so funny to me. girl all u wanted was power and i respect that but turns out that the side effect of power isnt the moral implications or whatever, its dealing with god's personal drama.

[artbyblastweave]

Funniest thing I've seen recently, and not funny in a ha-ha way, more funny in a "the endless entropic void gnawing at my will to live" way, was somebody asking around for alternatives to Neil Gaiman, in the light of Neil Gaiman's ongoing fall from grace. As though what we're currently sitting through isn't the collapse of the carefully curated "Good Guy Neil" image that caused people to parade Gaiman as the same kind of preferred progressive alternative to, say, Rowling. As though we won't be in the same goddamn situation in a few years or months, with some number of the new progressive sci-fi/fantasy darlings- not all of them, to be clear, but at least some of them- when their impeccably-curated marketing implodes in on itself and they're revealed to be the same kind of sex pest or abuser. Can you not see the wheel to which you are strapped. The game of human pinball you are condemning yourself to with this mindset. Maybe you do see, and you're just resigned to taking it one soul-crushing disappointment at a time, one "I never would have guessed" after another. I mean I think we all need to get resigned to that one way or another, sun's gonna go out before it stops happening

[whaliiwatching]

Hey hello. Consider. Hobie reading over and suggesting edits to drafts of Peter's writing and then going home visually with clippings and quotes from said writing as a part of him. Alternately, Peter takes inspiration from quotes visible on Hobie

heart on your sleeve…..

[gutfaced]

yes i am the biggest advocate of surrogate father haymitch & adopted daughter katniss but like. they're so Awful. they've not got a mother/daughter relationship, they've got that father/daughter relationship where the dad is both reaching for a connection and rejecting the thing that he made because she's too much like him, too close to what he is and far away from it because of her potential and the daughter rejects because she doesn't understand him. understanding him is understanding herself. caring for him is caring for herself. and then she's awful to him because she doesn't understand and doesn't want to understand. and he's rejectful of her because she's got so many traits that are for the worse and not for the better. their similarities don't hurt nearly as much as what their differencee impale them with. it will always be what katniss could be (haymitch), and what haymitch prevented/could've been (katniss.)

[katyspersonal]

me before SoTE: Gehrman 🤝 Miquella on being seen as creeps and awful people by fandom over misinterpreting some bits!

me after SoTE: Gehrman 🤝 Miquella on not being able to accept the drastic change (mostly to the worse) of a person they held dear and latching onto their former, "nicer" version, attempting to resurrect that version even although the result is a bit of just a husk (.....AND being seen as creeps and awful people by fandom over misinterpreting some bits lololol)

_________

I guess they're doomed to be friends no matter what gfjhjgv At least with Gehrman's crafting skills, he can make him many pretty dresses

[mazojo]

Anyways XO Kitty love interests summarized

Dae

Min Ho

Yuri

[expensivemistake]

The thing about Chip Zdarsky's daredevil run is that it takes inspiration from the Netflix show and forces that into the comic continuity, but it doesn't even lean into the elements I personally love about Netflix Matt?

He's not perfect, but NMCU Matt at his best is shown to be deeply compassionate and has such a rather warm demeanour to him. When he's happy (especially in college-aged flashbacks) he's really expressive. Women like him because he comes across as thoughtful, rather than being a womaniser. And there's no question as to whether he loves Elektra or not, considering he spends most of the Defenders trying to get through to her.

Not to mention that his Catholicism is deeply personal and certainly not devout. He's a person who grew up around religion and is uniquely attuned to the suffering around him, trying to work out his place in being a man of the people.

None of these traits are inherently better than 616 comic Matt, or even drastically different (although I do think they're fundamentally different characters who I like for different reasons).

But I guess my point is that... it feels like Zdarsky's Matt is based mostly off the "he's an emo Catholic who dresses like a devil to let out his anger and also sleeps with loads of women" jokes based on people's perceptions of Netflix Matt, without adapting a lot of the likeability and nuance that made me like him in the first place.

[rxttenfish]

merfolk in general are just. horrible horrible polyglots. their brains are already hardwired for language and quick language acquisition that remains active all their lives, further helped by retaining a high neural plasticity for their long lives, and especially enjoy complex language and language-based play and problem solving. but they also tend to have a lot of their society arranged where there's often multiple different languages at play within the same area, and only really stops being so once you get into especially small villages that have below the merfolk norm for outside contact. every merfolk alive today knows at least two languages, but most of them know far more than that, especially because one of those two will be the common-technical language. its been standardized and wide-scale implemented across the merkingdom after their dominance, to help bridge the gap between these different languages, basically as a successful version of esperanto. but its a trade language, and is mostly used for information you might want to reach as many people as possible, such as laws or business dealings or public announcements or the like. most merfolk don't view it as and don't treat it as a language proper, and its not what they prefer to converse in if they have another choice, usually finding it pretty limiting and restrictive, which is why its called common-technical.

miranda, being a royal who is regularly in contact with many different people around the merkingdom and regularly expected to be fully able to converse with them to do her job, knows just. so many languages. i might be changing exactly how many soon, but last time i counted it was in the low teens. like its just a perfect storm of her brain being wired for swift language acquisition and having a job that requires it and a position that means shes constantly around people from all around the merkingdom. not to mention having to know english too, which isn't just not her first language, it's not even her fourth language.

meanwhile, aaravi knows english and a little bit of hindi, less because of her mother and moreso because of her nana... its not that her mother never used it with her, but she was. less focused on using it or teaching aaravi, let's say. nana mishra uses it a lot more and is more interested in teaching aaravi when she asks her, especially in the intermittent period after her mom died and nana mishra was able to come back into her life to help aaravi pick up the pieces (though not after aaravi kind of. got left on her own. for an unfortunate amount of time). its just also fallen by the wayside with aaravi's whole Everything Else and kind of having a hard time accepting her nana's help and kind of being terrified of her (of no fault of her nana's, aaravi's just. she's just really traumatized after Everything, alright. having someone try to offer her help afterwards, especially when aaravi's scared of getting singled out as half human and half monster, is just. it's not something she can bring herself to trust.)

[jess-the-vampire]

Quick question one fan to another. Do you think Phillip knew he was related to Eda & Lilith? And would have knowing about his family made any difference or was he just too far gone?

genuinely? hard to tell

i mean dana claims "Some people do know"

and philip COULD of been one of them, and you could say that's a factor in why eda and lilith are targeted the way they were

but on another hand, you can also kinda sum that up as a result of remembering lilith from his past and therefore disliking her from that, and eda herself being the prime example of rebellion against his authority

there's nothing in the show that concretely proves he knew

especially since a lot of it relies on knowing about what happened with caleb and evelyn, which once again, is left with a lot of wiggle room

like we don't even know if philip actually knew evelyn's last name at all, or if he knew of her or about her long enough for that

when that stuff is all pretty vauge it's just yeahhhhh

if we are to assume Philip knew evelyn was pregnant he would have to be AWARE caleb has witch decedents probably, but he wasn't in power till 50 years ago, so i don't also see how he could keep an eye on caleb's entire family line either for 400 years

also also, maybe philip went after evelyn and said kid, maybe he just...gave up after caleb died and moved onto other things (It's still not even clear how evelyn got his door after all, if we are to assume it's evelyn's doing, because the door appears to be post caleb death)

(Look, i've been over this a few times, this timeline kinda doesn't really make sense, i'm kinda not convinced the crew planned out a proper timeline of events for the wittebanes because there are things that currently kinda don't make sense)

yeah idk, it's kinda left more up to your interpretation, like if you see belos as knowing nothing really proves you wrong

but yeah, nothing proves it right either, philip had plenty of other established reasons to single out lilith and eda outside of that concept.

i don't think it would of made any difference nonetheless, like maybe if philip saw his niece/nephew as more human then witch there could of been a dynamic of him thinking he could "Fix" them, but on another hand philip is shown to not trust anything and anyone who isn't a human like him.

The guy is very much been brainwashed by how he grew up to believe everything he doesn't understand is trying to manipulate him and hurt him, and i don't think any family he may have in the clawthornes would make him see witches differently

honestly i wouldn't be shocked if in his mind, evelyn and caleb having a kid to him is like a demon stealing someone he held dear to use for offspring because of how deluded he is about this stuff

granted, that also depends heavily on how you think philip assumes about the situation, him believing caleb was under a spell and him believing Caleb did everything of his own will have DRASTICLY different implications about why he did what he did.

so yeah, if you're to ask me this is all more of the same "This is kinda supported by canon but is also kinda not" stuff that is kinda all over the wittebane backstory in general

if we ever get that wittebane backstory, they have a lot of clear up here because there's a lot left to interpretation and it's kinda why people have very drastically different opinions on how aspects of this character were handled.

guy should of been destroyed at the end no matter what of course, but

people seeing him as a more tragic unredeemable villian doomed from the beginning due to growing up in extremism as a child and no guidance to pull him out of it so he just got worse and worse, and people who see him as just an asshole who never cared about his brother and was perfectly capable of getting out of his brainwashing is very much a result of leaving a lot of this stuff kinda up to interpretation

[sammygender]

^this but unironically

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

It's hard being someone who does genuinely get infuriated with Ford's actions and acknowledges a lot of his flaws and the people he hurt, while also liking (and relating) to his character enough that I would like him to have nice things sometimes and don't believe he's satan

[dazais-guardian-angel]

kinda wild to me that one of the most compelling aspects of both Chuuya and Kunikida's characters to me, that I never really see talked about, is how they're heavily set on a doomed crash course towards complete and utter destruction, and how I am so, so worried for them both.....

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[vaguely-concerned]

first of all rye 'hello fellow kids' ingellvar there is nothing in this world or any other I wouldn't do for you. second of all, considering where this story ends... I'm going to die. this conversation -- and how much he genuinely believes what he's saying at this point -- held up against the fact that in a couple of months max he's going to get her killed (well. that's how he feels anyway) and then go against everything she believed in and stood for as a person in the end and have to live forever with knowing that's how he honoured her sacrifice. (and live with how easy it is to live with, the way he doesn't regret what he did at all. she'll haunt him from time to time, that's fine, he's a watcher he's loved many a ghost before and will again. but that won't.) 'no one is beyond help? oh lace I'm so so sorry, wherever you are now please forgive me for who I am, but after what he pulled and by the time I'm done with him on my watcher's oath he will be beyond help. I'll hold every hand in this world that reaches back but his'. and she'll still be gone.

'or none of this matters'. im so fucking sad I feel sick *through tears* this is great I love fiction I love this game (embarrassingly genuine as is my wont)