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fatehbaz · 11 months

Note

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migrant detention; national border fences; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; de facto imprisonment or isolation of the disabled or medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; categories of “criminality"; etc.

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Katherine McKittrick on "imaginative geographies"; emotional engagement with place/landscape; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like cities, prisons, etc.; a “range of rebellions” through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; respect for other-than-human lifeforms; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; African cosmologies; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on the early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the prison's invocation of racist civilization/savagery mythologies; and its effects on locals.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Paulo Tavares on colonial architecture; nationalist myth-making; and erasure of histories of Indigenous dispossession.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot”; resisting the plantation; "plantation archipelagos"; and the “revolutionary demand for happiness”.

Pelin Tan on “exiled foods”; food sovereignty; building affirmative care networks in the face of detention, forced migration, and exile; connections between military rule, surveillance, industrial monocrop agriculture, and resource extraction; the “entanglement of solidarity” and ethics of feeding each other.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge, education, subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

#abolition

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soracities · 1 year

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what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds

I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.

I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)

The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)

The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)

A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )

Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)

The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)

Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems

The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.

But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:

anything by Sara Teasdale

Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver

Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti

Collected Poems by Langston Hughes

Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima

Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr

Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee

A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)

Crush by Richard Siken

Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail

Selected Poems by Walt Whitman

View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska

Collected Poems by Vasko Popa

Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)

Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,

Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef

As for individual poems:

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"

"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith

"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib

"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise

"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth

"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros

"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky

“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda

"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost

"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail

"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider

“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes

“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin

“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón

“The Flea” by John Donne

"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore

"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland

“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker

"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside

“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio

“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver

"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin

“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott

“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney

“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen

“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska

"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy

“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris

"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass

"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer

"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings

"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski

"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje

"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis

"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)

"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz

"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye

"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman

"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel

"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah

"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller

"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May

"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong

"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou

I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:

Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver

"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca

"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger

In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky

"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan

#ask #anonymous #beginner guides

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librarycards · 5 months

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hello! i apologize in advance this is probably something that you get asked a lot. but do you have any recs on literary magazines to submit to? im a trans poet, ive been writing for over a decade but never shared anything and ive been wanting to try to send my stuff to get it published somewhere. obv ive been google searching but theres so many big and small publications and i was wondering if you have ones you like especially and/or tips on how to choose a magazine/journal to submit to. thanks a lot! <3

no worries, thank you for reaching out!! i've been publishing for like 8 years + an editor for almost 4, so i always appreciate the opportunity to help people new to the world find ethical publications that will treat their work with the care it deserves.

first and foremost: there are going to be pubs out there that are awesome and i don't know about. you may be the one to discover them for yourself! one aid in finding the best mag for your work is the wonderful, writer-created chillsubs. it's a fantastic platform that keeps a huge list of mags and presses and their relevant stats, and lets you create an account and bookmark those you're interested in. everyone i know uses them, and it's very worth it given the sheer volume of mags out there.

i also have some recs of my own, ofc. i'm going to list them below. if they pay (which i prioritize) I'll mark them with a $. some are trans/queer focused and some aren't, but all are pubs i've either edited and/or published with and can confirm their ethics + respect for writers.

manywor(l)ds - my mag! i'm co-founder and eic. break genre _ shapeshift with us. ($)

Sinister Wisdom - old, well-regarded lesbian+ lit mag, now open to everyone who is/loves a dyke. I'm guest-editing an issue on Madness with them, now open for submissions!

fifth wheel press - run by a beloved friend and comrade of mine. i've published here. excellent transparency, care, great for first-timers. ($).

kith books - headed by trans literary icon kat blair. a mag/press/community centered around bodymind non-conformity and noncompliance.

Honey Literary - QTPOC-centered, unabashedly pop-culture + social justice oriented. the vibes are simply immaculate.

Whale Road Review - not queer/trans focused, more oriented toward....'grown up' poetry/prose/pedagogy papers. Katie Manning (eic) is a fucking gem.

Graphic Violence Lit - just had my first experience publishing with them, and their care + consideration for the whole writer is amazing. they publish boundary-pushing work.

beestung - one of the brainchildren of Sarah Clark. nb/gq/2s SFF. I just edited a few guest issues w them and have published with them. amazing work. ($)

A Velvet Giant - genrequeer work. the editors are experienced, enthusiastic, and amazing at promoting writers long after publication. it's a family! ($)

Ethel Zine + Press - handmade with love by Sara Lefsyk (as you can see, trans/nonbinary/2s sarahs dominate indie publishing, as well we should :3). Sara is a sensitive and care-full editor and bookmaker whose every publication is a work of art.

Protean - pro- as in proletariat. awesome left mag with a mix of politics and culture and everything in between. they take reprints! ($)

Mudroom - publish your work along with a picture of your mudroom/shoe rack. very responsive editors who will hype you tf up. ($)

The Institutionalized Review - for psych survivors. the editors concreteness of vision and dedication to their community know no bounds.

Just Femme + Dandy - queer and fashion-focused! led by the inimitable Addie Tsai. They pay *handsomely*. ($)

In addition, there are also some "big" mags I have had excellent experiences publishing with and wanted to shout out. These are harder for a beginner to break into, but worth keeping on your radar + have been fantastic to me as a writer.

Electric Lit

Split Lip Magazine

The Offing

Nat. Brut

Santa Fe Writers' Project

Bodega

New Orleans Review

Augur Magazine

I hope this is helpful to you + others! the literary world is ever-changing and this is just a snapshot. Hopefully you find some that you like!

#ask #anonymous #writing #literary magazines #lit mag #call for submissions

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azulock · 3 months

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so I wanna requests the guys as dads, I remember at some point you said you wanted to do something like this and I really wanna see it

Time to rull up my sleeves, cause I did say I was gonna do one of those right? Back when I got annoyed that all I found was girl dad this girl dad that and I got tired of all the typical gendering going on in dad fics.

Ryusei Shidou

Girl dad in the most chaotic way possible. Tiaras coexist with bows and arrows as a princess fights off an invasion. Every doll and plushie has a tattoo made either with a sharpie or from a patch attached with hot glue. Every tea time is a mafia family meeting that always involves an assassination plot. And the barbies live very intense lives that inevitably delve into wrestling like storylines where each one has a gimmick, a long standing feud, and a clear thirst for blood.

Chaos may not be the best thing to keep an organized home, but it's good for mental development. And much like a kid, Shidou also thrives in creative chaos. He isn't the best at practical things, especially the ones involving routine and quiet time, but he has got his uses. Very good at wasting his daughter's energy until she drops straight into a deep sleep. His antics are also good at convincing her to eat pretty much anything. And of course, great at entertaining her so you can take a break.

Oliver Aiku

Boy dad but like he really doesn't care, he'd be giving the same extremely affectionate, and even a bit clingy, treatment to his kid no matter the gender - sugary sweet nicknames included. Probably heard people saying he coddles his son too much, treating him like a princess, but Oliver is good at playing deaf. Tho, that kid gonna have to fight for the right to have his feet touching the ground, cause dad wants to carry his offspring everywhere. Sure to raise a boy as clingy and openly affectionate as him.

Those reflexes honed for football are quite good at catching a kid before an ugly fall. And he's actually good at the general everyday stuff, surprisingly patient too. Takes a genuine interest in the things his son likes, so when the boy shows sudden interest in colorful nail polish, he'll show up to a match with badly painted soft purple nails. Likes sleeping on the floor with his boy, when asked why the floor and not the bed he brings up the old man excuse of "the floor is good for my back".

Reo Mikage

Girl dad and he was ready for a little princess, but what he got was more of a cave dwelling gremlin. He was expecting frilly dresses and tea time but he gets a little girl who likes bugs, playing in the mud and digging things from the ground. It hits him as a surprise but he adapts to that, and as much as he isn't very excited for the cleanup afterward, he is always eager to entertain his girl's odd interests. If buying dinosaur fossils weren't such a legal can of worms he'd buy one just to bury it for her to dig up.

If he wasn't convinced to go to therapy before, now is the moment to convince him. Just gotta say he should do it not to become like his dad and he's gonna be booking the appointment fast. Will be reading child pedagogy books and shit like that to make sure he can be a good and understanding dad. Really just trying to kill his family's trauma conga line at himself - wants his daughter to trust and count on him in the way he never could with his dad.

Michael Kaiser

Boy dad but to the gentlest, sweetest of souls, a little boy who seems to have absolutely nothing in common with his dad, aside from some physical traits. It at the same time shocks and scares him, because the world out there is not kind to sweet people. But while the boy is at home, Kaiser can keep him safe. It does frustrate him a little bit when he tries to get his son into football but the boy is more into art than sports, but he learns to move past that. Truth is, he wanted the boy to mirror his traits a bit more, so this is a humbling experience.

That poor rose tattoo of his does not see a day of peace after his son learned to color. Tho, Kaiser gets used to the shaky new roses drawn on his skin fair enough. And he actually considers getting a full tattoo of just lineart and not colors just to let the boy color in. He's not the most patient so he has a bit of a hard time getting used to the whole parenting thing, but he does try his best. Also, whenever he takes his son out somewhere he makes their clothes match in color scheme.

a word from out sponsors: @tinnaagine @loser-vxbez @kiurona @bentolover @bevernats @weirdbutpr3tty @ada7201 @vollereix @rinitosh @kum1ko-chan @romanticizemai @wishiknewwhatiwasdoingwithmylife @qichun @true-latverian-baklava @oliveraikusweatyshirt @fivenightsatwhoreville @geemyfirstluvstory @mariyumemi

#oliver aiku x reader #reo mikage x reader #michael kaiser x reader #shidou ryusei x reader #mikage reo x reader #ryusei shido x reader #bllk x reader #blue lock x reader

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dearbraus · 29 days

Text

Good Luck, Babe ! - Chapter 1: You'll Need It.

— Aizawa Shōta

⊹ Details. 18+ minors dni, fem!reader, sfw, reader has hair that can be run through, reader is a teacher, reader is a slight author self insert, first meetings and a not so cute meet cute. ⊹ Run time. 4.2k ⊹ Note. This has been marinating in my brain for a while! So I decided to bite the bullet and write it, enjoy :3

❝It's your first day on the job, teaching at the overly prestigious hero school, U.A Academy, what could go wrong? Apparently a lot.❞

masterlist || next part

September's early morning chill was a bitter reminder that summer would soon come to an end. An unwelcome reminder that with summer gone so too would the precious tendrils of young adulthood. It was a frightening truth. Though you’d been one of the lucky ones. Employed only six months after graduating from university, with a fairly cushy gig that most could only dream of. The pay was good, you had an ample amount of sick days and vacation days. It was far more than you’d been expecting for a glorified student teaching position.

Still, the prospect of embarking on a new journey without the support of family and friends felt like too much for you to bear. Your stomach twisted itself into knots that refused to be undone no matter how many little reassurances you chanted to yourself. On the brink of thinking yourself sick, you forced your gaze upwards to the campus ahead. It was the stuff of legends, only something you could have dreamed of as a teenager.

The U.A High gates were an imposing sight to behold, far more akin to that of a fortress wall than your run of the mill boarding school. A twinge of pain shoots through your neck when you crane your head to drink in every last bit before you brave the next big adventure– actually going inside the building. Sweat gathers within the palm of your hands, you reflexively drag them down the length of your shirt, hardly flinching under the scrutinous stares of the passing students who need no invitation to head back onto campus after a weekend away. Your nerves fail to scatter the longer you peer upward but your eyes begin to burn as the sun shifts from behind the building.

“No big deal, this is no big deal,” you mutter beneath your breath, “This is just the start of your career, it’s not like failure is going to make or break it.”

You blanch for a moment, your mouth running dry.

Failure could ruin your career, it wasn’t everyday that the ministry of education hand selected educators to work with a school as prestigious as U.A. Rarely, had they taken interest in newly graduates with too many opinions like yourself. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to prove that all your hours spent researching pedagogy, writing papers on the merits of student-led learning, and focusing your dissertation on why hero courses were intrinsically detrimental to their social and emotional development, weren’t wasted because you couldn’t hack it in the classroom. Smoothing out the rumpled fabric of your dress shirt, you fought the urge to nervously swipe your sweaty hands against cotton once more.

“There’s nothing to worry about, today is going to be a great day!”

Your voice carries farther than you intend for it too, it catches the attention of two students who loiter nearby. They cast you a perturbed glance before shuffling toward the school. You offer them a toothy grin in response, hoping it’d disguise your nerves and give those kids the impression that you belonged here. It was laughable. You belonged at U.A even less than the countless number of journalists who milled about in search of an exclusive story. That lot hardly gives you a once over, as if they could smell the mediocrity wafting off of you. Your quirk wasn’t very interesting and you hoped you looked too old to be a student. So, there was no need for anyone to chase after your coat tails when you finally pried your feet from the cement, and walked past the school gates.

The sidewalk feels as though it’s fused to the soles of your oxfords, your legs like lead as you attempt to shuffle forward. You're rendered still by the nerves that eat away at your belly even as the clock tick closer and closer to eight. Sucking in a deep breath, you force yourself to step forward though the pace is still painstakingly slow. You regret not shaking out your nerves before you arrived at the school. Tension gathered in your joints and painfully fused your limbs together. You couldn’t rid yourself of the stress that clung to you not matter how many deep breaths you sucked down.

The main building possessed the same grandeur as the gate. Its front doors are ornate, with gold lettering detailing which door was designated for each year. You quickly yank open the door with the large letter one atop it, hoping you’d made the right choice. The email you received for this position stated you would be working with a first year class so, this seemed like the most logical choice by far.

If it wasn’t, you’d fake it ‘til you made it.

You remember a professor of yours telling you that confidence was key. Nothing could go wrong if you looked like you knew what you were doing, others would trust that you did. If you looked like you belonged, no one would question why you had a seat at the table. Holding your head up high, you walked towards the administration office, thanking whatever cosmic force that despite all its quirks, the ground floor layout was the same as most high schools in the area. The principal, a small marsupial looking man, Nezu pops his head out from the office before you’ve finished rounding the corner. The scar that cuts into his short white fur and left eye was slightly disconcerting, somehow more so than a talking animal.

Based on your googling during your commute, he’d once been an ordinary animal that developed a quirk– truly one of a kind, sentience and an IQ that surely surpassed your own was just the surface level of what Nezu had been blessed with. Though, there was little information detailing how and why he was given the position of principal. That struck a chord of concern. You wondered how much empathy he possessed, if he related to his students, and how he went about human affairs, even when they were personal in nature.

“There you are!”

Nezu waves you over with a paw.

“I was starting to worry you weren’t going to show!” He exclaims with a laugh, “Didn’t happen to get lost, didja?”

With as much confidence as you could muster, you shake your head, “No! No, of course not,” you mutter with a wave of your hand, “I was just taking a quick tour and didn’t realise how much time had passed!”

Nezu nods sagely as if there was some unspoken wisdom to what you said, “Oh, good! So I take it you’ve unloaded your things at the dormitory then, how proactive!”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I follow?”

“As of this year, U.A High is a boarding school as I’m sure you may know,” Nezu explains with a flourish, “As such, all educators must reside on campus, including temporary staff such as yourself.”

“Oh, right, yes, I was actually planning to do that after classes today!”

You chuckle unconvincingly, offering an awkward smile. Well, that solved your problem of where you’d go after your lease was up in two weeks. Still, the pressure of throwing yourself completely into this job weighed heavily upon your shoulders. You were still unconvinced that this was truly happening. Even if you did everything perfectly, there was still a chance the teachers here wouldn’t take too kindly to you bulldozing years of lesson planning all because parents, and the ministry of education were starting to listen to people like you. You didn’t want to believe that all heroes were as egoist as the media painted them out to be, but the thought still made your hands shake with anxiety every time you imagined what this new job would entail.

The smile Nezu offers only unsettles you further, something about seeing an animal's face contort like a humans, “Very well, come along now classes are starting shortly.”

He presses an ID card into your hands, a black lanyard dangles from it. Your smiling face peers up at you. The photo’s been swiped from your university's website, along with the other information– including your new job title– since you don’t recall submitting your picture to them. Slipping it into the front pocket of your pants, you follow Nezu through the halls. Your shoes click against the blue tile flooring. You’d been expecting scuffed linoleum but the tiles were smooth and recently buffed if your reflection was any indicator. The sound soothed your frayed nerves, and almost allowed you to forget how out of your depth you were. Almost.

The grandiose scale of the environment you found yourself surrounded by was intimidating. Everything at this school was large, given how massive Cementoss and Ectoplasm seemed on your tiny phone screen during the sports festival, the building must have been made to accommodate those of all sizes. Even the door to class 1-A made you feel dwarfish in comparison. It stood a good two feet over the top of your head, made of fine maple wood that had been painted brown and red. 1-A was printed in the negative space, denoting which class this room belonged to. You’d never have to worry about entering the wrong classroom, that soothed the butterflies in your belly.

Dragging your hands down the front of your shirt, you smoothed out the invisible wrinkles you swore were pressed into the fabric, “Deep breath in,” you whispered to yourself, your cheeks hot with embarrassment, “Deep breath out, you got this!”

Using the window pane of the door, you raked your fingers through your hair. Cursing to yourself when they got caught and tangled on a few strands. Pushing your hair behind your shoulders, you mechanically cranked your lips upward until a cheery smile replaced the anxious expression you wore like a second skin. Your shoulder blades slid backwards as if on cue, your spine straightening.

“Now then, go on, don't be shy,” Nezu says, nodding his head toward the classroom, “Introduce yourself to the class, tell them why you’re here, their homeroom teacher should be waiting for you inside.”

The doors hinges squeal as you struggle to open it all the way. Still, you force on a smile the way your teachers had instructed you to. Apparently, students could sniff out fear and anxiety like a bloodhound. You tried not to appear too miffed by how strenuous opening the door was, quickly stepping towards the front of the classroom. All twenty sets of eyes were glued to your frame, their conversations running to a harsh stop as you clapped your hands together.

“Good morning, class!” Your voice is chipper and perfect even just like you rehearsed in the mirror this morning, “It’s so nice to meet you all!”

The classroom was plain, devoid of any personality or signs that students had occupied the space for the better part of six months. The desk sat in four rows of five, their table tops practically sparkled beneath the sickly yellow fluorescent lighting. From here, the lack of student graffiti was evident. You supposed you could take it as a good sign. Though, following the rules and not defacing school property seemed like an entry level requirement for prospective heroes.

Principal Nezu offers your leg a pat before swiftly scuttling back out the door. There was no sign of the class’ home room teacher, even in the form of a yellow lump on the ground. Wringing your hands together, you flash the class a grin. The students stare blankly back at you in confusion. Some exchange a worried glance with one another before returning to eyeing you up.

“Are you going to be our new teacher?” A boy with unruly green hair asks. He raises his hand after he finishes speaking, a sheepish expression when he realises he spoke out of turn.

Midoriya Izuku.

You remember him from the set of student profiles you were emailed last week and the intermittent news stories he appeared in. He was a relatively good student, with only a few minor infractions here and there on his permanent record detailing unsanctioned usage of his quirk. That was out of your jurisdiction. Aside from his penchant for working himself to the point of exhaustion and his habit of breaking his bones, Izuku wouldn’t cause you much trouble within the classroom. His records from middle school told you that much.

“Ah no, actually-”

“Don’t get all excited,” a gruff voice rumbles behind you, you don’t have to turn to know it’s Aizawa, their homeroom teacher, “You lot are still stuck with me.”

A mass of loose black clothing and messy black hair begin to fill your periphery as the man steps closer to you. You hardly have a chance to greet him before he’s placed himself between you and the first row of desks. Dark circles line a pair of ebony irises that are nearly hidden by his heavily lidded eyes. The pale skin of his jaw disappears into a thin, wispy beard that Aizawa compulsively scratches at as he eyes you up. Pinned beneath his scrutinising gaze, you suddenly feel silly, like you were five years old again, caught playing dress up in your parents closet. The corduroy pants and nice dress shirt you took several hours picking out last night seemed over the top and childish.

“What are you doing in my classroom?”

“Oh!” You quickly offer your name with an apologetic smile and a bow, “I’m here on behalf of the ministry of education to audit your classroom and work alongside you for the foreseeable future.”

Aizawa looks unimpressed, but when you offer him your hand, he takes it. His skin is calloused and rough, yours, comparatively, are soft to the touch. The callouses that formed from writing seemed so insignificant to the history that marred his skin. Clearing your throat, you steel your gaze on him, smiling in hopes of covering yourself in an air of indifference.

“Did Principal Nezu not inform you that I’d be here today?” You nervously question, pulling out your brand new ID card, “He told me that you’d be expecting me.”

“Why don’t we go chat outside?” He suggests, taking your ID card to inspect. You suspect you don’t really have a choice in the matter.

You nod, ducking your head down to avoid his intense gaze.

“Start preparing for your next class,” Aizawa addresses his students, his tone even and unwavering, “Yamada sensei will be here soon for your English lessons.”

There's a mumble of agreeance that breaks out amongst the throngs of desks. You’re certain that if the walls were thinner, you’d hear far more from them once you stood outside the classroom door. Kids were nosey, you wouldn’t be surprised if a few of them pressed against the door and strained their ears to catch even the smallest morsel of information. You’d almost prefer to be chewed out in front of twenty teenagers than be left alone with the ire of a pro-hero.

“Look, I don’t know what Nezu told you but I don’t need help managing my classroom,” Aizawa says as soon as the door has clicked shut behind you, “And I certainly don’t need help from a child.”

His arms are crossed over his broad chest. Your skin prickles with insecurity as he regards you. With his hair hanging over his face, you’re unable to discern what it is that lays in the depths of his eyes. If there’s an ounce of pity or just annoyance, you’re unsure. Whatever it is, its intensity makes you squirm beneath his gaze.

“I’m not a child,” you pause, attempting to counter but you stumble a bit over your words “I have two degrees and was hand selected by the ministry of education to be here, to work alongside you.”

Straightening your shoulders, you puff out your chest. With the way Aizawa tiredly slouched, he wasn’t as intimidating as he could be. If anything, if you could imagine him to be a petulant student. It wasn’t so hard. You’d dealt with worse during your days of being a TA. Hungover frat boys were far worse than a grouchy new colleague who didn’t appreciate having their authority tested. Not that you wanted to do that. You were looking forward to working with him, even if he was resistant to change.

Aizawa hardly stifles an eye roll before he narrows his gaze, “You were just about to call me sir, see child.”

“You’re not that much older than I am,” you retorted, frowning. Of all the things you’d heard of the elusive Eraserheard, you didn’t expect him to criticise you so harshly because of your age. Your lack of experience in the classroom? Sure, fair game. But, your age meant nothing in the grand scope of things, “Even if you were, I’m still qualified for this position.”

Your face grows hot with embarrassment. Six months. That’s how long you’d been a real adult, no longer a student. Calling anyone with even an inch of authority sir or ma’am had become second nature. How quickly Aizawa had caught on, made you wonder if he was right, if you were too far out of your depth. You feel it again, the nasty little pang of self-doubt that made the new lipstick you wore feel like you’d rummaged through your mothers things rather than the understated elegance you thought it gave you.

“Still, I have far more experience than someone who's never stepped foot in a classroom,” he mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration, “Nezu made a mistake, and I’ll be sure to tell him myself.”

“So you don’t take naps during lessons and allow your students to do as they please?”

It’s a dirty, underhanded comment. But, you’re struggling to find any solid ground in this conversation, anything that would prove to him that you belonged in this school. Your throat feels like it might collapse in on itself as you suck in a nervous breath.

“That’s not-” Aizawa starts with a mild look of distaste.

Shaking your head, you continue on,“True? Well, Nezu listed it amongst some of your other questionable teaching practices such as threatening expulsion?”

Your hands tremble with remorse. U.A prided itself for its unique delivery of course content. They allowed teachers to do as they pleased within their classroom, even mid-semester expulsion if they saw it fit. Which Aizawa had, on multiple occasions. Apparently, he’d even expelled all twenty of his students on the first day of school a few years ago. Most of your peers dreamed of having that kind of authority in the classroom, they became starry eyed at the mere thought of being able to employ whatever pedagogical methodology they wished without having to adhere to curriculum expectation. You weren’t sure how they’d feel knowing you were expressly against such power.

“Are you trying to suggest that I’m a bad teacher?” The hurt in his voice is evident, the sincerity of it further fills the bucket of guilt that hangs off your neck.

“Not at all, just that you trained to be a hero not an educator.”

Tomorrow, or even twenty minutes from now, you’d regret reaching forward to place a hand on Aizawa’s crossed arms, “I don’t doubt that you care for those kids” the muscles in his throat tighten as he swallows and you’re keenly aware of his capture weapon sitting mere inches away from your arm, “And I’m not here to doubt you abilities, I’m just here because the ministry of education is concerned about the wellbeings of the students in the hero course.”

“They’re concerned?”

“It’s kind of hard not to be, they’re constantly in the news,” you say, sympathetic to the near constant villain attacks they had endured, “And the optics of a kidnapped student never look good no matter how it's spun, even if they’re a hero student.”

Aizawa rubs his chin with a sigh, “There’s no making this go away, is there?”

“Afraid not.”

You’re sure he feels your body shaking as you press closer. Your breath hitches.

“Besides, you’re really in no position to get rid of me,” you cringe when the words come out of your mouth but you can’t stop yourself from speaking, “Principal Nezu agreed, and if you really send me packing, it wouldn’t look too great on your end, it’d be all the more reason to question what goes on here.”

You’re right, he knows you’re right. You can tell by the way he sighs and tries to disguise it with a cough. You’re sure the way you invade his personal space doesn’t help your case or sweeten his opinion of you but it keeps you standing straight and prevents your knees from buckling beneath you.

He looks past you and down the hall, almost wistfully, “Would it really be so bad?” You ask, bouncing all on the balls of your feet, “Having me around would be a smaller workload for you to take home each night.”

The expression he wears tells you yes, it would be so bad, “You’re a civilian,” is all he says, a puff of air passing his chapped lips as he turns his gaze toward you, “If something were to happen, if there was another attack, you’d be in danger. You know that, right?”

“There are plenty of civilian students in the building, are you worried about them too?” You stupidly ask, crossing your arms over your chest. You’re sure you appear petulant, you feel petulant. You have to stop your bottom lip from jutting out in annoyance. Professionalism was still a bit of a struggle.

Your quirk wasn’t particularly flashy, but you had learned to use it for self defence as a teenager. Turns out, most didn’t enjoy being struck by lightning. They liked it even less when it came in the form of a spear— being a human sized taser had its perks. In any case, you were a nobody. No villain would take particular interest in you if their recent attacks were any indicator of their motives. They seemed to get their kicks terrorising teenagers.

“I’m worried about you,” Aizawa says with such conviction, that you’re not so surprised that he pursued hero work, “Working here, working with my class means having a target on your back. You realise this, don’t you?”

“I do.”

He clicks his tongue,“I don’t think you do,” deeply sighing, “You aren’t authorised to use your quirk even in self defence.”

“If I taught at a regular high school, I’d be expected to put myself in between my students and anyone who posed a threat without using my quirk,” you shrug your shoulders, “I’m prepared to do the same here.”

“This is different, this is serious. If you get caught up in an attack they could kill you or worse.”

Your skin crawls with an unpleasant feeling of dread. Goosebumps made your hair stand uncomfortably. What could be worse than death? You didn’t want to know. Aizawa clearly did. That’s why he didn’t find your blind acceptance endearing or brave. Just stupid.

Shaking away the nerves, you forced yourself to look him in the eyes,“The train I took this morning could have caught fire and killed me,” you say, like the thought of spontaneous combustion didn’t terrify you, as if you didn’t triple check your curling iron was unplugged each morning, “So could the raw flour in the cookie dough I ate last night.”

“You’re being far too flippant for me to take you seriously,” Aizawa doesn’t hide the roll of his eyes this time.

“Villains are dangerous, I get that,” you hope your voice didn’t sound as pathetic to him as it did to you, “I know what teaching here entails, I didn’t take this position on a whim.”

Aizawa’s dark, red rimmed eyes rake over you. He’s studying you, perhaps searching for a crack in your demeanour, for something to give reason for his refusal. A dissatisfied “hmph” passed his lips, they dip into a deepened frown. Whatever he’s going to say dies on his tongue as Yamada Hizashi– the pro hero, Present Mic– comes bounding down the hall, a tune humming under his breath, his head in the clouds. He sported his hero costume, seemingly more comfortable while dressed up than you did. His hair stands nearly straight up, a shock of bright yellow amid the calming pale blues and whites of the U.A hallways. Confidence oozes off of him, painting his aura in an alluring shade of something magnanimous.

Yamada wore the hat of hero well, sending you a toothy grin when he caught your stare.

You suddenly get the state of being star struck. His presence was startling.

“You should go unpack your things,” Aizawa suggests when he takes notice of your gaping– though, this was not a suggestion. The thin press of his lips and finite tone that edged into his voice told you that, “We can talk further, later, after the school day has ended.”

You nod numbly, slightly shocked that you hadn’t been fired before you’d even had the chance to start. This was happening. Perhaps not in the way you’d envisioned but still. You hadn’t failed, not completely, not yet. The megawatt smile you throw at him makes your cheeks ache but you can’t stop it from forming.

“See you later, Aizawa-san.”

#aizawa shota x reader #aizawa shouta x reader #bnha x reader #mha x reader #aizawa x reader #bnha fanfiction #mha fanfiction #aizawa x you #aizawa x y/n #good luck babe

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old-school-butch · 6 months

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What do they think Hamas wants? What do they think Israel is supposed to do? Do they seriously think Israel is supposed to be like sure here you go we are all going to leave Israel and you can have everything? Do they think that would bring about peace? I’m serious. Like really do they think there is anything Israel could do that would stop any of this? Do they think Israel should’ve done nothing and this situation would’ve just disappeared? Americans are the dumbest fucking people on the planet. Hamas wants compliance or death, that’s how terrorism works, that’s war.

Whoever is running the information warfare at Hamas is truly brilliant. The ideology of Islamists has been run through some kind of autotuner so it sounds like it came from a chapter in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Western liberals are eating it up. While liberals are still catching up on which river and which sea the chant refers to, they still don't grasp that the end goal here is the elimination of the state of Israel entirely. And while 20% of Israelis are Arab Muslims, there are zero Jews in Gaza. The PR people are saying Zionist these days instead of Jews, so maybe it doesn't sound too bad when they say Kill All Zionists but that's just the English translation. Zionism is the creation of a Jewish state. Hamas will call it the 'Zionist entity' because they don't recognize it as a state. They don't recognize it because all states should be Muslim. Israel is occupying territory that should be Muslim. When they say 'end the occupation' it sounds like a call for liberation of an oppressed people, instead of the desire to destroy Israel, kill or expel the Jews and create a Muslim state in its place.

Yemen's Houthi rebels (who are currently attacking Israel) have a slogan "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam" and I think it says a lot that they take the time to double down on how much they hate Jews/Israel instead of a single 'Houthis are great!' thrown into their own slogan.

The Islamists have noted the 'anti-colonial' rhetoric in Western universities and capitalized on it by positioning Israel as a proxy for the West and thus a scapegoat for the West's sins of imperialism. It does rely on some very old anti-Semitic tricks - because Jews assimilate fairly well (because they don't have an evangelical aspect to the faith) they are both within a culture and othered from the culture - the perfect scapegoat. Many liberals shrugged when the Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us" but the suspicion that Jews control the media, capitalism, also socialism, Hollywood (and any other center of power you can imagine) runs very deep in Western cultural anxiety. Imagining Israel as a prowerful villian is all too easy when you're primed to believe that.

A wild example of this is how Westerners view Israel as a colonialist power rather than a gathering point for religious refugees. The reality that Jews originated from the land of JUDEA should not be hard to grasp, but is conveniently ignored. The fact that they've negotiated with colonial powers like Britain and the UN is viewed as a sign of political power, even though the main goal of those colonial powers was to prevent Jewish refugees from flooding their own countries. And the memory that the post WW2 boost in political heft came at the price of the Holocaust in Europe, seems to have been lost. The reality that most Israelis are Jewish refugees expelled from Muslim countries, is conveniently ignored. There are enough white faces and dual citizens in Israel for guilty Westerners to find a convenient scapegoat to do all that decolonizing and let themselves be destroyed for our sins. Not that anyone is thinking that hard about it, it just feels right, because it's safe and convenient to accept blame and then shift it to someone else - no matter how many land acknowledgements they crank out.

I guess Westerners think colonizing is something only white people do, and they are blissfully unaware of the size and scope of the Arab Islamic Empires of the past. And also apparently unaware that Islamists explicitly say they want to recreate that empire. Zionists want a single state - and I have a lot of issues with the idea of a religious state at all, but no one can accuse Jews of ever having or wanting to create an Empire. Israel might be criticized for not having a more liberal democractic state, but Hamas isn't even trying to create one. It wants a single Muslim state occupying their entire region, where Jews are killed or expelled and Islamists can consolidate regional power - that's their goal. But the slogan is 'end the occupation' which sounds way nicer than 'end the occupation of land of Israel by Jews so we can make an Islamic state in its place and kill all the Jews who don't run away fast enough.'

Maybe it's that most Westerners don't live in a theocracy, and have no sense of just how controlling and energetic theocratic societies can be, that they can't grasp the idea of global jihad and what that really means. "The Caliphate is the answer" is written in Arabic on protest signs, flying under the radar of English-speakers and certainly not seen as hate speech, but when people tell you they want to establish a global world order under Islamic rule, and are actively coordinating their efforts between states and regions - you should believe them. Moderation is apostasy, punishable by death. Anyone negotiating with Israel faces opposition from more radical Islamists ready to take their place. This is why Islamists spend most of their time attacking more moderate Islamic states and leaders. And by 'moderate' I mean the Taliban, which can barely set up a state in Afghanistan - because it means diverting resources from expanding and conquering other areas. A group called ISIS-K is trying to overturn the Taliban to bring back the glory days of the Khorason, an entity so sprawling it would involve invading China, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, which would undoubtedly spark a global conflict. That doesn't phase them. Hamas can barely control the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which rejects any peace accords with Israel including the Oslo accord. Dying as a martyr is the highest achivement - eternal war is not a problem. The Islamic world is failing to contain radical movements it created and supported for its own interests.

The Palestinians are a good microcosm of this. When Israel declared independence in 1948, the region was invaded by its neighbors. The war ended with Jordan occupying the West Bank and Egypt occupying Gaza and normally the people living there would have been absorbed into these countries, or created a self-governed state. Instead Palestinians, as a group, were created as a stateless people. They didn't want to form a state within the boundaries determined by the war, but instead remain as refugees from a war and promised the 'right of return' i.e. that Israel would be returned to them. Importantly, the war didn't have a declared end. It's still happening, which is how they are still refugees 75 years later. And they live in 'refugee camps', otherwise known as buildings and towns, but it's all temporary in this narrative. Does no one wonder why the pro-Palestinian rallies call for a ceasefire and not for peace? Peace is not desired, just a pause in fighting until they can regroup and try again.

A separate reality was created where the 1948 war is still happening, Israel is not real, it's a 'Zionist entity' occupying the land and that refugees includes everyone displaced by the 'ongoing' war, and all their descendants are refugees too because they have nowhere to live - because where they are living is just temporary. And ‘all they want is to go home’ (but not their current home for 3 generations, the home back in Israel ofc). In this world, they all have to right to live in the region that the zionist entity is occupying, where their duty is to establish a Muslim state. The purpose of this fiction is to create a perpetual problem for Israel, a stateless population whose entire existence is focused on them eventually overthrowing Israel. But it's had unexpected effects.

Palestinian refugees have been more than willing to bring violence to any country that has taken them in as immigrants. Their nationalists have a long list of assassinations of anyone who supports a peace treaty with Israel, including the King of Jordan, the former prime minister of Lebanon, Robert F Kennedy and more. They've also started a civil war in Jordan until they were expelled to Lebanon, where they hijacked a series of international flights and started a civil war there that lasted for 15 years. Palestinians living as refugees in Kuwait aided Saddam Hussein's invading army until they were expelled when his regime fell. These are the reasons none of Israel's neighbor's will accept any more Palestinian refugees, but the Islamist problem remains for any country in its path. What I have found most disturbing among feminists on Tumblr, however, is the complete wilful ignorance about Islamist ideology and its relationship to women. You think you’re ok with the Quran? Read it. There aren't many religions founded by a conqueror who wanted to rule the world. Read what it says about conquest, murder, torture, raping and enslaving non-Muslim women. Arab slave traders castrated men and bred female slaves who were kept as captive wives. Using sexual violence as a tool of war and as a reward for Islamic fighters is long documented and continues today. The birth rate in Gaza is about 5 children per woman and frequently exhorted to be higher. Why? Arafat said it most clearly ‘the womb of the Palestinian woman is the weapon that will defeat Israel.' Population and fertility are part of the political landscape and Islamist strategy. It's how Lebanon went from being a Christian majority country to a Muslim majority country today. There is no reason whatsoever that feminists - who have not shied away from criticizing the sexism of Christianity or Judaism - should mince words when it comes to criticizing Islam in the strongest possible terms. Islamists - who combine Islam with a goal for global dominance - should ring every alarm bell we have.

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its-ancient-history · 6 months

Text

Sorry to bring this up again, but here we go.

This poem just came out. From a poetic side, it is brilliant. Perfect flow and construction, great imagery, excellent at showing and not telling. But is it factually accurate? No. No, it is not. And that's where we need to start caring.

There's a lot of excuses that art is just art and we can take liberties with it. But we're taking away the accomplishments of entire groups of people when we do stuff like this.

So, were the Olmec Africans? Were they Black? Cutting edge, modern pedagogy and research says NO.

This is the whole "Cleopatra was Black" thing again. We can't erase brown people from the history books. Just as not all history was white, not all history was black. There are indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc. people and we need to stop erasing their existence. We need to stop falsely attributing their accomplishments to people of other races and committing the same ideological frauds that early colonizers did when they said that great cities were made by white people and not the local inhabitants.

Ancient Black people accomplished great things. The Benin bronzes are amazing constructions. Ancient Middle Eastern people gave us written language for the first time. Stonehenge is a brilliant construction. The Terra Cotta army, the Great Wall of China, are amazing. And each belong to the people who built them and SHOULD NEVER be attributed to people who did not. These are items of culture, cultural heritage, and cultural property. They are not things to brainstorm over, falsely attribute, and create art with that spreads false information and lies.

#Olmec #archaeology #ancient history

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 2 months

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Am I the asshole for telling off my step-brother?

(Sorry for my possibly bad English, I'm learning)

I (18M) have lived with my step-brother (31M) and my sister in law (29F) for about a year, 2 years ago. They both had a child (5ish or so now, F).

For context, my step-brother got in a fight with my other step-brother (from my mother's side), and as far as I know, he never really tried to talk to our dad after and never bothered to visit, whilst also leaving out an unpaid debt at a university for an English pedagogy to my dad.

Well, after like 5 or 6 years of not talking, my dad decided to talk with my step-brother. They both forgave each other for what happened, but he didn't give a reason for disappearing.

A year or so later, my dad invited him to live with us so he could get a better job since he said that he hadn't gotten a job and that it was hard over at the city they were in. Even to the point he implied that they didn't have a great bed where they lived.

Once here, my step-brother didn't attempt to work much, and only did house chores except that one time he worked on a gaming store for approximately 2/2 months, but his spouse worked a 9 to 5 job that paid well, but only spent it on things for themselves and didn't help with any bills. My dad told him that he needed to tell his spouse that she needed to help us with something since we were starting to lose money, but as far as I'm aware (since I almost don't leave the house) that he didn't try.

This went on for approximately 10 months, and even worse; his spouse decided to get mad at my dad and my mother for telling her to help with the bills after we helped my brother and her to get two gaming computers, and didn't talk to any of us (or did so very passive-aggressively).

So, a month or so after that they both left. My step-brother told us that what had happened before wouldn't happen again and that I would always have a brother to rely on.

2 months after that he began to leave me on read for no discernable reason, and plain out blocked my dad for telling him that he needed the money he lent his spouse, I remember that on that night, I first heard my dad cry.

I was so mad that I sent him a message that pretty much said to him in a "very" respectful manner that he should go fuck himself for blocking my dad, though, I can't remember how much of it was actually insulting. I tried to make it not insulting, but I literally could not have done anything else.

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

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bettsfic · 3 months

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Desolately need a teacher’s perspective. If you feel comfortable can you way in on this:

I’m thinking of switching to English with a writing concentration because I love reading and learning about writing. However, I’m worried about a few things:

1. People keep saying there are no jobs for English majors

2. I’m worried that reading and writing in my academic life, may either crush my love for it in my personal life(e.g. bad professors or students who rip you to shreds(so not constructive criticism really))or cause me to be too burnt out to read or write on my own time.

Sorry just to add (in regards to my question about being an English major): I’m terribly afraid that my writing voice may change into something inauthentic when takings certain writing courses in this major.

these are all good and difficult questions.

to start, there are as many jobs for english majors as there are for anyone else. except maybe, idk, engineering or nursing or something. and if engineering or nursing are things you enjoy *almost* as much as english, then that might be a good option. but an english degree will qualify you for any basic office job and also jobs in publishing, copywriting, copyediting, media and communications, and a whooole lot of other things. publishing is a nightmare, yes, but not more so than most other industries. and with the right amount of hustle, freelance copywriting can be an extremely lucrative profession. if you're willing to move to LA or NYC, there will be many, many opportunities available to you. they might not be good opportunities, and you might not succeed all the time, but you'll make do. personally i think it's better to spend 4 years (and a lot of money) learning something intrinsically valuable to you and risk a more unstable job market than it is to slog through 4 years in a subject you're less passionate about but that has a clearer career trajectory.

more importantly, your major doesn't matter nearly as much as it might seem. what matters is completing the degree to the best of your ability and learning to apply the knowledge you obtain to multiple fields. as much as some people would have you believe, you can't predict or plan for your entire future. you can only honor yourself and your interests in the present.

but that's english. creative writing is a different beast. i don't recommend majoring in creative writing unless you need the motivation of a hard deadline. it doesn't open more doors for you than an english degree does, and very very few cw professors get adequate training in creative pedagogy. a good professor is great, but a bad professor can ruin writing for you for a long time. unlike an english degree which is a medium risk for a big reward, a cw focus is a high risk for a medium reward. if you're already writing on your own time for your own fulfillment, that's more important than writing for a class.

you're right about a cw degree changing your voice into something inauthentic, and you're right about it damaging your creative motivation. both of those things have some benefits, though: when you adapt your voice into something it's not, later it'll snap back into an even stronger version of what you're doing now; and being forced to write for certain assignments will offer discipline so that you learn to write well even when you're uninspired and unmotivated.

regardless, all of that is better suited for an MFA. 4 years reading, 2-3 years writing. that will get you the education you're looking for and you'll be spending that time doing work you enjoy. i don't recommend going straight to the MFA after the BA, but people do that all the time anyway. the MFA will pay you so you won't go into any additional debt, and you'll gain teaching experience to boot (i do not recommend any programs you have to pay a single cent for unless you're filthy rich and bored). you'll write a thesis and go on to begin a life of words, be it reading the words of other people or writing your own.

so spend this time reading stuff and thinking about the stuff you read, writing some original work for a writing sample, and maybe sending that work out to some magazines. go meet with the creative writing faculty at your university and ask these questions to them as well. they'll give it to you straight about what your specific university's program is like and what it can offer you. even if you don't focus in cw, there are probably a ton of other extracurricular cw opportunities available to you, like working at the undergrad lit mag or attending readings.

#writing advice #job advice

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cowpokeomens · 6 months

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please write a little jolly as a dad imagine

I’m feeling so soft for him so for both of us, I will

Jolly as a dad has me so 😔🫶 bc he would be such a good dad. Like I know the running joke is that he’s Dad Omens but genuinely he has all the makeup of a great parent. I studied pedagogy and child development as part of my degree so like, I’m gonna get a little nerdy about this. Anyways! He seems to have a really great relationship with his mom, and so I think he would have really high standards for his partner, but also so so so much appreciation for them too (especially if you are someone who actually births your child.) I think he’d have lots of those parenting books that talk about teaching your kiddo respect with regards to others and themselves, is all about healthy boundaries, is #1 supporter of baby not having to hug anyone if they don’t want to! He’s by no means a pushover, but he knows which battles are worth fighting intuitively. “Yes, you have to take a bath- but you can decide: would you like bubblegum scented soap or grape?” “No, you don’t have to eat that if you don’t like it, but I think it would be so awesome if you tried two bites of something new.” He’d be SO big on the baby sling/wrap things, would proudly tote little baby around on his chest while cleaning around the house so you can get some rest too. If you’re someone who would breastfeed, he’d have several books on the topic and keeps about 3 million creams hidden around the house so you never have to go far for relief. I think he’d genuinely take parenting very seriously, because he’s seen in others how quickly damage gets done, and he always wants to be a safe harbor for his children. He considers himself a facilitator of big discoveries for his kids, like communicating effectively, because those are things that need to be worked out internally with guidance, not explained in more unfamiliar terms. Kiddo is having a rough day so they sit down and have a genuine conversation about it where he helps name the big emotions and validates kiddo’s feelings. Idk I’d birth this man a rugby team if he wanted one he’s be such a good father that’s all I got

#bad omens fic #bad omens fanfiction #bad omens fanfic #bad omens x reader #joakim karlsson fic #jolly karlsson fic #jolly karlsson headcanon #jolly karlsson x reader #ramblin gal

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proosh · 7 months

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|| You said to send Gil thoughts, so I got you some 💕

It's all personal headcanons but maybe you might agree. 😀😂 (there's some lud in this one)

Gil absolutely has some top class tutors for baby lud, because a future king has to know everything. And then when he returns from his whatever, he personally drills him on those. But that also means he himself has to be constantly learning ahead of him.

And maybe one day Lud surpasses him in knowledge and Gil is both annoyed and proud.

Oh my god you don’t even know how much I think about this

So, one of my more set in stone headcanons is that Gilbert is a bit of a freak for education, and while he can be incredibly harsh he is an incredible teacher. Like, Prussia was one of the first nations in Europe to institute a compulsory state education for children of both genders from childhood to teenage years. This was repeatedly reformed and built upon from Frederick the Great’s reign onwards through to the 19th century where it was borrowed in part by other Western nation – the United States in particular.

There’s something to be said for the rational, practical purposes of intense interest in pedagogy – that it represents the intense urge for modernisation, it existing as a baseline for a smarter, stronger officer class that can be more efficiently fed into the war machine (“The battles of Königgrätz and Sedan have been decided by the Prussian primary teacher" - Thomas Nipperdey), that it exists to bring the population within the influence and authority of the state – but I do truly believe that it’s something close to Gilbert’s heart that he’s a strong believer in.

I do firmly believe Ludwig would have been afforded the education fit for a prince of the German Empire both academically and militarily; he could probably ride before he could walk, and would have tutors for English, French, Latin, and Greek. Ludwig’s a clever boy and a horrifyingly quick learner – reflective of his unnatural growth from babe to child to teen and onwards – and Gilbert finds himself both unsettled by how adeptly the boy takes to education but also deeply, furiously proud and protective.

He’s sharpening Ludwig into a proper weapon, but he himself has to keep his cutting edge and likely finds himself studying and researching along with his charge, training in the field alongside him as well.

It’s all very well and good until the boy becomes a man, and starts having ideas and dreams of his own that grow outside the scope of Gilbert’s goals for him, and, well. Gilbert has raised himself an Empire and now it’s going to do what Empires do and throw its weight around.

That’s something Gilbert is going to have to learn for himself.

#hws prussia #hws germany #historical hetalia #sorry this became a whole meta but it's been rotating in my head for so long #gil's made himself his own frankenstein's monster but this time adam bumblefucks himself into the war to end all wars #from the askbox #mine #my writing

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evignonita · 1 month

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💌 | Forget about sims, let's learn about YOU! Tell us one fact about yourself, and then send this to 5 other Simblrs to do the same 🌈

YEAAAHHH i'm the most uninteresting person in the world so here we go

I LOVE HISTORY, I literally LOVE history and geography, I was hyperfixated on those subjects for a long time, thanks to that I have developed the ability to remember precise years (it's insane for me bc i have ADHD ☠️), and I also know the flags of the world by memory, excluding some islands in Oceania......... I am a great enthusiast ueo3rugo

If being a history teacher were well seen and appreciated in my country, I would study history pedagogy 🥹🥹 maybe in the future

#wowoe0woewwwww lets gooo.....#I DON'T KNOW WHO TO TAG I NEED MORE FRIENDS.!!!!!!!!!#insane me #tag game

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bodybeyondstories · 9 months

Text

Just ignore it - 2

David schemes with his friend Lee over how to deal with whatever or whoever is bringing about these big booty changes. Things heat up, in the waking and unconscious worlds, and David finally confronts Logan (and his new friend).

1 (Previous) | 3 (Next)

“I can only imagine the teaching reviews at the end of the semester. ‘Dr. Palmer had great hands-on pedagogy but a reality-warper gave a bunch of us comically fat asses and he said to just be chill about it.’”

“Well we’ve both seen worse,” said Lee, nursing a gin and tonic across from me.

Lee was my closest friend and colleague at the Center, he specialized more in the ‘lab’ side of things. A few times a week, we would do happy hour at a gay bar a comfortable distance from campus, allegedly to strategize around whatever problems we were currently trying to solve but mostly just to vent over a few rounds of overly strong and suspiciously cheap drinks.

I had changed into some stretchy leisure shorts that looked painted on over the hemispheres of my ass cheeks, hoping they could handle any ‘aftershocks’ of growth that may arise. Still thinking about the incident during class, I wondered who else may have noted and identified it as such. While I felt bad for not having alerted my students yet, word getting out or someone taking action would not help the situation. At least not until I had more info.

Noah was a creative writing MFA whose skinny arms and svelte torso flared out into jiggly, wide hips. He had seemed to be adjusting himself to sit up straighter at first, but I surmised that it was actually his butt inflating enough to lift him up in his seat. As class ended, he had trouble extricating himself from his desk, his ballooning backside drawing more than a few stares as it nearly sent him off balance. Blake, by contrast, was one of the forest guys, a rectangle of muscle and one of the leg day enthusiast types that I mentioned earlier. Hiis khaki shorts, already stuffed to capacity, split along the side seams as his glutes and quads expanded with muscle, thankfully not reaching catastrophic failure. He definitely noticed, but didn’t seem to mention it, at least not during class, instead opting to power walk his way out of the room right after we wrapped up, his squat butt bouncing ludicrously in his shorts.

“The thing is,” I began, “shifting the threads of time and genetics to retcon someone into a fantastical, juicy derriere is a delicate process. It takes a lot of training, precision, and skill. But matter manipulation in real time? It’s powerful, brute force, carefully controlled chaos magic. And this guy can not only do both, but he’s getting clumsy. This is worrying, right?”

“It’s exciting!” exclaimed Lee. “Imagine the implications if we could study this, it would push the Center’s research agenda years forward.” He adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his nose, focusing on the space between his hands as if trying to materialize a slideshow. “And yes, yes, we should be very concerned,” he added, noticing my stern look. “But you have to admit, right now it just seems like this guy’s staying in the realm of erotic fantasy.”

“Yeah, but until when? Then what does he move on to? And how long is this going to continue?” I asked, grabbing a handful of my left butt cheek.

“Hmm, you said you’re the most serious case, right? I mean, the others who have been changed are still within the realm of possibility?”

“They’re starting to push at the edges,” I said, rolling my eyes in frustration. “They’ve noticed but I don’t think they’ve noticed. See for yourself,” I added, nodding towards the door.

As if on cue, Blake walked in and sat at the bar, drawing surreptitious glances and outright stares. And who could blame them with those globes of muscle perched on top of a barstool, spilling out of a pair of workout shorts which were pulled taut against his tree trunk quads. I guessed he had actually gone to the gym after class by the looks of the sweat running down his back to his deep ass crack. I couldn’t imagine the show he must’ve put on doing deadlifts with that recently enhanced posterior. Were the magical changes just visible, or could he lift more? What could I squat with this wagon? Maybe not the most pressing questions, but ones that needed answers nonetheless.

“Okay, well, not not inside the realm of possibility,” said Lee, looking visibly pained to avert his gaze back to me, maybe remembering that my bubble booty was somehow even better.

We went through our respective repertoires of spells, spirits, and metaphysical conceptual formations, and nothing seemed to quite make sense for the situation. While we don’t usually talk shop this deeply after hours, this was a pernicious problem with no easy solution, and if I didn’t address it soon, the higher ups would inevitably catch wind of it and step in. And who knows where that would lead. As we talked, things began heating up at our little corner booth. Partially because of the subject matter and partially because with my recent changes, I was rendered acutely horny easily and often. I could feel a deep, yawning need gathering around my pelvis, a yearning. I was practically squirming in my seat, feeling a growing vortex of hunger. Eventually, Lee finally broke the tension.

“Do you feel that, too?” he asked. Any magic sensitive person in the establishment could probably tell that my hole needed a good thrashing, but I really keep forgetting that Lee’s senses are often more sharply attuned than mine.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said, and before you knew it we were closing out and heading back to my place.

Lee could barely keep his hands off my bubble butt as we speed walked through the crisp night air. We almost caused a scene on the way up to my apartment as he stopped me on the stairs, bending me over slightly to bury his face in my crack, his hands gripping the flesh of my cheeks like he might fall off the face of the earth. When we made it to my bedroom, I turned around and held his eager hands at his sides, taking a moment to relish in his hungry, impatient gaze as I towered over him before leaning in for an indulgent kiss, our tongues urgently searching each other’s mouths.

With a flourish, I whipped his shirt off, revealing his trim torso and hairy chest. While I thought he was about to return the favor, he instead spun me around, looping his thumbs into the waistband of my overstuffed shorts and beginning to pull. What began as an over-dramatic act became a real struggle as he started to put some elbow grease into it, fighting to peel the fabric over my monster booty. Eventually I joined in, willing my shorts over the curve of my ass and ignoring the small pops of fabric tearing. Aftershocks, I said to myself sarcastically. When the pants finally came off, he let out a sigh of disbelief, caressing my glutes with something like reverence, before pushing me onto the bed and burying his face all the way down to my waiting hole.

He was an expert ass eater and was sending me into waves of pleasure, but I needed something else. Something deeper. Reaching into the nightstand I pulled out a dildo of blended blues and greens that had to be no less than fifteen inches. A toy that, at least in this timeline, I was very familiar with. And apparently so was he. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, at least in this version of events. Lee, ever the reliable friend, had come through on a regular basis to help scratch my unrelenting itch. After we lubed up the toy, I began working it farther and farther inside of me as I got to work on Lee’s juicy cock, which would have been impressive had it not paled in comparison to my recent enhancements.

Afterward, Lee cuddled into my chest as I lay on my side, tracing lazy figure eights across his back and planting small kisses on his forehead.

“I guess whatever this is has its perks,” I offered with a wry smile, reveling in the afterglow of yet another powerful orgasm.

Lee perked up at this, that familiar look on his face reminding me that the gears are always turning. “That might be it, actually,” he said. “Like these erotic changes might not be a byproduct or any sort of trickery. They might themselves be the point. They might be leading to some sort of goal.”

“A goal for what?” I asked, imagining everything from a bubble butted harem to world domination.

“That’s the question,” said Lee, pursing his lips in thought. “More research is still needed on this, but extra-dimensional beings don’t really move through or perceive spacetime in anything resembling the way we do. So all they need is a conduit in this dimension to work through. Either way,” he continued, giving my ass an indulgent caress, “this thing really is something else. Just excellent work. And even if it might be a curse doesn’t mean you can't still treat it like a blessing.”

—

That night I had a dream that may have offered some clues. Being trained in lucid dreaming is one of the introductory facets of this work, and it can be an effective tool for receiving and processing sensitive information as well as exploring things hidden in your personal corner of the astral plane. But it was especially useful as a liminal space in which one could encounter beings on the edges of our realm, like our primary suspect.

I was walking into the paranormal artifacts collection, the archive that Logan works in, hoping no one was there yet because I had finally figured out the delicate matter of confronting Logan about the situation, and needed to make sure the meeting was one-on-one. What my strategy was was unclear, but in the dream I felt confident. As I approached the entryway, I noticed that the double doors had been removed, yet something else seemed off. My eyes were level with the top of the frame, which was disorienting enough, but as I ducked my head through I realized that I was already in a full crouch. In fact, I was crawling through the entryway on hands and knees, my shoulders bumping lightly against the edges of the frame. Thankfully, it was just Logan in the collection, standing over a table of ancient tomes, scrolls, and even a hologram, all arranged around some object that I couldn’t look directly at. He glanced toward me with chromatic rainbow pattern glasses, a noted difference from his usual look, but otherwise nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

He looked…lonely? No, solitary, he was missing something. I was about to call to him, but was stopped in my tracks by someone holding me back, gripping my waist to keep me from progressing farther into the room. I initially registered this as a warning or some sort of invisible barrier, but when I turned around, I didn’t see anything or anyone. I tried again, still stuck by some unknown force. With mild annoyance, I realized that not only did my hips and butt take up the entire doorway, they were too big to fit through. As I continued trying to squeeze the flesh of my colossal backside into the room, I could hear the frame audibly straining, but still had no luck.

Then came a familiar force pushing from behind. What felt like massive hands were digging into the underside of my glutes, eagerly kneading and squeezing my cheeks to massage them through. As I glanced back at Logan, still patiently watching, I realized why he seemed so alone. Whatever power had been seeping into my life wasn’t doing it through him in this instance, it was right behind me. I guess in the liminal dreamspace, this being had less need of a human gateway. With a final shove, I cleared the doorway, my giant form tumbling into the room, trying to get my bearings without starting a chain reaction by knocking over shelves and shelves of magical artifacts. Before I could get a clear look at whatever, whoever that was behind me, I felt those hands again, parting my ass cheeks and slipping in a tongue that felt nothing short of massive, even at these proportions. As they hungrily tossed my salad I was driven to higher and higher levels of ecstasy, my body following suit by expanding with every wave of pleasure. Getting back through the door frame was a lost cause as I became more worried about the approaching ceiling, my gargantuan hands and feet pushing aside bookcases, tables, and crates of identified ephemera as I grew relentlessly, looming over Logan as he tried to move his carefully arranged spread out of the way, eventually giving up and staring at the sight of my behemoth cock rising taller than his entire body, pulsing with the coming release–before I lazily woke up in the early morning sun.

I really felt like with more time I could’ve gotten some answers, if not for the loud creak of Lee padding his huge feet to the bathroom to relieve himself. He had an earlier day than I did, so whenever he stayed over, I just had to deal with the hustle and bustle while still bleary eyed and emerging from a REM cycle. While he’s one of few people who would fully believe me if I told him I was just being eaten out by an ancient deity–and would feel especially bad for waking me–I had left the world of dreams with a sufficient amount of useful data. How could I even complain? I thought, as Lee re-entered the room, shooting me a sleepy wink as he ducked his head back through the doorway, absentmindedly petting the semisoft schlong that swung back and forth around his knees. He’s really the only one who can satisfy me, it’s like we’re made for each–

Ah. Interesting. While this was definitely the body I ‘remembered,’ and definitely the dick that had brought unending pleasure like few else could, I had a sneaking suspicion that this was not his form last night. At least not in this timeline. All you need is a conduit, his words echoed in my head. Whatever this being was had managed to link me and Logan through the astral plane, using me as a temporary conduit for its erotic power. And the results were towering next to my bed, stretching almost to the ceiling, all long graceful lines and sinewy muscle, trying to finagle a beautiful, golden brown, unbelievably long dick into some chinos.

—

Slowly becoming the manifestation of someone’s wildly fantastical wet dream didn’t mean I still didn’t have work to do. After another go round with my favorite silicone monster cock–the best I could do following Lee’s departure–I threw together a quick breakfast and hauled my big butt to the office, settling into a morning of paperwork and emails that I had been neglecting in light of this recent case.

Before long, I could feel the pressure building down below, and tried less and less effectively to stay focused and get some work done, convincing myself that once I found a good stopping point, I could run to the bathroom, whip out my extra long dick, and suck myself off as a late morning pick me up. The feeling was similar to the phenomenon during class, a rolling crescendo of erotic energy in desperate need of release. Except it just kept building, the pressure getting more and more intense, like some deep gravitational presence moving closer and closer. Then in walks Logan, placing himself slowly, carefully in the chair opposite my desk.

“I…need your help,” he said.

I decided to play it cool. I had surmised that Logan wasn’t fully aware that he–or more accurately his dick–was the source of all this foolishness, but if he was coming to that realization, I had to handle the situation with care.

“Yeah, what’s wrong?” I asked with genuine concern, though I was fairly certain he also had a dream of me growing to monstrous proportions and having my salad tossed by a higher dimensional being.

“I don’t quite know how to explain it, but I think you might be able to offer some clarification. There’s something I need you to see,” he said, pulling out what looked like a polished stone phallus with glittery lavender streaks, and a few cracks here and there. It looked to be about eight inches tall standing upright, the base composed of two concave bowls that resembled, of course, a ballsack.

“We received this at the museum before the start of the semester. It was lost in the mix of boxes of stuff from a smaller archive that had shut down recently–budget cuts, ya know, and there weren’t many details to go on. So it seemed like some sort of ancient fertility artifact and I was doing some analysis to get an idea of where and when it came from and there was this…energy that I could feel around it, like it was calling to me, and…well…”

Don’t tell me, I thought with an internal groan.

“I, um…” he continued.

“You fucked the ancient dildo, didn’t you?” I asked, figuring it would be easier if we just cut to the chase.

He lowered his head slightly in affirmation, his cheeks reddening in embarrassment.

“You fucked the ancient dildo,” I repeated, pinching the bridge of my nose with two fingers, “and now you’re cursed by some fertility god or related deity or supernatural being.”

“...Yeah.”

“One whose name we don’t know.”

“Correct.”

“Who may have been hidden in that thing for millennia until very recently.”

“Very likely.”

“And who is now, through you, trying to run amok.”

“Mmhm.”

“Okay. Alright. At least we’ve figured that out.”

“I was really hoping you could help me,” Logan jumped in, his voice rising in pitch, “I don’t know how to control it and it’s so strong. And I’m sorry for the changes to everyone, but it keeps like, demanding to be released, but I don’t really know what it’s saying and with what it already did to my boyfriend–”

“Hey,” I interjected, my voice becoming slow and deliberate. As Logan was talking, his hand wandered to the artifact sitting on my desk, touching it absentmindedly, and being this close I could feel this being trying to ooze their way into the plane of our existence. As Logan got more visibly worried, I felt my bubble butt pushing against the arms of my chair, my feet and legs slowly lengthening, my shoulders stretching wider as my torso extended, my clothes becoming snug. Meanwhile, Logan’s adorable twinkish visage became more acute, the bouncing curls of his hair increasing in volume, his lips plumping amongst his scruff, his body shrinking slightly as an astounding bulge in his pants lengthened even further.

“Deep breaths,” I continued. “Deep, deep breaths. We got this, you’re in the right place.”

He relaxed his grip on the artifact as I took his hands in mine, intentionally ignoring the fact that my mitts looked massive compared to his. We were reaching that energetic threshold, but I was confident that I could handle it.

“What changes do you remember?” I asked. “With you specifically.”

“Well,” he started, “my boyfriend always liked being the bigger one in the relationship, and I…think that before I found this I was around average height, but I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure I’ve shrunk several inches, which he’s loved, and he can’t keep his hands off my butt, he keeps commenting on how perky it is. And then there’s…this.”

With a sigh of resignation, he rose from his chair and dropped his pants in one swift motion. He wasn’t wearing underwear, because what would even be the point with a schlong that came straight from someone’s hyperdick fantasy. Revealed to the air, his cock felt like a metaphysical locus of energy in the room, a gravity well pulling everything toward it as it stretched over my desk, and, before I could intervene, dropped a thick glob of precum into one of the bowls of the artifact.

I felt a heavy pulse of energy reverberate through the room which would probably have been felt over this whole section of campus. While this power was too ancient for our contemporary defenses, it likely set off alarms with every magic sensitive person in the area.

“What…was that?” he asked.

“You gave it an offering,” I said, staring intently at the artifact for any changes on any plane that I had access to.

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not good,” I responded curtly.

The dissipation of that energetic burst wasn’t followed by a feeling of relief, but dreadful anticipation. My stomach sank as I imagined the ocean flowing away from the beach before a tsunami. Whatever being this was was on its way, and it was tired of dealing with Logan as a conduit.

We had to act fast and I had an idea. A completely unhinged one, but the only one I could maintain amidst the torrent of hormones, pent up jizz, and the deep hunger of my hole.

The erotic is a powerful force, one that with training and knowhow, can be a useful facet of any mage’s skillset. But more importantly, orgasms are, for lack of a better term, portals. Brief openings between dimensions, moments of energetic possibility. Whoever this being was, they were coming, and I had a sneaking suspicion that they were powerful enough to enter our world through brute force, a tear in the fabric of reality that could have ramifications far beyond ripped pants seams and donkey dicks. But if I opened a door in a controlled way I could set the terms of engagement and minimize destruction. I hoped.

“I know this is less than professional, but I need you to fuck me,” I said. “This curse seemingly works through erotic energy and orgasms are powerful focal points. If you fuck me, I may be able to redirect it, at least temporarily.”

Logan didn’t have to be told twice. His member looked ridiculous on his slight frame, still leaking precum as it rose fully to attention, defying gravity as it bobbed in the air between us. I briefly wondered how I was going to take all that before realizing it looked mighty familiar, very much like a certain dildo of slightly smaller size, but very similar shape, even with that curve. Of course, I thought.

Logan didn’t waste time, and soon I found myself bent over my own desk, my monumental bubble butt arched in the air as Logan’s mushroom head slowly pushed my hole wider and wider before slipping in.

Logan slid in and out with agonizing slowness, his prodigious cock working its way farther and farther with each stroke, the pleasure of his thrusts simply unreal. He had seemingly lost the capacity for words, his hands gripping the flesh of my fat ass as he was lost in cosmic orgasmic pleasure. Getting inch after inch of his dick into me could only be accomplished with magical assistance, yet I was still filled to the brim, feeling his mammoth cock pulsing against my walls with every one of his heartbeats. His precum mixed with sweat produced a loud squelch with every thrust, and as more and more of him entered me, I was rendered speechless by this never ending, all encompassing cock, in disbelief that there could possibly be more. It felt like a fantasy, because in a sense it was.

Finally, somehow, he bottomed out, and as I felt his pubes press against my overstretched hole, I took my chance, positioning my own cock over the second small bowl of the artifact as a glob of precum slid up my long shaft and oozed out, dropping into place. Although no sound was made on this plane of existence, I sensed something like a bell tolling in the far off distance, as if the circuit had been completed, and Logan’s dick pumped up as he began shooting volleys of cum deep inside of me, my own dick following suit.

As we were brought over the edge of oblivion, time slowed to a crawl, and through my other sight I could finally see the being that had been causing all this trouble, straining against the threads of our reality and oozing through with chaotic, erotic possibility.

But orgasms are a portal. And I opened the door, pushing aside the beaded curtains of our world to meet our new–and very old–guest. Usually, in situations like these, one might whip out some sort of binding or banishment spell, but this was a being of deep magic, old magic, and it would burn even the best of us to a crisp. So there were no tricks or complicated grammars here, just my outstretched hand, fingers splayed and palm up. An invitation to a being who hadn’t yet figured out how to communicate in any recognizable modern language, apparently opting to manifest through erotic fantasy. And a recognition in return.

—

The sun was much lower in the sky when I came to, painting the sky from my window in the streaks of pink and purple of waning afternoon.

Logan had fallen back into the chair and passed out, visibly exhausted yet also relieved, the mushroom head of his soft dick drooling as it hung just over the chair’s edge. As he realized I had finally regained consciousness, he leaned forward to plant a tender kiss on my right cheek in thanks, letting out an overdramatic Oof as I fell back into his lap.

“Let me know if you need help explaining this to your boyfriend,” I said.

“He’s open minded, I think he’ll get it. It’s not my first time encountering a magical artifact.”

After we awkwardly cleaned up and got dressed–I really was enjoying the skirt look– Logan turned to me and said, “Thanks so much for this. I guess I’ll…see you next week.”

“No problem,” I replied. “It’s literally my job, and the skirts are admittedly a nice touch. I’ll see about taking care of this before getting it back to the archive,” I added, gingerly placing the artifact in a drawer of my desk.

It was a partial truth. What Logan had thought to be a curse was actually a collaborator, and it had found someone more capable to play with. In the recesses of the metaphysical plane of my mind, I felt a newcomer making themself comfortable, finally finding the words to express themself in this world.

I’m not a linguist, but it sounded something like…Let’s have some fun.

#male tf #ass growth #butt growth #dick growth #growth

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actualbird · 2 years

Text

assorted hc rambles that one way or another have something to do with the academia in tot's canon

wc: 1k

cuz even if i know this is a game of romance and wits and murder mystery law, hyv cant just drop the cast like the nxx team (aka vyn and artem have doctorate degrees, mc is a graduate attorney, luke has a master's in bioengineering, and marius is working on his master's in oil painting) and not expect me to want to know more about how theyre interacting with their specific spheres of academia

stellis university's biology department is begging "Pearce, L." to please consider giving a guest lecture for their students, pretty please

i think it's very entertaining to remember that several departments at stellis university have a bunch of Celebrity Poster Students/Alumni/Profs.

psychology dept obviously has the graceful intelligent dr vyn richter and hoo boy, that incident back in his personal story 3 where for a hot sec the university believed a SKETCHY CALLOUT POST accusing him to be a TOXIC MANIPULATOR....okay thats pretty on par for the course of how social media works HAHA. but my point here is that vyn is beautiful and a great teacher and theres a fanclub for him and he was momentarily involved in juicy drama. hes the perfect poster prof, he brings in a lot of attention and, in turn, interested students.

the law dept obviously has artem wing, and theyve also got rising attorney mc too!! im not sure if ingrid rosworth is canonically also a graduate of stellis uni, but if she is, im sure the law dept can drop some spicy rumors about ingrid and artem's Bitter Rivalry or something

aaaand the fine arts department has The marius von hagen as a grad student, and that in itself is already a big draw and a bunch of publicity.

but what about the STEM nation?

luke pearce is the only person on the team that is in no way affiliated with stellis university. he got his master's degree at national central university, which (and i know i mentioned this before but i want to mention it again) is noted in the Big Data Lab to be a canonical rival school of stellis university

National Central University has been competing with Stellis University for the top-ranked college domestically for years, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. [from the Big Data Lab entry on NCU]

which is already so hilarious to think about. can you imagine national central university and stellis university's sports teams go against each other for a big game and suddenly the nxx investigation team is divided due to school loyalties? luke's gonna be the lone ranger rooting for national central and everybodys gonna affectionately call him a traitor

but i digress.

while luke is the most lowkey of the team in terms of publicity/popularity he gets from the media, surely, surely this canonical genius' bioengineering contributions during his studies garnered attention from the nerds at stellis uni.

the master's thesis written by Pearce, L. is something many students and faculty have been fangirling/fanboying over the moment they read it, and it becomes known that Pearce, L. is currently residing in south stellis, and thus the dept keeps sending luke emails inviting him to do a guest lecture sometime

and he always just replies with a concise and friendly "No thank you! :D" because 1) hes got enough on his plate to do right now and 2) cuz of stupid school loyalties jhvJHVKSJHFS, hes not teaching on enemy territory

"MY DISCIPLINE'S citation style is better than YOURS!!!"

luke (biology/engineering) and vyn (psychology/pedagogy) use APA. mc and artem (law) use The Bluebook Style. and marius, our sole trooper in the fine arts, uses MLA.

if ever the team have to collaborate with somebody else in the team who is outside of their respective discipline's citation style to co-author some research, blood will be shed. the chaos would be immense. everybody assumed they were using the same citation (i.e. whatever citation each of them were respectively used to) and then when they realize the formatting discrepancies, the ACADEMIC RIFTS IN MANUALS OF STYLE, everybody gets extremely defensive and comically overdramatic over their preferred format of choice

vyn, luke, and marius: //squinting at the bluebook format

vyn: this is...

marius: youre gonna be way too passive aggressive with your thoughts, what we need is blunt aggressive. this format sucks balls

artem: it does not suck balls

vyn: no, he's right, it does

marius, muttering to himself: oh that was a weird feeling, vyn saying im right

artem, louder: it doesnt!!

luke, looking at mc with the biggest saddest puppy eyes: w-when did you change so much...i...i thought i knew you, i trusted you 🥺🥺🥺

mc: STOP MAKING THAT FACE AT ME, I HAD TO ADAPT IN LAW SCHOOL. WHY ARENT WE BULLYING MARIUS??

marius: uh, cuz marius is right and holy and all of you are wrong?

vyn, immediately switching sides cuz he loves the drama: MLA is ridiculous. why on earth is the only number present in the in text citation the page number?

marius: cuz it's simpler and doesnt take for-fuckin-ever to read past?????

luke, grumbling: least MLA could do is have the year in the in text citation...

marius: thats what the works cited portion is for, bitch!

artem: so you want us to flip all the way to the works cited portion to see the year? that seems like it would take much longer to do, like it would take forever---

and this argument would go on for far too long.

moving on

one day vyn is sick and has to postpone a class and...

if vyn comes down with the ails, he'll of course have to update his students about how he wont be coming in on that day.

now, he wanted to start off his email saying. "I am afraid I will have to postpone classes [...]" and whatnot, but vyn is Very Sick. he starts writing the email, passes out like a few words in, and when he wakes up he sees the email he had accidentally sent to all his students:

Good day, I am afraid

(based on this hilarious tumblr post)

#tears of themis #luke pearce #marius von hagen #vyn richter #artem wing

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canmom · 2 years

Text

Animation Night 119: Dick Williams

heeheehee, dick

So. If you’re an animator, or have even thought about trying animation at some point in your life, you’ve probably ended up recommended a copy of this book...

Which is fair, it’s a fucking great book. It pretty much set the standard for animation pedagogy forever since.

You may also likely know the legend of its creator, Richard Williams. I believe I may even have mentioned him on Animation Night before, but since it’s been some time, let’s set the scene.

Animation is about compromise. On every production, from TV to film, you have to accept some limitation on your vision: drawings you don’t have time to correct, shots that might look better on 1s, CG where hand-drawn animation might look better. Part of the art of the animator is learning to do more with less, like developing a style that demands a more manageable drawing count.

Yet animators are proud creatures. It’s painful to let go of a sequence you know could be better with more time!

Which means... in the great annals of Animation Lore, there are a few times where some industry legend gets enough clout where they can get away with just going completely all out on a film. In the best cases, this results in films like Takeshi Koike’s Redline (Animation Night 19), which occupied Madhouse for a good seven years, but resulted in an exhilarating, one of a kind sakuga feast.

This one paid off, and while it rather strained the resources of Madhouse and they weren’t in a hurry to let Koike do whatever he wanted again, It’s clear that he levelled up a lot from the effort, with the nigh perfect understanding of 3D form becoming the foundation of his later Lupin films. But in these cases, actually finishing the film is maybe more of the exception than the rule...

The next famous case is that of Yuri Norstein - a titan of Soviet animation, who I have regrettably not yet covered on Animation Night! But Animation Obsessive have, in wonderful detail, so please go read what they have to say.

Norstein, famed for his films like Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales but fiercely independent, had a somewhat tense relationship with his superiors at Soyuzmutfilm. This came to a head when he set out to make an insanely ambitious feature-length adaptation of The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. In 1985 he was fired from Soyuzmutfilm for working too slowly... but he found private investors after the fall of the Soviet Union... and has worked on it ever since, with an animation team consisting of just Yuri Norstein himself and his wife Francheska Yarbusova whose drawings form the cutouts which Norstein animates. Even now, 37 years later, he is still working on The Overcoat. Occasionally, clips surface.

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It probably won’t be finished before Norstein dies, and at that point someone will probably find all the finished footage and edit it into something like a film. But the investors still seem to be willing to indulge him, perhaps because it’s not exactly expensive and it has the aura of a legend so they’re willing to play the long game.

But of course, the most famous of these quixotic passion projects is The Thief and the Cobbler, directed by Richard Williams. So let’s set the stage.

Richard Williams, in his own account, got interested in animation at age 10, in 1943, when he got a paperback book called How To Make Animated Cartoons. He started pursuing it seriously at age 22, while working as a painter in Spain, returning to London and working briefly in advertising while self-funding a short fim The Little Island, which he describes as a ‘half-hour philosophical argument’, released in 1958 when he was aged 25.

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After making this film, Williams came to a very familiar realisation: he didn’t know nearly as much about animation as he had imagined. He describes watching Bambi for the second time and ‘crawling out of the theatre’ trying to figure out how they did that. He started idolising the animators at Disney and Warner Bros such as Ken Harris - someone he would one day work alongside, and become a close friend, and in the end be a pallbearer at his funeral. And The Animator’s Survival Kit‘s prose is still soaked in reverence for these animators, with a lot of cute little anecdotes about moments Williams spent with them.

His reverence for the Disney ‘full animation’ school was cemented after seeing the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (Animation Night 86) and watching an unimpressed audience walk out - something Williams at the time attributed to the jerky animation that didn’t respect the movement principles of Disney. He describes by contrast how completely he was blown away by The Jungle Book, seeing the hand of some of the Nine Old Men like Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston - so he wrote them a letter about how much he was impressed and they invited him to come visit.

At this point his intro drifts away from autobiography, so let’s give a brief summary from other sources. During this time, Williams had founded a studio in London, which mostly made TV ads and animated segments for live action films such as the comedy Casino Royale (1967).

Notably also in this period, Williams animated segments for a film about the Crimean War, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). The drawings for this sequence were insanely intricate, calling to mind the woodcut engraving style of newspaper illustrations contemporary with the war.

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1971 saw his adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which was warmly received in the States. At this point he was frequently inviting talented animators from the States to come and teach the pathetic British how it’s done, including Grim Natwick (who is described as ‘still brilliant’ in the Survival Kit) and Ken Harris, who gets a fascinating little paragraph:

It takes time. I didn’t encounter Ken Harris until I was nearly forty and he was sixty-nine. I had to hire most of my teachers in order to learn from them.

I hired Ken in order to get below him and be his assistant, so I was both his director and his assistant. I don’t know if this is original, but I finally figured out to that to learn or to ‘understand’ I had to ‘stand under’ the one who knows in order to catch the drippings of his experience.

This period in the 60s and 70s was also the beginning of the saga that would lead, eventually, to The Thief and the Cobbler. Originally the film was to be titled Nasruddin, about the folk character Mullah Nasreddin. Williams had a hard time finding any sort of funding for the film, falling out with other production companies at times, so he quietly plugged away at it while working on other projects.

The Nasruddin connection runs a little deeper actually, because Williams was hired in 1976 to illustrate a collection of Mullah Nasreddin stories by the Sufi occultist writer Idries Shah. I’m not sure how this came about exactly - whether Williams went out of his way to draw Nasreddin, or if he happened to get hired by coincidence. In any case, the idea was clearly occupying a lot of his thought - but more on that anon.

The 70s also saw Williams work on animation for the title sequences for two of the Pink Panther movies, during which time he invited Art Babbitt to come to London to teach - Babbitt being the man who had been fired from Disney after the animators’ strike in the 40s, thus evading canonisation as one of the Nine Old Men. Babbitt also did some work on Thief and the Cobbler, and rendered this memorable quote about Williams:

He's a director, designer, animator, and has a good layman's knowledge of music. He's a dreamer. He has more to learn as far as animation is concerned, but God, he can draw like a bastard

By this point, Williams would have been 42 years old. He was still making ads, despite ‘despising the form’, and making the occasional film or TV special such as Raggedy Ann & Andy (1977) and Ziggy’s Gift (1982).

Of course, the real point he became famous was when Who Framed Roger Rabbit came about. The strange Disney/Spielberg collaboration is actually one I’ve written about before, back on Animation Night 40, where I said some kinda mean things about old Dick. What I don’t really talk about there is what the film is about: yes, it’s about the animation industry and full of little injokes, but it is also to adult eyes recognisable as a parable for how San Francisco lost its public transport system, leaning on the idea of the auto-makers conspiring to destroy it. The real story may be a little more complicated, but having now seen the strip mall sprawl in both ends of California, I can see why people would come up with it. It’s grim out there.

I also didn’t talk much about the production. Williams was involved precisely because Spielberg saw footage of Thief and the Cobbler and was so impressed that he approached Williams.

By all accounts, working on Roger Rabbit was intense for everyone involved. Williams writes of drawing scenes late at night in the hotel room, and there was all sorts of goofy studio politics with neither Disney or Warner Bros wanting the film to favour one or the other (leading to situations like the piano scene where Donald and Daffy Duck were obliged to have exactly even screen time; the same goes for Bugs and Mickey.

It was also, I learned recently, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for one young James Baxter, then 20 years old studying animation but frustrated by the more experimental approach taken at his course, wanting to learn - like Williams himself - something more tied down like the Disney tradition. Traditionally animated films on the scale of Roger Rabbit are basically never made in the UK (and odds are, never will be again now CGI is king), so Baxter and some of his university friends dived for the chance.

Baxter joined the production as an inbetweener, working basically non stop on animation for that year (‘eat, sleep and animate’) but so impressed the Disney animators with a brief test he did of Thumper from Bambi that they gave him a few small scenes of feet and hands to animate. His success at this led to him getting more scenes, and this is where we get a little anecdote about Richard Williams (see, this is relevant!):

Baxter: Not being a seasoned animator, not being, y’know, knowing kind of the ropes of that, I did the classic junior animator mistake of going too far with something before you show your director or your supervisor, and I got the beatdown! I got the classic beatdown from Dick, which was great. I had gone way too far on like a shot of one of the weasels and, you know, he said ‘yeah yeah yeah! No, get the drawings, go get the drawings!’ So I had to stand behind Dick for an hour or so while he drew over my pencil drawings with a pen, one by one.

Interviewer: Ohh, wow.

Baxter: That’s kind of awesome. Not on a separate sheet of paper either, just like, my drawing, his pen.

Still, Roger Rabbit was completed on something like a schedule; the animation helped kick off the Disney Renaissance and now everyone wanted a piece of Dick. Off the back of that, Williams was able to negotiate a ‘negative pickup deal’ with Warner Bros: they would buy the film on a specified date for a specified price. Williams believed he could fund the film through a major studio, so rather than seek European arts funding, he went for the Warner Bros deal - a decision that would eventually be fatal to the project.

So at last the passion project, at this point already ‘in production’ for around 25 years starting in 1989, could really get underway. Thanks to the work done by the visiting animators, it represented the final film for a number of notable animators: Ken Harriss, Errol Le Cain, Emery Hawkins, Grim Natwick and Art Babbitt.

Williams’s approach was... utterly uncompromising. Sakugabooru commenter pkoduah provides a nice summary of the issues:

1. The film was led by animation rather than story. He thought of the most technically impressive animation scenes and then tried to shoe horn them into a story. If even half of the care that went into the animation went into the story and clear locked down storyboards it would had fared better and not been such a hydra. Even after the 2+ decades the story is still not fully resolved. 2. Richard Williams had an almost religious commitment to working on 1's, even for relatively slow scenes. If he just changed that one thing he would have greatly increased his chances of meeting the deadlines. 3. The decision by a particular still powerful animation exec to steal his thunder with Aladdin which is heavily based on the Thief & Cobbler, put further pressure on the execs to take drastic measures with William's glacially paced project.

We can also add that the story - with its goofy orientalist framing featuring jokes like Grand Vizier Zigzag and Princesss Yumyum, and an incredibly simple story that simply revolves around a macguffin - feels like a relic of a different era of animated film. Despite Williams’s disdain for it, it feels like it has a similar feeling to Yellow Submarine.

As an animator who’s tried it, the insistence on working on 1s is especially crazy to me. At first glance it sounds like twice as much work, because twice as many drawings, but it’s worse than this - because issues in an animation, inconsistences of shape and line, become much more obvious on 1s than they do on 3s or 2s where you can get away with larger changes of shape.

The modern worldview is quite different, incidentally. Lower framerates, when used properly, can also create a snappy, impactful feeling (c.f. the Kanada school, or Mitsuo Iso’s ‘full limited’). It requires a slightly different approach with stronger poses and a lot of drawing skill, since each frame is pulling more work, so a sequence designed to run on 1s will not look better with half its frames missing, but a sequence designed to run on 2s or 3s can look just as good.

In the Survival Kit, Williams briefly comments on the issue, saying in his entire career he’d basically only found one sequence that worked better on 2s for reasons he didn’t understand - to him, animating on 2s was purely a cost saving measure, and now he finally had the chance to do his passion project, he wasn’t going to accept anything less than the best possible.

But then, I think Williams’s motivation was less about appealing to audiences, and more about showing off to his art senpais - the great animators he idolised. It’s telling that one of the first anecdotes in the Survival Kit is about Williams and Ken Harris:

In 1967, I was able to bring Ken to England and my real education in animation articulation and performance started by working with him. I was pushing forty at the time, and, with a large successful studio in London, I had been animating for eighteen years, winning over one hundred international awards.

After seven or eight years of working closely with Ken, he said to me, ‘Hey Dick, you’re starting to draw those things in the right place.’

‘Yeah, I’m really learning it from you now, aren’t I?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you know . . . you could be an animator.’

After the initial shock I realised he was right. Ken was the real McCoy whereas I was just doing a lot of fancy drawings in various styles which were functional but didn’t have the invisible ‘magic’ ingredients to make them really live and perform convincingly.

So I redoubled my efforts (mostly in mastering head and hand ‘accents’) and the next year Ken pronounced, ‘OK, you’re an animator.’

A couple of years after that, one day he said, ‘Hey, Dick, you could be a good animator.’

The anecdote continues with Williams going down to visit Harris in his trailer when Harris was aged 82, and finding that Harris could still correct his work. He still didn’t have Harris’s ‘thing’. But, at least, Harris said he ‘had his own thing going’.

It’s never mentioned explicitly, but the shadow of The Thief and the Cobbler hangs over the Animator’s Survival Kit. The footage that earned this praise from Ken Harris was footage from that film. By that logic, it should have been an immense success for Williams: finally earning him his place among the canon.

So why is it instead such a negative memory for Williams?

Well, in 1992, the film was still in progress, with just fifteen minutes left to complete - but it was too much for Warner Bros, who didn’t want to be seen as making a knockoff Aladdin. Williams was booted from his own passion project, putting Fred Calvert on to hastily fill in the gaps in the story and discard the unfinished sequences, adding a number of musical sequences with far lowre quality animation performed by a number of subcontractors including Sullivan Bluth Studios, Kroyer Films, Wang Film Productions/Thai Wang Film Productions in Taiwan and Thailand, Pacific Rim Animation in China and Varga Studio in Hungary. A second recut was performed by Miramax, removing even more of the original.

The resulting mess landed poorly in theaters, and Williams, utterly dejected for obvious reasons, shut down his animation studio and went back to Canada, spending the next few years as a teacher while nursing his wounds and starting work on writing what would become The Animator’s Survival Kit, published in 2002. And, in a sense, the story has a happy ending: Williams’s book became a bestseller, the reference on animation; Williams could pass on the secrets of the masters he revered, and trust that he would be remembered as a great teacher and animator.

In 2008 he was invited to become an artist in residence at Aardman; in 2010 he finished a film he’d begun in Ibiza in the 1950s titled Circus Drawings, and then he spent the rest of his life setting out alone on a new grand passion project, an adaptation of the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The first part of the film, titled simply Prologue, was released in 2015, featuring elaborate hand-drawn camera moves and background animation all done in pencils and photographed directly. You can watch it:

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What of The Thief and the Cobbler? Well, the workprint of the film prior to the edits has survived, and the legend of it gradually spread across the industry. Williams showed his workprint in 2000 at the Annecy festival, impressing Roy E. Disney, who started on a project to restore and finish the film... but this fell through as Disney turned away from hand-drawn animation and Roy left the company.

Instead, the restoration effort was led unofficially by fans. A filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist, created the Recobbled Cut of the film, which used all the Williams-era footage that could be found from various sources, including unfinished pencil tests and scenes rotoscoped by Gilchrist to deal with dodgy footage, all edited to basically the structure of the workprint with some added music. As more and more people saw the Recobbled Cut, the film began to be rehabilitated, and Gilchrist created further revisions as more sources of original footage came to light.

So a good ending for Williams, right. But I’ve talked a lot about how it is made, what is the film itself actually like?

In its Recobbled form, The Thief and the Cobbler is very very obviously an animator’s passion project lmao. It’s full of Williams’s homages to Islamic art, with the stark geometric patterns creating some very clever shot compositions.

The actual story is very light on dialogue, and in contrast to Aladdin, it keeps its characterisations very simple. The thief and cobbler themselves are both basically mute, driven by very simple impulses: the cobbler is simple and well-meaning and enchanted by simple things, while the thief is single-mindedly determined to steal the Golden Balls, never mind the consequences. It’s not a surprise it didn’t land well in a time when the rule in animation was Don Bluth and the Disney Renaissance: there are no ‘I want’ songs or really, character arcs as such.

So the Cobbler gets with Princess Yumyum, but... like a fairytale or a Golden Age disney film, not because we’ve been sold on them as characters who have chemistry and want to get with each other, but more because Yumyum seems to find the Cobbler kind of... a weirdly endearing little pet and that’s what the plot demands. The Thief continues his thieving throughout. Late in the movie, a massive army of barbarians shows up out of almost nowhere, leading to a spectacular scene in the cogs of their giant war machine, but we aren’t really asked to believe in them as a culture. It is basically a series of setpieces loosely strung together.

I have said in the past that The Thief and the Cobbler is callous in the treatment of the historical Islamic culture it depicts. It is certainly an Orientalist film and certainly very British in its outlook, there’s no question of that. Still, while I do still think the joke names like Vizier Zigzag and Princess Yumyum are tasteless, I think it would be hard to say that Williams does not have reverence or devotion. It’s a different beast than Aladdin - the way he shows this devotion is through his mad, obsessive craft. I’m not quite sure how I’d feel about it if I was on the receiving end of it, mind you. (I would be quite curious to find out what the Arabic dub does with it, if there is one.)

The thing is that Williams is, far more than a director, an animator. Like, say, Masaaki Yuasa, he loved the medium of animation more than anything - no matter what he’s animating, he’s clearly beyond happy if he can make it move in a cool way. The Animator’s Survival Kit is intoxicating because he really sells you in this fascination with how things move - the nuances of a walk, the effects of timing and spacing and gesture, like what does happen if you make this frame go up and this frame go down? The previous generation of animators was his god, but he also was keen to experiment, find new possibilities. For this reason, Williams is still relevant. Even if he had... fascinatingly strange ideas about how gay people walk!

But this means, unfortunately for this film, that he was far, far more of an animator than he was a director. In fact this ends up a very endearing quality. The Thief and the Cobbler is an intensely idiosyncratic film, a true expression of the worldview of Richard Williams both good and bad... the workaholic maniac that he was, a man with something to prove.

And for a man with a great deal to say about acting, we should look at the acting in this film. Since many scenes are wordless, it falls to the acting to convey the emotions of the characters in the scene. And... they’re certainly not subtle, but they are creative, full of clever and surprising images. It is I suppose a very theatrical mode of acting: a lot of exaggeration and big movements.

On the other hand, the characters’ inner worlds are like... well they aren’t really there. Pretty much everything is right there on the surface. Everyone is really exactly what you see. It’s interesting to contrast this with the psychological turn soon to be taken by anime in the 90s, in Eva or films like those of Mamoru Oshii. A character like Motoko Kusanagi has incredibly graceful 3D movement, yet she barely emotes... and nevertheless through the framing and script, we know a lot about what she might be feeling. Shinji sits still listening to his tape player. Sometimes less can be more.

What of the Thief? He is the most enigmatic character in the film, and yet he too is not complex. We don’t know why he wants the Golden Balls, why he tolerates flies buzzing around him, but he surely does. He’s just a weird little slinky gremlin guy, and in the end he gets away.

Of course, Williams talks a fair bit about gender in his presentations on animation acting. The Animator’s Survival Kit bonus DVD includes videos of lectures, so here’s a clip someone uploaded of some examples of what he’d say:

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You can see how his interest here is in really pushing and exaggerating that gender difference - of course, pushed to extremes for pedagogical purposes, but still, it says something about the worldview he was operating under. Especially at the end when he gets a laugh by, essentially, animating a very effeminate walk for the bodybuilder character.

So a character like ‘Princess Yumyum’ is exactly what she appears: curious, vulnerable etc., a feminine ideal. There is little room for contradiction, or even straining against the bounds of this role like Princess Arete. The same is true in a lot of Williams films. Animation is about exaggeration, of course, but Williams was inescapably a man born in the 30s.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him. Learn a lot, really. Thanks to Wiliams, even though the renowned animators of Disney and Warner Brothers have died, we can get a sense of how they used to think about things, and build on them. We can understand the tricks of spacing he uses to create a sense of impact, and pick up on some of his observations and insights about acting. And certainly, his exhortation to do figure drawing has caught on in a big way since the book has been published.

I feel like, in many ways, I can see myself in the young Richard Williams - well, not nearly as accomplished, but the awe he feels towards those old Disney animators, I feel towards people like Weilin Zhang, Mitsuo Iso, Shinya Ohira, James Baxter... the ‘how can they do that’, but also, one very important line:

Irrepressible ambition made me change my opinion that they alone could attain such heights; I figured, I think correctly, that given talent, experience, persistence - plus the knowledge of the experts - why should everything not be possible?

I couldn’t stand it any more. I had to know everything about the medium and master all aspects of it. Cap in hand, I made yearly visits to Milt and Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Ken Anderson at Disney.

For my part, I joined a lot of animation discord servers and now, starting this month, I’m trying to hit that “James Baxter’s first year” sort of pace. We’ll see how it goes. But like... all these guys are human. My muscles aren’t any different than theirs - I just need to see if i can shape my brain to acquire that power of observation and intuition for drawing. The method is clear enough. Like Williams, I won’t be an exact clone of my idols - I’ll become my own thing. If I just keep at it.

Anyway, I have gotten over my reluctance to screen The Thief and the Cobbler - orientalist as it may be, it is an important movie to animation history, and one worth seeing again, as well as Williams’s earlier animations to see where he came from. So if you fancy joining me, we’ll be at Twitch tonight - please head to twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll begin the movies in 15-20 minutes probably!!

#animation night #richard williams #the thief and the cobbler

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