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shinjisdone · 2 months

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Me: I should probably take a break from writing

Brainrot:

Platonic! Lucifer with Angel!Reader (who seems evil but inadvertantly becomes his friend and therapist and also he is weird)

This man got problems.

He knows it and anyone who spends a good minute with him knows it, too.

He's a bit reserved while being loud with his thoughts but quiet with his presence. For being the king of Hell, he doesn't have much of a presence nor does he want to.

But, as things turn, he reunites with his daughter Charlie and is introduced to her big project, the Hazbin Hotel.

Lucifer doesn't have much hope...he was met with betrayal and disappointment early on and believes that Charlie will face the same fate soon, unfortunately.

So, he felt prepared for the inevitable downfall but felt his entire system shock and stop when he spottend an Angel in the lobby.

"AH! Hah! Aaahghgah-! What is that?!" He spluttered as he pointed at that thing with his cane. Panic all over his pale face.

The heavenly being only rose a brow as Charlie was quick to come between you two and explain the angelic visitor.

You gave a smirk and feigned to bow at the king, offering your business card.

"A Judge from Heaven. I'll be here to oversee the progress of your daughter and her big project to rehabilitize sinners, the Hazbin Hotel."

Nope! No, no, no-ho-ho! No, no! Nope!

You're eerie and ever-knowing grin made everything so much worse.

You stand there in the lobby, the entrance, the bar, the rooms - observing each little thing that goes wrong. All menacingly!

Once again you underline that you came here to observe the progress and potential of the hotel and if it's existence is even allowed. If such a thing such as rehabilitizing sinners to send them to Heaven - your turf - is even allowed.

You can just put a stop to it whenever you like.

It all sounds awry to Lucifer. Angels are judgemental, uptight and close-minded. Too many rules that this hotel could neeeveeerr uphold. No way this is going to work out. Being in your mere presence freaks him out!

He is quick to tell Charlie all of this, who goes with your proposal anyway (what other choice does she have) and sees it much more optimistic than her father. This is a chance for Heaven to see up close what all she can do! What could be a possible peaceful way of getting rid of their overpopulation problem!

Her father on the other hand has his doubts. He's constantly feeling anxious with an angel around and is just afraid that Charlie will end up being dissapointed or worse. He makes it his mission to observe the Observer in turn just to ease his mind!

Charlie and her attempts are laughable at best but you simply stand there and watch with high awareness but zero schadenfreude at her failures. You simply point out the mistakes while sugarcoating nothing. Perhaps a tad bit of sarcasm can be found in your tone but you never seem to mean harm.

Charlie, being so optimistic, keeps her head high and takes your advice, no matter how cruel it might be. She wants to impress you and Heaven!

How the others react, depends a bit on you.

Both Vaggie and Angel Dust are protective of Charlie, with the latter mocking you with the fact of how sinful he acts. Alastor is curious (the thought of owning an angel's soul unrealistic but tempting!). How Niffty and Husker feel depends on you as well.

They are sure to take a step back though when you hint at knowing a lot about them. More than anyone else should know. Vaggie panics when you ask the subordinate to step aside and Angel Dust suddenly feels less comfortable being himself around you. Alastor is pissed at you mocking him, seemingly knowing of his intentions, past, death, and the leash around his neck.

All that fuels Lucifer's fears. See! See?! This is a bad idea, a bad- everything!

No, no! Lucifer is sure to WATCH YOU and don't you DARE do something to ruin Charlie's dream! Or herself!

He is sure he will kill you.

Yet it never comes to it.

You're not active and barely react to things. If something offenses you, you do not fight back but simply walk away. When someone asks you what grrrreat advice you angel can give, you candidly do so. You might even give a bit of divine intervention here and there to help but the big task is something the asker has to do themselves.

There you are, walking along the hallway, with your all-knowing, all-righteous, close-minded as fuck self as if - as if you're perfect!

Well, you're not!

Angels suck! He knows, he is one!

"There's something wrong, Quakie," He whisper-growled while aggressively petting the small toy duck's head, "They're wary and foul, I tell ya! Absolutely the worst!" The small alarm he had built into the hallway rung and like a maniac Lucifer rushed to his peephole to see you having stepped on one of his creations. The duck quaked pathetically as you raised your foot.

A crime against all art!

He switched between growling like a dog and heaving deeply and in panic.

Without hesitation, you picked up the duck and dusted it off. A bit of angelic power here and there and the little fellow was as good as rain.

Wait - Wh-ua-whaufu - what???

Lucifer spluttered as he squinted his eyes at the sight, only to jolt and squeak like a schoolgirl when you appeared behind him.

"This is what you got banished for?" You offered the back-flipping toy back with an open palm. It spat a bit of fire. Lucifer first panicked, audibly, before chuckling nervously. He avoided your eyes at all costs. "Oh, golly, how - how did this come here?" Quickly he snapped it away, still laughing. "The little fellas are gonna get squashed here, left littered as your spies, you know. If not by Alastor, then surely by some new guests. They're here to become better people and don't start off as one."

Again, the king only stuttered nonsense. You rolled your eyes.

"You don't have to look out for me. I'm not an Exorcist nor do I plan to kill anyone here. I am here to judge the potential of Charlotte Morningstar's project. As the princess of Hell, she's got power and it is my job to oversee if her plan can harmonize with that of Heaven and can be done long-term. Like I've already told you."

Still, he eyed you with suspicion. "Heaven is not agreeable. I don't know why you're waisting your time here." With a sigh, you slumped your shoulders. "What do you think will happen once Heaven gets wind of Charlie trying to shoot up one of her sinners into their turf and try to turn them into a winner? You think they'll accept it all?"

"Of course not. They don't listen, don't give you a chance, it's-!" With a small grin you gesture to him. "Exactly. I'm the first phase to impress per say. I can't allow anything unaccaptable to reach the gates - thats why me being here is not a waste of time." For once, you try to be friendly. "I understand you're worried about an angel being so near your daughter-"

"I- I'm NOT! F-For that you'd have to be a threat, angel, and I'm not scared of you! No! No,no,nonononono not at all! Th-this, this s' just- nghn..." Lucifer bites his finger, eyes darting wildly as his threats became unintelligable nonsense. He jumped when he felt your gentle hand on his shoulder.

"-but I can assure you that I will go out of my way itself to keep Charlie safe. From all demons and angels alike. Including Alastor."

Like shot from lightning, Lucifer felt shaken to his core. His face grew paler and he was quick to get out of his frozen state and escape to the corner of the room like a startled cat.

He stared at you as if you had spoken the most unbelievable nonsense. "Wh-what, what is that, what does that mean." You chuckle at his dumbfounded face. "I am a Judge but I can also serve as an Guardian Angel for Charlie or this hotel. No Charlie means no hotel to judge - and, well, it would bring hell to, hm, Hell."

Lucifer brings a hand to the spot you touched. It was oddly warm. "You'd do that...? Just to see if this hotel-schmotel would work? For...Charlie?"

You nodded. "So there's no need of you to be afraid of me. If you ever want to know my intentions, you can talk to me. I'm rather curious about you, too."

It felt like you offering food to an stray cat which slowly comes out of its cave. Lucifer approaches you with the same curiousity. "W-w-wait, you are? Me? Me, seriously?! Oh my gosh, really?!" He grinned and applauded briefly, jumping in his spot - before having to wipe it all away and clear his throat. He had to play the cool king. "That's, well, uhm, mmmmmmh - great. You, uh, do that. I can - I WILL talk to you and YOU WILL answer me! Right. So, that's...cool."

Theres an awkward quiet and he cleared his throat.

"...So, you wanna talk about...the hotel? And, and Charlie?"

Your willingness to openly talk about the hotel and your thoughts on his daughter puts Lucifer in an odd position.

It feels...freeing to talk about stuff. Normally. In a normal way.

He's always ready to listen about things about Charlie. Since they haven't spoken in a while, face to face and open with their feelings, hearing what you've experienced with her leaves him wanting to know more but also opens his eyes when it comes to his own daughter.

The weirdest thing however, is seeing an Angel being so open to Hell itself. You want nothing to do with it, no, no - but you listen and you watch. There's consideration in your words.

You are an Angel - so is he, or was, well...he's fallen now, so he isn't quite sure what he is.

But you, you must be different from him! You are! You represent all of Heaven for this hotel, all the strict rules, all the rejection, everything a dreamer like him and his daughter are not. So how can you even still be here and listen to it all when Heaven doesn't?

The moment for him to really approach you and not the other way around is when you keep your word and help Charlie.

It could be anything but the key moment would be when you actually become active when aiding her. Using your powers to give her a second chance.

A chance.

Red eyes glance all over the place as he shielded the object in his hands. Lucifer needed a moment, a very long and big one yet you still patiently waited for him to talk.

With a clear of his throat, he spoke. "I, uhm, uh...thank you for...helping my daughter." He began lowly and looked away. "...You...You didn't have to do that, you know that, right? No being from Heaven would have ever thought of or given the permission to help someone from Hell."

It makes him ponder. No angel would have done so. But you did simply for...her? The hotel? Whatever the reason might be, you still did it.

You rose a brow and seemed to understand where he came from. "I didn't. Like I said, no Charlie means no hotel and your realm would also be affected if its princess was gone."

Hesitating again, Lucifer held out his hands, presenting a small duck. "And...as thanks, this is for you. A token from the king of Hell...if it means anything..."

Surprised, you took the duck and couldnt help but burst in a fit of chuckles. Lucifer startled like a cat before feeling a soft warmth in his chest.

"I'll gladly take a king's gift," You snort as you pet the toy, "unless it'll get me banished as well."

Cue awkward laughter from Lucifer. (Are you laughing with him? Laughing at him? WHICH IS IT)

"I've never gotten a gift such as this. But seriously, it's quite cute." "Wh-uawhatwhatwhat, really?" Cute? Cute? And heavenly being calling his projects cute? No one's done that before!

Except Lilith...

"I, uh, can make you one that backflips! Or breakdances!" He snapped the duck out of your palm to make you a better one, "Or spit fire! Or is that still looked down upon in Heaven?"

He growled the last part which you just laughed at.

"I'd rather you not make that. I'm already comitting a crime in their eyes."

Wait what

It turns out you being here watching and helping Charlie was never Heaven's intentions but your own. You want to find a more peaceful solution to get rid of the overpopulation than what the Exorcists do.

It genuinely impresses Lucifer. You are what angels are supposed to be. Not others like Adam. You promise to help Charlie out again just once if your intervention is needed.

"I'll gladly take any backflipping, breakdancing ducks. And if you need my help again, just call my name. I'll be here before you know it, friend."

And with that you were gone until you deemed to be needed again.

A week passes and your phone rings. Confused, you take the call.

"Heeeeey, bitch!"

You spit out your drink and quickly excuse yourself from the other angels. You hear stuttering from the other side.

"Lucifer? What are you calling me for?"

"AhahHAh, hey, eh, you said to call you when I need, uh, uhm, your help..."

"I meant calling my name and I shall appear before you. How'd you get my phone number?"

You're met with awkward laughter.

Your promise to Lucifer might have been a mistake.

It seems your consideration, good deeds, care for his daughter, appreciating his art and calling him 'friend' made him like you quicker and easier than you thought.

Having a friend sounds nice...and, and you're like him! Maybe! Possibly! Anyway, he made you a new duckie! D-do you like it?

You cannot tell but he's chewing on his nails and jumping from one foot after another as you talk. He's just...curious how you are! And how you would like your duckie! With roaring, sqautting, squeaking, flying, dying, swimming, quaking???

It's not like he's LONELY and starving for attention and understanding! Haha, no! He's been fiiiiine thousand years having no one but himself to talk to! Heh, why-why'dchu think he's NOT okay???

Just indulging him in small talk is enough for him for a week ngl. He grows more and more curious about you and maybe secretly hopes that you will give him the same attention and understanding words as you did Charlie! And him for that few minutes a week ago!

It's just...it's nice to have someone from a place not filled with awful people that used to be home and not speak to someone who speaks to him as if he is a king and wants something from him. He has to seek you out rather!

You say you do not mind the calls but have to be careful. You might get punished when people find out you're talking to the fallen angel Lucifer. He promises it'll be no big deal-io!

Though one day you catch him talking in a solemn tone. Asking what was wrong, he admits he's got a Problem regarding Charlie and their relationship. With a big sigh and contemplating if it's REALLY a good idea to ask further, you tell him that you'll listen if he wants to talk.

And boy does he want to talk.

In the beginning Lucifer hesitates but will be comfortable real quick talking about his problems - in an weird, self-deprecating manner.

You point out that things don't have to be like that and maybe give himself a push and be kinder to himself as well.

"Hahahaha!!!" Lucifer catches his breath, "You're so funny, bestie!!!"

However, after some time he thinks about your words and takes it to heart. If he sees any progress with your advice, he grins like a Cheshire Cat. Spinning around and giggling goofily, he thanks you a thousand times for your help. "Oh, golly, thanks a ton! You're, uh, cool! Didn't expect to have a decent conversation with someone from Heaven again, y'know what I mean, hehehe..." You cringe over the phone, thank goodness he can't see it. "No prob, bob...just keep doing your best!"

Oh my gosh, my gosh, my gosh, did you just call him 'bob'?! That's like a nickname! *deep inhale* You must...not hate him! He hopes!

"A-and as thanks I made that duck for you! You can...come pick it up! Yeah! Here, in my, uh, heh, castle and stuff...if you still want it."

"Oh, uhm," Lucifer hears you pondering and is biting his finger anxiously, "...sure. One secret visit will not kill me."

AAAAAAAAAAA

Djdjeidnsk

Holy shit, he's going to have a guest over! He's gonna have tea, and, and talk with you! Omigosh is he making a friend?????

As you can imagine, the king of Hell itself is ecstatic at your visit.

He grows hyperactive and talks your ear off with all kinds of projects, feelings and thoughts that come to his head. He is so over the moon having you over that he forgets to give you his creation up until the end of your visit.

So happy and eager to show you anything you have the slightest of interest in. He can explain it to you! He's basically an expert, heh, he created it. Made in Hell (tm).

Oh, what do you want? Hm? He's your host (and technically the king but he keeps forgetting that) and powerful to boot, so he can make you anything you want! Just say it, friendo!

If you show any kind of positive remarks, Lucifer gets a huge boost of confidence and joy. Someone actually likes his stuff and they are from Heaven! Maybe there's a chance to be open-minded after all!

Though, surely but slowly, Lucifer will kind of...bombard you with his issues. There's a lot and I mean a LOT, that you curiously enough can understand from where they came from at least. You both are from Heaven, after all.

It kinda becomes a therapy session? You first hoped it wouldn't but, well, here you are with tea in your hand and Lucifer lying on his couch and talking non-stop.

Once he feels really comfortable he also plops his head on your lap and just starts talking.

You...try your best to share the pain and give advice and as cringey as it all is, you can tell that these talks mean a lot to Lucifer and he also takes them to heart.

One day, he might shyly ask if you two are friends.

You pat his hat (so basically his head too! Right?!) and smile: "Yes, Lucifer. We are friends."

With these words, you've doomed yourself.

Brought a catastrophe. Caused a calamity. Cursed. Bewitched. Alakazamed. A pact for life.

This man lost a lot. Now he finally managed to get his daughter back and he's definitely sure to do anything to not lose you. He's done being passive. If Heaven found out about your friendship, they are sure to punish you.

He's ready to use all his powers to keep you safe. Know though that Charlie is his priority.

He'll do his best to keep you both safe, even if you are powerful enough to look out for yourself (and Charlie, as you promised). He just can't risk it.

After this, he is totally on board with the whole friends thing. Proudly calls you it around people he trusts, calls you friendo, buddy, pal, chum, and all other kinds of things. Will definitely give you a nickname based on your name but would turn it absolutely goofy.

If people (Alastor) point out his ridicilous clinginess and eagerness about his new friend, he will either laugh it off or comedically defend you.

Lucifer will be very eager to show affection in theory but is incredibly hesitant to do so. What if he's being weird, what if you don't like being touched??? WHAT IF HE RUINS EVERYTHING OH GOD NO

However, if you show even a bit of affection, he will return it on the same level. Things just escalate when the affection is physical, such as pats on the back or hugs. He'll stifle his giggle, his joy, before slapping you on the back or squeezing you so hard your spine breaks. The king is very starved of touch and affection and tends to give everything back tenfold. He'll also initiate it much more frequently and with very, very, very, very, VERY and LOTSA, LOTSA delight. It does tend to get awkward afterwards though.

Gifts you a LOT OF THINGS. ALL CARNIVAL OR CIRCUS RELATED. YOU NEVER SAID YOU LIKED THE CIRCUS BUT HE DOES IT ANYWAY???

They are all quaint and cute little things with little to no use for anything. But it's the thought that counts and that makes you smile.

It's Lucifer's way of not only impressing you but also letting you know he appreciates you, aside from physical affection.

Since he cannot go back to Heaven, he invites you often down in his 'part of town, hey, hey, hey!' (in his words) and no matter what you do, you often find yourself ending up playing the therapist. It's...endearing how he trusts you but also...annoying.

One day you say something particurlarly striking, something that eases his heart like a balm. Hot tea with the sweetest honey. With a big sob, he throws himself at you, clinging on you like a damsel in distress as he just bawls. You try to calm him down - then PUSH him off BUT HE WONT LET YOU.

"Y-You," He wiped his nose (as if he had one) and barely could recognize you through his squinted, watery eyes, "You're the bestest friend I've ever had. I dunno if anyone back up there even was my friend when they just easily pushed me away...you are what angels are supposed to be."

You crack a sad smile and embrace him back. "There, there. Maybe one day everyone down here and up there will be the same?"

He hoped so. Maybe there is hope for Charlie and her dreams.

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel lucifer #lucifer morningstar #hazbin hotel headcanon #reader insert #hazbin hotel reader insert #platonic #hazbin hotel platonic #lucifer morningstar x reader #PLATONIC PLATONIC #UR HIS FRIEND #and therapist (not planned)

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bookishfeylin · 1 year

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The selective application of real world standards in the ACOTAR fandom is truly the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. When discussing Nesta's behavior or Lucien's actions or Tamlin's style of leadership or... anything Tamlin does, really, we have to use real world standards and ignore the circumstance and context, ignore that this is a fantasy world and hold them accountable by our values. They cannot act like they are in a world that is fantasy, and if they do they are faulted for it. They cannot act on the knowledge they know and have of their circumstances, and if they do they are faulted for it. They cannot merely exist within the broken system that is Prythian's power hierarchy, rather they are faulted for not attempting to better things and make their world mirror ours. But the minute those standards are applied to Feyre and Rhysand or anyone else, suddenly we need to keep in mind again that this is fantasy and to not judge by real world standards. Feyre and Rhysand are praised by the narrative as progressive leaders attempting to change the system of power. They objectively aren't, because you truly cannot be progressive while actively upholding the system that oppresses others and, for example, leaving brown women and children to rot in the places you dislike because you've stereotyped all the brown men as savages too dumb and uncivilized to change whew the racist writing of the Illyrians jumps out, nor is it progressive to remove your wife's bodily autonomy by keeping information about your wife dying in childbirth from her. If you get upset at that being pointed out because ~it's fantasy~ then you can't exactly write 10-paragraph long essays about how horrible other High Lord's feudal systems are, now can you? After all, it is fantasy. Feyre and Rhysand are adored for their "healthy" relationship, despite that being woefully not true by any real-world metric. Hell, with having the male get so jealous when other men look at his mate that he feels the need to fight them, break the bones of people who call her a whore, and have the couple become incredibly co-dependent once they mate, mating bond in and of itself is wildly unhealthy by real world standards! If pointing this out bothers you because ~it's fantasy~ and you believe you can't use real world standards to judge a relationship between two magical creatures in a retelling of a Greek myth, then you can't write essays about the healthiness or unhealthiness of any other relationship in ACOTAR. After all, it is fantasy. Feyre and Rhysand are excused for their atrocious actions that harm and displace tons of innocents because they are "acting for the greater good" or lack the information to wait at a later time for revenge, despite the dire consequences their objectively horrible actions. If this bothers you because ~it's fantasy~ and they don't need to act by real world standards and every horrible thing they do can be excused with "it's for the greater good" or "they didn't have enough information at that time", then you can't critique other characters who don't abide by real world standards of what behavior is ok and not because they canonically have limited information or are doing something for "the greater good." After all, it is fantasy.

Either everybody is critiqued by real world standards, including the faves, or no one is, including the characters you hate the most. You can't hold a certain group accountable by real world standards and be surprised when people do the same right back.

#acotar analysis #anti sjm #sjm critical #anti acomaf #anti acotar #anti rhysand

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faesystem · 1 year

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(Edit 2: If you want to see the original version of the post, it has been reblogged by at least two accounts. JAS is one of them. You can see it there.)

(Edit:

@problemaddtic

I did not initially @ you when I created the post, but I have decided to as you are what it is about. I know you do not care what anti-endogenics/sysmeds have to say about your behaviour, but I am not either of those things.

One of the biggest things I advocate for in syscourse, if not the biggest thing, is for people to stop worrying about whether or not non-CDD plurality is scientifically provable, and that people's experiences should be treated with respect.

As someone who is with you on the fact that endogenics and other non-CDD plurals deserve better treatment, I really hope you'll believe me when I say you are hurting your own community more than you are helping it.

(Also, I edited the post sightly to try and have a nicer tone. I am autistic and tend to sound rude, so I am very sorry if I have phrased anything poorly. I am truly just trying to help people here.))

Here's a reminder that trying to harm people you dislike by being bigoted towards them impacts people you do like.

Flexing about how not disabled you are and treating being disabled as a bad is ableist, and it hurts the disabled people in your community as well.

Especially when you are conflating a certain ideology with being disabled, you are villainising everyone with those disabilities for having those disabilities. Even the people with those disabilities who are in your communities and have put hard work into combatting the rhetoric you are both against.

It does not combat anything or help anyone to be bigoted to people you oppose. Not only does it not help, it actively hinders. It makes people care less about the genuine points people in your community have, because all of their hard work is now tainted by, "You make community with bigots." This is genuinely the biggest reason I do not label myself as pro-endogenic, because people like you mean using that label actually makes it harder to do anything to help endogenics and other non-CDD plurals.

You did not do anything productive. If you set out just to hurt people, it is going to hurt those who care for your opinions (as in, people in your community) far worse than those who do not. I feel sorry for the marginalised people in your community that you view as a justifiable collateral in your plight.

(This is also a part of the edit. Since I was trying to make it more vague initially and applicable to anyone who needed this advice, I did not include how what you did hurt me very much.

As someone who has spent genuinely hours creating posts that not only educate people about non-CDD plurality, but is tailored to whoever I am educating to get them to treat non-CDD plurals with kindness, what you said hurt me. Honestly, quite a lot.

I have been harmed by all those things you wished on sysmeds, a lot of that being because I have DID. I have had to fight and adovcate for myself and others because of those things. I have and will do that for every single disabled person, even those I hate more than I can articulate, because no one deserves to experience ableism. Opposing oppressive systems is not just something you opt in and out of based on whether or not you like people. Wishing for the upholding of ableism just so it can hurt other disabled people is something that made me genuinely ill to read.

My advocacy for kindness towards non-CDD plurals and endogenic plurals is also built on the fact that you are all people. Even you, I wish things get better for you because you are a person and you deserve that.

But even if you do not feel that same compassion for everyone's humanity, you at the very least could be mindful not to harm the people who are on your side in the process.)

#Mod Tim (He/Him)#Syscourse Subsection #syscourse

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swiftsaltsweet · 15 days

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The Hunt for Kyoshi: Chapter 4

Characters: Rangi and Kyoshi (plus whoever appears in Rok)

Pairing: Rangshi

Summary:

“What are we going to do?” She asked steely, still not looking up from the ground. She was ready to uphold her duty, or at least, what remained of it. “We need you to capture Kyoshi,” Jianzhu instructed. “Capture?” “Yes, we need to set an example of an Avatar murderer,” Jianzhu responded, oh so matter of factly again.

(Canon Divergent AU- “What if Rangi wasn’t there when Kyoshi ran away, and Rangi had to hunt her down?)

Prev chapter

Other Sites: AO3 and Fanfic.net

A/N: Thank you for the kind comments! \;w;/ TT0TT I’m really happy to read them, it really gives me lots of motivation~! :3 (it helped get me over my writer’s block for 5 and 6 XD, I actually got 6’s rough done early which is why I’m posting this one early!)

_____

As Rangi felt herself sliding off her saddle, she jerked awake and stopped the ostrich horse for a small break. It had been nearly two days since she began her journey, and nearly two days since she had a full night's rest. She’d forgone sleep so she could catch up to Kyoshi.

She’d taken a moment to stop off at Tu Zin after Gaoling to swap ostrich horses, realizing it was probably more efficient than waiting for her original one to rest.

She took a sip from her water skin, before splashing the cool contents on her face, hoping the chill would wake her up.

I’m so close, just another hour or so and I’ll be at Chameleon Bay. Chameleon Bay was the primary place of operations for the Daofei group Kyoshi was a part of. It seemed they also had locations in Ba Sing Se, Omash, Gaoling and the like.

One of the reasons Rangi had wasted a night and part of the day in Gaoling was to scope out any daofei activity. Especially ones that would lead to Kyoshi. Unfortunately, nothing came from the fruits of her labors, so she left.

However, out of all the locations listed, it made the most sense for Kyoshi to go to Chameleon Bay first, it was isolated and no one would know about it unless they had her journal due to how small it was. And, again, it was listed as the main base of operations.

Rangi slapped both of her cheeks and mounted her steed again.

Just you wait, Kyoshi. I’m coming for you.

_________

Rangi hid her ostrich horse in the deep forested area outside of Chameleon Bay, from there she entered the dilapidated town.

As she strolled through the streets, she noticed barren fields, starving dogs deers, and malnourished people young and old.

No one should live like this. Her heart panged, almost the same way as when Auntie Mui told her about what happened to Kyoshi when she was younger. She remembered how sickened she felt, and how much she wished to send fiery retribution upon the townsfolk that’d hurt Kyoshi like that.

Rangi shook her head in disgust. Disgust for the systems that put people in that situation. Disgust for the villagers who harmed Kyoshi. But most importantly, disgust for herself, for still giving Kyoshi any of her pity.

As she walked towards her destination, she passed an alleyway, with a child huddled against a wall. They were just staring blankly at the ground.

Rangi had just walked past the entry when a new wave of disgust hit her. She had no room to judge nor talk. She was part of the problem. She was just about to turn a blind eye, just like the villagers had done to Kyoshi.

Rangi may not be the Avatar, so she couldn’t solve the world’s problems. And Kyoshi may have robbed the world of the Avatar, but Rangi could at least be better than Kyoshi, couldn’t she? If Rangi couldn’t change the world, maybe she could at least change this child’s world?

She rummaged into a hidden pocket in her armor as she made her way to the child. She took the child’s frail hand, and put a gold piece into it. “I’m sorry, this is all I can spare at the moment.”

The child finally picked their head up, their dull eyes vaguely looking at Rangi, then at what Rangi put in their hand. They looked back at Rangi, their dull eyes started gleaming with new light. The child started to scurry away, maybe afraid of their new precious treasure being taken from them, and then ran out of the alley and out of Rangi’s sight.

_________________________________

“Spirits above,” was all Rangi could say when she finally arrived at her destination. Rangi stood in front of Madam Qiji’s Teahouse, or at least, what remained of it. The half that remained upright, looked about as broken-down as the rest of the town, while the other half stood in ruin from obvious earthbending foul play.

Well this isn’t good. Rangi clicked her tongue, briefly wondering if the carnage was recent or not. Was I wrong? Did she choose one of the other locations?

Rangi knelt beside the ruins, and picked up some dirt. She let it shift and fall through her fingers.

No, this is new. It was probably Kyoshi, the timing was too convenient. Rangi was most likely on the right track.

A stumbling sound from behind got her attention. She turned around to see a burly drunkard meandering in the street.

Rangi sighed, knowing what irksome interaction waited for her, but she needed a lead. She walked over to the man. “Excuse me, sir. What happened to the teahouse?”

The burley drunk spun slowly around, eyes refocusing as he looked at Rangi. “Welllll heeeeey cutie! You wanna hang out with *hic* me?”

Rangi instinctively formed her face into a deadpan expression. “No.”

The man hiccuped again, and took another swig of whatever filled his bottle. “Then why are you talking to me, if you don’t want any fun?”

He attempted to put his arm around Rangi’s shoulders, but she backed away. Rangi sighed to herself. She was used to this kind of interaction. Unfortunately for her, she had been getting marriage proposals since she was twelve, from suitors of various ages. So she knew how to handle people like him. However, this guy was just a bit more direct than most others.

“Can you please tell me what happened here?” she repeated her question, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose.

“I can, for a kiss.”

Rangi resisted the urge to vomit.

She used to pride herself on being able to repress her urges to melt skulls with just her eyes, especially when she was thrusted into these situations. This was something she should be able to deal with on any normal day. But it wasn’t a normal day. It wasn’t even a normal week. She could feel her self-control slipping a bit.

“Well if you insist,” was all she said, as she swept her leg, knocking his ankles out from underneath him. His face landed right into the dusty dirt.

The man spluttered, nursing his jaw and nose. “T-that wasn’t a kiss!”

“You never said it had to be me,” she batted her eyes innocently. “I thought the ground might be more your speed.”

The man glared at her, before taking another swig from his bottle. Rangi had no idea how he maintained his grip on that thing, nor how it didn’t shatter when he fell.

Just as she was about to leave, assuming she’d upset him to the point he wouldn’t want to talk to her after what she did; the man started laughing so boisterously, it caught Rangi off guard. She decided to just chalk it up to the alcohol messing with his head. Or perhaps she concussed him.

“You're funny,” he chortled. “Ok I’ll help you. What did you need again?”

“What happened to the teahouse?” Rangi repeated, trying not to let the exasperation into her voice.

“Teahouse? Hmmmm, oh! You mean Madam Qiji’s?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, some girl came up, yelling all kinds of daofei code at some lot. The guardsmen were called, and well….” he gestured to the teahouse.

Rangi’s heart began to pound so hard it rang in her eardrums. Kyoshi had been here! “What happened to them? To the daofei? The girl?”

The drunk scratched his neck, uninterested. “Girl? Oh, you’ve got girl troubles?”

That is a vast understatement. Rangi shook the intrusive thought away.

The man eyed her suspiciously. “Hm, wait a minute…. you look too pretty to be a boy. And if it’s girl troubles, then-gasp! Are you….you know? A Maizu-nese?”

Rangi rubbed her temples. She did not want to get into the Earth Kingdom’s behind-the-times politics on marriage and other such related matters, especially with a belligerent drunk. It was something that had been the bane of her existence for the past two years, and she didn’t need that freshly scabbing wound to be reopened up.

“She’s my brother-in-law’s sister,” she lied quickly. “She ran away from home, and I’ve been tasked to bring her back.”

The drunk dropped his suspicious eye, and turned his attention fully towards his bottle, his eyes in a distant place. “Ah family troubles, I understand. I ran away once-”

“The girl!” Rangi interrupted, unable to contain her annoyance. “What happened to the girl?”

The man scratched his chin. “Well there were two. One flew away like a spirit in the night.” He sighed dreamily. “She was so graceful.”

Rangi continued to stare deadpan at the man.

“The other, wrecked half the town with her body.”

Rangi blinked at him. “Her….body?”

“Yeah she was like a bull pig in a ceramic shop,” he started laughing. “Not the most graceful exit you could say! Never seen earthbending like that before!”

Rangi clenched her fists and a low growl escaped her lips. She really can earthbend… It didn’t matter how many times she heard it, or the one time she saw it, it still frustrated her all the same.

The drunk flinched at Rangi’s change in demeanor.

“So what happened?! Did she get away?” she growled.

“Ah, no they caught that one. Amazing what a swift rock to the head will do to some people!”

Rangi’s eyes widened, and she grabbed the man by his tunic. “She was captured?! Where? Where did they take her?” Please tell me it’s the jail and not the morgue!

“P-probably to the nearby jail or sumthin’- aaaagh- I dunno!” he choked out.

“Where is it?!”

“I dunno! I really don’t!”

Rangi dropped the man, and took off. There has to be a guardsman or some lawman still meandering around.

Rangi raced down alleyways, trying to find someone nearby. When a loud explosion rang in the air and shook the ground, causing Rangi to trip and fall.

People who were hiding in various crevices in the street, got out and started running past Rangi in a panic.

Rangi looked up and saw a giant dust plume in the distance, and began sprinting towards the disaster.

______________

As Rangi ran towards the growing dust bowl the image of what looked like a jailhouse came into view. People were panicking and running in the streets, and the sound of combat could be heard but not seen.

The source of the dust storm was at the front of the building where a giant hole was ripped out of the jailhouse, and where earthbenders were kicking up earth in some kind of scuffle. It appeared to be a prison break.

Rangi futilely put her arm up, as if trying to catch the dust before it blew into her eyes and lungs, but she coughed all the same. Through her teary eyes she saw a familiar shadow emerging from the dust, and Rangi’s eyes locked with Kyoshi’s.

Kyoshi wore the green armor she’d received from Jianzhu back when they faced Tagaka, the only difference from back then were two gold items that were tucked into her sash. Rangi looked at Kyoshi’s face, besides the dust and grime, she didn’t look worse for wear. No injuries that she could see.

She’s fine! Rangi felt her heart thud in her chest, constricting and singing with relief against her wishes. She’s ok, she’s not hurt!

Kyoshi turned to her with a familiar smile donning her lips. Rangi could feel her eyes watering for a different reason besides the dust. She gritted her teeth. Don’t look at me like that! Don’t look at me like-like I’m- like I’m the only-!

Before she could finish her thought, her vision swayed and the smile Kyoshi had started melting into the one from her dream a few nights ago. A monstrous grin.

Rangi could feel her breaking out into a cold sweat, her heart pounding for two different reasons now. Her thoughts were spiraling.

She’s fine!

She’s fine?!

Thank the spirits, they didn’t hurt her!

She’s unharmed, while we’re all picking up the pieces she destroyed!

How can you smile in a time like this, you idiot?

She’s smiling, and our friend is dead!

Rangi felt something constrict around her, as if squeezing the air out of her lungs. The last thought was festering and taking hold of her. One side of her overtaking the other.

She’s messing with me, she’s trying to bring my guard down! She’s trying to use me- I- I-!

An image of Rangi and her mother, and the rest of the estate laying dead on the ground flashed into her mind.

What if I’m next?

The constriction finally snapped, and she felt a wave of uncontrollable fury and fear coarse through her, she focused it all into the palm of her hand. Kyoshi's smile faltered, and she took a step back as she witnessed the fireball form in Rangi’s hand.

Rangi began running at Kyoshi at a breakneck pace, hurling the fireball at her once friend.

Kyoshi responded instinctively with her native element, hoisting up a very, very large wall of earth. But that wasn’t going to stop Rangi, she knew exactly how to deal with tanky objects. She took a page from her Fire Academy days, from when she needed to brawl after curfew without fists or fire.

She gathered energy into her hand and arm, and right as she approached the wall, she let out a concussive and combustive force, blasting the wall in front of her and barreling right in front of Kyoshi.

Kyoshi was quick on her feet, she started running right before Rangi could get her footing back. Rangi let out a wave of fire at the ground, hoping to disrupt Kyoshi’s root and slow her down, but it was cut off by another earth wall.

Rangi growled and began her pursuit, shoving random guardsmen and freed criminals out of her way. As she chased Kyoshi through the chaos, Kyoshi would try to slow Rangi down with various earth walls. But Rangi would either nimbly dodge them, or blunted her way through with a concussive blow.

“You’re just so good at earthbending all of the sudden!” Rangi accused Kyoshi, as she blasted through another earth wall, following Kyoshi through a Kyoshi-sized hole she had made into a nearby building.

“Rangi please! I can explain!” Kyoshi looked back just in time to dodge the fireball that was being hurled at her face.

“Silence! You can ‘explain’ all you want back in Yokoya! Where we’ll deal with the likes of y-!”

Rangi was just barely able to dodge to the left, just avoiding Kyoshi’s arm as it grabbed for her.

Going on the offensive, huh? A grapple? Rangi wasn’t exactly sure what Kyoshi’s fighting prowess was, considering how much she’d hidden until then, it was best if she stayed cautious. The only thing Rangi knew about Kyoshi, is that she was strong. Good thing Rangi had ways to deal with people in a different size class than herself.

Kyoshi had her hands out in front of her, almost like a wrestling stance. “Rangi, I can’t go back to Yokoya!”

Yeah, no shit. “Then you should’ve thought about that before you did what you did!” Rangi put her fists in front of her face and crouched low, and sprinted towards Kyoshi’s right side. She ducked Kyoshi’s attempts at grabbing her, and landed a destructive blow to Kyoshi’s side. The combustive fist radiated right through Kyoshi's armor.

Kyoshi instantly doubled over onto her knees, hacking and wheezing from the punch to her liver. Rangi slowly walked around Kyoshi to her back, giving her a wide berth. That was….a bit too easy. Rangi frowned, unsure of her own victory. Was this really the girl who killed the Avatar?

But as soon as she started to question herself, Kyoshi stood up. That’s impossible, she shouldn’t be able to get back up for at least five more minutes!

Rangi, thinking quickly, jumped on Kyoshi’s back, almost like a rucksack, and then wrapped her arms around Kyoshi’s neck into a chokehold and flexed. Fine if you won’t stay down, then I’ll just knock you out!

As she counted down the ten long seconds, Rangi could feel Kyoshi getting back up and standing at her full height, all while clawing at her arm.

Just four more seconds! She thought, as something cool wrapped around her waist and yanked her upwards with so much force, she lost her grip on Kyoshi. What?!

“Hey Topknot! Leave the kid alone!” A voice rang out from above. Rangi looked up, to see a woman with sapphire eyes and wolf-like features. She held a stance like a waterbender, except she floated on air! No, not air, Rangi could see pools of mist spilling from beneath her feet. Rangi looked down at her waist and saw she was trapped in a water whip.

A waterbender? Here?! Of all the lousy-

“Why don’t you pick up on someone your own size?” the waterbender yelled cooly, and then she whipped her arms upward, and the water followed her command. It shot Rangi up into the air with such force, the only thing she could hear was the wind whistling in her ears. She ascended higher and higher, and when she got to the top of her ascent, Rangi looked down.

She blanched as she looked upon what she almost mistaken as beetle ants, except those were no mere bugs. Those were people.

Rangi’s mind went blank, except for the memory of her encounter with Aoma from a few weeks ago. How Aoma shot the pot of goods up into the air with no regard. Except this time Rangi was the pot, and Yun wasn’t there to catch her.

Rangi started to descend, spiraling in the air, if she didn’t do something she was going to die!

Her mind flashed to the waterbender woman, how she floated in the air with her water.

Yes! Something like that! Maybe if I do that then-

Rangi started focusing her energy to the soles of her feet as she took what controlled breaths she could, and then shot the energy out of her feet! Small jets of fire sprung from her feet, and she began to spiral even more.

Rangi cursed to herself. It’s ok, we’re halfway there. I just need to get it under control.

She controlled her breathing, this time she aimed the energy at her hands. She let small controlled jets out of the palm of her hand, and alternated between her hands and feet.

Slowly but surely, she got herself into an upright position, but she was heading to the ground fast! She did her best to breathe deeply and then put all her energy into shooting the flames out of both her feet and hands.

The result was a giant blast of fire that slowed her down just enough, she stopped right above the roofline of the buildings. Hovering in place like a sitting turtle duck. Breathing heavy, she looked around, there was a pool of water right below her, with Kyoshi right underneath it. A water trap?

But before she could react, the water shot up and doused the flames she created, and she fell to the ground. But she didn’t hit it.

Rangi wiped the water away from her eyes and looked up, Kyoshi had caught her bridal style.

“That was am-“ was all Kyoshi could get out before Rangi headbutted her jaw, causing the two to tumble to the ground.

As Rangi scrambled to get up, she felt her clothes, or rather, the water in them, being tugged on. In an instant she was hurled into a nearby wall.

“That’s what you get, you big softie,” Rangi heard a voice yell. When she looked up, she saw the waterbender pulling Kyoshi to her feet and sprint away.

Rangi clawed at the ground and began sprinting after them.

“Tui’s gills! She just doesn’t give up does she?!” the waterbender yelled, as she yanked Kyoshi around a corner. “Quick this way!”

The three women ran down a main drag, dodging lawmen and outlaws fighting amongst themselves.

When Rangi looked ahead, she forced herself to pick up her pace. She didn’t need a shirshu to figure out where Kyoshi was running to. Up ahead, there was a large white, furry mass hovering just in the air. It was Pengpeng, Kelsang’s bison.

Rangi attempted to conjure up a fireball to hurl at Kyoshi’s legs, but nothing sparked. Perhaps she was still too wet? Instead of firebending, she pushed and dodged her way through various swords and knives.

When the waterbender and Kyoshi reached Pengpeng, the waterbender expertly climbed the side of the animal with her strange mist-stepping. While Kyoshi grabbed its tail, as soon as she did, the bison started to rise into the air.

Rangi pounded her legs into the ground, running faster than she ever did before, and launched herself into the air. Her hands hit something hard, and she clung onto it, it was Kyoshi’s foot. Rangi closed her eyes, bracing herself for Kyoshi to stomp her face with her other foot, but it never came.

Rangi opened her eyes and looked up to see Kyoshi staring down at her with pure terror. But before she could question why, she felt something cool and hard hit her face. And she lost her grip.

“Rangi! No!” she heard Kyoshi scream.

“Will you just GIVE UP?!” another voice yelled.

Rangi felt her vision go dark, but she knew she was falling. With one last mercy throw, she attempted to force fire out of her hands and feet. After a desperate pushing feeling, she got her flame to spark again, and was able to stop herself from hitting the ground in the nick of time. Her hands and toes made scorch marks on the dirt, as her face hovered inches above the ground. Blood from her nose and mouth dripped onto the ground below her.

She plopped herself on the ground and looked up to the sky, as her vision started to straighten out, she saw the bison and Kyoshi growing smaller into the distance.

“Don’t think you can run from me, Kyoshi! I’m going to get you if it’s the last thing I do, I swear!” she yelled as loud as she could, the blood pooling from her mouth turning her words into a blood oath along with it. All her anguish and rage seeping into her voice, a declaration being made to the heavens. “Where you go, I go!”

_____

A/N: Who else has hallucinated things due to lack of sleep? No? Just me? Tbh I could never make it past 3 days before some loopy stuff started happening.

I think the drunk guy deserves a name! I don’t know what to name him tho. u_u

Honestly, if I can agree with Jianzhu on anything, it’s us wondering/marveling at how Hei-Ran and Rangi haven’t killed some of the people who harass them at parties. TT0TT

Ch 5 should be mostly good to go, just working on 6/7 now. I like to create a lil buffer between chapters.

#rise of kyoshi au #rise of kyoshi #shadow of kyoshi #the hunt for kyoshi #hunt for kyoshi #rangshi #rangi #rangi sei'naka #kyoshi #rangi seinaka #the rise of kyoshi #the shadow of kyoshi

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queerbrownvegan · 1 year

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I can't fathom the number of messages I've received throughout my career from people demanding I answer why I’ve done ads. For the people that are truly familiar with my work, I've used the QBV for years to center and discuss this issue. There is no ethical way to earn our money as environmentalists, but perhaps there is a career that is the least harmful. I’ve explained it in the past: most of my revenue comes from ads, some speaking events, and consulting clients. I don’t come from any generational wealth, my parents rely on me as their source of survival, and I feel that every time people leave their comments like, "why are you doing this?", I tell myself these are the same people who don’t even engage with my content, don’t support me in transitioning to being hired for speaking events and other engagements, and are only there to leave binary statements. In examining the current structures, many of us in the Global North continue to uphold the oppression of humans and animals. Our systems and dominant belief systems do this without us needing to do anything. This isn't about being morally superior to one another but about the intent of reducing harm in different sectors of our life. I’ve found myself in conversations about how we create opportunities beyond this space, and a lot of my friends are also working through this. It’s not easy. More often than not, people (outside of my community) are quick to dismiss my past answers, responses, and commitments, and impose their view on how the world should be, while doing nothing to bring about the existence of that world.

I continue to develop free education for everyone on these platforms to emphasize that everyone deserves equitable, introductory environmental education. Currently, my paid engagements are one way that I support myself, my family, and my team. These conversations about funding need to be active and I don't trust your comment on social media to reveal any answers, because no matter what I say, these people will simply walk away and are more interested in a call-out than a conversation. It's not about critique not being allowed (because it is), but rather, how much existing social power and privilege play a role in who can say these things about money and where it comes from, especially so freely towards BIPOC. I'm always rooting for my friends, and I know that we are all trying in this space.

-qbv

#queerbrownvegan #late stage capitalism #anti work #anti capitalism #antiracism #bipoc #queer #intersectionality #intersectional environmentalist #intersectional activism #justice #social justice #environmental justice #freelance #blog #sustainability #climate change #activism #environmentalism

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threewaysdivided · 2 years

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Thinking about The Light

More thought exercises? More thought exercises.

You know the drill: in this house we are Season 1 only - let’s see what we can extrapolate from just the information available way back when. You can consider this canon to the Deathly Weapons-verse if you like but I’m also a big fan of Death of the Author so feel free to ignore literally anything I say on this blog until/unless it appears in-story.

Let’s go:

What are the Light’s Overarching Values?

The Light’s recurring tagline is to “make humanity see the Light” or “bring humanity into the Light”, which can be decoded to mean driving humanity into “the next stage of evolution” and building Earth into a cosmic power.

In Auld Acquaintance, Vandal Savage gives the clearest explanation for why their organisation opposes the Justice League; he believes that the heroes are upholding (and perhaps even enforcing) a “calcified status quo”, and that by continuing to operate they have become “agents of stagnation” who allow weakness to persist, holding humanity back from the next stage of its evolution.

Here’s a question: Do they have a point?

Let’s break this down into some sub-questions:

Is the status quo bad?

Do the heroes exist to uphold or enforce the status quo?

Are the heroes doing harm by (accidentally or intentionally) upholding the status quo?

Are the heroes impairing humanity’s development?

1. Is the Status Quo bad?

This is argument that has the most validity. There are real issues with the status quo of Season 1; we see crime, corruption, poverty, domestic abuse, racial supremacy, violent dictatorships, warmongering and war-profiteering among others. Season 1’s Earth-16 is presented as fairly analogous to the real world of 2010 so it would be reasonable to assume it has many of the same underlying issues with structural and systemic inequality.

2. Do the Justice League exist to uphold or enforce the Status Quo?

From an outsider perspective it could be argued that the Justice League as an organisation don’t do much to meaningfully address the problems with the status quo. The League claims to uphold the principles of “truth, liberty and justice” but operationally they’re most publicly involved in danger management, apprehension of super-criminals, disassembling large-scale organised crime, and disaster relief. Some League heroes do overtly function as an extension of some kind of military or law enforcement organisation - for example, the Green Lantern Corps. From this perspective, one could argue that heroes exist to stop the status quo from backsliding/ being disrupted but don’t do a lot to better it, or to effectively address the root causes of suffering.

And for someone who empathises or agrees with the arguments of a figure who the Justice League has stopped, and who interprets this as the League condemning and silencing their ideology (rather than the actions it is being used to justify), they could come to see the League as existing to forcibly instate a specific status quo and set of values.

However, while this is a not-reasonable conclusion for someone with a limited in-universe perspective to reach, from the audience’s wider perspective we know it to be incomplete. Behind the scenes and outside of public Justice League activities, many heroes are working to improve the status quo and its systems. In-show Bruce Wayne (Batman) is acknowledged as an internationally active philanthropist, and general pop-culture knowledge holds that several others do grassroots work in their home-cities (either as civilians or openly as heroes). From certain angles, “heroes” could be considered a single extrajudicial facet of a diffuse humanitarian effort; the publicly visible stopgap against things getting overtly worse, while the same people work to make systemic improvement more quietly through other avenues.

The League also doesn’t have a single unified agenda or stance on the specifics of their mission and methods; as seen in Agendas, the actions of the organisation are decided democratically through a process of round-table debate and voting. From general pop-culture knowledge of the heroes presented as core members of the League, a range of political and ideological backgrounds are represented. In that regard, the Justice League is more of an administrative/ logistical body for efficient large-scale coordination and information-sharing than an institute with an active political agenda.

Some additional fridge-logic nuance should also be noted: because of their position, heroes cannot be too overt in their politics or in agitating for societal change. Heroes - particularly metahumans and aliens - are physically powerful and imposing, especially a large paramilitary body like the Justice League. They have to walk a fine line to avoid being seen as a political or military threat, or to give their more politically-influential adversaries material to make that argument. In order to retain the public and institutional sympathy needed to continue operating unimpeded, the League has to maintain some degree of outward image positioning themselves as apolitical defenders working with society and within the status quo. Being outwardly seen as safe is a necessity of being allowed to continue operating.

3. Are the heroes doing harm by (accidentally or intentionally) upholding the Status Quo?

Not really. An argument like this holds some weight in worlds like My Hero Academia - where heroism has become a widespread societally-integrated institute that is functionally a branch of law-enforcement, with a financial incentive to enforce the status quo and supress dissent - but in DC Comics heroes are still a fairly small movement with limited systemic power.

Exact numbers vary depending on the canon but there are usually no more than a handful of individual heroes or a small team (<10) per major city, with many cities having no permanent resident hero. Even on the scale of organisations like the Justice League (which, let’s be real, is small relative to most institutes), they don’t have the presence needed to be an oppressive force - let alone the inclination.

You could argue that the presence of heroes inadvertently creates more violence and expansion from “villains” - a risk that the Justice League themselves acknowledge during Agendas - but it’s kind of a non-argument. While heroes do sometimes create their own “villains” this is fairly rare - a lot of criminals are motivated by personal goals that have nothing directly to do with the heroes, and some of the ones who claim to be “the monsters you created” would probably have slid into villainy anyway and are just shifting blame for their actions onto the nearest available authority. (The Joker’s multiple-choice past being a prime example here). The fact that some criminals use the heroes as scapegoats to justify their actions or alliances doesn’t make them liable for those crimes.

4. Are the heroes impairing humanity’s development?

No. The Justice League uphold “truth, liberty and justice” - outside of opposing corruption, criminal actions and inhumane behaviour they do not arbitrarily block progress. They may be opposed to the development of technology that has the potential to be used for harm but the opposition is to the potential misuse and damage, not to progress itself.

Nor are they stifling innovation. Heroes exist to solve a very specific niche of problems; they are a supplement to existing systems, stepping in where the normal course of justice is failing/ being impeded and to manage immediate threats/ disasters that are too large to be easily handled by existing infrastructure, everyday civilians or communities. The problems they solve are not problems that had other viable solutions at the time, and they do not treat the development of alternative solutions as “competition” to be eliminated. The most legitimate argument is that the League hoard advanced technology (such as Zeta-transportation and holo-displays) for themselves rather than sharing it with the public, but even here they are not attempting to supress its use or distribution by others.

Vandal’s argument contains a more overt implication that heroes cause complacency because people become over-reliant on them to solve problems rather than using their own ingenuity/ developing resilience, but again the League doesn’t have the scope for this to be systemically true. It’s the same bad-faith argument that can be used against any safety-net or preventative system/tool: “X is bad because people can rely on it rather than having to be fully individually self-reliant to survive Y”. You might as well argue that oncologists are bad because people rely on them to help overcome cancer.

Let’s look at another angle: do the Light practice what they preach?

Are the Light addressing the problems with the status quo?

Are the Light working to progress humanity?

1. Are the Light addressing the problems with the Status Quo?

No. All of the members are either indifferent to these problems, actively benefiting from unfair systems that they have a vested interest in maintaining, or intentionally doing harm. Lex Luthor is an ultracapitalist war-profiteer who is openly self-aware about the moral bankruptcy and purely financial motivation of his actions in Targets. Queen Bee is an iron-fisted dictator, using dubious claims and propaganda to justify annexing her country’s peaceful neighbours. Ocean Master stoked the flames of the Purist racial supremacist movement in Atlantis as part of an attempted coup for the throne. Ra’s Al Ghul runs a sect of assassins, engaging in “extortion, manipulation [and] power-broking”. The Brain is largely removed from the world, preferring to conduct unethical experiments in pursuit of his interests in bioenhancement, immortality and the mind. Klarion is an overtly sadistic Lord of Chaos who would happily turn the world into a “personal playground of pandemonium”.

All of these people have the power to influence the status quo and address some of the issues but they are not interested in doing so. When they do attempt to make change it’s usually for the worse, in service of personal gain.

2. Are the Light working to progress humanity?

Not really. This one’s a little more complex as the big-picture scope and ultimate goal of their actions is not clear, but for the most part each are shown pursuing largely personal endeavours outside of the unified plan for Starrotech - which is itself a mind-control device intended to disrupt the Justice League rather than something to benefit the people. All of them in some way have the resources and/or influence to improve the lives of people in their sphere and/or contribute to technological advancement but we never see them doing this; more often than not they cause harm, and any good done is an incidental side-effect of pursuing another goal (e.g. the Rhelasian peace summit).

To summarise:

Claims of harm used to justify dissembling the Justice League are a gross overstatement/ wilful misunderstanding at best and illegitimate at worse

The Light are demonstrably not working to address any of the criticisms that have legitimacy

Many of the Light’s actions either directly or indirectly cause far more harm

From this we can draw 2 potential conclusions:

1. The Light’s claims are an empty placard used to lend a veneer of legitimacy to selfish pursuits

This seems very likely given the composition of their membership, their actions and that several members are openly self-aware of their wrongdoing.

The following statement could be easily applied to the narrative of the Light: “The moral of this new story is freedom over equality, and one freedom above all – the freedom to be unbothered by others' needs.” In holding the members of the Light accountable for their actions, the Justice League “impinges” on the desired “freedom” to indiscriminately do what they please in pursuit of selfish goals. It is not hard to interpret the Light as reactionary and their rhetoric as the bad-faith reactionary argument that being held accountable is a form of oppression.

This would explain why they do not propose an alternate solution beyond dissembling the League and eliminating/ restricting heroism. They don’t actually want to refine the system, they just want to remove a control.

2. The Light subscribe to a different moral/ ideological framework, which has diagnosed a different “problem” and is prescribing a different “solution”

This is not mutually exclusive to the first idea. While the Light is an organisation, it is composed of individuals who each have their own personal position towards the mission of the whole. Some may be in it purely as an alliance of convenience against a common enemy, others because they believe in “the cause” to varying degrees.

But to make sense of the Light as a unit you need to make sense of the ideology driving its formation. Which is to say, the ideology of its leader.

Vandal Savage and Survival of the Fittest

Vandal Savage is positioned at the leader of the light - he is designated L1, he is the one who brought them together and he is the character who most explicitly vocalises their stated motivation. The Light’s purported ideological stance is specifically a reflection of Vandal’s personal ideological stance.

What is Vandal’s ideology?

Functionally it is a belief in “survival of the fittest”. This is the overt explanation he gives - that by protecting humanity from dangerous situations the heroes allow the “weak” to continue existing, causing human evolution to stagnate.

Implicitly, his stance is that the heroes should stand aside and allow humanity to face danger directly, so that the weak can die and the survivors can build a stronger species.

Is there any validity to this?

No. He’s categorically wrong.

Firstly, this is a basic failure to understand what “survival of the fittest” means. It has nothing to do with individual strength or athletic “fitness” - what it actually means is that natural selection favours individuals and populations with traits that are best suited to efficiently survive in the ecological niche they inhabit. It is a process of random mutation and the primary success metric is simply that the organism survive long enough to pass that mutation on to the next generation. Physical strength or aggression are not prerequisites for this; in fact, both can become liabilities in excess (high musculoskeletal mass becomes deleterious if the environment cannot meet the nutritional needs to maintain it, while overly-aggressive individuals will be unlikely to successfully attract a mate). Some of the “fittest” organisms on Earth are incredibly physically weak and incredibly vulnerable to sudden changes in their niche.

Secondly, humanity has been evolving successfully around Vandal Savage in a way that disproves his thesis. Natural selection has been at work, it has been selecting for the traits that make humanity best suited to survive on Earth, and (on the whole) the traits it has selected for are ones that make humans pro-social, intelligent, compassionate, communicative, collaborative, adaptive and resilient. Evolution selected for a species of individuals who care about others, and whose ability to develop tools and pass on information outstrips the need for raw physical might - a collective that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. (To use a real-world example, there is a reason why women survive so long after menopause and why we feel compelled to care for people who are visibly elderly/ frail - it benefits the population to have individuals with accumulated life experience).

Within DC comics’ alien-inhabited universe there are also a large number of other social species with community structures. Pro-social/ tribal behaviour is one of the most commonly selected-for evolutionary traits across the galaxy (just look at the diversity of species that comprise Green Lantern Corp membership), with compassionate pro-social behaviour being a quite common variant. Vandal isn’t just wrong about physical strength being the end-goal of life on Earth - he’s wrong on a cosmic scale.

There is also an irony to Vandal Savage being a self-proclaimed champion of human evolution. Vandal himself cannot evolve. He can adapt, certainly, he can learn and he can grow on a physical/psychological/emotional level, but evolution does not occur on the scale of a single individual, even a long-lived one. As an immortal individual and static point, Vandal will always be limited to the constraints of his own starting nature; human evolution will inevitably leave him behind no matter what direction it takes.

How might someone like Vandal have come about this mindset?

Vandal is indeed limited by his origins and starting point. He is a relic of early-humanity; a man who fought a bear and won, who was big and strong - at best a warrior-protector type - and who gained immortality/invulnerability through exposure to meteor-radiation that either made him into a mutate or awakened a latent proto-metagene.

This was a random event - not necessarily the “next phase of human evolution” but simply the acquisition of a trait that offset the personal negative consequences of his more aggressive, uncompassionate and antisocial sides. But that invulnerability elevated him above his peers and gave him a reason to see himself as exceptional. It bred within him a narcissism, and a belief that his mindset and experiences were either universal or superior.

And then humanity moved on. It evolved, and that evolution selected for a more communal, more pro-social, more compassionate population; whose skills at collaboration, coordination and tool-building surpassed the need for raw brute strength and domination. Not only that but other meta-humans and mutates began to emerge - ones who chose to use their abilities in compassionate, pro-social, humanitarian ways. Vandal was left behind, no longer exceptional in any way that mattered.

But a world in which Vandal Savage was not “the fittest” was intolerable to his ego. Rather than considering that maybe he was flawed, that he needed to revaluate himself, adapt, grow and place value in other things, he became reactionary. Instead of accepting the evolution occurring before his eyes, he disdained it as wrong, as enabling weakness, as a regression. Vandal may have adapted the rhetoric of his worldview to fit within the new language of modern science but he’s never actually questioned the core premise. He actively rejects the evidence in front of him, seeking to drag humanity back to a mythologised past, where might is power and Vandal Savage is the apex of the species.

Underneath all the attempts at intellectual rationalisation, this is ultimately the validation-seeking tantrum of a reactionary narcissist, whose meta-abilities let him enact it on an immortal and cosmic scale.

Here is a small truth Evil is mundane.

What is the ultimate goal of The Light?

While never explained in-show the most logical answer is that it’s probably a form of intergalactic colonialism. This tracks with the membership of the Light - ultra capitalists, unethical scientists, dictators, power-hungry princes - and is a reasonable fusion of the “survival of the strong” and “evolved humanity” ethos.

It also aligns well with this reading of Vandal - the idea of conquering the universe, dominating all the warlike species and subjugating the peaceful ones to become the ultimate “apex predator” would flatter his ego and strength-based exceptionalism. It also tracks with traits of narcissism; one of which being a perception that others exist to support and serve oneself. In Vandal’s mind, humanity will be better off reshaped in his image: Earth as a cosmic power, not through trade or innovation or diplomacy but through might.

Let’s ask a couple of other questions:

If Vandal is immortal then why only form the Light now?

There are a few potential factors here.

Firstly, the tools he needs are now readily available. True global interconnectedness, communication and space travel were only properly refined in the last two centuries - before that he would have been limited to operating on a much smaller scale, over much longer timespans. The last two centuries also saw large leaps in technology, science and warfare. In the modern age Vandal can source allies from around the world, communicate with them instantaneously over distance and make use of a number of resources. Starrotech is the product of multiple advancements that would have until recently been impossible for even powerful people to easily obtain.

Secondly, this is the age of metahumans and heroes. The last two generations saw the prominent appearance and then public acceptance of heroes on Earth 16, and development of coordinated groups (first the Justice Society and then the Justice League) combined with global news media spreading the word. This would likely have provided the inspiration for Vandal’s plot of using the heroes as tools. It also would have made him more reactionary; the presence of people who were exceptional in similar ways to himself and who chose to use their gifts compassionately challenging both his view of human nature and his place as “the fittest”, spurring him to action.

A Theory T.O. Morrow and his Reds may have been an early test. Vandal may not have directly recruited him but he could have made contact and planted the suggestion of using Androids to infiltrate the Justice Society - an experiment he could observe from afar. It would also account for Morrow’s ambitions diverging into a plan to wipe out humanity - Vandal planted the seed but he didn’t have control over what it would ultimately grow into.

It is also possible that Vandal made smaller scale attempts in the past, but this likely would have been hamstrung by both technological limitations and by the personalities involved. Vandal’s preferred allies would be people who share similar strength-based antisocial worldviews but those groups are essentially doomed to tear themselves apart with infighting eventually - after all, there can only be one “fittest”.

What do the Light’s loyalties look like?

The 7 principal members of the Light have different motivations for joining, spanning from purely personal alliances of convenience to varying degrees of belief in Vandal’s mission. These factors will determine the closeness of their allegiance and the conditions under which they might turn on the others.

It’s also worth noting that all of the members of the Light are at least somewhat antisocial and will likely abandon or even betray the group out of self-preservation if needed.

Vandal Savage The originator of the ideology. He will remain loyal to it but may turn on the others if he perceives them as no longer useful, as “weak” or as a potential liability/ threat to himself, his ego or the cause.

Lex Luthor Luthor has a number of potential personal and ideological reasons for joining. As an ultra-capitalist he stands to economically benefit from their colonial schemes. As someone with political ambitions, the Light’s rise to power as leaders of the “new humanity” would appeal to him. Luthor is also often depicted as xenophobically motivated by a fear of Superman - a projection of his own mindset, which cannot conceive of someone using their power for pure altruism - something that aligns well with Vandal’s reactionary strength-based mindset.

Luthor will potentially turn on the others if he believes doing so is a more financially or politically profitable move.

Ra’s Al Ghul Ra’s alignment will depend on the specifics of the character; his depictions range from a brutal, villainous “demon” to a more sympathetic anti-villain with environmental motivations. What little is seen in Young Justice seems to swing more towards a calculating villain.

Ra’s often has a strength-based worldview, something that would resonate with Vandal’s mission: though they may diverge on the details, Ra’s has no great love for humanity in its current state and would have reasons to see them as weak. As the leader of an assassin sect, he has a potential business interest in intergalactic warfare as it generates a need for espionage and sabotage.

In canon it seems that Ra’s is withholding some information from the Light, as he explicitly knows Batman’s identity but does not appear to have shared this with the rest. He canonically has family, Talia Al Ghul appearing in the YJS1 companion comics. He also often has some degree of honour-code (if not a moral code), and a loyalty to his Shadows.

Ra’s will likely hold true to any agreement he has made, but may turn on the others if they go back on their word, if their actions severely violate his personal code or reveal them to be hypocrites, or if he believes they pose a threat to his Shadows or his family.

Queen Bee Queen Bee’s motivations and allegiance to the Light are somewhat unclear. Her personal motivations seem mostly concerned with retaining power in Bialya and acquiring Qurac as a territory. As a dictator holding power through military might and propaganda, it is possible that she is sympathetic to Vandal’s ideology and may stand to politically and materially benefit from the Light’s intended rise to power.

Interestingly, the Light seems to have more interest in Queen Bee’s connections than her own skills and abilities; making use of Bialyan locales and the more powerful telepathy of her second-in-command, Psimon. It is possible that the Light could turn on her if they were to require an equivalent alternative ally and supply of resources.

Queen Bee may turn on or abandon the Light if they do not provide adequate support to her ambitions in Qurac, or if she believes their plans will require her to cede power without equivalent returns.

Ocean Master/ Prince Orm Ocean Master’s reasons for allying with the Light are not explained. He seems personally motivated by jealousy toward his half-brother, King Orin (Aquaman), and a desire to supplant him on the throne of Atlantis. It is unclear what the Light are offering him in return, although the promise of gaining political power through alternative avenues, or the potential to discredit and unseat Orin as part of dissembling the Justice League may be driving him.

Like Queen Bee, Orm seems more useful to the Light for his position and sphere of influence than his specific personal skillset; he provides a foothold in Atlantis and the ability to monitor and potentially influence Orin’s court in his capacity as Prince Orm. The Light may turn on him should he fall out of Orin and Mera’s favour, or if they acquire another Atlantean ally with similar reach.

Orm may turn on or abandon the Light if they do not sufficiently support his attempts for the throne.

The Brain The Brain seems rather detached from the main activities of the Light - mostly involved in their experiments with Kobra Venom and bioenhancement rather than Starrotech. He appears to be their biochemical and neurology expert - being the one to suggest that the Kobra Venom sample could be reverse engineered - yet it is Luthor who seems to be driving the operational side of Project Cadmus.

It is possible that he scientifically agrees with Vandal’s Darwinian argument. However he may also be involved for more amoral, transactional reasons; content to provide the Light with scientific services and advice so long as they provide the resources and facilities for him to pursue his own unethical research interests. This may explain his relative distance from their central plan.

It is unlikely that the Brain will diverge from the Light on moral or ideological grounds, but he may turn on or abandon them if he believes they are cutting him off.

Klarion Klarion is here for shits and giggles; he allied himself with the Light because he thought it would be “fun”. As an immortal Lord of Chaos who cannot be contained, they have very little to offer that he might materially want. The Witch-boy is a wildcard loose cannon - impulsive, impatient and childish - both their powerhouse and biggest potential liability.

He will stay so long as it remains entertaining and will either abandon or turn on them on them if it becomes too “boring”, if he thinks the alternative would be “more fun” or if he believes they might try to contain him.

A Different Take on the 16 Hours

For the sake of people just tuning in: I don’t really vibe with the direction Season 2 took - I think both the heroes’ and villians’ plans are more hole than plot and end up much less compelling than they had the potential to be. So, let’s try something different:

How about this?

When the Light sent the Justice League members off-world for 16 hours, they sent them to directly adjacent solar systems and galactic arms (with the exception of Green Lantern who may have been sent further in attempt to divert the attention of the Corps). The intent of this was to extort resource-rich alien civilisations; demonstrating the strength of the controlled heroes before demanding that the inhabitants being paying protection tithes to Earth, with the threat that the full might of the League would descend upon those who did not comply.

This would accomplish several things:

The Light could quietly collect resources from any planet that complied, allowing them to stockpile wealth and alien technology to serve their future plans.

If any of the threatened planets attempted to contact Earth in protest it would reputationally damage the Justice League - shattering public trust by “revealing” that their supposed protectors had apparently been racketeering for personal gain outside of the public eye. In order to counter this, the Justice League would have to definitively prove that they had been controlled against their will - an admission to having been severely compromised that would weaken faith in a different direction and create opportunities for the Light’s publicly visible members to smear them as dangerously incompetent.

If any of the threatened planets attempted a military retaliation it could accomplish some combination of A) setting the Justice League up for targeted elimination, and/or B) present a “common threat” for Earth to militarily rise up against, allowing the Light to stoke demand for their own weapons-tech (bionic limbs, Kobra-Venom, Genomorphs etc.), potentially rise to power and drive humanity into a more aggressive state that would justify abandoning the “weak”.

Not only would this variant strategy offer multiple potentially beneficial outcomes, it would also yield results on a faster timeframe. By acting on adjacent systems, effects would likely be seen within a year or two at most - sufficient time for the Light to make preparations and set other support plans in motion, while also allowing just enough time to pass for the Justice League’s own investigations to potentially start turning cold, opening them up to be blindsided.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. Let me know your thoughts - or if you want other meta I did a S1-Only Take on Martian Colourism.

#scattered thoughts #young justice #young justice season 1 #yj meta #young justice: deathly weapons #YJ:DW Meta #The Light (YJ)#DC Comics #the thing that drives me bananas about this show is how much interesting stuff you COULD extrapolate from just S1 #3WD

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promiseiwillwrite · 3 months

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I Blame Keanu Reeves.

So I listened to the most recent episode of Hidden Brain the other day. I love this podcast, and it really makes me think sometimes. This episode is called "Escaping the Matrix". This episode focuses on the model of the world that we have, that we often assume is universal.

(hint: it is Not, any more than international definitions of "good food" are universal)

The episode talks about how profoundly social media has influenced people's models, and directly contributed to a mental health crisis in young people by being instrumental in vastly expanding the continuum of harm on a psychosocial level.

There are thousands of new dimensions to identity. There is no respite from the constant presence and barrage of social comparison and performance required by the internet, especially for younger people who lack the boundaries, coping skills and discernment to hold their sense of self and interact in safe and healthy ways.

I know, because I didn't have my old adult shit together well enough to safely exist on Tumblr until the last few years.

It also talks about cultural values, and how some of the reasons we think and feel what we think and feel are like the water that a fish swims in. Fish probably don't have a concept of water.

And it would never occur to most people that you can express and experience values and beliefs differently.

Something like caring for others, or fairness fall in line with most human's ideas of right livelihood. These things are very likely a part of your model and deeply ingrained, no matter what your system or preferred value set might be called.

But if you elevate one element of a value system above all others, it can cause great discomfort and role strain, because mortality is not static. It changes situationally, it changes contextually. It changes socially and chronologically. It can even change inside one person from moment to moment.

The psychologist being interviewed on this program said that something like caring for others, when elevated too much in a personal paradigm can give rise to massive depression by creating an impossible standard of behavior. It can stoke continued outrage and a perception of callousness in anyone who fails to "care enough" or that is perceived as "actively harmful".

Sometimes well past the point where the agency and autonomy of people is disregarded, and challenges that bring growth and learning through adversity are undermined or seen as abuse.

I know after listening to this, that this is part of what has been wrong with me. I have known for a long time that I was obsessed with trying not to hurt others.

I am trying to tease out where the line is for me, between caring as much as feels intuitive to me, and staying offended by people who don't think the same way I do.

I understand the social contract. But I may indeed have been harmed by the ethereal nature of the goalposts it represents. The constant sense of Failure when faced with wanting to engage and connect, and not wanting to hurt others, and not being able to figure out how to do that.

I often feel painted into a corner by my own ethics, and safe interactions seem to constantly dwindle.

So how do you escape the Matrix?

By knowing that not everybody is going to like you. By knowing that just because someone doesn't think like you do it doesn't make them automatically a monster. They do not become impure by having a different value set, or a different value hierarchy, or different interpretations of the same values.

And we would all do well to keep that top of mind, and remain curious about why people think what they think, and be willing to be in uncomfortable conversations without deciding to nope out. Willingness to uphold the social contract whether or not others do still has merit, up to the point of meanness. And then I think your own boundaries should meet it with class, sass or brass, in proportion to the situation.

#therapy things #Social contract

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the-feminist-philosopher · 2 years

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You unironically believe being small and curved is inherent to being born female.

Congrats on completely misunderstanding the use of "sex" in that sentence. If I meant "intercourse," I would have said "intercourse."

"Ms." is inherently gendered. Before "Ms." there was just "Mrs." for a married woman and "Miss" for an unmarried woman. "Ms." was not the gender neutral alternative. It was the marriage-status neutral alternative.

"Ms." is gendered. In a world without gender, "Ms." either would not be used, in favor of "M." or "Mx." Or, it would be widely applicable and usable by people of any sex and identity. "Ms." is gendered.

No one believes this. Trans people make up between 0.5-2% of the population. There are men who wear skirts all the time who will never in their life think, "This makes me a woman."

Literally no one except y'all believe that if someone wears different clothing or a different hair style that they suddenly think they're trans.

Transwomen do not believe that wearing a skirt makes them, or anyone, inherently a woman.

You heard it here, folks. The people who want to "abolish gender" believe that it is *checks notes* exactly like racism to abolish gender distinctions in public spaces.

Unless you have passed a law that explicitly compels the observance of and compliance with identifying as a sex, And Unless you have passed a law that explicitly compels observance of and compliance with the strict separation of people on the basis of a binary sex...

Then public spaces and legal documents are gendered.

Transpeople can change their designation on legal documents, making them gendered. Public spaces rely on the honor system for access, making them gendered.

They say "men" or "women" on the door of gendered spaces, not "XX" and "XY," or "penis peoples" and "vagina peoples," or "males" and "females."

True epicenity is the use of "pregnant person" rather than "woman," which I know you oppose. You are all against true gender abolition, in favor, instead, of the legal enforcement and legal separation of people on the basis of reproductive function (one of you all called it a "reproductive role").

And I could not possibly see how that would go wrong.

"Nobody has a gender" says the person in response to my sentence: "Agender means not having a gender."

Which was a response to someone who claimed that agender is... "highly gendered." It was a response to a claim that "agender" is the belief that gender is innate.

What was it they had claimed? Oh:

Agender and non-binary are inherently gendered, especially non-binary, and agender is a submission to the misogynist supposition gender is innate and universal.

They also claimed "Everyone is agender."

Colloquially, "gender" refers to a lot of things. It refers to a sense of self and it also used as short-hand to refer to gender-norms, gender-roles, and gender-expectations.

I also find it highly ironic that you consider the wide application of gendered language regardless of sex to be conservative.

the anti-trans sentiment of the radfem movement has lead them to partner with the likes of the ADF and the FRC, and has made them vulnerable to recruitment tactics among the christian right and white supremacists, the groups with the money often behind anti-trans policy campaigns.

European Parliamentary Forum

The Southern Poverty Law Center on the ADF

The Southern Poverty Law Center on the Anti LGBT Campaigns

Political Research Associates on Partners with the Christian Right

Alt-Right "TERF" recruitment plan

These are groups that have had tangible affects on the ground in anti-Gay bills and anti-abortion bills. Partnering with them and sympathizing with them is doing women active harm.

Lmao, what?

Me: "Saying that a thin, upturned nose is a sign of a 'real woman' is racist and misogynistic. You're upholding misogynoir." Them: "So you believe all black people look the same? You're racist!"

Also, intersectionality does not say, "people are united over being the same sex."

Intersectionality is about how social categories intersect at the individual level to reflect multiple interlocking systems of privilege and oppression at the social-structural level. Intersectionality is about overlapping systems of oppression and inequalities operate together and exacerbate each other.

Intersectionality is why we should center queer, poor, black and brown people in our feminism.

Me: "This is a Eurocentric beauty standard and impossible to hold people to." Them: "You're upholding a European construct of femininity."

Me: "Holding women to these standards under the guise of 'science' is racist and misogynistic." Them: "This is a white supremacist talking point."

This is highly ironic considering that we aren't partnering with christofascists. Also ironic considering that we don't have any "leaders" who have been on the Ingraham Angle or Tucker Carlson Tonight.

If Piers Morgan is defending y'all, you're doing something wrong.

###

Biology and it’s discourse are still structured by historic and current social and political views. That includes using “sexual dimorphism” as an excuse to justify the racist and misogynistic standards used by TERFs in their Sex Pattern Recognition, and the classification and categorization of faces. It’s constant emphasis in arguments for sex separatism is a political choice influenced by one’s socialization, rather than one that can claim to neutrally reflect what the world is “really” like.

All of the terms we use and concepts and standards we apply to bodies are still influenced by patriarchal, white supremacist, and heteronormative standards, including the classification of sex. And we're inherently biased about the level of differences when we talk about humans, as humans. The fact you perceive the differences you do doesn't necessarily reflect our actual level of genetic and anatomical diversity, because those differences you perceive are a result of your environment.

Relying on these patterns with the standards you do without questioning why you use certain qualifiers to refer to certain bodies has the unintended consequence of reinforcing and entrenching precisely the forces of socialization which you claim to be critical. And enforcing these standards to achieve “true separatism” only encourages the surveillance of bodies for nonconformity to the standards put forth. It creates a system where everyone is subject to constant inspection and where the only way to hopefully avoid being inspected is to force yourself into the qualifiers you have laid down as inconvertibly true and universal. And all that does is uphold the norms we currently exist under and send women who don't fit your pattern flocking to things like cosmetic surgery in order to be seen as a “real” woman.

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genderqueerpositivity · 3 years

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I've been thinking a lot about the impact that these anti-trans bills are going to have. Trans kids will be affected the most, for certain. But so will everyone else. What are cis kids going to learn and internalize from these situations?

Cis kids are actively being taught that their trans classmates are lesser, should be excluded, and are a threat to them. That alone is sick.

But at the same time, these anti-trans laws are teaching cis kids a lot about their own gender and assigned sex.

What must it be like to be a cis girl right now? To be told that you can never truly compete with your male classmates because you are inherently biologically weaker? To be told that you will always be at a disadvantage because of your assigned sex?

What must it be like to be a cis girl student athlete right now, seeing that the majority of public discussion about girls sports is not actually about girls sports because of their own value and importance--but about anti-trans laws?

At the same time, cis boys are being taught that their cis girl classmates are not as strong as they are and are less capable athletes. They're being taught that "boys" are stealing scholarships from girls--implying that girls are held to lower standards of performance than boys are. How will this impact the ways that cis boys think of and interact with their cis girl peers?

How is this NOT reinforcing sexism and patriarchal beliefs about sex and gender?

It's also going to be interesting to see how the move to ban access to transition related health care impacts not only trans people--but cis people.

One of Arkansas's newest anti-trans laws allows medical professionals to deny certain services to patients if providing that service would conflict with their moral, ethical, or religious beliefs; the same law also applies to health insurers, allowing them to deny coverage for certain services.

A pediatrician wouldn't have to prescribe puberty blockers to a trans child, a doctor wouldn't have to provide a referral to an endocrinologist for a trans person to seek hormone therapy, a health insurer would not have to cover transition related surgeries, and so on.

But do you really think a pharmacist who would refuse to fill an estrogen prescription for a trans woman based on their personal religious beliefs wouldn't also refuse to fill a birth control prescription for a cis woman?

That a religiously affiliated hospital which would deny a trans man a hysterectomy wouldn't also refuse to allow a cis woman to have a tubal ligation after childbirth?

That the same laws which allow health insurance companies to deny coverage for gender affirming health care services based upon religious objections won't also be used to defend refusing coverage for birth control?

Stripping bodily autonomy from ANYONE is a serious problem and a violation of human rights. Every single one of these anti-trans healthcare laws will open the door for further restricting the bodily autonomy and human rights of minorities in the future.

Republicans know this--they know exactly what they are doing by pushing transphobia as an issue of religious freedom and by pushing the "think of the children" tactic. There is a reason that one of Arkansas's anti-trans bills' is titled the "Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act", while South Carolina introduced a similar bill a short time ago called the "Minor Child Compassion and Protection Act".

Republicans are experts at this shit: they've been fighting for decades to restrict abortion rights to save "innocent unborn babies", to prevent marriage equality in order to defend "Christian rights" and "religious freedom", to prevent lesbians and gay men from adopting and fostering children to protect children from the imaginary "child abuse" of having same gender parents because "every child deserves a mother and father".

Oppressing minorities to privilege Christian conservative beliefs is the name of the game. Do y'all really believe that Republicans are suddenly wildly supportive of girls and womens sports--or have they simply spotted an opportunity to further marginalize trans people, uphold traditional binary sex roles, strip away the right to bodily autonomy, and further their agenda to pass laws that allow discrimination based on Christian religious beliefs?

It's ridiculous to me to think that the radical feminists cheering these bills on don't understand how allowing medical professionals the power to discriminate will also harm cis women. And if you think that openly and visibily lesbian, bisexual, and queer cis women won't be among those harmed by transphobic laws, I am certain you are wrong.

Transphobia hurts everyone. Patriarchy hurts everyone. Biological essentialism hurts everyone. Trans people, especially trans kids, will suffer the most. But cis people will not be unaffected. Fighting to maintain cis supremacy and the binary gender system will not come without a cost--for everyone.

#op #transphobia #anti trans legislation #anti trans laws #trans healthcare bans #transphobia tw #sexism tw #religion tw #homophobia tw #medical tw

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decolonize-the-left · 3 years

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This is the anon about why voting is important. Be mad at people who stop at voting. But if the gun wins, good luck protesting and getting something. This is coming from an European living in a country where the right wing government made it illegal to record the police. I have friends in legal battles and who might end up in prison for being in protests. Historically, think Thatcher vs. the Miners. Vote the knife AND protest. It only works if you do both.

P.S: Also, I understand you're replying to the side you think I'm on and not to me personally. But I'm pro violent protests, pro strikes, pro boycotting, pro sabotage, pro self-organized autonomous zones... etc. In fact I've been actively involved in everything I've mentioned. And I still fucking vote. Because low voter turnout always, ALWAYS benefits the right. So again, it's not vote OR protest. You can do both, and you fucking should.

Hey anon. Today is Orange Shirt day.

You may know it as the day where we think about how Every Single President (both red AND blue), prime minister, and monarchy regardless of their beliefs allowed residential schools to function and kill natives, even FDR the most social Democrat this country ever had and even the same man who created the minimum wage and asked corporations to stop bleeding workers dry.

Yeah he didn't do shit. Neither did our "allies" who constantly wanted our vote but didn't want anything to do with us when elections are over.

Decades later look at you. Still using the same bullshit, gaslighting tactics.

Anyway did you know attendance was mandatory at the residential schools til 1947? You may recognize this as the year WW2 officially ended. Y'all remember what inspired Hitler? Yeah I guess keeping mandatory attendance at the 'schools' that inspired Hitler's concentration camps must have been a bad look for allies. They kept functioning tho. The last one didn't even close until 1997.

And what have yall done about those schools since? In the 70 years since. What have yall done about the treatment of natives besides pretend to care for a week whenever it's trendy? Besides try guilting us to be the bigger person & vote your way every time the guy you don't like seems like he might win? Which of the 13 presidents you've had since then has given a singular shit about anyone who wasn't a settler? How many times have y'all demanded your president to give a shit about us?

Exactly.

Not one. And you voters haven't done a damn thing about it except bitch at us to accept the slow death you've sentenced us to over and over again. You refuse to recognize your participation in our genocide. Voting doesn't help. It never has. It's something you tell yourselves is reducing harm when the opposite is true. To placate your own conscience.

Maybe if you spent less time trying to recruit votes that Do Nothing then we'd have more to show for 200 years of "progress" than reservations still without running water and an ignored national MMIW crisis spanning 2 countries.

Hell, we still have to beg your goverments to give our kids back. Over 200 years of asking to be considered humans worth respect and you still want me to vote for the guys who killed our sons, our daughters, our elders and won't even do us the decency of admitting it, let alone return them to us.

Voter turnout has enabled white supremacists and has helped uphold white supremacy. In fact, that's literally why laws were created. Reminder that prison labor was created specifically to be a form of ongoing slavery in the same exact article where slavery as a whole was abolished. That article still allows slavery through the prison system and in fact it's used and abused all the time to exploit prisoners to do shit they have no business doing (like fighting fires). And that's just One Law. Just one example. Nevermind the thousands of others that sought to harm specifically BIPOC, some even passed this year.

So fuck you, your knife, and the horse you rode in on.

"vote for the knife that's stabbing you in the throat"

When settlers show me they give an actual shit about brown people, I'll start to give an actual shit about your half formed colonizer opinions.

#asked #answered #voting #ndn #Indigenous #white audacity #vote blue #anti Indigenous #reblog #just Colonizer things

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cosmik-homo · 3 years

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For some reason I literally cannot find the post where I talked about my rewrite of The Hanged Man Rusts so Brian actually explains the trans thing and still gets rejected by Arthur but I am once again thinking about it.

'But that's the Means-Before-Ends mode'- well ever in a moralistic and not utilitarian system of morality I think explaining Mordred is trans is The Better Thing Brian would do, not only because explaining more clearly he is alive will help in the Good Deeds of relieving Arthur's grief, but because as a trans person the idea that mentioning a person has changed their gender from the one assigned at birth is morally wrong and taboo enough for a robot that prefers to Do No Harm to abstain from it at the price of an entire planets life is kind of insulting to me?

It's too much like how conservatives try to sweep queer identities under the carpet in Polite Company, and besides, even from an ally standpoint...

There is nothing wrong with being trans, and while outing is an issue and is not ok, it is not objectively horrendous to discuss a trans person's agab or transition.

that kind of thinking stems from and helps uphold the idea that trans people universally aspire to be seen as Cis People Of Their Target Gender and to let no one know of their transness- it's the same harmful idea that leads to the prevalence of empahsizing passing instead of normalizing trans bodies.

There's nothing objectively wrong with a trans character in a narrative having some of their struggles relate to their gender or due to dealing with cisnormativity/transphobia, but since the mechanisms are, well, the mechanisms, they're trying to make queer normative stories, and in this story specifically, I am a little bit disappointed of it- because in my opinion, and even tho I think Arthur would have dismissed Merlin anyways, the narrative and wording sort of frames it like The Prophecy Is Not Getting Through and the basis for a happier ending is failing because of Mordred's gender change- if he were not trans, and Brian just sang of the return of a daughter, the narrative doesn't say what would Arthur say, right? The key to the tragedy here is presented as the miscommunication, instead of it being Two Factions Not Seeking Out Each Other, Despite Mordred's Attempts. I actually feel like I would prefer, if any trans struggle, a straight up 'mordred faces transphobia' variant to this round about 'my robot tried to be A Good Non-Outing Ally And Look Where It Got Us' variant.

Specifically I think "I Would Rather Not Mention About This Aspect Of This Person Because It Could Be Impolite To Acknowledge, even if it harms the efficiency of my request that you support this person" really rubs me the wrong way due to my experiences of Ableism that operates like this. Amongst abled people, they consider calling someone disabled a value judgement of them or an insult (incorrect, obviously), and sometimes their attempts of dancing around actively mentioning a person's disability can do great harm and great delay or barrier when it comes to the conversation of giving that person accommodation. Mordred is trans, and no longer Arthur's daughter, despite being at one point known in that way- and there is no need to sugarcoat or gloss over that fact, because in a queer-normative future, i would expect understanding that trans genders are valid and true as much as their cis counterparts- that manhood that is SPECIFICALLY TRANS is just as real as cis manhood, and being trans does not detract from it. the fact that a gender identity is transitioned into rather than born in does not make it any more fragile- Mordred's having-been-a-daughter does not make his manhood less valid, so there is nothing harmful in explaining it, and it's ok for a Means Over End robot's morals.

And again, this story is not that much about Brian's Means-Justify-Ends/Ends-Justify-Means modes and their ethical choices! That's a secondary theme!! Getting rid of this miscommunication and having Arthur reject him anyways brings forth so much more the themes of War, Peace and the ways the two groups view themselves and each other while also deepening and highlighting Arthur's conflicted characterisation, the idealized, disconnected nature of his grief- more for a concept of the past he had then for an actual autonomic child- and his tiredness!!!

Which is why you should try singing my version and see if you like it:

Arthur, my sheriff, I've news to cheer you

Your child yet lives, and drawing near you.

Been saved by tribes which you misjudged

Then he changed his gender and name.

You lived, and grieved you'd ne'er again see him,

But still he came though worried how you'd act*,

So recognise, embrace and believe him

And you may yet save your world.

Hanged man I don't want to hear it,

A family is more than blood.

I have enough men to protect here,

Let Saxon sons go as they come.

I've got all those I've trust around me,

This world is hard, and I must be too

There's none of that trust left for you,,

*'though feeling deceiving' once again falls into an uncomfy transphobic territory for me, but I think it is a good lyrics and if you are comfortable with having that you're welcome to keep it. Again nothing wrong with representing trans people facing transphobia, I personally don't feel comfortable having that line out of my mouth.

So yeah! It's folk music, ish, it's open to changes, and I still think about my version of the narrative now and again and want people to see it.

#the mechanisms #high noon over camelot #drumbot brian #the hanged man rusts #mordred #sorry this is SUPER non readible im a Rambler ADHD. im trying my best with the formatting #let me inow if it would be better without the bolding or with it

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theseerasures · 3 years

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a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride

honestly there is just like. no point as of Witch (if not earlier) in thinking about Marrow and Winter as following along the same defection path, and downright facile to compare the two in terms of who is “closer” to defecting and therefore “less problematic” (even setting aside that making value judgments along those lines in fiction is...never that straightforward), when the narrative has emphasized REPEATEDLY how they are on entirely separate tracks in terms of character and role in the Atlas military.

seriously, it’s like saying “this orange is bad because you can’t eat the peel like you can eat an apple skin”

so like, yes, Marrow is the one who has verbally expressed his misgivings, and has clearly articulated scruples (as opposed to just the dial-up noise) and will blurt them out any second now as soon as he gets a word in edgewise. but also: Marrow HASN’T gotten a word in edgewise (except with Winter, fancy that), and has done approximately fuck all to actually subvert the system that he is growing to hate. both his theory and lack of praxis are tied into Marrow’s relatively low, overlooked position in the Atlas system, and feed into the fact that for Marrow the project of Atlas is not personal.

Marrow joined the military on ideological grounds. he clearly does want personal connection, but that has been denied him at every turn, largely by his teammates, largely by his partner, all of whom use him to enforce their own struggles with the clash between political duty and personal grief. he has been alienated by the system he upholds, which started even before we meet him. this makes it much harder for him to rebel in deed, because he doesn’t have a lot of power to begin with and he knows the system will not protect him if he does; at the same time, that relative powerlessness and isolation keeps his investment in Atlas abstract, uncomplicated, and much easier to dispel. Marrow is still with Atlas because he has a job to do, because it’s his duty, because he is still clinging to the Atlas military’s illusory altruism. he wants Penny to come with them so she can save Atlas. his protestations at seeing Team FNKI, that they are “just kids,” comes from the belief that it is categorically wrong to send children into battle. what is keeping Marrow from defecting is belief, and once the belief is shattered--like, say, when his boss’ new ingenious plan is to Nuke the Poors--there is nothing keeping him around.

and once his path is set he will not waver, because Atlas, by design, has no hold on him materially or personally (outside of his own life, which he was already happy to dedicate to a cause). Marrow then, is the limit case of Atlas being hoist with its own petard: an exemplar for how it gives its people nothing while demanding everything, but also an exemplar for how quickly the entire system folds in on itself when the veil is lifted. when Marrow defects (and it IS when) it will represent Atlas as a whole defecting from itself, even if we don’t see it visually--from the civilians, to the enlisted soldiers, to perhaps even members of Marrow’s own team.

NONE of the things i just mentioned really apply to Winter, because there is nothing about Atlas that is not personal for Winter.

i have no doubt that Winter is in some ways invested in same abstract principles that swayed Marrow, but that is constantly overridden by the fact that Winter has family at all sides of this, even before everything fell to shit, and the narrative will not stop reminding her.

“what about your sister?” “would you say the same thing if it was your sister inside?” her father was gunning for a seat on the Council. the man who took her in is essentially Head of State. Penny has made herself Public Enemy Number One, and Weiss is actively abetting her. even Whitley has now thrown himself into the fray, unbeknownst to her. and another person might be better at compartmentalizing all this the way Winter clearly wants to, and stick to the party line, but Winter cannot, because the more i watch her the more i’m convinced that the current crisis in Atlas is just a microcosm of the real issue, which is to say: everything is personal in Atlas for Winter, because everything is personal for Winter.

at a moment-to-moment level, and especially when backed into a corner, Winter defaults not to ideology but her tightly coiled lattice of personal relationships. and this makes perfect sense, because Winter grew up in a household where she had to perpetually crisis respond, and then she never stopped. Marrow does what he does because he believes in the dream, in making the world a better place, and therefore it is more difficult in some respects for him to defect, because it involves taking a long hard look at and then rejecting the structures he bought into and made himself complicit in. once lines are crossed and he DOES do that, though, he’s home free. for Winter, there are no lines to cross, because all Winter wants in the end is to throw her arms around everyone she cares about and drag them to safety. to keep them there, closely held, where she can see them and make sure that they stay safe.

but what’s tricky about Winter--what’s fascinating to me, what Jacques tried to beat out of her, what James alternately capitalizes on and tries to quash, what she resents about herself--is that in times of crisis (which for Winter is again ALL THE TIME), “everyone she cares about” becomes everyone, so that suddenly she takes a shine to the General’s war machine, so that she’s risking her life to give Penny and Fria a few more seconds of time, so that she’s stepping in front of Elm’s incoming fist, so that she’s letting JYR go rescue Oscar. Marrow has ideals he values, but at her core Winter has nothing but the people, who are real the moment she sees and feels them--real enough to defend, or defend against.

Winter jealously protects her web of people, but that web will also spiral out to infinity if she lets it--so she doesn’t. she has adamantly refused to move out of the mode where she lives present-by-present, only reacting to what is right in front of her, what she has been told, weighing her own life against the people who are closest, and no more. this is unquestionably a trauma response, but it’s also reinforced by 1) her choice to become a career soldier, and 2) the fact that Winter actually HAS quite a bit of power, and she knows that. but she has never trusted herself with any of it, largely because her hypervigilant response to situations has only ever been chastised instead of rehabilitated. Winter knows the weight of her name and her position, but she constantly tries to ignore it, or run away from it, so that she is only ever the heiress, the second-in-command, and never the Queen. she cannot be a leader until she is Good (that is to say, perfect and rational), so she tries to obliterate her power the same time she obliterates that pesky personhood: remaining still for as long as possible, avoiding situations that she knows will prompt action and choice, and when absolutely pushed to think through her power, moving the pieces around with extreme caution, hoping that the world won’t be burnt black by it.

Marrow and Winter are fundamentally at opposing ends of the personal-political bleed, and the story could NOT telegraph it any more clearly than their conversation in Witch, where Marrow makes a personal plea to Winter so that she can make a call far beyond just that, and she refutes him, by reminding him of his obligation to Atlas in the form of impersonal duty.

i’ll conclude by pointing out that there is something very interesting happening with Winter right now, that exceeds her power in-universe. because even as a Schnee, as Ironwood’s protege, what Winter can do is limited (partly because she limits herself), except for how the story has resolutely centered her actions and MADE them significant. in the course of this war Winter has let herself make exactly two choices--both of them noninterventionist, easily justifiable, and not meant to take any ideological stand--and they ended up altering the entire fabric of the war with Salem. all because she loved her sisters more than her duty. all because she was shown a slim chance to save the kingdom and a fourteen-year-old boy, and she thought just for an instant, what’s the harm

(and James Ironwood will never know. that even with his plan, his bomb, all his ships, all his soldiers...he was no match for her. his loyal lieutenant. the only child he will ever have, who has only ever called him “sir.”)

it is not about what Winter COULD have chosen in those moments, if she had the ability to stop Penny and Weiss from leaving, if JYR were even Oscar’s rescuers, in the conventional sense. it is about the fact that she DID make those choices, and the story has made them reverberate, in spite of the fact that she did not mean for them to. Marrow’s story is about being neglected and overlooked by the system, the moment of recognition that it needs you more than you need it, that there are so many more of you, and together you can stop chasing the dream and make your own. Winter’s story cleaves to the heart of not just Atlas, but the RWBY monomyth, which goes something like: stars are like us. the world was created because two brothers could not get along, and sundered because a woman could not cope with her grief. just because you move closer to the elite, to the center, to the top, to the sublime, it does not mean that you move farther from the fallible. we are all, at our deepest layer, people.

but the world does not tremble any less for it.

#winter schnee #marrow amin #rwby #helen writes meta #there is something like. gallingly poetic to the point where it's just shy of kitsch #about the throughline of winter letting penny go and then penny letting emerald go #(and then emerald helping free oscar with JYR and hitching a ride on the other strand winter left trailing behind)#it's not about causation. it's not that simple #it's about the ways that penny is both winter's apotheosis and (dare i say it) mirror #as maidens so often are for each other #so that winter's desperate compromise becomes in penny's hands a transcendent mercy #winter would not have spared emerald. and penny is not there solely because of winter #but they constitute and echo each other even apart in the kingdom of creation #winter might call that being 'human' but penny would call it something else #me yesterday: teehee i think i will make a leetle joke #about how winter has done more for the war effort than ironwood by basically doing fuck all #HOURS AND A ZILLION WORDS LATER #listen. do i regret it? yes. do i wish i'd done something more productive? absolutely. do i wish i could hyperfixate on anything else? ye

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monsterqueers · 3 years

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New Essay Up

New essay up on the website!

props and credit to @shadowfae , whos panel on problematic sources at Othercon 2021 motivated and inspired me to write about morality differences.

Alignments - A Memory Dump Essay

Essay has also been transcribed under this readmore if thats easier to read for anyone.

Morality, in The Before, was different, in the sense that there were Allignments.

I am A Silver Dragon, from a slightly AU-ed Dungeons and Dragons world. Alignments there dictated whether you were good or evil, lawful or chaotic. You may have seen the grid around, the nine squares with things like ‘neutral good’ and ‘lawful evil’ on them. This is that.

When I say ‘good’ and ‘evil’ I mean a different concept than the behavior choices that fall into ‘doing harm’ and ‘helping people’. There were words differing between the two in dragonic, though I do not remember them now, for what I am talking about.

In this world, ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘lawful’ and ‘chaotic’ - the dragonic forms of these words, were not behavior descriptors, nor intention descriptions. They were factions, and many species simply could not choose their born faction or change it very much if they could. These factions were generally due to god interference in the creation of that species, and it meant certain magics worked or did not work against/for them or they had traits that were often seen as harmful. The correct translation for ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is more accurately ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, though lawful and chaotic are close enough to ‘things that follow order’, and ‘things that reject order’.

These alignments said very little about the behavior they exhibited or the morals they had. The dragonic word for ‘evil’ as in how people here use it to mean ‘does harm to others’ could be retranslated as ‘being an asshole’. A person aligned lawful good could regularly commit tax fraud and beat their wife, and a person who was chaotic evil could be a pacifist who gardens and is passionate about healthcare reform.

For some of the littlefolk (the Polite translated dragonic word for humans and elves and the like), this was more flexible, and generally littlefolk would not consider those who did large amounts of harm to their in-group to be good aligned, nor people who had never done harm any worse than neutral, despite this not being the case magically speaking. It could make things rather confusing when talking to the layman, as much of the littlefolk could simply choose whatever faction they liked and often could jump ship whenever they liked too.

There were other various littlefolk somewhat limited in their alignment choice however- a Drow could not be ‘good’, and Aasimir could not be ‘evil’, for example. Usually this was split down the good and evil, rather than lawful and chaotic, as the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ deities held the most active sway.

Think of it like nationality, I suppose. Its the closest equivalent. Some people can't ever gain citizenship in a country other than their country of birth even if they want to, others can do so with a bit of work.

Dragons, however, didn’t have this sort of choice. All true dragons were born a specific alignment to do with their species, and inherent instincts to follow the tenants generally professed by that faction. This is one of the major traits that separated a True -also known as Greater- Dragon from other dragonic creatures, such as fairy dragons, wyverns, and rust dragons, actually. Other dragonic creatures had some wiggle room.

Chromatic dragons were all evil aligned, Gem dragons were all neutral aligned, and Metallic dragons were all good aligned. Planar dragons, while true dragons, were another matter and their alignments were to nothing on the scale as their origin points and commitments were beyond the gods of that my former plane’s influence. Lung dragons were a type of Planar dragon in my canon, instead of their own category.

The individual species of those groupings each had a assigned further spot. A Gold Dragon was ALWAYS Lawful Good, whether they are an abhorrent entity or not, and a White Dragon was always Chaotic Evil.

The individual species were as follows(* for ones that are AU to dnd 5e canon but are true to mine):

Chaotic Evil - Red, Black, Yellow, White

Neutral Evil - Brown, Purple*, Gray

Lawful Evil - Blue, Green

Chaotic Neutral - Topaz, Crystal

True Neutral - Amber, Amethyst, Obsidian*, Prismatic

Lawful Neutral - Emerald, Sapphire

Chaotic Good - Copper, Mercury*, Brass

Neutral Good - Silver*, Iron*

Lawful Good - Gold, Bronze, Platinum*, Steel

So I was and am a Silver Dragon. Bahumat created metallic dragons with the intention of combating His sister Tiamat, who created chromatic dragons in turn. The deities of Law and Chaos- neither touched my kind deeply. We could use all magic aligned with the light or neutral powers, and none of the dark. There was little magic that was specifically aligned with order and chaos, but all of that was accessible, provided the spell was not of the shadow. Things that repelled creatures of the light could keep me out.

The more ‘good’ creatures that existed in the world in relation to ‘evil’ ones brought more and less power to Bahumat and Tiamat in their eternal fight. So long as one ‘good’ or ‘evil’ creature existed, neither god could die and they were driven to wipe each other out. The same could be said of the law and chaos deities.

Of my life, the beginning is murky. Once I was grown enough to roam, I first Adventured with a elven rider companion and then lived upon a mountain lair until my death. Towards the middle and latter end, the towns at its base paid me rites and respect for my guardianship. These rites did technically elevate me to a minor god* capable of working greater magic. I also had a village much closer to and in my lair, one where I took those who asked my asylum who perhaps needed greater safety or guidance.

I would defend my territory and would help those who asked. It was a good life, and I hold little to no exotrauma from it.

*not to be confused with Greater gods, which are what effect Alignment or embody big concepts, minor gods are just those who are Believed in by enough people- and thus given power from that collective Belief

The divide between what was and what is is deeper and more shallow that one would expect, all at once.

I’ve started tentatively identifying as a walk-in relatively recently, my selfhood simply showed up one day and the original, whos interests, opinions, demeanor, and identity was different than mine disappeared shortly thereafter. The system has many theories on how exactly this happened, the origins thus such, and how much of the original’s ego was made into me, and also exactly when. The transition was rather seamless and there was much brain weirdness to muddle it all and convince me that I have always been here. None of us know the answer, and it generally doesn’t matter in practice.

The experiences of the original that I inherited gave a large amount of distance to this life. For reference, I Awakened as a Silver Dragon ~2014 perhaps 2015 -time is muddy- or so- having finally put together all the noema and shifts and assorted feelings that were not my cat theriotype into what they were. I had been in the body for a good handful of years previous to that, however. It gives me a distance from that life. My memories and retained selfhood from that life are dull- a botched reincarnation. I remember just enough- I experience just enough bleedover that it upholds a pillar of my identity and I still identify as the being of that life, but not so much I am exactly as-is.

I want to do a little disclaimer- The statement that this definitively IS a past life and I AM a walk in and these ARE memories of a past life is a theory, not fact. I do not and cannot know if my theory is right, and I have a healthy dose of skepticism in regards to this. My experiences could be sourced to many things, however I experience my draconity in a fashion that is similar to how others describe their past life experiences. It fits accounts better than the accounts of people who are not past-life otherkin. It feels right to describe these experiences as such, and so I do. Perhaps one day my understanding of this may change, but for now it is as such.

Returning to the topic at hand; its a point of frustration to me almost to the point of dysphoria, how good and evil, and moral and immoral are used in society here and how. Good and evil denote both the ingroup-outgroup AND the moral standard, equating sinful with strange with harmful behavior. Evil no longer means ‘entity supporting or created by Tiamat’- who is night and shadow. Good no longer means ‘entity supporting or created by Bahumat’- who is day and light.

The congruence of good with helping and evil with harming is far more intense here, Bahumat and Tiamat as I know them hold no power here- as they shouldn’t. Their place was in my old reality and that is as far as those entities reach. The assignment of moral values to enjoyment of a thing or thoughts, rather than actions is wholly new, and honestly quite unpleasant.

Evil here, becomes ‘entity that enjoys harming’ and often ‘anyone I don’t like’

Good here them also becomes ‘entity that enjoys helping’ and often ‘anyone I do like’

There will be people who insist to ignore people that do that last part and claim that it doesn’t matter- that the social realities of how others assign you do not matter, but I disagree.

Being queer, kinky, mentally ill, neurodivergent, disabled, and a strong leftist among other things means people will think me evil for existing quite a bit. Stigmatized minorities are othered, our traits become evil no matter how kind we may be.

Society calls us evil, has designated us evil- alright, how is this a bad thing?

Disassociating Evil from moral allows one to reclaim Evil. Ok, we are Evil now, but oh, no less kind. No less caring. Take the words slung at you and make armor out of them.

And also no matter how kind you may be, by this metric if you enjoy causing pain and destruction, you are evil.

This… is a thoughtcrime thing. No matter how you conduct yourself in life, if you enjoy pain you are evil to society at large. So as above, unlink Evil from Moral, and it is reclaimable.

How people assign you is a material reality you can choose to make hold no power over you. You can make it your own scales.

It is for the reason of words changing meanings, of the fact that my god I was born to does not reach here and thus frees me from obligations, that I no longer identify as Neutral Good. It simply does not mean the same thing anymore and I can now choose my alignment besides. Bahumat was no terrible god to serve or anything, but I would have appreciated the choice if it was not hardwired into my dragon brain at the time to be devoted to such a being.

I take joy in harm and at the same time take joy in helping, I think the absence of care of society is not something I can do, nor do I think rigid obedience is right.

Thus I would consider myself in the alignments of this world today as True Neutral.

Not to mention I have chosen the service of a True Neutral god in Cernunnos, so by my former world’s standards I am True Neutral now as well.

It feels right, to identify as such now. Society considers me evil enough I am too sin-stained to be good, but I have too much love of creation and helping to be wholly evil.

I believe that rules are necessary or we get Situations that cause harm to others, but at the same time am too Anarchist-leaning to not chafe under absolute order.

Still, the... Dissatisfaction with how people use alignments here persists.

#otherkin #fictionkin #alterhuman #nonhumanity #dragonkin #alterhuman stuff #oh no not me writing stuff to procrastinate on writing other stuff #wayward rambling

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hopelikethemoon · 4 years

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Past Connections (Javier x Reader) {MTMF}

Title: Past Connections Rating: PG-13 Length: 2100 Warnings: Mild Angst Notes: You can find everything about Maybe Today, Maybe Forever here. Set in March 1998. Summary: The second article hits the newstands.

@grapemama @seawhisperer @huliabitch @pedropascalito @rogrsnbarnes @thewallpapergoesorido @twomoonstwosuns @gooddaykate @livasaurasrex @ham4arrow @plexflexico @readsalot73 @hdlynn @lokiaddicted @randomness501 @fioccodineveautunnale @roxypeanut @snivellusim @lukesrighthand @historynerd04 @mrsparknuts @synystersilenceinblacknwhite @behindmyeyes-insidemyhead @exrebelshocktrooper @awesomefandomsunited @ah-callie @swhiskeys @lady-tano @beskar-droids @space-floozy @cable-kenobi @cool-ultra-nerd @himbopoes @findhimfives @pedrosdoll @frietiemeloen @arrowswithwifi @random066 @uncomicalhumour @heather-lynn @domino-oh-damn @cyarikaaa @ahopelessromanticwritersworld @im-still-a-pieceofgarbage @ksgeekgirl @yabby-girl @xqueenofthecraziesx @punkass-potato @coredrive @pascalesque @theduchessofkirkcaldy @queenquazar @sabinemorans @buckstaposition @holkaskrosnou @yespolkadotkitty @fleetwoodmactshirt @seeking-a-great–perhaps

PAST CONNECTIONS SPEAK OUT IN DEA SCANDAL

Following the bombshell report The Post released in the March 2nd issue, the DEA came forward with allegedly incriminating documentation purporting a pattern of unsanctioned expenditures, where Javier Peña had filed expense forms on evenings spent with Colombian hookers.

During our investigative reporting, The Post was able to connect with three of the women who had been paid by Peña, using DEA funds, during his time with the DEA in Colombia.

Elena Ramierz, who was willing to go on record using her own name, was forthcoming with information concerning her time with Peña.

“I would not be where I am today, had I not crossed paths with Javi. He was willing to sponsor my immigration request — without asking for anything in return. Javier Peña is one of the only men I worked with who was a genuinely good man. He cared about all of the girls at the brothels and would look out for us. I cannot, however, say the same about other men who abused the systems the DEA willingly put into place.”

When pressed further, Ramirez went into detail painting a picture of the systemic abuses that were encouraged by the DEA, including but not limited to brutalizing sex workers, non-consensual contact, and intentional situations that led to physical and mental harm. These claims were largely substantiated by the other two women who were willing to speak with The Post.

“He hated what he had to do to get information for the DEA. You could see the weight on his shoulders. Despite the brutal situation he was in, he was always kind and gentle with me and the other girls. Whatever picture the DEA is trying to paint him out to be, it’s to hide their own misdeeds.”

At the request of the DEA, The Post also made contact with Lorraine Jackson (neé Davis) who was the former ex-fiancé of Peña. Jackson, who hails from Laredo, Texas, provided details about the nature of her relationship with Peña nearly thirty years ago. Despite the DEA’s insistence that Jackson’s testimony would be detrimental to Peña and Morley’s case against DEA, her statement was to the contrary.

“Look,” Mrs. Jackson stated, “Javier left me at the altar when we were kids. I was angry for a long time. A long time. Even after I got married and started a family with a truly wonderful man. I was still wounded by what Javier did, but it all worked out for the best. I can’t even imagine what life would’ve been like if he’d shown up. Have you met his daughters? They adore him. He’s a good man, despite what happened between us.”

Mrs. Jackson continued, “When the DEA approached me about our relationship, I let my hurt feelings get the best of me. He made a lot of mistakes when he was younger — but didn’t we all? He left, went to college and came back to work for the Sheriff’s Office. He’d closed himself off and frankly, he was an ass. I don’t pretend to know what happened in Colombia, I wasn’t part of his life then, but I could see he had changed when he came home. The DEA wants to paint him out to be a villain in all of this and that’s just not the case.”

The DEA issued a revelatory statement, rebuffing the claims previously printed in The Post.

There is no doubt that Ms. Morley contributed admirable efforts in the war against Pablo Escobar. As the American people have now seen, her records contain multiple instances where she assisted in the apprehension of multiple associates of Escobar’s.

Despite her efforts, during her tenure with the DEA in Colombia and Ms. Morley failed to uphold the standards expected of a DEA field agent. One year after her transfer, she entered into a relationship with a CIA liaison who was an active member of a joint task force formed by the two agencies. It became clearly, early on, that she was not capable of maintaining a professional work environment.

In 1992, when Ms. Morley revealed that she was pregnant, she was immediately placed on desk duty. During a meeting with her direct chain of command, Ms. Morley intentionally concealed the identity of her child’s father. When questioned about Mr. Peña, she blatantly denied that she had any sexual contact with her partner. The following year, when Ms. Morley and Mr. Peña provided the DEA with the truth, we were forced to terminate her employment for her misconduct.

While The Post may attempt to twist this situation into a gender-based discrimination case, it is abundantly clear that both Ms. Morley and Mr. Peña engaged in unethical practices unbefitting of federal agents.

The Post reached out to CIA Agent, Lance Collier, who Ms. Morley was in a relationship from June 1988 to June 1989, clarified that their relationship had been approved by his director prior to its beginning.

Collier was willing to go on record with a statement of his own, “Annie was one of the hardest working agents I’ve ever worked with. During meetings, I repeatedly witnessed her being ignored and silenced by her superiors. They would ultimately use her knowledge under the guise of their own, intentionally undermining her abilities. On numerous occasions, I was also present for meetings where Javier Peña and Steve Murphy would go to bat for their partner. Annie was well aware of the risk and complications related to being a woman in a male dominated field, and despite that she persisted. I have seen men who acted as bad agents against our government still be venerated, so why are they still punishing her for becoming a mother?”

The Post is dedicated to the continued investigation of this scandal.

————

“You’re brooding.” You told Javier as you shut off the stove and grabbed a trivet to sit the pot of wild rice off the burner.

Javier huffed, folding his arms across his chest as he leaned against the kitchen counter across from you. “I’m not brooding.” He rubbed at the back of his neck before he pushed away from the counter and moved to grab two plates out of the cabinet. “The timing was just less than ideal.”

“I know.” You grabbed an oven mitt and pulled out the pan of chicken patties, sitting it on the stovetop. “I wish Vickers had told us how thorough Valerie was going to be in her statement to the paper.”

“It was fucking mortifying, baby. I don’t know how I’m gonna make it through exams next week. Think it’s too late to make it a paper?” He questioned, grabbing the buns and mayonnaise out of the fridge.

“Unfortunately,” You made a face as you shut off the oven and moved to grab a paper plate to cut the tomato on. “It’ll blow over.”

“Not nearly soon enough,” He shook his head. “You know how much I hate looking back on that shit and now everyone knows my business.”

“It was a risk we were both willing to take,” You reminded him. “Say the word and we pull the plug.”

“I’m not pulling the fucking plug, baby. I’m just saying — did my class really need to know about my exploits with hookers in Colombia? I get that it’s tantalizing, but she pushed it too far.”

“Even Elena didn’t realize how far it would go,” You sat the knife down and wiped off your hands on a dishtowel, turning to approach him. “I’m sure the DEA thought they could put a wedge between us — like I didn't know what you got up to.”

“You talked to Elena today?”

You nodded, “I called to thank her. Her word would’ve been enough I think, but having two ‘Jane Smiths’ reaffirm what she was saying? There’s so much bullshit going on, in the pursuit of stopping drugs that has to end. We both know how they abuse those women.” You reached up and brushed your fingers over his cheek, leaning up on your toes to kiss him.

He snaked his arm around your waist, pulling you towards him. “Think they’ll try to track down Matias next?”

You let out an incredulous laugh at that, “God, I don’t even know what happened to him.” You admitted, “I doubt they’d be able to track him down.” He had been a sweet young man you’d spent a handful of evenings with in the pursuit of intel nearly a decade ago. “It’s not like you don’t know.”

Javier dragged his teeth over his bottom lip and nodded slowly, “It’s just fucking bullshit. Even if it exonerated us.” He sighed heavily, “I should’ve cancelled class. Standing up there trying to keep on topic — knowing they’ve just read an article with three women who I’ve fucked.”

“Technically five.” You pointed, clarifying when he arched a brow. “Elena, Valerie, and Mia, Lorraine, and myself.”

He made a face, feigning disgust before he released you. “I hadn’t realized the DEA would be so determined to punch below the belt.”

“Because bribing Monica to say you’d fucked her was above the belt?” You pointed out as you moved to grab two buns out of the bag, throwing them on the plates and using a spatula to pick up the chicken patties and place them on each bun.

“Alright, alright. You’re making valid points.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “One day the girls are going to see these articles.”

“Then we’ll explain to them that sex workers deserve more praise and credit than they’re currently afforded.” You stated simply, “And that there’s nothing wrong about being sexually active — like we were, before we got together.” You shrugged.

“You wanna have that conversation with them?”

You shrugged, licking your thumb clean after you got mayonnaise on it, “Sure. It doesn’t bother me.”

Javier pinched at the bridge of his nose for a moment before he started plating up his chicken sandwich, “You got cheese?”

“Hang on,” You headed for the fridge, pulling the door open and rummaging around in the deli drawer. “Swiss or cheddar?”

“Do we have any of the pepperjack left?”

You hummed as you pulled open a drawer below, grabbing the bag of pepperjack cheese. “You’re in luck. I hid it the last time Nadia was here.” You tossed it onto the counter beside him, “That girl loves cheese.”

“Monica wasn’t in class today,” Javier stated, throwing two pieces of cheese onto his chicken patty before topping it off with the bun, “Did you hear from her today? I meant to call but got pulled into meetings.”

“I called her this morning at work,” You told him as you stowed the mayo back in the fridge. “She’s still pretty skittish after everything that happened.” You explained, smiling when you returned to your plate and Javier had scooped up a spoonful of wild rice for you. “Thanks, babe.”

He pressed a kiss to your cheek, “Anytime.” Javier gave your ass a playful swat before he headed for the kitchen table. “She’s got office hours with me tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t make a big deal about it,” You cautioned him as you sat down across from him at the table. “Honestly, she seemed fine. She just wanted to skip today.” You took a bite of your sandwich, before washing it down with a swig of beer. “I can’t wait for all of this to be over with.”

“You and me both, baby.” Javier retorted, covering his mouth with his fist as he spoke with his mouth full. “I want them to fucking pay for their bullshit and let us get on with our lives.”

You nodded your head slowly, “Everyone at the P.D. has been so supportive. They’re far from perfect, but they at least recognize what the DEA’s been doing is morally and ethically wrong.”

Javier rocked his jaw slowly as he stared at you across the table, “You still thinking about quitting?”

“All the time,” You admitted with a shrug. “I just want to get through this first. The DEA’s been such a dark shadow for so many years.”

“Once this is over, I feel like we’ll be able to really live.”

“Right?” You agreed with a grin, “Connie thinks we should go on vacation.”

“As soon as this semester’s over.”

You leaned across the table and took his hand into yours, giving it three short squeezes. “There’s a part of me that is stupidly excited about my name finally being attached to yours in the record books. And Steve’s, of course. It’s bizarre to see our lives laid out in the newspaper, but at the same time — I love it.”

“Me too, baby.” Javier grinned at you, “It means no more hiding.”

#javier pena #javier pena x reader #pedro pascal x reader

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