thepastisaroadmap

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It genuinely bothers me how almost nobody wants to talk about or acknowledge how disturbingly normalized it is to mock, devalue, and appearance-shame nonbinary folks online.

I hate being told it’s wrong for me to identify under the trans umbrella because I “don’t belong there”. I hate being misgendered and accused of “faking” and “attention-whoring” because I’m not androgynous. I hate being called a “theyfab” and having that term used to discredit me. I hate being told to censor my self-expression so I “don’t look like a stereotype”. I hate my preferred pronouns never being used because it/its is too “weird”. I hate being laughed at the very second I bring up neopronouns and xenogenders. I hate being subject to jokes about my chosen name. I hate having every single aspect of my identity and expression laughed at and mocked constantly because y’all hold such a fucked-up stereotype of nonbinary people as these 2016-esque SJW keyboard warrior caricatures and I hate watching people online giggling away at “Arson (they/star/bun) in the Discord groupchat” memes because cringe culture never died to them, they just chose a more “acceptable” target to project it onto.

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I love when the protagonist is something Other, when they're just a bit off compared to other characters, disconnected from their world in some way, living on the fringes and never truly part of the lives that everyone else seems to have. This is because I'm autistic.

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Ever since watching The Wire for the first time, my brain has doggedly kept working away at the Especially the lies of it all, and specifically at how much the structure beneath the different stories Garak tells contributes to the overall meaning of what he’s trying to say. While the contradicting narratives of course expertly obscure the factual circumstances of his getting exiled, using them also allows him to tell aspects and facets of the emotional truth I don’t think he ever could have, if he’d simply told the actual story of what happened. (It’s very Varric-core of him honestly.)

The first story — the ‘oh, you think you know me?’ story — says I have done things that would sicken you if you knew any detail of it. It’s clearly meant to scare Bashir away so he’ll leave him to die shamefully in peace already lol. But it’s also one of his (probably much-needed lbr) little lessons to Julian that are so frequent in the beginning, given while Garak still has some hold on himself — “Don’t be so quick to forgive me if you don’t even know what I’ve done; what would you do if this really were the sum total of what I am?” (And Julian seems to surprise him by going ‘Well, exactly the same thing, because no matter who you are I am a doctor. But I sort of take your point.’)

The second story — the letting the orphans go story — says I have failed to smother my soul in its cradle when it was required of me, and I regret that more than anything I’ve done. To my ears this is the one most shot through with active self-loathing too, which is interesting. He’s officially lost the control he’s been clinging to and it’s about to get ugly. His TL;DR is ‘Sentiment is the greatest weakness of all’, even all the way back here. (Which is the one lesson Julian steadfastly refuses to learn, which I think in turn does some serious rearrangement of Garak’s soul over the course of the show haha. Get uno reversed into the process of loving and being loved without shame asshole.)  This is also where he builds up to admitting to having any sort of need for companionship or closeness at all and — so much worse — that Julian’s role in his life actually has fulfilled some of that need, and he’s DRIPPING with defensive venom over it b/c well I get it Garak vulnerability is scary it can take a person like that. 

(I also feel there’s something honest and forbidden in ‘Suddenly the whole exercise seemed utterly meaningless’. I suspect ‘actually… why the fuck are we even doing this???’ is not a welcome sentiment in an Obsidian Order water cooler environment, no matter what you’re saying it about lmao. The very first seeds of him deconstructing the things he’s been taught about Cardassia and his work might be hinted at here, though they of course take a looong time to come to any real fruition.)   

The third story — the ‘Elim was my best friend’ story — says hey, remember that thing you said once, about how sometimes, you have to be loyal to yourself before you can be loyal to anything else? Well. guess what. I couldn’t even be that lmao. It also furthers that thread of being divided from yourself, split, that having ‘Elim’ as a separate person around in all versions of the story brings in. He’s in control of himself again, but he essentially hands his life and soul over to Julian to decide what should be done with them. 

I’ve done horrible things and it finally caught up with me, I’m getting what I deserve → I let sentiment master me and the fact that I’m too weak to do what’s needed of me shames me more than the evil I’ve done → I fucked up. I betrayed myself and everything I held to, all for nothing, and I have no one to blame for it but myself. But it’s very nice that you’re here anyway, Doctor. (Wow. I didn’t realize quite how isolated and lonely that last one was before right now. The way Tain has shaped him really has just… locked him completely into himself, huh.) We can also see a movement through from a completely professional context in the first story, to an intensely interpersonal and internal context in the last one — even his fake stories spiral in towards intimacy, which I think is what he longs for here even if he can’t quite like. Touch that without the stories as a buffer yet, it’s clearly like touching a hot stove for him to interact with it too directly. 

And you know what I find incredibly interesting the whole way through? Even on his deathbed, where he’s dying from the thing Tain had put in his head, he’s protecting Tain. He puts all the blame for where he is on himself (‘My future was limitless, until I threw it away’), even if he has to employ a strange twisty logic where he’s split himself into two to do it. Don’t get me wrong, Garak has done horrific things all on his own haha, but it’s notable that he almost isolates Tain from that. ‘Tain was the Obsidian Order. Not even the Central Command dared challenge him. And I was his right hand.’ Tain in Garak’s stories is this infallible implacable weirdly distant figure, even now. Indeed, as will make a lot of sense with the revelations further down the line, more than anything it seems the gaze of an abused child desperate for recognition looking up at an idealized (if not in any way nurturing) parent.‘He was retired at that point; he couldn't protect me’, Garak says, as if what he’d need protection from in the first place isn’t Tain himself lmao, as if Tain had no active part in any of this. He never lets blame touch Tain at all. At this stage he would rather consider himself a broken flawed tool than accept that the hands that have wrought and wielded him have ever had any fault in them. AND in the middle of it all, with plausible deniability, on death’s door and knocking meekly to be let in before he must finish the mortifying ordeal of being known and test the even more daunting possibility of being loved, Garak at the same time manages to drop the breadcrumb trail of clues to make it possible for Julian to find Tain if he so chooses and gets in the ‘sons of Tain’ thing too for future dramatic irony purposes. Truly he is the Michelangelo of lying. Every falsehood a multifaceted masterpiece. Elim ‘achieving a state of intertextuality in real life is possible if you work hard and believe in yourself’ Garak. I love him so much. 

I think all of this is why “I forgive you. For whatever it is you did,” works so well, because it too works on a structural level. It’s such a deceptively multilayered response — it has the syntax of a joke, in a way, and it is kind of funny even under the circumstances, but delivered with such earnest warmth and fondness. It’s both recognition and acceptance (forgiveness!). It’s saying ‘I finally understand enough of what you’re trying to tell me beneath and through all that, in whatever way you’re capable of, I see you’ and ‘my answer hasn’t changed (bitch)’. The forgiveness Julian offers here is complete — on principle, and out of personal feeling and empathy (only one of which Garak deigns to respond to during the second story, where he calls it ‘smug Federation sympathy’, placing it more completely on the principle side than it probably is. ‘Dude you’re my friend please don’t just lie down and die in a completely avoidable way on me, who else is going to not only tolerate but actually gleefully enjoy me being annoying as fuck over lunch’ seems to be the subtext that’s a lot harder to acknowledge and invite in for both of them. And yet Tain seems perfectly clear on the fact that Julian is Garak’s friend, which, y’know. Must be fun living with the knowledge that Tain has eyes everywhere looming over you every day haha guess you’d just have to tune that out.) 

Most of all — ’Don’t give up on me now, Doctor’... and he didn’t! He didn’t. Augh. Ow.

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love when theres a character whose entire existence is spoiler tagged by default. go behind the curtain boy

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i tried to make a venn diagram but my migraine is ironically too bad for me to have the brain power to take the time to fix the proportions and then i locked one of the text layers and got pissed off and gave up. but i kind of like it all fucked up like this

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Valentine’s Day merch idea from the group chat

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whenever someone talks about how (cis) men & (cis) women supposedly have this huge gap in their consumption of pornography im always like. well does that include erotica. does it include fanfiction. because im betting when you include the kinds of porn that are known to be more popular with cis women the difference would be a lot different. almost like a lot of our data around porn is heavily influenced by cultural attitudes and constructs

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It's wild to jump the Berlin Wall of gender and experience just straight up homophobia for the first time. Like you meet the kind of cis men who go coocoo bananas at a man wearing earrings or whatever and I know all this is built on centuries of patriarchy and all that but it's literally just a bit of jewelry. Bro my water bottle has flowers on it and you looked at it like Frollo in the hunchback of notre dame. Pure foaming at the mouth. Jesus i promise it won't hurt you. You want a juice box?

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Actually the funniest thing to happen in any of the mxtx fandoms is that in svsss, Shang Qinghua never published Shen Jiu's backstory because he didn't want to deal with the discourse, and then irl every other post I've seen about Shen Jiu is some kind of discourse

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I’m in Vegas and in order to avoid being overstimulated my spouse and I are pretending that we’re showing Oscar Wilde around, and tbh? It’s working. He loved Magic Mike Live

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I love entomologist humor. There is this famous butterfly, the one species everyone knows, the regal and instantly recognizable Monarch butterfly

and back in the day a very similar species of butterfly was discovered and thought to have evolved to mimic the Monarch (we now know this isn’t quite the case)

But because this smaller butterfly seemed to be impersonating a Monarch, they named it the “Viceroy” in a joke that is criminally underrated and makes me chuckle every time I see one of these little dudes. Clearly he’s doing important work as an appointed governor ruling in place of the sovereign

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“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the Vietnam War raged on, Asian American activists waged an antiwar movement that exposed the racist and imperialist nature of the war. Watching war images on the evening television news, young Asian Americans “realized with a shock that the ‘enemy’ whom American soldiers were maiming and killing had faces like their own.” Alienated by the US antiwar movement, Asian American protesters rejected the popular slogans “Give Peace a Chance” and “Bring the G.I.s Home” and touted their own: “Stop Killing Our Asian Brothers and Sisters” and “We Don’t Want Your Racist War.” For these young activists, the slogan “Bring Our Boys Home” clearly privileged American over Vietnamese lives. In 1971, the Asian American contingent refused to join the main anti-war march in Washington, D.C., because the coordinating committee refused to adopt the contingent’s antiracist statement. When Asian Americans did participate in the white-dominated antiwar marches, they passed out their own leaflets denouncing racism and imperialism.”

—

Yên Lê Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship”

Most recently, Dr. Espiritu published her groundbreaking book, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/Body-Counts-Vietnam-Militarized-Refugees/dp/0520277716

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"kung pow penis," a phrase commonly used in reblogs to indicate utter disdain for OP, has twelve letters, each of which (traditionally) must be supplied by a different user. the unanimity of disdain indicated by these twelve unrelated users has strong parallels to the requirement of unanimity for a jury—also traditionally of twelve—to arrive at a verdict. in this essay i will

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Scum Villain AU where Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu transmigrate by swapping lives (i.e. Shen Yuan wakes up in Shen Qingqiu's body on Qing Jing Peak, post-fever, while Shen Jiu wakes up in Shen Yuan's body in a hospital in modern China) but it doesn't quite work right.

The system glitches or something and they end up having to jointly time share their lives. Every time a certain moon phase or something (cyclical) comes around they abruptly switch back.

So they spend the entire time trying to undo everything the other one has been up to while everyone around them is just desperately attempting to figure out wtf is going on. Shen Yuan does the skinner quest and stops Luo Binghe's abuse, and Shen Jiu gets a job with a rival company and starts showing up Shen Yuan's brothers. Then they switch back and Shen Jiu is like "it's woodshed o'clock for the beast" and Shen Yuan resigns. Then they switch back again and Shen Yuan saves Liu Qingge's life and gets poisoned defending Luo Binghe, and Shen Jiu creates his own start-up and blackmails his eldest brother about the mistress he's just uncovered. Then they switch back and Shen Yuan gets his brother and his sister-in-law into couples counseling and Shen Jiu embarks on a quest to either cure himself without Liu Qingge's help or die trying.

Eventually they just start leaving bitchy messages for one another to find and doing things that won't cause lasting damage but are incredibly petty. Shen Yuan keeps trying to tell Shen Jiu to read PIDW but Shen Jiu takes one look at his merch-filled bachelor pad and immediately decides that his opinions aren't worth anything, so it takes him a while to actually do it (he is really mad about this when he finally opens the novel and it turns out to be extremely relevant information).

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"gooner" "coomer" "porn-brained" just fucking STOP

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Sections of the Alphabet, a guide:

ABCDEF - The Grade Quarter. For obvious reasons these letters are associated with rank and quality. Though E is not a common grade it nevertheless is part of the territory.

GHIJK - The Working Class Neighborhood. In English these letters do a lot of grunt work. Their proximity to the grades make them overlooked but what would we do without them?

LMNOP - Midtown. When learning the alphabet this section gets a lot of attention due to its distinctive landcape and how it rolls off the tongue. Its vista of peaks and hills make it stand out as well.

QRSTUV - The Support Town. A land of contrasts. The heavy lifters in this area draw a sharp disparity with Q, which is unique for its specialist role.

WXYZ - The Outlands. A stretch of unusual landscape that is distinct for its cuisine. Everyone knows what kind of dish you're eating when it's got some of these letters in it.

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(to taste) only enough to know what you cannot have