burninbriight

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right now you might be in a situation that you think you won’t survive but six months ago you were in a situation that you didn’t think you’d survive and two years before that you were in a situation you didn’t think you’d survive and the point is you will always surprise yourself and you will always make it through

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Does this story need to be written down? Is it not enough to have it simply live in my head?

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to the people who want to have a conversation about john's being an indigenous man, a māori man, i would like to remind you that the first time we see māori spoke onscreen it goes as follows.

one person in this room is interested in the cultures and languages of the world that came before, to the point her name and mission in life are respectively a human chain reaching back ten thousand years and justice for the destroyed earth: a mission that allowed her to persist beyond death, which brings her to being in control of cytherea the first's corpse. the other is john, who is disinterested in her idea of justice for them and speaks over her multiple times.

that human chain, her name? he doesn't respect it just as he doesn't respect her. this conversation is beneath him and so is her full name. he is annoyed into reciting it.

māori is spoken by john here, and it is spoken with contempt for the woman who wishes to avenge earth and whose name preserved a part of the language that he helped annihilate, along with aotearoa and all other māori people.

the first time māori is spoken in the series it is spoken by an indigenous man—who received an extensive colonial scholarship, who was alienated from his culture and sought respect and recognition in predominantly white academia, who was burned time and time again by the systems of oppression that formed the basis for climate change and the earth's abandonment by the trillionaires—who speaks it with a tone of condescension and a complete lack of gravitas because it is irrelevant to him. genuinely sad, bordering on very funny.

the second instance of māori is when he renames gideon the transliteration of her name into māori. she does not identify with it and she likely does not know its significance.

she is also a corpse: killed indirectly by cytherea the first, who presented a threat to harrow's life that could only be dealt with via her ascension to lyctorhood via gideon's death, who groomed gideon into accepting her role as cavalier primary to harrowhark nonagesimus.

killed by one of the emperor undying's fists and gestures, killed by the ideals of cavaliership which he societally instituted, killed due to cytherea the first's disillusionment with him leading her to go on a killing spree at canaan house in order to gain his attention, killed due to john and john's actions and the systems of the society he created.

the only time we see john use the māori language in a way that isn't dripping for contempt is when he renames his daughter's corpse, wherein he clarifies that she is prince kiriona gaia, heir to the emperor divine and the emperor's only daughter, the emperor's construct.

construct, like the skeletons that farm leeks on the ninth. she is not entitled to resurrection: she is to ownership, to being the ninth's chattel in life and her father's construct in death. he uses the language to declare her his.

gideon is the name of his saint, his oldest friend, spoken by the ghost of the woman that birthed her, to the nuns of her house—kiriona is john declaring a corpse his heir, and his daughter his construct.

there is a conversation i would love to have about john's indigeneity: it's the one where we acknowledge that after wakes death he has preserved the legacy of the māori language by using it to name his daughter, a māori woman killed by his society and the consequences of his actions, something she doesn't feel any connection to.

john is an indigenous man, a māori man, who was born into a land settled by colonisers who rendered it rife with systems of oppression that alienated him from his culture, and led him to fall back on the same systems of oppression when he founded the nine houses. indigeneity describes a relation to colonisation and settler capital, primarily in the form of dispossession; when john declared kiriona his, did he do so as an indigenous man or as the emperor of an empire that ships populations between planets like cattle?

#tlt #tlt analysis #john gaius

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Lover, Lover, Lover - Leonard Cohen; Nona the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir; As Yet Unsent - Tamsyn Muir; Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

#i am so normal #beating myself up with a baseball bat rn #gideon nav #kiriona gaia

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The thoughts I have about John the emperor colonizing space and remaking it in his image giving Gideon a Māori name (and not just a Māori name, but specifically a Christian biblical Māori name) as part of his claiming and remaking of her. Gideon/Kiriona being ethnically Māori ⁠— like, genuinely the daughter of someone ethnically and culturally Māori as that concept exists in the 21st century ⁠— but having no frame of reference for what that means because Māori culture has been dead for 10,000 years and her father killed it and stands as its last survivor. The last living person in the universe to be explicitly canonically Indigenous to Aotearoa gives his daughter a name in its language as a means of staking the flag of his empire on her and enlisting her into its colonial forces. There’s something intelligent to be said here and I’m not landing on it, but it does make me feel insane to think about.

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this happened... trust

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A word from Bisan to the students of the U.S. in their campus solidarity encampments.

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I love the old timey phrase "you forget yourself". bro that was so impolite like do you even know who you are rn

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I NEED TO READ I NEED TO WRITE I NEED TO CREATE I NEED TO DRAW I NEED TO CLEAN I NEED TO WORK OUT I NEED TO LEARN *watches YouTube for 6 hours*

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i don't smoke for the obvious reasons of not wanting to develop an addiction to nicotine but god do i so often feel the emotion 'i need a cigarette'.

#me

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the self care industry will sell you face masks and teas and whatnot so i'm here to remind you not to forget the most important self care activity which is masturbation

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i want so badly to be more offline but alas the siren call of images

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Girl what am I being sold here?

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Everyone wanted to be thicc but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wanted the dad bod but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wants fat mommy milkers but nobody wants mommy to be fat. Everyone wants to be a bear but not like, an actual fat bear. You get what i’m saying

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