#but this is very much a problem with many native american practices too
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Dreaming Of a Grave: Chapter Two
Word Count: 3,190
Pairing: Matt Murdock x Named! Fem! Enhanced! Reader
Warnings: Descriptions of injuries sustained through physical assault (no implication of sexual assault at all, so maybe goons beat reader up in her apartment, but they weren't total pricks about it?), There is mention of a man being a creep towards young girls and physical violence against him because of it, the girls are fine, mention of distrust of police/government, Also I didn't change Mrs. Cardenas' existing dialogue, but for everything I created it's in Spanish, because the broken English being spoken when two other speakers are present and when she understands English just fine and then also being killed off for white male plot reasons... none of that sits right with me, so she speaks Spanish and Foggy is accommodated by Matt and Karen, as is perfectly common in an American setting I feel. I know that it was for an English speaking audience but still, subtitles or something. Also when they address her in Spanish they call her Sra, just because I've never spoke to someone in their native language and used an English title, it just was too weird for me to write it that way idk.
Masterlist
Thank you so much for reading! Any comments or feedback are much appreciated!
Also I am not a native Spanish speaker, I've been studying it for a long time, but I've been practicing French and Arabic more lately, which sometimes are all jumbled together in the Non-English half of my brain, so if you see something wrong or funky, please let me know, I would rather be corrected than go around not knowing, especially since it's my favorite language.
Another person might have struggled to focus when faced with the amount of turmoil that Matt Murdock was currently against. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily for those who cared about him, Matt had been capable of excellent focus ever since he was young. Beyond being able to tune out any extra input or hone in on the important bits, when Matt cared about something, he could drive out everything except for his goal.
His problems with Fisk, the Russians, keeping Claire safe, that could all wait until after work. For now, his attention was locked in on the nervous woman who’d walked into their offices, claiming to have been directed there by Brett’s mother.
Karen helped to translate as Mrs. Cardenas spoke, given her soft voice and more gentle demeanor, Matt felt content to let her do the questioning while he listened in. According to Elena, two weeks ago men came to her apartment building and tore into the walls with sledgehammers, leaving many people without power or water. Their landlord refused to answer them or help, and when they went to the police, they were told that there was nothing to be done, it was an issue for the city to solve.
A whole building of people and families, left completely on their own. They deserved to have hope that justice would be served on their behalf. Nelson and Murdock could give them that, though it may take a few months in the courts.
The case that Mrs. Cardenas had brought them was daunting, to say the very least.
Armand Tully had a reputation as a predatory landlord. His properties were rent-controlled by the city, which was the only protection that tenants had against his greed. Buildings crumbled under his purview. Leaky pipes, faulty wires, and poor security all combined to leave only the most desperate candidates willing to build their lives in his apartments.
Tully presided over another twist in the cycle of poverty, ensuring his tenants had to spend their own money on these repairs and legal fees, money that could’ve been saved to afford a better landlord.
Worse still, no one could fight Tully. He kept barely within municipal code, and allowed other suits to be tied up in civil courts for as long as possible before doing the right thing. Matt and Foggy had detested running into his cases when they were interning, it felt like a betrayal of their roots.
To Matt, Wilson Fisk was like a blackout rolling through Hell’s Kitchen. Even when Fisk wasn't the direct cause, the increasing spread of darkness through the city was emboldened by his mere presence. The worst sides of everyone around him were encouraged, their greed and cruelty nurtured to monstrous levels.
People feared the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen for the pain left in his wake, but he wasn’t the one inspiring lowlifes like Tully to start smashing in the walls of family homes. All for a quick buck and an investment opportunity.
Elena’s voice wavered as she explained that the tenants had exhausted all of the options that they could. They were desperate, and it was a relief for Matt to know that at least he was still capable of making one right decision, it could even be easy.
Talking with Claire had him questioning if he really was doing more harm as the Devil than good, it certainly hadn’t been good enough to help protect her last night. However, if Matt hadn’t decided to leave Landman & Zack, he would be defending an asshole like Tully against a vulnerable woman like Mrs. Cardenas right about now.
Maybe he wasn’t doing the right thing as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, in fact he was pretty sure that he wasn’t, but he couldn’t stop. The work had to be done, and if the city was going to paint people with sin, Matt would prefer it to paint him. If it did, then the people who deserved better could finally have better. Matt Murdock would be there in the daylight, always ready to listen out for the weak, to help them the way that God and his father wanted him to.
Karen walked around the table to offer Mrs. Cardenas a box of tissues. Meanwhile, Foggy was already moving on to next steps, thinking aloud about strategy; “This says Tully offered them 10,000 dollars to give up their rent control and vacate the premises. Maybe we can pressure him into giving a better payout.”
While that’d be the easiest solution, Matt knew before she spoke that Mrs. Cardenas wouldn’t go for it. He could hear her head and gold earrings shake in unison, and a whiff of aerosol hairspray accompanied the resolute motion.
“No, Señor Foggy. We do no want money. We want to stay in our homes,” she pleaded, barely holding back her tears while trying to get them to understand her position. Matt already understood, he wouldn’t want to leave his home either.
Matt remembers when aliens tore a hole in the sky and started smashing Hell’s Kitchen apart— as if anyone could forget something like that. He’d been sheltered with Foggy in their broom closet of an office at Landman & Zack, desperately trying to understand what was happening, worrying about the Nelson’s, and dreading the possibility that he may die before passing the bar. Below the more urgent panic, as the trembling ground and ear-splitting attacks slowed into one of the worst headaches of his life, Matt worried about Hell’s Kitchen, his apartment, if there would be even a scrap of home left to return to.
He had prayed for a long time that day. Just as he was about to reassure her, Mrs. Cardenas took a shaky breath and continued speaking.
“Hay algo más. Los obreros, son solamente un ‘city issue’. Pero, uno de mis vecinos, Ms. Charlotte, ella fue… atacada por ellos.”
“They attacked her?” Karen gasped, pen almost falling from her grip. She and Foggy exchanged a frantic look, and Matt’s back straightened, posture growing as stiff as the curl of his frown.
“Pienso que si, pero no me digas lo que sucedió—”
“She thinks so, but her neighbor won’t tell her what happened,” Karen translated, stumbling over the words a little in her shock.
Mrs. Cardenas grabbed another tissue from the box that Karen had provided for her as she spoke, explaining that she thought that her neighbor had been hurt while standing up to the workers.
With Karen intermittently translating for Foggy, Elena explained that once, an older man had been following some of the building’s young girls home from school. Rumor has it that when Charlotte found out, she began walking home with them to keep them safe. One day the creep dared to say something inappropriate, and Charlotte maced him. She then allegedly stomped so hard on one of his hands that the story says she broke every finger. Allegedly.
He never returned, and she leads a pigtailed parade into the building almost every afternoon.
Elena figured maybe Charlotte had tried to stop the damages, having been one of the only younger adults there that day, working from home. Many of the working tenants were out, leaving only children, older residents, and few others. People had been scared, many of the children down Elena’s hall had gone to hide in her own apartment. Mrs. Cardenas also swore that she’d seen Charlotte injury-free just that morning before the workers arrived.
“La próxima día, la ví en el vestíbulo. Charlotte tuvo moretones en la garganta y las muñecas, y en el pómulo— la piel está rota.” Mrs. Cardenas spat out the list of injuries as if they stung, jerkily motioning to her own body as she spoke. Karen turned her mouth into the palm of her hand and closed her eyes, Foggy looking between her and the stone-faced Matt.
“What does that mean? Guys, what happened?”
Foggy’s question was absorbed into the tense silence of the conference room.
Matt pulled his hands from the table and tightly knotted them in his lap. It was good that his glasses shielded the old woman acrost him from the full force of his glare, Mrs. Cardenas wasn’t the intended recipient of his rage. No, it was someone else entirely that he’d be searching for that night. The Devil had heard its name being called, and wanted nothing more than to punish the kind of worm that would beat a young woman in her own space. His fingers twitched, knuckles turning even whiter from the force of his restraint.
“Seriously, what did she say?”
Sensing the lump in Karen’s throat, Matt took it upon himself to answer Foggy’s question as best he could through the gritted frown on his face. He translated what Charlotte looked like when Mrs. Cardenas saw her in the building lobby the next day, from the bruises on her neck and wrists, to the one on her cheekbone that came from a hit so hard that the skin had split open.
“Jesus, and they still claim that these were contractors? Maybe brutes for hire, but certainly not plumbers.” Foggy scoffed, shaking his discomfort off in the only way that he knew how. Unknowingly, he’d set the Devil to work inside of Matt’s head, achingly familiar with the work of hired goons. Maybe there was more at play here. Or, you could be obsessed and paranoid.
“Did she say anything about what happened? Give some story or excuse?” Foggy asked, leaning in across the table. Karen picked her pen up again, turned to a fresh page of the notepad and copied down the injuries that Elena had described. The gentle scratching filled Matt’s ears as he thought. He arranged a tentative plan of action, the rest of the day could be spent on gathering information, and once the sun had fully set, he’d let the Devil pick his favorite of all the violent thoughts running through his head.
“Excuse? No, no. Ella no hablará con nadie sobre eso. Intenté muchas veces, y nada. Brett, el hijo de Bess, lo vistió, sin uniforme, sin placa. Pero ella, no… no budge.”
Shifting in her seat, Karen turned toward Foggy and Matt, head bowed towards the table as she spoke; “She won’t talk to anyone about it, Brett Mahoney visited without his badge and uniform, but she still wouldn’t explain.”
“Sra. Cardenas, por qué Charlotte no se ha ido a hacer una denuncia? No es ‘city issue’, eso es criminal, asalto con agresión.” Matt asked, wanting to know why an assault charge hadn’t been filed. Were there more cops on Fisk’s payroll then he’d thought? Maybe they’d dismissed the charges to cover up what had been done.
“Si, yo sé, y le dije. Nada.” Mrs. Cardenas spread her hands in defeat as she explained that even though she’d explained this to Charlotte, it had done nothing.
“Mrs. Cardenas, if those men hurt her, why won’t she file a report?” Foggy asked, brow furrowed as he tried to understand this neighbor. There were many reasons why victims of various crimes didn’t come forward, maybe if they could help to ease her fears, then they could move forward with charges.
It would certainly make the civil case more valid if they were also filing criminal charges against the workers.
“Pienso que está herida y tiene mucho miedo. Más por los funcionarios que los obreros. Ella fue tajante, no quiere hacer una denuncia, no quiere hacer nada sobre eso.”
This wasn’t good news for the civil case. Injured and scared, Charlotte wasn’t willing to file a report because she was more afraid of the officials than of the workers returning. She was firm about not doing anything. Matt wondered if someone had already convinced her not to step forward. Like that one scumbag had said, there’s gonna be another light in another window.
“Sra. Cardenas, vamos hacer todo que podamos. Foggy hablará con su abogado de la gentador esta tarde, y hablaré con tu vecina sobre sus opciones para ayuda. Estarámos en contacto.”
It was such a relief to hear that something would be done, to have a plan, and Elena sighed, reaching across to squeeze Matt’s hands, “Gracias, Senor Murdock. Muchas gracias.”
Karen led Mrs. Cardenas out of the office, and Matt explained to Foggy that he was going to be spending his afternoon speaking with Tully’s lawyers on behalf of the tenants.
“Tully’s lawyer?” Foggy asked, exiting the conference room hot on Matt’s heels, “Do you know who reps him?”
Matt grabbed his cane from the corner, not even attempting to hide his laugh before he turned back around, “Yeah, I know.”
“Landman and Zack!” Foggy insisted, arms gesturing at his sides in a way that agitated the air, the smell of anxiety wafting towards Matt. Apparently deciding that Matt didn’t quite get it, Foggy leaned forward, voice straining with hushed emphasis, “Landman and mother-freakin' Zack, man!”
Karen and her soft perfume breezed through the door behind him, having guided Mrs. Cardenas to the taxi waiting for her on the street below.
“Ooh, sounds impressive.” She made her way to her desk with the notes and information from their meeting, “Are they looking to hire?”
“Oh, you wouldn't be happy.” Matt said, gesturing to Foggy with his cane, “We used to intern there.”
“Oh, right.” Karen bobbed forward over the desk, how could she have forgotten about the first thing that Foggy brought up whenever the cooling fall air came in through cracks in the windows, or when the lights flickered, or if Matt breathed too loudly. Karen had made the mistake one of her first mornings on the job of thinking out loud about how nice a bagel would be for breakfast. Matt had groaned from his open office, and before she could ask, Foggy was suddenly opining in the reception space about a place where there were all the free bagels that you could eat, every. single. morning.
Foggy flicked his hands around in annoyance, defeat and coating his dry words, “And they offered us a job, a great job. Which we turned down to go off and save the world. Now they hate us.”
Karen and Foggy shared a smile as he finished his speech, all of them knowing that he wouldn’t change a thing, even for free bagels. As much as he complained about their circumstances, Matt knew that he loved what they were doing, that Foggy wouldn’t have survived long in a place like Landman and Zack.
Letting Foggy in was easy, it was impossible not to really, and staying friends with him was even easier because Matt saw that Foggy was one of those people that was effortlessly good. Unlike him with his devilish shadow, Foggy didn’t have to struggle to make the right choice. Greed and desire could tempt as much as they wanted, he wouldn’t cave, even if he pretended differently. When he knew something was wrong, Foggy Nelson would not do or endorse, and having him by his side always made Matt feel more at ease.
Already, he was moving away from sarcastic complaints, turning back to Matt so they could start working on a plan for how to approach this case. “We'll need to load for bear if we're gonna take them on.”
“I'll hit the precinct to check for complaints against Tully.”
Foggy’s panicked objection was cut off by Karen calling out, “Is that before, or after you go talk to Elena’s neighbor like you said you would?”
He released the hand that he’d had on the doorknob, he’d been so close to leaving. Unfortunately Karen seemed to have her own radar for picking things up, and she wasn’t always keen on offering slack. Matt could sense, but was in no way fooled by the innocent tilt of her head. Beside him, Foggy’s eyes narrowed. Just one step and he’d have been out the door, no such luck.
“After,” Matt nodded, having to accept defeat, “Thanks, Karen.”
“No problem,” she chirped back, mirroring the sarcastic smile that he’d given her. Hands spread between the two, Foggy abandoned his professionalism in favor of once again being annoyed at Matt Murdock.
“Wait, wait, hold on. How is it that I’m going to Landman and Zack, while you go and talk with the damsel in distress?”
It’s not as if Matt could say that he was going to speak with the neighbor not just for the case, but also for an illegal extracurricular activity where he would be using his super senses to try and identify the assailants. Matt sighed, shifting on his feet. Half-truth it is.
“Well, from what Mrs. Cardenas described, it seems like the only way that Ms. Tanner would answer the door for a man in a suit is if he looked like he needed help. What was it that you call it again?”
Foggy threw his head back, groaning for a long moment before facing Matt again. Though his face spelled his disapproval, his eyes shone with the reminder of their first meeting and love for his friend.
“The ‘wounded duck’, you’re gonna wounded duck yourself.” Foggy said, one hand on his hip and head bobbing. His free hand leveled an accusatory finger at Matt. “I swear she better not be hot, because this is becoming cosmically unfair. You need a new phone for all of your girls, and now I’m going to play chum while you’re off being a hero.”
“Chum?” Matt laughed, hearing Karen tilt her head in confusion, before her hair rustled with a shake and she focused back on organizing the new files. There were maybe three whole files in the whole cabinet, but Matt could hear her moving them around repeatedly on slow days. So, almost every day.
“Yeah, chum!” Foggy burst out, leaning forward to hiss out a plea to Matt, “I can't go to L and Z alone. They're gonna shark attack me, Matt. Look at me, I'm delicious.”
“Well, take Karen.” Matt said through his chuckling, pointing over at the woman who had been trying to mind her own business.
“I-I mean, yeah, if she wants to.” Foggy stumbled and shrugged, taken completely unaware by Matt’s suggestion. His heart raced despite the way that he was trying to play it cool, and Matt fought off a smirk.
“Oh,” Karen straightened with her own surprise at the action, before tossing her hands up. “Sure. Never seen sharks feed up close before.”
Matt chuckled as they all prepared to leave the office, “Try not to splash too much. It attracts 'em.”
“You both are so funny.” Foggy huffed in mock despair as he turned to grab a coat. The two just laughed louder. “That piece of notebook paper on the door has my name on it first, you know. Which means that only one of you is allowed to mock me at a time.”
Already out in the hall, Matt called over his shoulder, “Of course, that’s why we were taking turns.”
“Oh wounded duck off, Matt!” Foggy cried, and the laughter of his friends followed Matt all the way down the stairs and out onto the street.
#matt murdock x reader#daredevil x reader#daredevil x y/n#daredevil#slim ficc#matt murdock#dreaming of a grave#doag#daredevil x you#daredevil fanfiction#matt murdock x enhanced!reader#matt murdock x you#matt murdock fanfic#matt murdock fic#daredevil x female reader
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Christianity and Christians are weird and I have a negative opinion on it/them. Here is an essay of a ramble about it.
Christianity as a faith is not inherently problematic or wrong. It teaches the principles of Christ, and some of the most notable of those principles being to love each other and be unified. And that, in it of itself, is a perfectly understandable thing to believe in. Hell, I believe in that too to some degree. I think we should care for each other and "love thy neighbour." Biologically and according to the Theory of Evolution, that also makes sense. Humans are social beings, so it would make sense that Christianity (and by extension most religious practices) include being compassionate or good to others.
But then we add the, ahem, human aspect of Christianity into the mix. Humans, inherently, are messy. We make a lot of mistakes, we do a lot of really bad and really good shit. And there have been some really bad people throughout history. And a lot of these really bad people were and ultimately still are power-hungry dragons who like to hoard gold. And people like that fear losing that power.
And, I can't help but notice, there have been a LOT of Christian atrocities committed against people who were not Christian. The entire history of Colonisation is inherently linked with Christianity. Maybe not what Jesus intended for humanity, but people have been twisting the "word of God(s)" since "the word of God(s)" has been a thing. The slave trade was explicitly established and defended through religious reasoning.
So over the course of 2000 years, Christians went from being martyrs and persecuted to being those who persecute and condemn. Entire cultures have been erased or nearly erased thanks to Christian influence. And the only reason this can happen is because of something called proselytising.
For those who don't know what proselytising means, it's the process of attempting to convert someone from one set of beliefs to another, especially in a religious context. And Christians love to proselytise. Like... a lot. They also love forced conversion, so that's also a plus (sarcasm heavily implied.)
Examples would be... the persecution and Forced conversion and murder of Jewish people throughout all of the CE, persecution and forced conversion and murder of Pagans, persecution and forced conversion and murder of LGBT+ people, persecution and forced conversion and murder of Native Americans, persecution, forced conversion and murder of Africans/Indians/and honestly every single British colony (former or current), persecution, forced conversion, murder of Indigenous people... Hell, even other Christians persecuting, forcibly converting and murdering other Christians.
Mind you, the point is not to make current Christians who don't do this shit feel bad, it's to point out the very real realities of your religion's history and why so many people like me have an issue with it.
(Lighthearted:) And I'm also not saying that other religions don't have similar histories, because yeah duh no shit. Don't derail my criticism of Christianity and Christians you dingus, let me finish my essay!
But then we get to the minutia of why so many people like me have a negative relationship with Christianity. There's a more sinister aspect to Christianity that I think a lot of westerners tend to... overlook. And that's mostly because we live in a society where Christianity is the dominant religion.
Proselytising, as a concept, is incredibly insidious. One of the core and often less frequently talked about issues about Christianity is that the way Christians go about converting people to their religions is incredibly manipulative. Missionaries are an especially scummy thing because missionaries travel to places where people are struggling and don't have much, and use those moments in people's lives to convert them, promising things like "God will set you free" and "you will go to Heaven if you convert."
And the problem is that Christians don't view this as negative. They don't see it as manipulative because in a Christian's mind, it's the truth. To them, God is the ultimate daddy and whatever he says goes and he is everything that is good about life. Christians live to serve God, and according to the Bible, God wants others to convert to Christianity.
Christianity promises things like "once this life is over, you will go on to the next life and be always happy" and in a vacuum that sounds appealing, but it also sounds really cult-y. Why is it cult-y? Because it sounds like promises that are too good to be true. It sounds like something people say to a) justify their converting and b) convince people to join a group. And a lot of Christian religions have had people in power who wanna abuse and control people. And to me, this all reads like a method of controlling a population.
Christians are not encouraged to question their holy texts, Christians are not encouraged to have discussions with others outside of their faiths, Christians see themselves as right and everyone else is wrong. And when you are discouraged from questioning and discussion, you have a recipe for a docile and controlled population.
Do I think all Christians wanna control people? No, of course not! That would be silly. A lot of Christians genuinely do believe they are serving god and that they are good people. And to me, that's not really a comfort. That's horrifying because it implies that they view the forced conversion and murder of minority groups and non-Christians as a good thing. Which they do.
And some Christians are not like that. Some Christians actually do follow the tenets of their beliefs. Some Christians are pro-choice, pro-LGBT+, pro-POC rights, pro-protecting disabled and impoverished groups of people. And these are Christians who I respect.
But it still feels incredibly weird because while it may offer people comfort, it's not proven. God hasn't ever been scientifically proven to be real and even in philosophical thought there is a lot of people who don't see there even being a god. Obviously if you genuinely believe you are doing good in the world, then you won't see it like how I do.
And, obviously, not all Christians are bigots. Not all Christians hate the gays or the transes. But we as LGBT+ people who have been persecuted by Christians, are not fond of them or their faith because of the pain it's caused us. Some of us are definitely theists and still believe in God, just a healthier version of God and Jesus, and some of us, like me, completely reject Christianity as a result.
But imagine being in my shoes for a moment. You are 13 years old and you are in a classroom with a religion teacher who is a priest who tells your class that being gay is a sin and is immoral. Imagine you, as a gay child, are the only one to stand up and leave the classroom. And as you leave, you are told "you cannot deny it." Imagine sitting in the hallway, tears streaming down your face as your music teacher tries to comfort you.
Imagine telling your parents this happened and for them to take no action because kicking up a fuss would be a "waste of time." Imagine being told to "hide who you are because you could get beaten or killed." Imagine being asked if you are bisexual in a girls locker room and you lie to them because you are scared of being further bullied and harassed.
Imagine having your name be the subject of scorn and mockery because none of your teachers want to respect your chosen name and want to pretend it's because of "legal reasons" when the teachers in the USA had no problem with using my name.
Imagine being told that you are overreacting because you are scared of your friends and fellow LGBT+ people being raped, beaten or killed by those who hate them. Imagine being called a "groomer" because you just want to live your life as a trans person without some asshole harassing you for using a bathroom. Imagine thinking about killing yourself because you are terrified of the world you live in because people want you to die based off of something you cannot change about yourself.
If you can imagine any of this, then welcome to a small fraction of my life as an LGBT+ person.
But I also didn't reject Christianity because of identity, no no no, I also just... am an atheist. I don't see any rational or logical reason for there to be a god or for one or many to exist.
And the worst part about is that I know how Christians will react to this post. They will say or think "I will pray for you to realise the error of your ways" because they think I'm wrong. They don't want to question anything they are taught and as soon as someone does so, their reflex is to deny and say shit like "I will pray for you" because it's their only recourse. To them, I'm wrong and I will always be wrong and I'm a sinner who needs to be saved.
But here's the thing - I don't want your empty words or your empty love. What I want is for you to just leave people alone. Stop persecuting and targeting people based on the mistranslations of a book that was written 2000+ years ago by many different authors.
But I doubt what I say will change your mind or make you reconsider because, again, you think I am wrong and a sinner and someone who needs to be saved by God. Sweetheart, if I'm gonna believe in god(s), it sure as hell ain't gonna be the one y'all pray to.
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Watched "Prey" and I have Thoughts™
Writing felt a little cliche in places, though there were enough bits of imagery and thought that in hindsight I don't mind them too much. (The orange herb did seem to strain credulity, but I don't know enough about North American native flora to dispute)
Some excellent visual symbolism in places. In particular the Predator's footstep over Naru's and the shot of Naru walking against the flow of women.
I appreciated the effort to show feminine work as useful and valuable to the tribe -- I feel like many "woman rejects feminine work" stories often implicitly denigrate feminine work, and that Naru uses her experience with feminine gathering and medicine to save a person, as well as gain an advantage over the Predator.
Relatedly, I appreciated the scenes of the Comanche using their environment to make tools. It was excellent to see the competence on display utilizing their environment as their personal toolbox, and the experience and tradition that goes into that competency.
The subtitles we had labeled the Comanche whooping as "ululation", which I thought was powerful. The word "ululation" comes from a Latin onomatopoeia describing a certain sound people would make, though I can't recall in what context. It feels important and powerful to me to connect these Comanche whoops, a culture often denigrated, with those of the prestigious Romans.
The "Beat... reload the muskets" shot was very funny. (Also sparked a conversation about just how fast a practiced musket wielder could reload that thing, which is always fun)
The difference between the French camp and night and at day was very good. Leaving aside how such an effect can happen in real life, it felt like a good way to show Naru's relation to that camp
It was cool to see a less advanced version of the Predator in this film. One with a cool arsenal on top. It feels like science fiction often neglects to have technological -- and especially aesthetic -- changed over long periods of time, as if a culture can just remain static for a millennium or more, so it's nice to see how different the aesthetics and arsenal of the Predators changes over 250 years. (This is also a problem I have with most fantasy media -- writers, please at least cut your timelines down by an order of magnitude, or at least study how long historic civilizations tended to last, but I digress)
THE BUFFALO SCENE. This was beautifully loaded with meaning: the waste on display to a woman who's probably thinking how all those corpses could have fed her whole tribe through the winter, if not longer, if she'd found them sooner; the red herring to first time viewers that the Predator had done this; the brief death ceremony Naru performs out of respect for this highly important, possibly sacred, animal; the way that combined with the rattlesnake earlier that the film connects the Predator with the French trappers (and not in a way that's particularly flattering to either); and the imagery reminiscent of the buffalo massacres of the 19th century. I almost want to call it the heart of the film, it was so heavy with meaning.
Sarii is best dog
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not-fun news about Roe vs Wade
yeah, so it is pretty inevitable that I heard about the news in my gloriously dysfunctional dwelling-place, the USA.
Current mood is “frantic internal screaming,” but I’m also ruminating on precolonial Philippine culture.
Under the “read-more” bit for both the obvious reasons of “talking about abortion,” and for colonization.
Honestly, anyone who reads my other blog would know I talk about being Filipino and colonization ALL THE TIME, but in case new folks have noticed: HI, THIS IS EVEN LESS FUN THAN YOU THINK.
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When the Spanish came to the Philippines, they CONSTANTLY threw a hissy-fit about how natives would abort unwanted fetuses like, all the time. Because they had PREMARITAL SEX, or THEY FELT LIKE LIVESTOCK HAVING TOO MANY CHILDREN, or because TOO MANY KIDS AREN’T GOOD FOR A REGION THAT WIDELY PRACTICES GAVELKIND / PARTITIVE INHERITANCE AND SPLITS UP THE PARENTS’ POSSESSIONS, or because THEY JUST DIDN’T WANT TO BE PREGNANT, AND ABORTION WASN’T STIGMATIZED.
And like, they mutated our folklore of the tiyanak--going from a fairly neutral “the souls of dead children have potential to be corrupted into demons if they cannot journey safely through the afterlife,” to “ABORTED FETUSES WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT THEIR CRUEL MOTHER FOR DEPRIVING THEM OF LIFE!!!” specifically to push their pro-birthing agenda.
And modern Filipinos are widely known to be extremely Catholic, and to have an extremely rampant teenage-mother problem.
Like, as an adult who lives in this hellhole because my parents swallowed the “American Dream” propaganda, because their homeland was destabilized and colonized LIKE FUCK by ‘Murica itself, one of the few things I sort-of-maybe liked about living here is that 1) we have many contraceptives to avoid unwanted pregnancies here, and 2) most options are AFFORDABLE.
Birth control is $20-50 per month. Condoms are like fifty cents each.
Plan B and other morning-after pills cost around $10-70 if those two methods fail, and you caught it early.
The ultimate safety net of getting a first-trimester abortion, in case even Plan B doesn’t work? $400-500.
I can pay that. It’s one of my paychecks for the month, and aftercare for my “late period” would be another few days of lost pay, but if I had to? I would do it ASAP.
So like, the Spanish talk so goddamn much about how the godless heathen islanders ran around doing abortions all the time, but they obviously didn’t say too much about what methods we used, or any ingredients for medicine, and it’s just such a contrast to the Philippines in year 2022, when sex is barely discussed; my very traditional mom, for example, told me “I don’t mind what you do, just don’t get pregnant,” and that’s it.
I hear sexual education in the Philippines is having trouble because the sex-ed teachers, who are grown adults, are still overwhelmingly Catholic and are often uncomfortable talking about the thing they were hired to teach.
And it’s like, many people here in ‘Murica are talking about “OMG, WE’RE GOING BACK TO THE 1950S!” or “IT’S LIKE THE HANDMAID’S TALE HAPPENING IN REAL LIFE!!!” but people have noted that “dystopia fiction is what happens when terrible societies happen to white Europeans, instead of the Black and Brown colonies they’ve subjugated.”
You want to know a place where abortion is illegal, and THERE’S NO EXCEPTIONS? The Philippines, that’s where.
And like, sometimes I think about my decision to not go into medicine because 1) I don’t do well under pressure, and 2) I especially don’t do well if people are in distress or physical pain, and 3) I don’t want to be another Filipino nurse who went into medicine for financial stability, instead of doing what I actually wanted, but with one of my urban-fantasy stories revolving around “medieval nobility had the ‘glamorous' daily job of doing mountains of paperwork and funneling supplies where needed,” logistics is constantly on my mind.
Plan B is often good for up to FOUR YEARS, and I am already thinking of buying a few packs of Plan B and privately telling folks, “hey, if something goes wrong, I have Plan B.”
And then comes the simmering rage because I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT FRANTICALLY HOARDING MEDICATION, BECAUSE A PERFECTLY GOOD LAW IS IN TALKS TO GET REVOKED BY CHRISTIAN FANATICS.
I also have a bad feeling that gardeners will start looking up herbs for OLD FASHIONED abortions, and um... I really hope not.
Sometimes herbal remedies don’t work, but the abortifacients that DO work are notorious for being EXTREMELY TOXIC TO PEOPLE, so the way they get rid of the fetus is by “poisoning you JUST enough that your body panics and miscarries, but not making you sick enough to die or have lasting fertility issues.”
Like, say... Lysa Arryn from Game of Thrones.
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final thoughts: sophie's world
so i ended up staying up late last night and powering through the last few chapters. i wanted this shit done!! getting a new gig slowed me down and it was beginning to frustrate me, so i guess i just expended all of that energy in one go. i think that's the fasted i've read something in ages honestly lmao
anyway i quite liked the book. the ending was more or less satisfying to me, though i was expecting that with how much emphasis was placed on that "magic" mirror, they would actually do something with it. if you mention the gun it has to go off and whatnot. all that talk about the mirror being some kind of "portal" and how the mirror functioned as a symbol connecting sophie and hilde and then in the end they didn't even truly connect with each other through it. idk why the author went with the boat instead honestly. it wasn't bad, but it just made me shrug unimpressed-like.
i found the prose too juvenile for my taste, but while it was pretty distracting in the beginning, i did get used to it quickly and it didn't pose much of a problem. the translation, though, was incredibly awkward. it felt like a random mish-mash of of dozens of english dialects: the general spelling conventions were american, but there were so many instances of words and phrases being dialectically non-american or straight-up stilted and non-english (i.e. there are set phrases and translations we use for certain things, and the translator inexplicably used something else instead). it was only after i discovered the translator, too, is norwegian that i realized what was going on. it does seem like yet another case of "you probably should only translate into your native language(s)" that seems to prove the rule more than being an exception. i was very unimpressed with the tl, and when i noted errors (small, like grammar or punctuation, or large, like claiming the surrealists did "automatic writing" instead of the aforementioned romantics) i found myself doubting the translator over the author. i'd like to get my hands on the original norwegian to check myself tbh.
i did think the book did a good job of presenting its information. it's both informative and engaging, and because the novel is aimed at kids, it makes the dense subject a lot more digestible. which was great for me, since philosophy texts tend to make my brain melt out my ears—i'm glad it wasn't fucking heidegger all over again, jesus christ.
but again i'm still bothered by the fact that it claims to be a history of philosophy, but it only actually covers european philosophy, and staggeringly so. maybe it's a marketing error, but that does rub me the wrong way. i was looking forward to getting more broad insight to far-eastern philosophies or even buddhism or schools of thought in the islamic world and so on. outside of asian religions, i don't actually know where to start research on this, and i certainly don't have the foundation in philosophy required to easily connect and weave all of the philosophies together the way this book did, so i was pretty disappointed when it finally sank in that this novel would only cover europe's philosophical background.
i think some of the eras were glossed over way too quickly though. i already mentioned my disappointment in the enlightenment, but the modern era was really lacking too. i'm pretty sure nietzsche deserved more than one sentence dedicated to his ideas considering his impact. if sigmund freud and charles darwin can have whole chapters dedicated to their decidedly not philosophical practices of psychology and biology i really think nietzsche can get more than "he said god is dead" and then moving on. obviously i get why setting the context for the shifting european order is important; darwin and freud needed to be explained. but why dedicated a whole chapter to each of them and then leave out very important actual philosophers like nietzsche or camus or voltaire or montesqieu (and et cetera et cetera). it feels poorly planned in the second half of the book and it was pretty frustrating.
but the way each philosopher (that gaarder did give time to) was presented in an engaging and digestible way. i like that there were seemingly certain criteria that had to be covered with each one; the notes i've been taking are in the form of a chart with headings for those criteria. it brought up elements of each person's philosophy that i never would have thought to look into on my own (namely, personal views on god (or "god") and the soul).
and the way the book presented these philosophies as a never-ending back and forth between history, a game of tug of war, a series of theses and antitheses and syntheses and so on, was really clever. it's the exact kind of understanding and context i try to create for myself when i study history; the cyclical nature of humanity is important to understand imo. it helps you find patterns in our current world and it presents options and solutions tried by our predecessors, and it gives a warning about what happens when the pendulum inevitably swings back in the other direction. this book gave a great purview of these patterns and i really appreciate what it set out to do—in the end the individual philosophers weren't as important as the changing social, economic, and cultural climates through the ages. and in that regard i think gaarder did a pretty good job of accomplishing what he set out to do.
i do feel like it gave me a solid foundation for understanding the development of european philosophy from the last 3000 years, so despite my criticisms i'm really happy i read it. it satisfied almost everything i was looking to gain from it, and that's pretty awesome! i don't think it was amazing or perfect, far from it, but for what it offered it did do a pretty good job. i feel more confident that i can go and read the works mentioned in the book and understand the philosophical and historical context in which they were written—and i feel more confident that i can go and research underrepresented philosophers like nietzsche or voltaire and be able to follow along with their projects without struggling too much.
so with that said, i'm finally going to reread candide. i remember liking it when i read it in high school, and watching a lecture series on unbelief made me remember (or realize?) that the book is a scathing critique on the church, so i'd like to revisit that as my current, enemy-of-the-church self and see for myself. honestly after reading sophie's world, what i really want to do is pick up another nonfiction book, but while i'm reading east of eden simultaneously i think i should stick to lighter reads, lest i fall to the same mistake i made trying to read carry the wind (which i've shelved for the time being, because it's too dense and textbook-like to serve as a refreshing alternative to steinbeck; i'll try to pick it back up maybe once i've finished eoe). so i'm excited to get through candide! it's a short read, so i don't think it'll pose too many problems for me (or if it does, the problems will be short).
#liveblogging: sophie's world#thank god i'm finally done. i'll finish writing out all my notes for the book this weekend bc i'm still busy with this job until friday#.txt
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The First Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone books 1-3
Book 1: The First Mountain Man
This one has been on my list for a while.
This book follows a Mountain Man in the days of westward expansion. Our main character Preacher thinks that it is 1837. He's also pretty sure that his fur trapping days are about over, as the trade is slowing down. He has to figure out what to do next, but is in no real hurry. He leads a solitary life in the moutians.
While pondering this, he comes upon a wagon of settlers (called pilgrims or movers throughout the story). They are Missionaries separated from their wagon train heading west to Oregon.
I'm not great with geography but I think they are somewhere around South Dekota/, Wyoming when Preacher finds them. Preacher promises to get the missionaries to the nearest fort and then he plans to leave.
Of course, to do this he must keep them all alive which is a complicated task considering that 1. All but one of the missionaries (a practical-ish lady named Melody) don't think all that much of Preacher. 2. They had a guide before they got lost that seemingly had no idea what he was doing. 3. Preacher manages to really really piss off Bum Kelly and his gang of outlaws.
He eventually gets the four of them to the fort and reunited with what was left of their train,and ends up getting roped into getting them all to Oregon.
Preacher and a few of his fellow Mountain Men take up this challenge.
Adventure and a lot of shooting commences
Book 2: Blood on the Divide
In this one, Preacher come across a settlement in the middle of the wilderness. He notices that the Pardee Brothers a family of outlaws are casing the place.
He warns the settlers they don't really listen and Preacher comes back to a massacre. Two women and about 10 kids survived. Preacher helps them get to a safe place. He is fairly certain that they are all going to head back east.
Well, they don't. They join up with a train heading to the coast and preacher finds out that they had been hoodwinked by a snake oil salesman, who told them that he would set them up to head west safely, only to essentially leave them more or less lost.
Once again, Preacher and some of his friends help the movers make it to their goal. While this is happening, they are also hunting the Pardees to avenge the settlers that they killed.
Book 3: Absorka Ambush
This time Preacher is hired by the government to get a train of 160 women from Missouri to the coast where men in need of wives are.
He weedles some of his friends into the job, and the moutan men must also work with a portion of the army who is seeing this through.
Preacher must help these women, get trail ready and get them to the Pacific.
The problem is, a huge train of women seem like an easy target for hostiles.
It's interesting, my friends seem to think that westerns are racist stories, and, honestly I have not come across that. In these books, all people are treated as being capable of good or of evil no matter who they are. Also, it is said and shown many times that there are far more good people than bad. Preacher and the other Mountain Men are friendly with a lot of the Native Americans and they respect each other. Preacher says, that the Native Americans aren't bad, their way of life isn't wrong, it's just different. And he walks the walk too. He has learned the culture of many of the different tribes and feels that their way of life, of living with the land and the elements rather than trying to make both bend to their will is a better way to be in the wilderness.
The pilgrims are threatened much more by outlaws and within their own ranks than by anyone else.
The language used is harsh, but you have to consider the setting, course that doesn't mean that I would blame anyone for noping out of this series because of it.
These books are also pretty gritty in that they are very much like the few spaghetti westerns I have seen (such as the original Django). There is a lot of killing, both by the bad guys and the good guys. Preacher is sort of like a wild west Punisher.
Rape is featured a lot, and it did get to the point where it was making me grit my teeth. The difference between this and say, Outlander, is that it happens off stage. The reader hears about and sees the aftermath. This narritive distance makes it feel *slightly slightly * less gratuitous, as in it doesn't feel like it's meant to invoke shock, only that you are meant to understand just how loathsome and evil the men that Preacher tracks down and kills really are. I don't *like* the use of rape as a plot device, especially having it feature three books in a row, it feels lazy. I feel the same way when detective books make it happen in every book.
Despite the problems, I did enjoy these books. I like the characters, and the descriptions of the settings are lovely. Also there is something about reading about a character who successfully avoids people, not because of any self imposed punishment, but because he just likes being alone, that is very relaxing for this introvert working customer service.
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When foodies sink their teeth into a slab of cheese from one of the historic dairy farms in Point Reyes, California, their minds probably run to grass-fed cows ranging free on the lush green oceanside hills of Marin County. Over 5,000 dairy cows and beef cattle roam the Point Reyes National Seashore National Park in full view of visiting tourists. Unlike the many dairy and meat companies that slap happy animals on their labels while sourcing their product from hellish factory farms, the dairy and beef farms at Point Reyes represent an agrarian ideal of ecologically and ethically sustainable animal agriculture.
“Pasture-raised” and “extensive” or “regenerative” grazing have been watchwords in the American foodie community since at least the 2000s, when celebrated food writer Michael Pollan presented sustainable, nonindustrial practices as a way out of the ethical morass of the American food system in his award-winning bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Everyone from progressive agrarians to libertarian ranchers to multinational food companies, and even conservation NGOs such as the Audubon Society, has thrown their weight behind the idea of replacing mass-produced meat, from chickens to ungulates, with a holistically raised alternative. While some environmentalists reject beef altogether for its contribution to climate change, pollution, and deforestation, proponents of free-ranging beef have rallied under the motto, “It’s not the cow; it’s the how.” They argue that, done properly, pasture-raised cattle can replace the ecological functions of wild ruminants like elk and bison, produce food on “marginal” land that would otherwise be wasted, and eliminate beef’s carbon hoofprint (since well-grazed land can sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide). This would mean consumers could stick it to Big Ag, fight climate change, and help imperiled animals and ecosystems without actually changing their diets too much; they’d just need to eat a bit less meat and pay a bit more for the grass-fed option.
Whether these promises hold up under scrutiny is a subject of fierce debate. And in recent years, a series of lawsuits have argued the opposite thesis: that even “regenerative” cattle imperil the very ecosystems proponents claim they will “regenerate.”
This past June, the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic, on behalf of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and a number of individual plaintiffs, filed suit against the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, which manages Point Reyes National Park, alleging that cattle ranching is endangering the iconic tule elk.* It’s not the first such lawsuit that has been filed over the past decade against the NPS to stop alleged environmental damage from Point Reyes cows.
The National Park Service leases parkland to a number of “historic” cattle and dairy farms, which it has done since the park’s creation in 1962. The elk, native to the region but driven to near-extinction by hunting and human activities such as ranching, are protected by a 1976 federal conservation law and were reintroduced to the park in 1978. But to keep the elk from competing with cattle for forage and water, the NPS erected fences that confine the elk to select corners of the park with limited water and forage. This confinement has proved fatal during droughts. Drought in 2013–2014 led to 254 elk deaths. A current drought has already killed over 150 elk, a third of the once 445-strong herd that inhabits Tomales Point, all just a stone’s throw away from thriving commodity cows. Ranchers have even pushed for the right to cull elk outright to keep their populations in check, in part because they have also killed off the natural predators that would do so in a healthy ecosystem. The Harvard suit alleges that “the Tule elk are continuing to die horrific and preventable deaths” in clear violation of federal law.
Prior to the twentieth century, the tule elk were an important part of the Pacific coastal ecosystem and a major component of the diet of the Coast Miwok tribe, the native peoples who lived there. In fact, the NPS concedes that the region’s characteristic hilly grasslands were “the byproduct of burning, weeding, pruning and harvesting for at least two millennia by Coast Miwok and their antecedents.” These grasslands made a juicy target for white settlers arriving in the middle of the nineteenth century. They brought cattle with them, plundered the Coast Miwok lands, hunted large predators and elk to near-extinction, and then grazed their cattle on the hills instead. The intertwined processes of colonial and ecological displacement have continued into the twenty-first century: In 2015, the NPS balked at a proposed “Indigenous Archaeological District” that would have protected Coast Miwok heritage sites from damage from ranching. Even as it did so, it quickly approved a “Historic Dairy Ranching District,” over and against Miwok protests. Today, many Coast Miwok are opposed to the rancher-backed plan to fence and further cull the elk. “The Park Service proposal to shoot indigenous tule elk and promote ranching that harms wildlife, water and habitat is a travesty and contrary to the traditions of our ancestors,” Jason Deschler, dance captain and headman with the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin, wrote this summer in a statement opposing the cull.
The cows at Point Reyes don’t just compete with the elk. They also defecate about 130 million pounds of nitrogen-rich manure a year, which leaches into the soil and streams and ponds of the area. An NPS-funded study suggested that removal of the cows would benefit numerous native species, including butterflies, seabirds, frogs, and salmon. And yet the same study recommended the expansion of ranching. As a damning investigative report into the issue in the Marin County Pacific Sun suggests, the ranchers and dairy farmers have urged pliant politicians, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, to “pressur[e] the Park Service to prioritize the preservation of private ranching profits over environmental concerns.”
Point Reyes is a microcosm of a much broader anti-wildlife bent in American ranching, regenerative and otherwise. To protect their cows from predators and disease, or simply to ensure that they have access to food and water, ranchers across the country have supported wolf hunts, vulture and wild horse culls, and the deployment of cyanide bombs. It is difficult to count the number of wild animals killed in the service of ranching interests by government bodies like the Agriculture Department’s secretive Wildlife Services, the Bureau of Land Management, and various state-level farm bureaus, but about a million animals per year is the federal government’s own estimate.
Unlike wild animals such as elk, ranched cattle are commodities in a global market. And the goals of commodity production run directly counter to those of a functional ecosystem. In the wild, ungulates like bison or elk range across vast swathes of land, serving all sorts of ecosystem functions just by living: rooting, trampling, defecating, dying and decomposing, serving as food for predators and carrion birds and insects, nourishing other animals and the soil in death as their hooves did in life. Commodity production, be it conventional or regenerative, removes animals like cows from this web of life, using fencing and predator extermination to protect grazers from harm so that they can be profitably sold. In place of that natural web, ranching also requires an economic and material infrastructure to breed, manage, slaughter, process, and transport cattle as they are transformed into beef or milked. Even with the best of ecological intentions, ranchers who want their business to survive must build and maintain that infrastructure according to commercial principles.
The capitalist assumptions pervading these enterprises are clearest when regenerative proponents promise to be able to extract food from so-called “marginal” lands. Conventionally defined, “marginal land” is land that has little current agricultural or industrial value, often because of poor soil, water resources, or climate conditions. What ranchers mean is that grazing cattle can extract value, in the form of commoditized beef, from dry, rocky, difficult to access lands. Of course, such lands are only “marginal” from an instrumental, Lockean view that all land must be worked to create value. But from a biodiversity and ecosystem health perspective, so-called marginal lands can be thriving, biodiverse habitats for myriad flora and fauna, which can be disrupted by the introduction of grazers.
Historically, even land that is home to human beings has been deemed “marginal” if its value cannot be commoditized. As historian Joshua Specht shows, ranchers have historically been the spear tip of settler colonialism in the American West. They often used the pretext of “waste” and “emptiness” to violently uproot Indigenous lifeways and ecosystems and replace them with “productive” commercial ranching. The Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin linked that history of dispossession to the plan to cull the elk in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, describing it as “a travesty … that perpetuates a long legacy of harm inflicted on Native People by the National Park Service.”
The idea of converting “marginal” or unused land is basically a promise to produce something from nothing. All too often, that simply means that the costs are hidden. Increasingly, environmental research suggests that while introducing grazers to marginal lands can be economically generative for those who own the grazers, it is degenerative of previously existing ecosystems. A recent meta-analysis in the journal Ecology Letters, for example, found that excluding commercial agricultural grazers increases the abundance of plant and faunal biodiversity in most ecosystems. That’s because most livestock are managed at densities that dramatically exceed those of wild fauna. In fact, the Center for Biological Diversity recently won a lawsuit that will force the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect sensitive ecosystems within New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest from free-ranging cows.
Over the past two decades, proponents of “regenerative” grazing have increasingly justified cattle agriculture by claiming their methods reduce ruminants’ contribution to climate change: Currently, the world’s cows, by belching out methane, contribute about 6 percent percent of all greenhouse gases. (Many note that cows “only” contribute 3 percent of U.S. emissions, but this is only because of America’s massive total emissions.) Regenerative ranching proponents claim, however, that by turning over and fertilizing the soil where they graze, free-ranging ruminants create healthy soil that can act as a carbon sink.
One of the biggest drivers of this claim has been the work of the rancher Allan Savory, made famous through a viral TED talk in 2013. But Savory’s claims have little peer-reviewed support and seem to fail under scrutiny. “The Savory Method Can Not Green Deserts or Reverse Climate Change,” five researchers argued in a lengthy rebuttal published in the journal Rangelands that same year. In 2017, an exhaustive, 127-page study led by scholars at Oxford found that grass-fed livestock “does not offer a significant solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate.”
Studies suggest that while some forms of well-managed grazing can increase the health and productivity of soil, there is little proof that this has much impact on soil’s ability to capture carbon. To the extent that soil can act as a carbon sink, a widely-cited article in Frontiers in Climate argues that it can do so through practices like cover crop rotation, tillage, and novel soil amendments that don’t use animals at all. But cows or no cows, the idea that soil can act as a meaningful carbon sink at the scale at which global climate change currently operates is itself not entirely convincing. Removing soil from any agricultural use and allowing it to rewild, however, can create meaningful carbon sinks while protecting and restoring biodiversity; wild elk populations might plausibly do more to capture carbon than the most holistically raised cattle.
When it comes to cows, there is actually a sort of perverse climate and ethical math at play. Most of America’s 93 million cattle spend at least some of their life grazing on pasture, although many beef cattle are also fattened for slaughter in feedlots where they are fed soy- and grain-based meals. But since processed meal is easier to digest and beef cattle, on average, spend only a few of their 18-month lives at feedlots, only about 11 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions happen there. The remaining 89 percent happen when they digest rough forage and grasses on pasture. In other words, cows that graze throughout their lives actually potentially emit more than feedlot-finished ones.
Small numbers of grazers may be consistent with healthy ecosystems and have minimal greenhouse gas impact, but only if their populations stay within ecologically defined limits. The situation in Point Reyes, where ranchers have pushed the NPS to be able to use more land for grazing and prevent elk from competing with cows for food and water, illustrates exactly why that’s unlikely.
The problem of scale bedevils regenerative beef from every angle. Holistic grazing cannot hope to compete on price with Big Meat, which operates with high volumes and low margins: A pound of ground beef from a Marin County ranch can run well over $10, compared to $3.99 for mass-produced beef at Kroger. Regenerative ranching proponents often answer that consumers will opt to eat “less but better meat,” but it’s far from clear what’s going to drive that transition at the societal level. (Also worth noting: In the absence of a public agency that could define and regulate ecologically informed grazing practices, “better” meat is a little nebulous. The “regenerative” label has been affixed to so many different techniques that what exactly it means is often hard to pin down.)
As a result, “regenerative” beef currently represents not so much a scalable climate solution as a way for those who can afford to do so to purchase indulgences for their continued meat consumption. The owners of grass-fed beef ventures may market their premium-priced products as a way out of the hellscape of Western capitalistic agriculture. But absent much broader societal changes, regenerative agriculture’s anti-industrial rhetoric is more of a class marker than a call to revolution.
If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent, according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73 percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.
This list of mismatches between theory and empirics prompts an important question: Who does benefit from more demand for holistic-grazed beef? Ranchers and dairy farmers, of course. Regenerative ranching begins with the assumption that cattle must be commercially ranched and then backfills an ecological narrative to sustain that assumption, much as the NPS assumes there must be ranches in Point Reyes and then reshapes the park’s history and landscape to fit that need.
Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as “marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches. This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”
As the elk of Point Reyes might attest, grass-fed beef and dairy are not ecologically benign. Nor are they a solution to climate change. Nor yet, in offering a more expensive alternative to industrial agriculture to those who can afford it, do they offer a clear path for reducing meat consumption society-wide. If anything, regenerative ranching lends itself either to niche locavore indulgence or large-scale corporate greenwashing, but it offers little promise for sustainable food system transformation.
Achieving more sustainable agriculture means we need to produce and eat less meat. To get there, we’ll need individuals to change their habits, but we’ll also need policy aimed specifically at reducing meat consumption through taxation, nudges toward animal-free diets, or, potentially, support for the proliferation of plant- or cell-based meat analogs. Ranchers tend to deny this, not because it is ecologically unfounded but because they are financially invested in ranching rather than regeneration.
*One of the authors of this piece is a fellow at the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program. He is not and has never been personally involved in the Point Reyes lawsuit.
#regenerative grazing#regenerative farming#animal agriculture#ecology#greenwashing#capitalism#food systems
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Louis and the Aquaria: Chapter 3, Part 2
The next morning.
After yesterday’s incident, Moran was keen to know what Louis would do next — and so he headed to the hall with Fred, who presently had some time to spare. Perhaps it was because he’d been working late into the night, for Fred kept yawning as he rubbed his bleary eyes.
But the moment Moran pushed open the hall door, the startling sight before them banished all of Fred’s sleepiness in a flash.
“This is……”
“What the heck is this?” Moran exclaimed.
Dumbfounded, the two men stood where they were.
One corner of the hall—— had been turned into a dense jungle.
Numerous South American trees, planted in giant pots, were now surrounding the angelfish tank. At the same time, the two men were struck by the feeling that somehow, the room’s humidity had risen since yesterday.
Hearing Moran’s shout, Louis poked his head out from behind an ivy-wrapped tree.
“You’re being much too loud in the morning, Mr Moran. It’ll stress out the fish, so please refrain from shouting; but what on earth’s the matter?”
“That’s my line: what have you done here?!”
A flash of light gleamed off Louis’s spectacles.
“I was seeking a more conducive environment for my bro—…… no, the fish, so I have recreated a South American rainforest here. They were ordered a few days earlier, and arrived last night; I’ve just finished arranging them.”
Apparently, the luxurious water plants had just been the beginning for Louis. Even so, Moran had not expected this much progress in one night.
The situation raised so many questions that he had no idea where to begin. But for now, Moran refused to back down, and raised one of the problems at hand.
“First off, you were obviously going to say ‘my brothers’, but still: don’t talk about such grand feats as ‘recreating South America’ so lightly! No, I had a feeling about this. A normal person would reflect on what happened yesterday, and restrain themselves after that — but for you, you’re the type who ends up going amok instead. And yet, I didn’t think you’d do something as drastic as this!”
Moran had launched into a heated tirade, but Louis kept his cool as he replied.
“Thank you for taking the time to point out each and every one of those things. However, I believe I’m treating all of the fish equally; and in my view, it’s unfair to say that I’m favouring some of them just because some plants have been placed at specific areas.”
“What kinda nerve is that, to not even admit it after going this far…….. I mean, you are actually a little aware of it, aren’t you?”
“Also, it’s actually quite amazing that you’ve managed to remain calm all this while, Mr Louis……”
Even after weathering that torrent of questions, Louis was unmoved — and if anything, that had inspired a sense of awe within Fred.
“Well, it was us who said you were free to do as you liked. In any case, your love towards your brothers is certainly terrifying.”
To Moran, it seemed meaningless to continue arguing with the youngest son of the Moriartys, who stubbornly refused to acknowledge his biased rearing of the fish. He gave up trying to persuade Louis, and went on to watch the fish as he normally did.
“…………”
He tried to focus on the vibrant fish before him. And yet, Moran couldn’t help but notice the trees standing at the edge of his sight.
Tormented by that conflict, he finally succumbed to temptation. With sure steps, Moran made his way toward the vegetation, and Fred followed cautiously behind him.
“……Well, if they’re already here, we may as well enjoy them to the fullest.”
Mumbling to no one in particular, Moran walked up to the row of trees. Using one arm to push away the leaves in his path, he moved through the greenery; then, his gaze landed on an aquarium placed on a nearby table. Inside, were some animals with incredibly striking colourations.
“What’re these?”
“They’re indeed very colourful,” Fred remarked.
Within the tank were several tiny frogs. They were a deep blue, and mottled with red.
The two men were full of questions about the presence of these unfamiliar creatures. Nevertheless, out of sheer curiosity, they moved their faces near the tank and peered in.
Louis, who was feeding the other fish, called out to them in a loud voice.
“Please don’t open the tank lid: they may look beautiful, but they secrete a lethal poison so deadly that some indigenous tribes of South America use it to coat the tips of their blowdarts.”
In an instant, Moran and Fred leapt away from the tank. Due to their natural athleticism, the distance they’d retreated was further than that of the average person.
As it were, they had narrowly escaped the jaws of death. But even as the sudden appearance of these poisonous frogs gave them chills, Moran stilled his pounding heart, and shot Louis a look of anger.
“Why are such dangerous things here?! Even recreating a South American environment has its limits, doesn't it?!”
“My apologies. One of my motivations was indeed to recreate the fishes’ native habitat. But more than that, I wanted to prepare for a scenario where Stapleton expresses an interest in other creatures besides fish. Hence, I began rearing these frogs just in case.”
As he said that, Louis made his way beside the tank. Opening the lid just a crack, he tossed in some tiny insects: food for the frogs.
“…………”
Seeing his practiced hand, at this point, the other two men had nothing else to say. In this extraordinary space created within the mansion they lived in on a daily basis, their ability to process information had long since hit its limit.
After confirming that the frogs had eaten their fill, Louis proceeded on an efficient path around the room to check on the rest of the tanks.
Moran gazed into the distance.
“It sure is amazing, what people can do in such a short time……”
But excessive zeal, once taken in the wrong direction, can lead to outcomes no one would’ve expected.
Even as various points had deeply impressed upon them just how amazing Louis was, at the same time, Moran and Fred also grew conscious of a certain truth in life. Once again, they stepped through the row of trees.
The two men parted the curtain of leaves, some part of them nervously wondering if those dangerous frogs had escaped, and walked up to the aquarium they had in mind.
“Oh, there they are.”
Seeing that the tank itself hadn’t changed, Moran finally breathed a sense of relief, and went on to admire the three “Moriarty brothers” swimming within.
The one at the head of the group was ‘William’. Right behind him was ‘Albert’, then ‘Louis’. Within the jungle Louis had created, the three angelfish shone in a way that lived up to their angelic names.
However, in contrast to the joyful Moran, Fred’s expression was serious. He narrowed his eyes slightly.
“Don’t you think…… its movements are a bit awkward?”
“Ah?”
Moran stared at the focus of Fred’s attention. Immediately, he perceived a subtle change in that fish.
Although it seemed perfectly fine at first glance, if one were to observe all three of them carefully, it was clear that the one at the head of the group was swimming a little differently from the other two.
“Is there something wrong?”
Louis came over, sensing something was off. But even before Fred explained the situation, he noticed the abnormality with ‘William’.
He put his face close to the tank, observing the fish for a few moments; but gradually, his expression turned grave.
“Oi, Louis: what on earth’s going on? Could it be that he’s sick?” Moran asked.
Louis placed a hand under his chin, thought for a split second, then quickly made a decision.
“——First, let’s move it to a separate tank. There’s a smaller one near the hall entrance: Mr Moran, please bring it here. Fred: please read the measurements from the devices installed on this tank and report them.”
Hearing those instructions, the two men assumed their roles at once.
Meanwhile, Louis took a notepad from his breast pocket, and checked the emergency response measures he’d studied on his own. Though he had already memorised all of them, he wanted to avoid any potential for error.
Moran returned with a small tank.
“Oi, is this one alright?”
“Yes, thank you.”
First, Louis transferred some water from the angelfishes’ tank into the one Moran brought over, such that it was deep enough for one fish. Then, he set up some equipment to confirm the water temperature and quality once more, then added a bit of salt to the water.
Watching him, Moran cocked his head.
“Why’re you adding salt?”
“Saltwater is an effective treatment for diseases in fish. Though it certainly isn’t all-powerful.” [1]
Saying that, Louis used a net to gently scoop up ‘William’ and move it to the tank they’d prepared. Although there were drawbacks to isolating sick fish, his priority was to stop the disease from spreading, as well as limit any damage that could be caused by the other fish.
As he worked, Louis listened to the measurements Fred read out, but his puzzlement only deepened.
“The water quality and temperature are both normal. As far as I can see, there isn’t any obvious debris or dirt in the tank, and the equipment doesn’t seem to be malfunctioning. In that case, perhaps some foreign substance had entered its food, or maybe it got stressed from its surroundings……”
“Maybe it got bullied by the other fish?” Moran asked.
Louis immediately dismissed that idea. “From what I’ve observed, there were no such quarrels between them. In that case, another possibility I can think of is the change in its environment.”
He cast a sideways glance at the trees surrounding them. And Fred picked up the implication behind that casual gesture.
“By ‘stress’, do you mean these trees? But it’s not like they came into contact with the water, so they probably didn’t impact the water quality, at least not directly. Also, weren’t they only added a while ago? To affect the fish so rapidly……”
“We can’t dismiss that possibility. Perhaps the changes to the view outside the tank had caused some visual stress…… Well, regardless of the reason, the blame for its ill health rests with me: the one in charge of its care.”
“…………”
After isolating the fish, the three of them remained standing where they were.
They gazed at the sick angelfish, swimming alone in its tank, with a sense of misery and frustration growing within them.
Footnotes:
[1] There is some truth to this: Practical Fishkeeping UK
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You have said many times that Vivien's hell is not even hell at all, since sinners in their world practically do not suffer, and I completely agree with you. But technically, despite the fact that hell, theoretically, is a place of suffering for the worst of people, sinners here could at least live well, given their position in the infernal hierarchy.
I rather don't understand what happens in the society of hellborns. Not to mention the fact that theoretically in such conditions, hounds and demons could not survive as a species in principle, for mortal they live too well in fucking hell. I don't know, personally, it's really funny to me that the four main characters, who only have a book to get to Earth(let's keep in mind that they are not the only ones who can visit the human world), and a very strange business strategy, in general, live better than me. M&m has money for food, water, good repairs and even entertainment, Blitz changes phones and televisions every episode, when in some countries of the Earth the cost of gadgets is equal to the average annual salary. Although, in theory, fragile, unable to fight back creatures that do not have magical abilities should not be part of the economy at all. What is the use of wasting resources on demons when there are fire tornadoes in the main agricultural center, and sinners almost start walking on each other's heads from overpopulation.
Theoretically, hellborns would have to live ten times worse than any homeless person in a third world country, if they did not become extinct at all. Seriously, it feels like hell is literally red America with pentagrams on the walls of houses. Had Vivien ever seen poverty? Well, at least on TV? I won't even mention that a species living literally in another dimension has the same culture, language and moral values as ordinary people. Although this does not prevent you from justifying with the phrase "they are demons" all the shoals in the relationships of the characters:) In short, ugh. I'm mad.
sorry for the grammar errors pls, i'm not native speaker(
Definitely a lot to think about here. We do see a homeless demon with a sign on the sidewalk in the Helluva pilot, implying Viv or at least one of the storyboarders has seen the American version of extreme poverty. But you're right; it doesn't make sense that beings on the lowest tier of Hell society aren't dead, or at the very least in constant agony.
This is a huge problem with making Hell function so much like our own world. Those who believe in an afterlife view death as the great equalizer. It doesn't matter how rich a person was in life; all that matters is the quality of their soul. Their actions and only their actions will determine how the next world treats them.
But in Viv's Hell, money remains a necessity. Even in death, money determines how enjoyable the sinners' "punishment" is. Even in death, they can't escape the constant grind.
And maybe the grind is their punishment. Maybe that's what Viv intended all along: An edgy comment on how Hell is just like Earth (or at least the US), because life is hell, get it? Lol!
That, or she put absolutely no thought into the worldbuilding whatsoever. I'll let readers judge for themselves which of these options is the case.
#ask#exactlyannoyingtree#hazbin hotel#hazbin hotel critical#helluva boss#helluva critical#worldbuilding#vivziepop#poverty
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Hello! I have a question related to traditional tatoos. I know that it's a closed practice, and therefore non-native artists shouldn't use them in their drawings, but does this work for writing as well? I do not mean to describe them in great detail because I am a white person and it's def not my place to do that, but would mentioning Sokka and Katara having them be disrespectful? Thank you, I hope you have a lovely day!
Okay, let's talk about why good intentions with depicting tattoos can go wrong.
I personally don't mind the depiction of the tattoos themselves. A lot of my loved ones aren't comfortable with getting them because it can affect how they're perceived by others (employers, friends, potential romantic partners, etc.), and seeing the tattoos in fan art could normalize and destigmatize the practice to a degree. A big problem is that people often don't do any sort of research. They go to google image search and type "inuit face tattoos" and do screenshot redraws where Katara, who said herself she's not ready for marriage, has tattoos that suggest she's already married.
Another thing is that, well, yeah, there is some blatant racism and cultural appropriation involved in this insistant fascination with the tattoos.
"But mostly-mundane!" you folks might be saying as you read this, "You just said it could be helpful!! How can it be racist if it's helpful?"
To which I'd reply that we're allowed to have complex feelings on complex topics. It's not a simple and straight forward "this is bad because it's bad and I want you to feel bad for it" thing. In any case, I know it's not the intention and I don't mean to suggest that it is, so stewing in guilt and telling everyone how awful you are for thinking traditional tattoos are neat won't do anyone any good. Just pay attention so you guys know how to start doing better, okay?
The fact is the series itself is not representative of circumpolar peoples at all and the fandom is very reluctant to admit that. We have our own take on clothes made of fabric rather than skins and none of that was taken into account. It seems no one feels like drawing Sokka or Katara in something baggy that doesn't wrap around the body and tie at the waist, not when it's supposed to be warmer weather. I guess that would upset the aesthetic consistancy? We also have our own traditional jewelry and hair styles (the "hair loopies" aren't universal because the Inuit are a diverse people and also not the only ones who live in the North American tundra) that are also rarely, if ever, depicted in fan art. I guess Hakoda and Bato would be unrecognizable if either of them wore their hair shaved on the top but longer at the front, back, and sides or had a labret. So it seems the response to this "they should be more eskimo but not too eskimo to recognize them" mindset or otherwise lack of effort in research or willingness to work research into one's art/writing is to just slap tattoos on it and call it a day.
And there's the line between appreciation and appropriation. Appreciation is not taking the thing you find most cool and denying it the proper context or just ignoring everything else but that super cool thing.
I try to make it a habit to not proclaim what people should or shouldn't write and draw because I'm not about that. If you wanna write about a character having tupit or tavluģun, I really don't mind. My culture is dying and I'm probably gonna have to settle for a similar enough dialect because there aren't that many people that can teach me my ancestral language. If you like our traditions, I like them too and would like to see more of them! I'd just ask you to examine who you're doing it for. Yue with brown hair and eyes doesn't look any more like my family or the people I see in old photos and footage. I don't see any of my heritage in that and it doesn't connect with me. If all you're adding to Sokka and Katara are tattoos, it won't really mean anything to me as an Inupiaq. There's no cultural context there.
I'm sorry. I'm sure you wanted a simple yes or no with maybe a paragraph's worth of explanation, but this is a much bigger question than that.
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Not Up For Interpretation - An Essay On Nonbinary - Erasure
(Trigger Warning: Misgendering, Transphobia, Nonbinary-phobia)
If you’ve been following me for a while, you probably know this was a long time coming. I’ve made several posts about my frustrations concerning this topic and how much it hurt me just how socially accepted erasing an entire identity still is. While representation marches on and things have become better for nonbinary people as a whole, we still battle with a lot of prejudice - both intentional and unintentional.
In this essay, I want to discuss just how our identities are being erased almost daily, why that is harmful and hurtful and what we all can do to change that.
Chapters:
What does Non-binary mean?
Nonbinary- representation in media
So what’s the problem?
How do we fix it?
1. What Does Non-binary Mean?
Non-binary is actually an umbrella term. It includes pretty much every gender-identity that’s neither one or the other so to speak, for example, agender.
Agender means feeling detachment from the gender spectrum in general. If you’re agender, you most likely feel a distance to the concept of gender as a whole, that it doesn’t define you as a person.
There are many identities that classify under non-binary: There’s gender-fluid (you feel you have a gender, but it’s not one gender specifically and can change), demi-gender (identifying as a gender partially, but not completely) and many others.
Sometimes, multiple non-binary identities can mix and match.
Most non-binary people use they/them pronouns, but like with so many things, it varies.
Some nonbinary-people (like me) go by two pairs of pronouns. I go by both she/her and they/them, because it’s what feels most comfortable at the moment. But who knows, maybe in the future I’ll switch to they/them exclusively or expand to he/him.
There is no one defining non-binary experience. Nb-people are just as varied and different as binary people, who go by one specific gender.
There are non-binary people who choose to go solely by she/her or he/him and that’s okay too. It doesn’t make them any more or less non-binary and their identity is still valid.
If your head’s buzzing a bit by now: That’s okay. It’s a complicated topic and no one expects you to understand all of it in one chapter of one essay.
Just know this: If a person identifies as non-binary, you should respect their decision and use the pronouns they go with.
It’s extremely hurtful to refer to someone who already told you that they use they/them pronouns with she/her or he/him, or use they/them to refer to a person who uses she/her.
Think about it like using a trans-person’s deadname: It’s rude, it’s harmful and it shows complete disrespect for the person.
Non-binary people have existed for a very long time. The concept isn’t new. The idea that there are only two genders, with every other identity being an aberration to the norm, is largely a western idea, spread through colonialism.
The Native American people use “Two-Spirit” to describe someone who identifies neither as a man nor a woman. The term itself is relatively new, but the concept of a third gender is deeply rooted in many Native American cultures.
(Author’s Note: If you are not Native American, please do not use it. That’s cultural appropriation.)
In India, the existence of a third gender has always been acknowledged and there are many terms specifically for people who don’t identify with the gender that was assigned to them at birth.
If you’re interested in learning more about non-binary history and non-binary identities around the world, I’d recommend visiting these websites:
https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/History_of_nonbinary_gender
https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender-variant_identities_worldwide
https://thetempest.co/2020/02/01/history/the-history-of-nonbinary-genders-is-longer-than-you-think/
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/gender-variance-around-the-world
Also, maybe consider giving this book a try:
Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources by Charlie Mcnabb
2. Non-binary Representation In Media
The representation of non-binary people in mainstream media hasn’t been... great, to put it mildly.
Representation, as we all know, is important.
Not only does it give minorities a chance to see themselves in media and feel heard and acknowledged. It also normalizes them.
For example, seeing a black Disney-princess was a huge deal for many black little girls, because they could finally say there was someone there who looked like them. They could see that being white wasn’t a necessity to be a Disney princess.
Seeing a canonically LGBT+ character in a children’s show teaches kids that love is love, no matter what gender you’re attracted to. At the same time, older LGBT+ viewers will see themselves validated and heard in a movie that features on-screen LGBT+ heroes.
There’s been some huge steps in the right direction in the last few years representation-wise.
Not only do we have more LGBT+ protagonists and characters in general, we’ve also begun to question and call out harmful or bigoted portrayals of the community in media, such as “Bury Your Gays” or the “Depraved Homosexual”.
With that being said: Let’s take a look at how Non-binary representation holds up in comparison, shall we?
This is Double Trouble, from the children’s show “She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power”.
They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns. They’re also a slimy, duplicitous lizard-person who can change their shape at will.
Um, yeah.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Did I mention they’re also the only non-binary character in the entire show? And that they’re working with a genocidal dictator in most of the episodes they’re in?
Yikes.
Let’s look at another example.
These three (in order of appearance) are Stevonnie, Smoky Quartz and Shep. Three characters appearing in the kid’s show “Steven Universe” and it’s epilogue series “Steven Universe: Future”.
All of them identify as non-binary and use they/them as pronouns.
Stevonnie and Smoky Quartz are the result of a boy and a girl being fused together through weird alien magic.
Shep is a regular human, but they only appeared in one episode. In an epilogue series that only hardcore fans actually watched.
Well, I mean...
One out of three isn’t that bad, right?
Maybe we should pick an example from a series for older viewers.
Say hello to Doppelganger, a non-binary superhuman who goes by they/them, from the Amazon-series “The Boys”.
They’re working for a corrupt superhero-agency and use their power of shape-shifting to trick people who pose a threat to said agency into having sex with them. And then blackmail those people with footage of said sex.
....
Do I even need to say it?
If you’ve paid attention during the listing of these examples, you might have noticed a theme.
Namely that characters canonically identifying as non-binary are either
supernatural in some way, shape or form,
barely have a presence in the piece of media they’re in,
both.
Blink-and-you-miss-it-manner of representation aside, the majority of these characters fall squarely under what we call “Othering”.
“Othering” describes the practice of portraying minorities as supernatural creatures or otherwise inhuman. Or to say it bluntly: As “The Other”.
“Othering” is a pretty heinous method. Not only does it portray minorities as inherently abnormal and “different in a bad way”. It also goes directly against what representation is actually for: Normalizing.
As a general rule of thumb: If your piece of media has humans in it, but the only representation of non-white, non-straight people are explicitly inhuman... yeah, that’s bad.
So is there absolutely no positive representation for us out there?
Not quite.
As rare as human non-binary characters in media are to find, they do exist.
Here we have Bloodhound! A non-binary human hunter who uses they/them pronouns, from the game “Apex Legends”.
It’s been confirmed by the devs and the voice actress that they’re non-binary.
Nice!
These are Frisk (bottom) and Chara (top) from the game “Undertale”. While their exact gender identity hasn’t been disclosed, they both canonically use they/them pronouns, so it’s somewhere on the non-binary spectrum.
Two human children who act as the protagonist (Frisk) and antagonist (Chara), depending on how you play the game. (Interpretations vary on the antagonist/protagonist-thing, to say the least.)
Cool!
......
And, yep, that’s it.
As my little demonstration here showed, non-binary representation in media is rare. Good non-binary representation is even rarer.
Which is why those small examples of genuinely good representation are so important to the Non-binary community!
It’s hard enough to have to prove you exist. It’s even harder to prove your existence is not abnormal or unnatural.
If you’d like to further educate yourself on representation, it’s impact on society and why it matters, perhaps take a second to read through these articles:
https://www.criticalhit.net/opinion/representation-media-matters/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-on-screen-representation-matters-according-to-these-teens
https://jperkel.github.io/sciwridiversity2020/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/05/22/why-is-equal-representation-in-media-important/?sh=25f2ccc92a84
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-representation-the-media-matters
3. So What’s The Problem?
The problem, as is the case with so many things in the world, is prejudice.
Actually, that’s not true.
There’s not a problem, there are multiple problems. And their names are prejudice, ignorance and bigotry.
Remember how I said human non-binary representation is rare?
Yeah, very often media-fans don’t help.
Let’s take for example, the aforementioned Frisk and Chara from “Undertale”.
Despite the game explicitly using they/them to refer to both characters multiple times, the majority of players somehow got it into their heads that Frisk’s and Chara’s gender was “up for interpretation”.
There is a huge amount of fan art straight-up misgendering both characters and portraying them as binary and using only he/him or she/her pronouns.
The most egregious examples are two massively popular fan-animated web shows: “Glitchtale”, by Camila Cuevas and “Underverse” by Jael Peñaloza.
Both series are very beloved by the Undertale-fanbase and even outside of it. Meaning for many people, those two shows might be their first introduction to “Undertale” and it’s two non-binary human characters.
Take a wild guess what both Camila and Jael did with Frisk and Chara.
Underverse, X-Tale IV:
(Transcript: “Frisk lied to me in the worst possible way... I... I will never forgive him.”)
Underverse, X-Tale V:
(Transcript: “I-It’s Chara... and it’s a BOY.”)
Glitchtale, My Promise:
(Transcript: (Referring to Frisk) “I’m not scared of an angry boy anymore.”)
Glitchtale, Game Over Part 1:
(Transcript: (Referring to Chara) “It’s ok little boy.”)
This... this isn’t okay.
Not only do both of these pieces of fan-art misgender two non-binary characters, the creators knew beforehand that Frisk and Chara use they/them-pronouns, but made the conscious choice to ignore that.
To be fair, in a video discussing “Underverse”, Jael said that only X-Tale Frisk and Chara, the characters you see in the Underverse-examples above, are male, while the characters Frisk and Chara from the main game remained non-binary and used they/them (time-stamp 10:34).
Still, that doesn’t erase the fact that Jael made up alternate versions of two non-binary characters specifically to turn them male. Or that, while addressing the issue, Jael was incredibly dismissive and even mocked the people who felt hurt by her turning two non-binary characters male. Jael also went on to make a fairly non-binary-phobic joke in the video, in which she equated gender identities beyond male and female to identifying as an object.
Jael (translated): “I don’t care if people say the original Frisk and Chara are male, female, helicopters, chairs, dogs or cats, buildings, clouds...”
That’s actually a very common joke among transphobes, if not to say the transphobe-joke:
“Oh, you identify as X? Well then I identify as an attack helicopter!”
If you’re trans, chances are you’ve heard this one, or a variation of it, a million times before.
I certainly have.
I didn’t laugh then and I’m not laughing now.
(Author’s note: I might be angry at both of them for what they did, but I do not, under any circumstances, support the harassment of creators. If you’re thinking about sending either Jael or Camila hate-mail - don’t. It won’t help.)
Jael’s reaction is sadly common in the Undertale fandom. Anyone speaking up against Chara’s and Frisk’s identity being erased is immediately bludgeoned with the “up for interpretation”-argument, despite that not once being the case in the game.
And even with people who do it right and portray Frisk and Chara as they/them, you’ll have dozens of commenters swarming the work with sentences among the lines of “Oh but I think Frisk is a boy/girl! And Chara is a girl/boy!”
By the way, this kind of thing only happens to Frisk and Chara.
Every other character in “Undertale” is referred to and portrayed with their proper pronouns of she/her or he/him.
But not the characters who go by they/them.
Their gender is “up for interpretation”.
Because obviously, their identity couldn’t possibly be canonically non-binary.
Sadly, Frisk and Chara are not alone in this.
Remember Bloodhound?
And how I said they’d been confirmed as non-binary and using they/them pronouns by both the creators and the voice actress?
It seems for many players, that too translated to “up for interpretation”.
(Transcript: “does it matter what they call him? He, her, it, they toaster oven, it doesn’t matter”)
(Transcript: “I’m like 90 % sure Bloodhound is a dude because he could just sound like a girl and by their age that I’m assuming looks around 10-12 because I’ve known many males who have sounded like a female when they were younger”)
(Transcript: “I don’t care it will always be a He. F*ck that non-binary bullsh*t.”)
(Transcript: “Bloodhound is clearly female.”)
(Transcript: “I’m not calling a video game character they/them”)
(Transcript: “exactly. The face was never fully shown neither was the gender so I’d say it means that the player is Bloodhound. So it’s your gender and you refer to “him” as yourself. It’s like a self insertion in my eyes.”)
So, let me get this straight:
If a character, even a player character, uses she/her or he/him, you can accept it, no questions asked.
But when a character uses they/them, suddenly their identity and gender are “up for interpretation”?
This attitude is also widely prevalent in real life.
Many languages only include pronouns for men and women, with no third option available. Non-binary people are often forced to make up their own terms, because their language doesn’t provide one.
Non-binary people often don’t fit within other people’s ideas of gender, so they get excluded altogether. Worse, non-binary people are often the victims of misgendering, denial of their identity or even straight-up violence when coming out.
People will often tell us that we look like a certain gender, so we should only use one set of gendered pronouns. Never mind that that’s not what we want. Never mind that that’s not who we are.
Non-binary people are also largely omitted from legal documentation and studies.
We cannot identify as non-binary at our workplace, because using they/them pronouns is considered “unprofessional”.
We don’t have our own bathrooms like men and women do. Our gender is seen as less valid than male and female, so even that basic thing is denied to us. I’ve had to use the women’s restroom my entire life, because if I go into a male restroom, I’ll be yelled at or made fun off or simply get told I took the wrong door. It’s extremely uncomfortable for me and I wish I didn’t have to do it.
And since non-binary people aren’t seen as “real transgender-people”, we often don’t receive the medical care we need. This often renders us unable to feel good within our bodies, because the treatment and help we get is wildly inadequate.
It’s especially horrible for intersex people (people who are born with sex characteristics that don’t fit solely into the male/female category) who are often forced to change their bodies to fit within the male/female gender binary.
And you better believe each of those problems is increased ten-fold for non-binary people of color.
We are ignored and dismissed as “confused”, because of who we are.
Representation is a way for Non-binary people to show the world they exist, that they’re here and that they too have stories to tell.
But how can we, when every character that represents us is either othered, barely there or gets taken away from us?
We are not “up for interpretation”.
Neither are the characters in media who share our identity.
And it’s time to stop pretending we ever were.
For more information about Non-Binary Erasure and how harmful it is, you can check out these articles:
https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/08/common-non-binary-erasure/
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nonbinary-people-racism/
https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Nonbinary_erasure
https://traj.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/traj.422/
https://medium.com/an-injustice/everyday-acts-of-non-binary-erasure-49ee970654fb
https://medium.com/national-center-for-institutional-diversity/the-invisible-labor-of-liberating-non-binary-identities-in-higher-education-3f75315870ec
https://musingsofanacademicasexual.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/dear-sirmadam-a-commentary-on-non-binary-erasure/
4. How Do We Fix It?
Well, first things first: Stop acting like we don’t exist.
And kindly stop other people from doing it too.
We are a part of the LGBT+ community and we deserve to be acknowledged, no matter what our pronouns are.
Address non-binary people with the right pronouns. Don’t argue with them about their identity, don’t comment on how much you think they look like a boy or a girl. Just accept them and be respectful.
If a non-binary person tells you they have two sets of pronouns, for example he/him and they/them, don’t just use one set of pronouns. That can come off as disingenuous. Alternate between the pronouns, don’t leave one or the other out. It’ll probably be hard at first, but if you keep it up, you’ll get used to it pretty quickly.
If you’re witnessing someone harass a non-binary person over their identity, step in and help them.
And please, don’t partake in non-binary erasure in media fandoms.
Don’t misgender non-binary characters, don’t “speculate” on what you think their gender might be. You already know their gender and it’s non-binary. It costs exactly 0 $ to be a decent human being and accept that.
Support Non-Binary people by educating yourself about them and helping to normalize and integrate their identity.
In fact, here’s a list of petitions, organizations and articles who will help you do just that:
https://www.change.org/p/collegeboard-let-students-use-their-preferred-name-on-collegeboard-9abad81a-0fdf-435c-8fca-fe24a5df6cc7?source_location=topic_page
6 Ways to Support Your Non-Binary Child
7 Non-Negotiables for Supporting Trans & Non-Binary Students in Your Classroom
If Your Partner Just Came Out As Non-Binary, Here’s How To Support Them
How to Support Your Non-Binary Employees, Colleagues and Friends
Ko-fi page for the Nonbinary Wiki
The Sylvia Rivera Project, an organization who aims to give low-income and non-white transgender, intersex and non-binary people a voice
The Anti Violence Project “empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected communities and allies to end all forms of violence through organizing and education, and supports survivors through counseling and advocacy."
The Trans Lifeline, a hotline for transgender people by transgender people
Tl:DR: Non-Binary representation is important. Non-Binary people still suffer from society at large not acknowledging our existence and forcing us to conform. Don’t be part of that problem by taking away what little representation we have. Educate yourself and do better instead. We deserve to be seen and heard.
#non-binary#agender#demigender#gender identity#essay#erasure#lgbt representation#misgendering#undertale#she ra spop#apex bloodhound#doppelganger#steven universe
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SONGS OF RESISTANCE: The View Myla Grants Us Of Hallownest’s Moths
hello again hollow knight fandom, i am back with my picante takes and ready to discuss two things i love: myla hollowknight and the moth tribe! Let Us Be Sad About Them Together.
as with my previous essay i’m going to be putting this fellow up on dreamwidth later for accessibility purposes since my layout text may be too small for high-res pc users. this time i’ll be attaching that in a reblog to avoid this post getting eaten by the dread tungle algorithms.
CONTENT WARNINGS FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay discusses colonialism and genocide both in real life and the fictional depictions in Hollow Knight, as well as racism in the zombie horror genre and in fandom.
ALSO: if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay
SONGS OF RESISTANCE: THE VIEW MYLA GRANTS US OF HALLOWNEST’S MOTHS
In this house we are all love Myla.
Well, in all fairness, there are probably plenty of Hollow Knight fans who aren’t interested in her character, since which fictional characters one attaches to is always a matter of personal preference. But she’s still well-loved for a minor NPC and inspires a high level of devotion in her fans. There’s nothing that whips folks into a frenzy like a cute character you can’t do anything to help, and unlike some other characters in Hollow Knight Myla’s fate leaves no room for ambiguity. Once you pick up the Crystal Heart you’re left with only two choices: Avoid her, or kill her.
A lot of Hollow Knight’s world is designed to make you care about it so that it will hurt more when Ghost’s violent skillset proves too limited to save something or someone. The consequences of Hallownest’s founding and policies have directly or indirectly caused a great deal of damage to everything, and chief among those consequences with massive damage and a wide splash range is the Infection. Much has been said elsewhere by other people about Hollow Knight’s predominating mood being a struggle against futility, with Ghost arriving at the eleventh hour and every new tragedy designed to make the player more desperate to find something actionable, only finding out by trial and error what’s beyond your personal ability to save.
Myla, in that sense, is a typical example of that worldbuilding. She’s a particular kind of stock character in the zombie horror genre, the innocent who falls victim to the plague and cannot be saved, wrenching audience hearts and demonstrating the stakes.
But Hollow Knight plays with the trappings of zombie horror in a very unusual way, one I find thematically fascinating.
For a quick overview, the “zombie” as we know it in popular culture is an appropriation of a voudou (the Black American spiritual practice) concept that deals with the fear of slavery killing one’s spirit. (People more versed in/with roots in voudou culture can give a much more comprehensive overview than this simplistic one.)
The zombie horror genre, especially in Western media, is part of the great white fragility stock plot trifecta (the other two being alien invasions and robot uprisings). Zombie horror in particular expresses white fears that marginalized ethnic groups will rise up violently in revenge for their mistreatment and destroy white society. The fear of “that which is human, which ‘humanity’ is not” (to borrow mecha visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine’s pithy term) and the extreme levels of violence towards human-but-not bodies typical of zombie horror are often an expression of such bigotries. This is, again, a subject that’s been discussed in greater depth and with more nuance elsewhere.
But what Hollow Knight does is take the ugly metaphors and it makes them literal, makes it harder to ignore the toxic subtext of the genre. The Infection is literally a native god’s revenge on the settlers who committed genocide* against her people. How the Pale King’s colonization of the crater negatively affected the preexisting groups of bugs underpins every level of the worldbuilding, as does Hallownest’s cruelty towards its neighbors.
Hollow Knight is a game that is about the tragedy of Western imperialism. It is one of the work’s central themes. There are a lot of conversations that need to be had about the ways these themes manifest and, on a real-world level, about fandom’s predisposition to avoid the subject.
But, for now, let’s get back to Myla. If she fits such a stock zombie horror archetype, and Hollow Knight uses zombie horror tropes to underline the conversation it attempts to have about colonialism, then what has Myla got to teach us about the overall worldbuilding?
There's two topics I’d like to broach here: First we’ll get into how the circumstances of Myla’s infection fit in to the implied role of Crystal Peak in pre-Hallownest society. Then let’s take a long look at the lyrics of Myla’s song and what it implies.
MYLA, THE CRYSTALS, AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
If you think about it, Myla is an interesting outlier compared to the other NPCs we encounter on the verge of succumbing to the Infection. Both Bretta and Sly are unhappy: Bretta is a lonely, anxious bundle of abandonment issues yearning for someone to sweep her off her feet; Sly misses his pupils and loved ones who’ve left him in death (we never learn who Esmy is or what they were to Sly, but we sure can tell they’re not around anymore). The temptation to dream away those sadnesses seems to play a part in their vulnerability to the Infection, and also why Ghost’s interruption brings them back to reality.
Not so Myla. She appears to be blissfully unaware of her fellow miners’ fate, and most of her dialogue prior to her infection (besides the song - we’ll get to that later) is about how much fun she’s having at her job and how much she enjoys Ghost’s occasional company.
Yet she still winds up infected when Ghost’s back is turned. Why?
Not to discard the possibility that Myla’s got her own issues too, but in her case there seems to be another likely cause at hand: The crystals. If hit with the Dream Nail before infected, she mentions that she can hear them “singing” and “whispering”.
Under the The Hunter’s Hot Takes section of the Hunter’s Journal entries on various Crystal Peak enemies, we can learn more about the crystals - particularly in the entries for the Husk Miner and Crystallized Husk.
Crystal Peak’s crystals were thought of as particularly precious in Hallownest and harvested en masse for use in luxury items and the like. To do so, the mining operation was set up throughout most of the mountain, though the area around its peak still remains largely untouched. However, there’s more to the crystals than just that. Like Myla, the Hunter notes that the crystals can be heard to sing very very softly if one listens closely enough.
Perhaps of even more interest than that is this particular comment he gives us, from the Crystallized Husk journal entry: “There is some strange power hidden in the crystals that grow up there in the peaks. They gleam and glow in the darkness, a bright point of searing heat in each one.”
I don’t think it’s a particularly revolutionary idea to point out that there’s some connection between the crystals and Radiance’s power; this is something many players have intuited just based on Myla’s dialogue. But, in order to understand what Myla is demonstrating about the game’s world I think it’s important to think about what that connection is.
Speaking of which, the local Whispering Root has two important clues for us: The phrases “light refracted” and “energy contained”.
The very top of Crystal Peak is one of the only places in the crater where the moths’ architecture has escaped Hallownest destroying it, and is the only place in the entire game setting where their religious iconography remains fully intact. There are stone monuments covered in their language (which has been destroyed with the rest of their culture) and the statue of the Radiance - this is easier to see in the Wanderer’s Journal tie-in book, but the huge stone arches upon the Crown represent Radi’s halo and its rays and encircle her when viewed head-on or from a distance instead of the side view we get in the game.
The crystals grown here were used by the moths to store and cultivate Radiance’s light. It’s impossible to know what sort of architecture/infrastructure existed inside the mountain before Hallownest stole it from the moths. But between the massive scope of her statue and all the texts at the Crown, and the fact that the moths were working with their literal actual god’s freely given power here, it can be safely asserted that Crystal Peak was a holy ground to them.
Hallownest didn’t care about the mind-boggling level of spiritual significance Crystal Peak must have had to the natives, though. To the Pale King and his people, the crystals are just a natural resource to be harvested for personal profit.
This is unfortunately a conflict that still plays out in colonized countries today. If you’re American, #NoDAPL probably comes to mind; Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are filled with these sorts of horror stories too. Settler disrespect for indigenous sacred grounds is a huge problem that needs addressing. If you’re looking at the story of Crystal Peak and thinking it’s very on-the-nose... maybe it needs to be.
Anyway, Myla is nowhere near as miserable as Bretta or Sly, but she still notices that something’s up with these crystals. She hears the voice coming from inside, and she’s curious, and she tries very very hard to listen to it... so she DOES end up hearing Radiance’s voice. Radiance’s real voice, not the songs and whispers inside the crystals: The voice of a frightened, angry, grieving god who knows there’s a new vessel running around in Hallownest, and doesn’t want any part of that. A voice that’s pleading for someone, anyone to kill this dangerous creature, and save her from the threat Ghost poses.
Between how freaked out Radi is to know Ghost is poking around, the tendency we see in her boss battles for her to panic and kneejerk blast things at full volume/vibrance when she’s panicking, and the way her dream broadcast seems to be only a one-way communication line while she’s in the Black Egg... naturally this spells disaster for poor Myla.
Similar to the Moss Prophet, this small tragedy is a demonstration of the eleventh-hour state the conflict is in: The Pale King has escalated this situation so far, and Radiance is so traumatized and isolated, that bystanders who might in a kinder timeline have become Radi’s allies instead get caught up in her AOE. Myla’s definitely not as aware of the overall situation as the Moss Prophet, since she’s a Hallownest bug and not an indigenous one the way they are. But she noticed things were not as they seemed, and she was curious. Who knows what new possibilities could have opened up, if Radiance was able to truly communicate with bugs in the outside world?
Small side note before we move on, but I’ve noticed a tendency among some folks who notice the missed connections to come down extra hard on Radiance and chalk Myla’s infection/Moss Prophet’s death down to deliberate cruelty on her part. I’d like to gently push back against this.
Living in a post-colonial world we all absorb some level of prejudice from our surroundings, and it’s important to take a look at our first assumptions about people (or, in this case, fictional characters lol) to examine whether these prejudices we’ve inherited have influenced those assumptions.
So, if your first instinct is to look at this situation and say the problem is that Radiance is being too harsh and too angry where she should have stepped back and softened her emotions for others’ benefit to gently persuade them to her side... Please think about how when people of color and non-Christians express anger or hurt at our treatment, or even so much as calmly assert our boundaries, white/Christian viewers often view us as much more aggressive and threatening than we actually are. The “angry black woman” trope is a good example of this stereotype. You may want to look up the HuffPost article “Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism” and its discussion of white fragility to further understand this phenomenon.
It is absolutely essential to remember the complex power dynamics in play in Hollow Knight and that the Pale King deliberately imprisoned Radiance (who had at this point already gone through an extreme amount of trauma) in a way that would compromise her ability to communicate with others. If you can extend compassion to characters like Ghost or the Pale King and empathize with their motives/feelings when their actions cause harm, but you are not willing to do the same with Radiance... it’s important to sit down with yourself and examine why that is.
THE MEANING BEHIND MYLA’S SONG
Okay, let’s switch gears and take a look at the lyrics to the song Myla sings, since it’s got some interesting things to tell us too.
The first verse, which you can hear from Myla the first time you meet her/before you acquire Vengeful Spirit, goes:
Bury my mother, pale and slight
Bury my father with his eyes shut tight
Bury my sisters, two by two,
And then when you’re done, let's bury me too
There’s not much particularly story-related going on here except foreshadowing that Myla may in fact wind up dying. Most of what we get here is that a) this is a song about burying the dead and b) it’s morbid as fuck.
Curious, a new player might think of the mention of burying the dead; there are a lot of corpses just lyin’ around all over the ground - something that might lead one to believe Hallownest didn’t have such a custom. Later players will discover the Resting Grounds, confirming Hallownest did bury its dead... and that the gravekeepers are all dead too.
Let’s look at the second verse, which Myla remembers and will sing after you pick up Vengeful Spirit:
Bury the knight with her broken nail,
Bury the lady, lovely and pale
Bury the priest in his tattered gown,
Then bury the beggar with his shining crown
This right here is where it gets interesting. The first verse describes the singer’s family as dead or dying, but the people we’re burying now sure do have some parallels to Hallownest's ruling body, don’t they?
Among Hallownest’s Great Knights, three of them - Dryya, Isma, and Ze’mer - were women. They are also very dead or might as well be: Dryya was killed by Traitor Lord’s resistance, Isma is a tree spreading acid through the kingdom’s waters to cut off access to the City of Tears, and Ze’mer hung up her nail after her mantis girlfriend’s death and only lingers on as a revenant.
While there aren’t any characters who are described in-text as “priests” in Hallownest, the idea of a tattered gown might bring Lurien the Watcher to mind, or perhaps the Soul Sanctum’s magicians before they went rogue.
The lovely, pale lady in the song can only refer to the White Lady, Hallownest’s queen. And there’s only one man in the game who has a shining crown: The Pale King. The lyrics are particularly derisive towards him in a way they aren’t to any of the other figures listed, too.
So, it seems like whoever came up with this song didn’t think much of Hallownest. With that in mind it’s hard to think that it originated from any sort of faction loyal to the king.
We’re missing a line from the third verse, which Myla sings after you’ve beaten Soul Master and she’s beginning to become infected. But what we do see of it is Huge in terms of lore:
Bury my body and cover my shell,
[...]
What meaning in darkness? Yet here I remain
I’ll wait here forever ‘til light blooms again
So. The “protagonist” of this song’s family has died, and they expect to die as well, but even unto death they're waiting for Hallownest to fall and the light to return.
The moths became Hallownest’s gravekeepers after the Pale King forcibly assimilated them. Under the Pale King’s light, the moths forgot Radiance and most of their original culture, but Seer tells us in her final monologue that a few individuals remembered just enough to pass bits and pieces down through the generations. This secret resistance among the moths was what kept Radiance alive and prevented her from being sealed away entirely.
This song Myla sings comes from that moth resistance.
Code songs amongst oppressed ethnic groups are very much a real thing, especially when groups have to communicate or signal each other within hostile parties’ hearing. Since I’m American (and had a big ol crush on Harriet Tubman as a little kid lmao!) the first thing that came to mind for me when I made this connection was the working songs escaped Black slaves used in the Underground Railroad.
These have another point in common with the moth gravedigger song Myla sings, in that they enter the general cultural consciousness through out-group people who don’t know the true context. If you ever pick up a book of American baby songs, you’ll probably find some Underground Railroad code songs in there - often because generations ago white kids heard these songs from Black slaves or servants, and went on to sing the same songs to their children with zero awareness of what the songs were really for.
So some Hallownest bug somewhere probably heard the moths’ song and liked it and sang it in a context totally divorced from its original one, and it got spread around and passed down to become one of Myla’s old favorites, with her seemingly not realizing the meaning behind the lyrics. The moths’ song of devotion to their lost god survived them as a people.
This is some VERY realistic and layered worldbuilding. There is so much to glean from just one NPC’s dialogue when put together with other clues. Of course all of it is SAD and DEPRESSING, but Hollow Knight is a tragedy with a super unsubtle point to make about the unsustainability of Western imperialism.
What happens to Myla is awful, and upsetting, and unfair. So was what happened to the moths and their sacred ground, and to Radiance too. It’s important to understand the scope of the conflict that led to all this happening, trace it to its roots, and lay it at the feet of the ones responsible for engendering all this tragedy in the first place: Hallownest and the Pale King.
*A NOTE ABOUT MY USE OF THE TERM “GENOCIDE”
This is a tangent, but since there’s some debate about whether it’s appropriate to define the Pale King’s actions towards indigenous bug nations as genocide, allow me to cite the official definition of genocide here.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention for short) defines genocide like this:
Genocide is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group, as such:
A) Killing members of the group
B) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
C) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
D) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
E) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Among the abovelisted, Hallownest is guilty of A (Deepnest and the moths), B (Deepnest physically/the moths vis a vis brainwashing), C (the mantis tribe and the hive), and E (the moths, which we know from Marmu, and possibly the mosskin also - Isma is mosskin).
Then there is cultural genocide, i.e. acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group's way of life. Let’s look at the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) and how it defines cultural genocide:
A) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities
B) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources
C) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights
D) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures
E) Any form of propaganda directed against them
Hallownest is guilty of every item on this list. A: The moths, attempted with Deepnest. B: The moths, the mantises, the flukes, the mosskin; also attempted with Deepnest. C: The moths, the mantises, the flukes. D: The moths; attempted with the mantises and Deepnest. E: The mantises and Deepnest.
Any sort of discussion of the wide-reaching harm Radiance caused MUST include the context that the Infection is her response to multiple levels of genocide. Discussion that does not include this context loses nuance and simplifies the conflict and power dynamics portrayed in the game in ways that reflect real-life racism and Christian supersessionism.
Now, this is NOT some sort of holier than thou Fandom Purity dunk to say that it’s Bad or Wrong to care about Hallownest’s nobility. Like, one of my favorite characters in this dang game is the White Lady, who spent a long ass time enabling her husband’s actions before she finally walked out on him over the mass infanticide thing. You can, and it is okay to, love TPK and want rehabilitation for him while acknowledging that the dude has done objectively bad things.
I just feel that it’s important to keep things in perspective so that we don’t wind up stirring a bunch of real-world bigotry into our fandom funtimes. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of turning our brains off and simply Not Seeing It, because these same sorts of dynamics are behind a lot of the hardships that threaten our everyday stability.
It’s pretty hard to have conversations about those things in real life if one can’t even recognize them in fiction. So, this might be a good opportunity to start practicing anti-racism so we can better utilize that ideology in real life, where the stakes are much higher.
#hollow knight#hollow knight spoilers#hollow knight meta#myla hollow knight#the radiance#hk myla#hk radiance#essay#long post under cut -
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Wow thanks for the in depth answer! I guess in theory they are same genus different species if that makes sense. If it's not too much trouble could you go into how it practiced? Because it seems that Communist states end up using nationalism to string up dictatorships and their allies like the Soviet Union and China did or it that too much of a simplification? And seriously thanks for responding this is much easier to understand then other times I tried to get my head around it.
Sure, let's put a cut up, because it's long and controversial, including discussing atrocities.
It's not hard to see similarities between fascism and communism in practice - they depended largely on a brutally authoritarian model and practiced widespread atrocities against designated undesirables and dissenters of all stripes. The problem is, that these verses have been sung by many singers, and not all of them were communist or fascist. Much of the same brutality seen in those systems were seen in non-specific military juntas, warlord states, and petty dictators like Saddam Hussein or Indonesian dictators Sukarno and Suharto. After all, plenty of policies toward minorities and dissidents in the Soviet Union were the same, even if larger in scale, to those practiced by Nicholas II, and brutality could easily be found in policy toward colonial peoples or Native Americans in systems described as liberal democracies. So we should always specify that those atrocities are not unique to these movements, and supremacist movements can and do exist in all stripes of political arrangement.
One of the more interesting and amusing differences is in how the governments came to power. While fascist governments typically extol national renewal through force and militarization, the leading fascist governments were appointed as head of state (Hitler by Hindenberg, Mussolini by Victor Emmanuel III, Tojo by Hirohito), and these three were largely appointed out of exasperation and hope that they could control the more extreme elements of their movement. Only Franco could have been said to have come to power via military force and even he lucked into it, largely because most of the other major military leaders died early in the war and Franco's early successes, and Franco largely neutered the fascist Falangist party into his own brutally authoritarian caudillo government. Communist governments, by contrast, posit themselves as mass movements of the proletariat but were typically fringe urban movements (peasant parties were frequently quite opposed even when they expressed similar ideas and concepts), very unpopular compared to less radical movements and had to seize power through creating crises and fighting a civil war - the Bolsheviks were much less popular than the Mensheviks despite their names, the Chinese Communists were initially outnumbered by Chiang's Nationalists and contributed very little to the war against the Japanese comparatively to make it easier to take over in the aftermath, Castro's movement was initially middle-class and outnumbered. It's not a straight be-all-and-end-all, but it is sort of funny.
One of the most important similarities between fascism and communism is the element of totalitarianism - the movement attempts to place itself as the core identity of its people and devotes considerable effort to strengthening this identity. In essence, that which is in the ideology is good, and outside it wicked, and so all must be within it. In fascism, as defined by Mussolini: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state," meaning all people are members of the state and must only conceive of themselves in that fashion. All activity is for the state, all goals are for the state, and all people are rigidly defined, by class, by gender, and sorted accordingly. Fascism often rewarded loyalty and adherence materially - loyal fascists could receive confiscated property or high positions of power with large income. Conversely, non-fascists or those defined as not within the national community frequently had their property confiscated or placed under so much threat of attack that they frequently fled the country in fear for their lives, their abandoned property be snapped up by the fascist party and distributed to a loyal fascist.
In communism, one is strictly defined by class and theoretically equal (after the purging of those considered subhuman like the bourgeoise), but in practice, communism was usually wildly unequal (inequality in the Soviet Union was actually higher than inequality in the USA in 1950), placing party members into positions of power where they reaped considerable rewards while work weeks continued to lengthen and the fruits of labor were not enjoyed. In both of these systems, overt awarding for loyal behavior was the tool, it was meant to convey that advancement was only possible within the apparatus of the totalitarian state and party - all other considerations were secondary. This would attract the ambitious and create an unofficial network of informants who would hopefully inform of any disloyalty or dissent in hopes of a reward - the Gestapo and the Stasi were both infamous German secret police organizations who relied on a network of informants to create a climate of fear to repress dissent and prevent any identification outside the system, even if one was Nazi and the other was Communist. There were differences, largely depending on the definition of the desirable and the undesirable - one was typically viewed through national lenses and the other through the lens of relationship to the means of production. In practice, heads of state in both of those movements used those tools to identify enemies as "those who oppose me" to varying degrees of severity. In China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, for example, homosexuality was criminalized despite sexual orientation having nothing to do with social class or relationship to the means of production; it was a tool to establish part of the totalitarian identity.
In matters of religion, communist societies largely denounced religion as a tool of oppression, while fascists had a larger range with religions, usually selectively using it if it could benefit such as a state church but harshly denouncing in other terms. For example, in Nazi Germany, there was an attempt to establish a Nazi Protestant church, but Himmler practiced an occult esoterica and both Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann were ardent atheists who believed religion should be stamped out as counter to their conception of the mythical Aryan. In many cases, civic fascist ritual was used as a religion, and open demonstrations of allegiance were strictly enforced, such as the Nazis mandating saluting the Honor Temples in Munich to enforce the fascist cult of martyrdom via public display. However, like everything, public civic display is not limited to just one ideology; people stand at attention and remain quiet during their national anthems, typically removing hats, which is definitely a public display of national support via ritual behavior.
While in practice communism professed to be an international ideology, in practice nationalism was used as a tool of unity and as a means of stamping out dissent and identification much the way other aspects of life were. Stalin's first position as Commissar of Nationalities saw him seeing separatist movements wishing to establish independent socialist states which he quashed with ruthless abandon, Lenin would incorporate those techniques against Ukraine, brutally suppressing Ukrainian sentiment and language in his attempts to seize as much grain as he could to address the food shortages in Russia. In fascist societies, nationalism was key to identity and members outside the nation were considered lesser - the Holocaust is the most stark and chilling example of this ideology in practice. Little else needs to be said - nationalism was intrinsic to both the theory and practice of fascism.
Economically speaking, fascism again maintained the totalitarian model and applied it to the economy. Corporatism was the driving model, all elements of the economy were organs of the state to be directed by the brain: the party head or those he appointed as subordinates. Economic advancement was done via loyalty and utility to the fascist state. Loyal companies in Nazi Germany were given lucrative contracts, disloyal ones were taxed on gross revenue to render them unprofitable, seized, and distributed to loyalists, hence fascist companies could either be privately-owned with state-directed output provided the owner was a loyal fascist (such as IG Farben) or state-owned via an appointed loyalist (such as Reischwerke Hermann Goring - the state-run industrial conglomerate operated by Goring). Private property was maintained depending on utility to the state as directed by the fascist apparatus. Corruption, as you might imagine, was rampant. High-ranking fascists, perhaps most notably Himmler but really all the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, received extensive holdings to manage, which were parceled out to their own loyalists, to form an truly massive criminal empire. These were extensively embezzled from for their own private fortunes. Slave and prison labor was rampant, and even standard workers found little use in economic performance as consumer goods were rare and deemed unnecessary; promises were large but delivery scarce. In many ways, Nazi Germany's economic policy was most accurately described as a kleptocracy common to tinpot dictatorships: the money-making enterprises used to enrich key power brokers and keep the head of state in power. The Social Darwinist theory was on full display, individuals attempted to do things and the most successful would retroactively receive Hitler's approval, which in practice meant duplicated and wasted efforts and rampant corruption. It was hardly surprising that Nazi Germany was predominantly defined by economic failure at all points during its operation - only in the early years could anything have been said to have been successful, and this was largely due to Weimar ending the harsh Bruhning austerity measures before Hitler took over.
Communism, in practice, usually had a forcible confiscation policy in its earliest incarnations until it could establish itself, this was Lenin's "war communism" - largely a policy which legitimized the seizure of goods beyond a "bare minimum" - causing widespread shortages and large black markets but allowing the Red Army to continue the fight against the Whites, or Mao's policy of plunder and requisition to fight the Nationalists. Communism also typically relied heavily on compulsory labor from prisons, forcible confiscation of goods, and fixed prices (often these goods would be sold at market rate abroad, with the dictator pocketing the difference). Afterwards, the most powerful communist societies typically engaged in large-scale collectivization programs when they had the resources and capability to do so, typically to disastrous results. Peasants that owned their farms were typically not keen on surrendering their land and being placed under Communist management, usually violence would erupt between peasants and communists attempting collectivization, with the farms seized and turned over to collective management. In many ways, collectivization was also a totalitarian affair, communist parties in these efforts would turn poor peasants against the wealthier or more productive farms, weaponizing envy and stoking class divisions, and appealing to unemployed farmers whose farms had failed. Predictably, the loss of so much intellectual capital led to disastrous results - the collective farms produced far less output and required far more input. The Great Leap Forward was probably the most disastrous example of this, it ranks as the largest peacetime disaster in terms of raw deaths. Efficiency was disincentivized, as exceeding a quota simply meant a higher quota, with no reward. Even within the industrial sectors these problems persisted. Poor economic planning, promotion of loyalty over merit or intelligence, and absence of strong signaling left a glacial economy that in practice only produced strategic goods of worth: missiles, rocket engines, as opposed to products that were desirable or functional - unsurprising since so many engineers were forcibly shunted into military projects.
I've always found this example to be the most instructive: during the Khrushchev era, the Soviet Union experienced a great growth period, and both Soviet and Western leftist thinkers espoused it as the time that communism would surpass the antiquated capitalist models of the Western world., perhaps most famously illustrated by Francis Spufford's Red Plenty and the dialogues between Khrushchev and Kennedy. This growth did not last (not even until Brezhnev - the regression was still under Khrushchev), and in fact, was comparable to 1970's economic stagnation in Great Britain. Corruption was also rampant, both in black markets to cover numerous goods shortages and utilization of resources enabled by apparatchiks and party bosses
So as you can see, there are differences and lots of similarities in practice, but I'd go so far as to say that a lot of dictatorial models and authoritarian governments have similar actions so I think the similarity is due primarily to the actions of an authoritarian state on securing power - promoting loyalty to the head of state and ensuring no one can act as a threat, clamping down on disunity, establishing an enemy to focus the attention of the people through propaganda (even if you have to fabricate the "enemy" and their hostile intent), intentional impoverishment through policy to keep people from uniting against you. Otherwise, I'd say a lot of the other similarities revolve around the totalitarian mechanisms. I'd recommend The Dictator's Handbook to see how so many of these actions resound within dictatorial regimes, and how in practice many of these movements end up looking so similar when you stop listening to the rhetoric and start looking to the effects. And of course, this is just the bare bones basic stuff - I've barely touched on small countries like Cambodia
Hope you have a good one, James. Thanks for the question.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King
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So...Lilith
So I did not think my responses would be reblogged by @veiledlight-blog and @ohmourningstar but I want to continue the discussion on Lilith which isn’t a reblog chain but instead a full post.
So, why not use Lilith in your practice?
Because you’re not Jewish. Lilith is Jewish. You are not. Judaism is a closed practice for a reason. You aren’t supposed to use the stuff there if you aren’t Jewish. Maybe I have to explain why it’s closed.
Anti-semitism is a big issue. It’s everywhere all around the globe. Closed practices are closed to keep the practice how it is without being colonized, and Judaism is no exception. The Jewish people are often discriminated against. I could go on a full rant on how.
My Sunday school classmates have found nazi symbols spray painted onto walls near their homes. My Jewish friends have been made fun of for being Jewish. I’ve personally been threatened with violence and possible death for being Jewish. It’s caused a long issue with my self identity and my religious beliefs which I still struggle with now. I have often not wanted to be Jewish because I felt so ashamed and bad about it. I didn’t want a Bat Mitzvah in case others found out because I knew telling my friends might bring up a side of them I had no clue about or letting others who would also harm me know about my Judaism. It worsened my mental health which was already not good. And guess what? I was a kid. Not even thirteen when this all happened. No kid should go through that. No kid should hate who they are and what they believe because of others and their hate.
Judaism at its root is meant to protect its people from those who want to harm those who practice it. The whole book of Exodus was about escaping the Pharaoh who enslaved us and finding a new home. We have countless stories about it (the Prague Golem is an amazing one). We have the Holocaust. We’ve been taught by the world to keep closed to ourselves. Its figures like Lilith are not for those who are not Jewish.
Now, Lilith has become so popular because her whole concept has been changed from what it once was. Lilith was a high figure, not to be messed with and a literal demon who could and would harm babies and their mothers. Now she’s all succubus queen empowering women. While I am very happy that women, especially young witches, can feel empowered, there’s many, many ladies in other pantheons who are more appropriate for goyim (those who are not Jewish). Honestly, if i were a non-Jewish witch I would love Eve and even as a Jewish witch I still love her. Like your free will? Thank her. Stay away from the lady who was written to eat babies.
Also, young witches are also a big problem when it comes to this. You're naive. Hell I’m still young I’m definitely still naive. But I’m learning. You should be too, learning what you shouldn’t use in your practice because it’s appropriation.
And I mentioned before in my responses that some people have deities and entities come to them, not the other way around. I’ve dealt with this situation with another involving Lilith as said deity/entity before. Let’s have a hypothetical situation. You see Loki in your dreams. You’re not a Norse Pagan. He talks to you. When you wake up you feel this connection between you and him. You research. You find out about Norse Paganism and since you feel so connected to one of its deities, you study more of it and eventually become a Norse Pagan. People can get involved in certain religions or practices because of such experiences. Why can’t the same be done with Liltih and Judaism?
Now, Norse Paganism is an open practice. With closed ones it’s different, especially with African and Native American practices. But I say the underlying concepts and ideas still apply in concerns to Judaism. You’re free to join us. If you actually really feel connected to her, then I bet you 9/10 you’ll feel connected to Judaism and its concepts as well and end up converting. It’s a long process and yes, it’ll require a lot of work. But if you really want it you’ll do it. Getting into studying magic in itself is a massive undertaking. If you want it, you can do it. And if you want to become Jewish you can do it if you really want it.
I know many young witches who want to work with Lilith will say “but I’m too young I can’t convert!” Well guess what? If you really want it you can sit down and wait and when you’re 18 you can convert. Study Judaism in the meanwhile. Help out your local Jewish community. Be an ally to us. We’ll greatly appreciate it and it’ll help with the conversion. If it’s too much of a hassle to wait, hopefully you’ll learn you made a mistake as your young naive self and have more wisdom for your practice, because we all make mistakes and we all should learn from them. And definitely still stand with us as an ally against anti-semitism! And if you still work with and worship her after all that without the conversion, then you’re just an approperiating asshole. Why she would want to work with you is beyond me. Even being “against anti-semitism” is a futile effort because clearly no you’re not.
Also, please do not work with Lilith while you’re converting. Wait till after. You made it so far doing it all right only to ruin it by doing that. Plus by doing so you’re honestly just showing 1) you only converted for Lilith 2) you don’t actually respect the rest of Judaism and 3) Honestly you’re just an asshole trying to cover your tracks.
For any witches who do fully convert or those thinking on it: you can still be a witch and do pagan things as a Jew! Look at me. Look at my mom. Look at @will-o-the-witch. Nobody will judge you for it (you’ll find we’re a very open-minded and accepting community). Even rabbis will be open to it and might give you resources! So don’t be scared. We’ll welcome you.
One big thing, don’t just do nothing when you are officially Jewish. Attend services at a synagogue. Help out at your local JCC. Celebrate the holidays. Don’t just turn Jewish because some kid on Tumblr told you to if you wanted to work with Lilith. If you’re just going to ignore all of it when it’s done, then why even bother? It makes you another asshole just covering their tracks. If this is what you’re gonna do, don’t do it.
Also, please note my whole ramble on conversion is meant for people who genuinely feel a powerful connection to Lilith which should extend to the whole of Judaism. Don’t convert or even consider it if you’re only vaguely interested in her and the religion. Research is fine but active practice is a whole new bucket of worms. You’ll waste your time and everyone else’s time with a conversion if you’re not fully involved and into it. Attend or watch (with the pandemic and that) a service or two and see how you think of it. Research research research as well and decide after you’ve done the two. It’ll likely be a no at the end if you are not genuinely interested. Or you may end up genuinely interested in Judaism by doing those things. Just always make sure you’re 100% confident in your choice for this if you’re going to actually convert. It’s a big move and not one to be taken lightly.
So, TLDR for the whole conversion thing: you either end up realizing your mistake and growing as a person and witch, you reveal yourself as a true asshole, or you end up in a community you’re happy in. Think hard and long. Question your interest and connections. Don’t not get involved in Jewish things if you do convert.
I didn’t expect this to end up mostly about conversion at the end but oh well. I hope this helps or provides some insight. For any questions please just dm or send me an ask. Any anti-semitism or hate will be ignored because I don’t have time for your shit.
#judaism#cultural appropriation#cultural appropriation in witchcraft#lilith#long post#antisemitism#conversion
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This is kind of a weird route to terfdom but one of the things that really got me questioning the libfem blogs i followed was the strange insistence that because a thing was common in one group or they had first heard of it coming from that group, that it coming from anywhere else too was clearly copying or appropriation. Like braided bread was Jewish and Jewish only, hairsticks were asian and asain only, square peices of fabric tied at the waist for skirts were african and african only, dual dutch braids are black american and black american only. It's not that I don't think cultural appropriation is a thing but humans have been coming up with the same basic ideas for fucking ever, all over the globe, because they are simple and sensible approaches to problems. Once i started to question their weird insistance on being right about that stuff in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise, i began to question trans politics too and look at evidence provided by radfems and spiraled from there. This ridiculous idea that humans of different cultures couldn't possibly have similar solutions to things is really similar to the idea that a western woman has nothing in common with an eastern woman and there is no universal female experiences. They seem to determined to seperate us.
sorry it took me so long to get to this, i wanted to be able to give a really well thought-out answer bc... there's a lot of nuance to this discussion imo!
my problem with the average "cultural appropriation" argument is that more often than not it's the laziest possible interpretation, usually online, usually by some white kid trying to look woke. just a little bit ago kids on tiktok were demanding these like, eastern europeans i think (don't quote me) apologize for appropriation for wearing their own traditional dress bc it "looked mexican." or however long ago when nicki minaj was in the hot seat for wearing a "native american" headdress.... that was actually caribbean.
because you're exactly right, a lot of humans were coming up with the same shit all over the world at different times.
but my other issue is this idea that all of these cultures evolved in an isolated vacuum and were never influenced by any other people groups. that's hilarious to me, personally, but also a little disturbing when i start to get major "Cultural Purity" vibes from otherwise well-meaning people who think we should all just keep to our Own Cultures :)
university is where i mainly observed this weird dissonance where i'm being bombarded with evidence of cultural amalgamation every day in my art history lectures, while in my small discussion sections i'm asked to apply cultural relativity to, say, the practice of fgm in west africa. i wrote an entirely neutral paper on its cultural significance, as if those girls (and boys as well in that case) aren't also people like me. that's just the way "they" do things. it forces you to dehumanize people from other cultures, honestly.
and this isn't to say that the dynamics of cultural interactions don't matter. there's a very good, historical reason why white americans do not and should not ever have ownership over black american culture. to me, for the most part, there's a visible difference in how braids are used in black hairstyles versus the traditional white european hairstyles. but not always. it's not really about the hair itself, but the double standard applied to black people whose hairstyles are called "unprofessional," "inappropriate," while on white people they're cool and subversive. the real harm of cultural appropriation isn't really the decontextualization of a specific culture, but that it obscures discrimination. yes, both white people and black people wear braids, but as white people we're not discriminated against when we do.
at the same time, i love to see evidence of human interaction. oppressive cultural dynamics happen on a very wide scale that can be summed up in your history textbook from a third-person perspective. on an individual level, of course discrimination still exists, but there's no real malicious significance to seeing someone do or make something and thinking "i like that, i want to join." one of my favorite things i encountered studying art history was seeing the way cultural artistic styles combined, yes, sometimes as a result of an overarching subjugating political takeover. and like, i hate to say it, but sometimes that didn't really change someone's daily life. people are very resistant to change on an individual level. look at how many people were converted to a new religion by just adding a new god to their own beliefs.
mudéjar architecture came about because of the islamic empire's conquest of spain over a thousand years ago. and check out this greco-roman influenced gandhara bodhisattva from almost 2000 years ago. cultural exchange!
"emperor qianlong watching the peacock in its pride" from 1760 qing dynasty china, influenced by the italian painter castiglione.
there's a lot more universality to our different cultures than a lot of people would like to acknowledge, i think. it dehumanizes someone to categorize them as Foreign, to label their culture as entirely separate and untouchable, and it feels to me very much like people think culture is something that can become contaminated by the wrong people interacting. and i do think heritage is incredibly important, i do think cultural appropriation hurts people from oppressed social groups. but i also think cultural exchange is very natural and important.
the refusal to see nuance (not to mention the blatant inaccuracies i mentioned at the start that happen all the time) is definitely a big part of what drove me away from liberal spaces, and i do think there are people who have a specific agenda of dividing western white women from other women around the world. specifically to keep us from empathizing with each other and finding common ground. i just think it discourages the genuine instinctive desire to explore something new and compare it to what's familiar to you.
#answered#bet you weren't expecting a whole dissertation fkghsklfg sorry anon#anyway not to get into discourse. i do see people on here say stuff like this so i don't know that this is that unpopular of a take#but i get v excited to have an excuse to talk abt art history stuff so thanks nonny
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