SUN COMING UP ON A DREAM COME AROUND ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM THE EMPIRE NOW SUN COMING UP ON A WORLD THAT’S EASY NOW ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW

Artist credit:

I hate how some people think Enjolras would be traditional preppy when he would clearly be grunge or punk

Normally I tend to agree with Zoro in these situations but I have to agree that Luffy is absolutely right here. You can’t just NOT go through the special entrance to start the special journey!

This is another personality trait that gets played for laughs but Luffy has a very keen sense of the emotional and symbolic importance of things like these. There are definitely times when his arbitrary decisions about “because it’s cooler that way” are patently ridiculous, but when it really matters this kind of emotional intelligence is crucial.

Humans need ritual, story, magic… all that jazz, to give their lives meaning. Luffy may not understand it in that way, but he does know that when you allow yourself to be impressed with the world around you, when you find things special and meaningful, your life is a lot more fun.

There’s another layer to this that is part of what makes Luffy so powerful. As Terry Pratchett has said, you need to believe in fun little lies like tooth fairies and Easter bunnies as practice for believing in the big lies, like Truth and Justice and Love and Freedom. When you put all these things together, you start to see how Luffy’s unwavering excitement for silly little rituals lets him believe in other things that should be impossible, like beating an Emperor or becoming the King of Pirates. Or finding the One Piece. And when you combine that with his Devil Fruit power…

please understand

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.

In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

— Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Thinking about her 😌💕

that's one crooked ass bottle

A good reminder on Black Friday, the most capitalist of days! Just because we are born into a capitalist world doesn't mean it has been or will always be a capitalist world, nor does it mean that there isn't something better for humanity than capitalism.

65/638 days of missing yoongi

It's so so disingenuous to claim that Dany should have taken the time to separate xyz privileged persons in Meereen because "not everyone sanctioned the murder of those 163 children 😞". Oh ok. So that very wealthy, very influential man did not personally give the order. Maybe he doesn't even have slaves. But riddle me this: Where did their wealth come from? What are the historical foundations of their political power? In a society that continues to practice oppression (and a society where wealth and status is defined by it), how is it that they continue to hold as much influence and social capital as the "direct evil"? None of this is happening in a vacuum. And like....this is a society where the dehumanization of slaves is systemic. It runs policy and economics. And the people in power obviously know each other and support each other (considering the fact that they can keep wealth and influence!!!). So does it matter if xzy didn't give the order? Does it matter if they were not the ones nailing those kids to the posts? What matters is that they saw oppression, did absolutely nothing in the face of it, and continued to benefit from it. They are not innocent. Evil isn't just related to the guy pulling the trigger. The devil is also the one who's standing in the back, watching, and counting his coffers. And it terrifies me to think about what some of you would be saying in the real world, in the face of oppression. "I cannot be held accountable because I wasn't the one who pulled the trigger"....but you continued to benefit from the privilege afforded to you by the oppressive system AND DID/SAID NOTHING. By turning a blind eye, you have taken the side of the oppressor. So I'm sorry sweetie but you 👏 are 👏 part 👏 of 👏 the 👏 problem 👏 big time!

circling back to my hater thought from earlier, it really bugs when fandom disengages from a story and activity ignores its themes and message in favour of unsalted porridge bland shipping and surface level engagement bait

Left-wing speculative fiction reading list

A chart of science fiction and fantasy books that address social and political issues from a broadly leftist perspective (either socialist, Marxist, anarchist, or Green). Utopias, dystopias, and stories of resistance, emancipation, and revolution are all represented. This is a selection from a much longer list of left-wing speculative fiction that I published on my website.