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raayllum · 2 years

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I cannot even explain how Terry the Earthblood bf of freaking ELF HARVESTER CLAUDIA is making the shipper in me go feral. There are so many interesting ways this could go

Like, first there’s the somewhat typical but still deliciously angst worthy scenarios where:

Terry Doesn’t Know

1) and genuinely likes Claudia and thinks she likes him too except Claudia approached him on purpose and is USING him (but also she is deep in denial at the fact that she has somehow ended up Actually Liking Him, which she cannot accept for multiple reasons, mostly because she can’t get over her remaining pride and prejudice towards elves, because she can’t choose him over her dad and she knows it too so what’s the point, and because she doesn’t want to think about how Badly Things Will End when he learns about everything she has done)

Terry Doesn’t Know

2) and genuinely likes Claudia, and she genuinely LIKES HIM and she didn’t want to get him involved but she couldn’t bear to leave him either, so she’s lying her mage ass off about everything, but she is visibly torn and paranoid, she doesn’t want to leave him, but she doesn’t know how to protect him, she doesn’t want him to find out What She Has Done, but she can’t stop being daddy’s little girl either - she has to pick a side but she can’t so she’s trying to have her cake and eat it too

Bonus Messed Up Points for both scenarios if Claudia does like him but she still can’t quite see elves as ‘people’ and confesses to her dad that she sort of thinks of him more as an ‘exotic pet’ - hence why she has no moral hang ups on deceiving him and using him. But she still wants him to like her back, so she doesn’t want him to Find Out.

Then it gets interesting:

Terry Knows

-and he is a completely and utterly Willing Accomplice because of some personal grudge against Xadia (they have been portrayed as a little too noble so far, like no one really mentions anything terrible they did behind the whole purge an ethnic minority thing which was mentioned maybe three times. So I would appreciate something to paint them in darker tones. Earthblood Elf massacre? Maybe Terry was adopted by humans? Is half human? Either way, Xadia is going down.) Claudia is completely taken by this cheerful traitor and the feeling is mutual. He’s happy to assist in Claudia’s dedication to human take over and he thinks she’s the cutest little tyrant he has ever met. High in shock factor. Super messed up. Also kinda cute.

We have the slightly more nuanced:

Terry Knows

-and Claudia thinks he /doesn’t/. She thinks he’s totally in the dark, and either she’s using him from the start (and won’t admit to herself she’s grown to like him) or has genuinely liked him from the start, but either way, she’s lying to him about everything and he still just. Goes along with it. Just because he Likes Her That Much (some yandere vibes). And he doesn’t tell her that he knows because he knows she doesn’t want to have that conversation. And he is waiting for her to trust him enough to tell her himself. Again, super messed up. Also kinda cute. Also ship makes more sense if they both have extremely skewed morals for their loved ones.

But. But my favourite one is this.

Terry Knows

- and Claudia thinks he doesn’t. Because Terry is the one who approached HER first. On Purpose. Yes. THE ELF BF IS A DOUBLE AGENT. And that is why he Knows everything Claudia is up to but plays dumb and just goes along with whatever lie she says or whatever shady request she makes, that is why he plays the silly, blindly devoted boyfriend, all so he can put himself in a position that’s close enough to her to Stop Her. And even better? He’d rather die than admit it, but Terry-the-double-agent can’t help but Like Her A Little. Even as he’s preparing to betray her. Claudia is cute and silly and pretty and he’s still steeling himself to put an end to her, if that’s what it will take to stop her. And Claudia (whether she started out using him and grew to like him or she liked him immediately as he started out using her) is just the same, she Can’t Help But Like Him even though it’s stupid, even as she thinks about how she’ll still have to betray Terry eventually for her father’s sake. They both look at each other with smiles and lies and die a little inside as they think about how they will inevitably have to Get Rid of the other to reach their goals. Either one of them Turns or they both Burn. IT IS ALLLL THE ANGST.

So I’m gonna disagree on the Xadia is never portrayed as bad because

Assassins are literally coming to unjustly kill the king and his innocent child in 1x03 even once Runaan (who I love, bc I love all the characters) knows the egg wasn’t destroyed

Everything about Sol Regem

The Ghosting Spell that is portrayed as horribly unfair and presumptive in every case we’ve seen it used in that Callum directly calls out as decidedly horrific and unfair

The Light spell that Amaya and Viren both suffer for basically no reason

and much more

Claudia also doesn’t want humans to necessarily take over! Viren has wanted to reclaim Xadia for a while, but Claudia has never said anything similar, and given the way Aaravos has treated all his pawns thus far, I don’t think he currently cares for humanity anymore than he cares for elves. Claudia wants to keep her family (rn her and Viren together) as much as possible, and given how Terry met Viren - no new clothes or cover up or anything - I’d say he’d have to know, and Claudia wouldn’t be with someone who wasn’t going to help her in that regard.

I don’t think Terry is going to be a traitor to Xadia, but I’ve long figured and written about elves who would be okay with dark magic and if anything embrace it, because they’re particularly potent walking spell parts and it’s very convenient. Using their own blood / hair / nails, chopping off and regrowing their fingers, etc etc. So maybe that’ll be him, offering up antler shavings too while he’s at it.

I think Claudia just using Terry is unlikely (because it wouldn’t add much to her arc / character and he’s also trans which - yeah does factor in for me as an NB) but I do think they can have some interesting conversations around personhood and agency and I’m here for all of it. I feel like he could be something that helps her perspective change (depending on his possibly going further into the ‘maybe people as spell parts isn’t great’) so I’m super curious about that.

Claudia may have taken an elven solider from the battlefield, but the boot looks more human to me, so she’s not canonically an elf harvester. Yet, anyway

#long post #thanks for asking #claudia x terry #terry the earthblood elf #tdp spoilers #s4 spoilers #arc 2 #s4 #speculation #predictions #tdp #the dragon prince #tdp claudia #shipping

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dhampiravidi · 8 months

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ronnie x jasmine/artemis/the traitor

continued from here (moved to comply w/Beta editor):

It was like a work conference for organized crime. There were maybe fifteen people inside the hotel's largest event room, all dressed in some kind of business casual or formal wear. They represented different "families", each characterized by their members' ethnicity and the territory they claimed within the United States. But Jas knew that they all had one thing in common: they were going to die in the next ten minutes, courtesy of her. She just needed her plan to go smoothly.

Common sense said she couldn't just walk in, pull out a semi, and start shooting--there were innocent waiters scattered about the room, offering amuse-bouches, petits fours, and generous flutes of champagne. Thankfully, she knew that the waiters would be shooed away at some point because she'd managed to get a program for the event. Apparently, the hotel had requested some kind of itinerary, presumably so they could give their guests all the necessary amenities, blah, blah, blah. Jasmine doubted the hotel would turn down the kind of money that the crime lords could pool together. People always turned a blind eye whenever money was involved. The only unknown was how much they felt their services were worth.

She was waiting a building over, sniper equipment ready. Close combat was more efficient in her opinion, since it almost guaranteed executions. The only challenging part of that scenario was getting away, and half the time that was made easy because she already had to carve a path to her target in the first place. But when it came to taking out multiple targets at long range, there was always the possibility that the enemy's entourage could and would trace her shots back to where she was set up. Once they did that, Jas only had about five minutes, tops, before she was caught. One step at a time. She'd been in worse situations and gotten out alive.

Half a second after the last waiter left the room, Jas swept the room using her laser sight, found her first target, and started shooting. The first shot narrowly missed, because the asshole had to bend over for something. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice. So she lined up the shot again and pulled the trigger. While her first target was staggering, about to fall over, Jasmine looked for the next face she'd memorized and took out two more scumbags before anyone at the little event even tried to take cover. Sometimes it was hard not to take a certain pleasure in what she did. Yes, she was doing the world a service, but her job wasn't something she'd encourage kids to do. She had dedicated her life to making the world a better place, the only way she knew how. There wasn't any going back, and there certainly wasn't a happy ending in store for her...

Four left.

She played Chicken (more like Idiot) with one target, finding the woman's head to line up the shot, then shooting far away from her so she'd think she was safe. Three left. Jas could do this. She could go back to her hidey-hole without a scratch. Maybe, depending on how much energy she had to put on a decent disguise (her sniping outfit didn't exactly scream "casual, typical young woman in her 30s"), Jas could even get Starbucks, or something interesting from one of the small places near the apartment she was squatting. She'd have to beware of the many CCTV cams in the area, but that was a given. In the modern day, anyone could be found. Even though she had been caught couple times, and tortured, she refused to give up. So she just had to be careful. Luck wasn't a thing when your parents had been killed in front of you.

#in--noctem #jkw: thread #moved thread to use beta editor #amer assassin RP

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ilovesamwilsonn · 3 years

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Hello, saw your post about asian rep in tfatws! Also wanted to point out that in ep6, two of the prominent GRC reps are from the philippines and india :) sam even coordinates with the filipino rep (ayla perez, if im not mistaken--her name and credentials are flashed onscreen at one point through redwing) for the helicopter rescue. Those two reps are also part of the people that sam makes his speech to at the end :)

yes omg you’re right! tysm for mentioning them. it’s been awhile since i’ve seen episode six so i had forgotten to mention them in the post.

#tfatws #wheezeasyouleave #the casual diversity this show had really is something else !#honestly #and it’s not even just one ethnicity used repeatedly #it’s multiple ethnicities in scenarios that just make sense #like ofc the grc aren’t going to be an all white board #and that nyc is diverse as hell itself

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attemptsonherlifepdf · 3 years

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attempts on her life: an exploration of victimhood, theatre and self-empowerment as modern feminine survival tactics

trigger warning for discussions of suicide, self harm, sexual assault, fetishism, eating disorders, implications of paedophilia and violence

‘is she not saying, your help oppresses me? is she not saying, the only way to avoid being a victim of the patriarchal structures of late 20th century capitalism is to become her own victim?’ martin crimp’s 1997 play, attempts on her life, was first performed at the royal court theatre upstairs the year of its release. written ‘for a company of actors whose composition should reflect the world beyond theatre’, the play explores the seedier, harsher aspects of reality, including pornography, ethnic violence and suicide. crimp’s central character, anne, is characterised as unique and empowered, but most importantly she is characterised by narrators and other characters describing her. the irony of a woman described as so empowered having so little voice of her own throughout the play is crucial to the question the play poses: is liberation from patriarchal constraints even possible, or do acts of reclamation serve to eventually end up catering to the male gaze regardless?

the scene ‘untitled (100 words)’ details anne’s self-destruction, manifesting in ‘various attempts to kill herself.’ it is an effort to replace being a victim of ‘patriarchal structures’ with being a victim of her own actions and emotions. arguably though, this effort may not be entirely fruitful as anne’s behaviour produces the same result she would achieve through allowing herself to cater to traditional expectations: a helpless victim of the male gaze. anne’s actions are presented as exhibitionist; while motivated by her own suicidal ideation, her attempts to take her life work as ‘a kind of theatre for a world in which theatre itself has died.’ she leaves a ‘gallery’ of memorabilia surrounding her attempts, including ‘medicine bottles, records of hospital admissions polaroids of the several hiv positive with whom she has intentionally had unprotected intercourse, pieces of broken glass...suicide notes…’ a narrator describes this exhibition as ‘the spectacle of her own existence, the radical pronography...the religious object.’ the semantic field of language in this scene associated with anne’s suicide attempts is littered with sexualisation and ideas of performance: ‘its sexy...voeyuers...pornography...object of herself...to be consumed...self-indulgent...entertaining.’ this opens up a dialogue between the narrators that evaluates her suicidal behaviour as a piece of artwork. one asks ‘who would possibly accept this kind of undigested exhibitionism as a work of art?’ while the other offers the idea that ‘gestures of radicalism take on new meaning in a society where the radical gesture is simply one more form of entertainment - in this case artwork - to be consumed.’ as uncomfortable as it is to suggest, anne’s suicidality is both fetishised and commodified, something that is partially her own doing. the concepts of ‘pure narcissism’ and ‘self-indulgence’ are attributed to her performance, along with one of the narrators pushing for her to receive psychiatric treatment. an obvious but viable interpretation of anne’s ‘gallery’ is that it is an exaggerated cry for help, where she lays out the evidence of her mental state in the hopes of receiving validation or assistance. this idea is disputed by this narrator’s counterpart, who suggests that ‘help is the last thing she wants.’ the sexualised language used and the repeated hints at exhibitionism could indicate that her performance is for the purpose of her own sexual pleasure: ‘surely our presence [the audience] here makes us mere voyeurs in bedlam.’ in forcing those around her to witness her mental decline, anne may be participating in fetishism. she certainly is acting with the intention of performing, and of being watched.

this is where the idea of empowerment and reclamation comes in. anne forces her peers into watching, something that she gets pleasure from, and this arguably serves as a reversal of typical sexual dynamics which place men in dominant, pleasure-receiving roles roles. in self-destructive behaviours, she reclaims her body and chooses to destroy it herself rather than allowing others to do it to her. however, in the process of doing so she achieves the same result that she would if she were allowing her environment to shape her into an object of the male gaze; that is to say, a helpless object. men’s stereotypical attraction to what ibsen referred to as ‘feminine helplessness’ tends to be the driving force of the objectification of women. it can be argued that this objectification is inevitable and thus anne’s efforts to control the means by which it occurs is the closest she can get to liberating herself from it. finding a way to enjoy or bear something painful and inevitable serves as a survival mechanism; ‘not the object of others, but the object of herself.’

the aesthetic framing of anne’s violence against herself is incredibly significant to its relevance as a piece of artwork. in ‘aesthetic violence and women in film: kill bill with flying daggers’, kupfer argues that film, and by extension plays and scripts, aesthetically frame violence in three ways: symbolically, structurally, and as a narrative essential. anne’s violence can be characterised as self harm and fulfills these three framings. symbolically it is an act of free will and a reclamation of her own body, an opportunity to enjoy her ‘inevitable’ objectification. structurally, the scene ‘untitled (100 words)’ occurs five scenes after the last discussion of anne’s suicidality within the play, a scene titled ‘mum and dad.’ this sets up certain aspects of anne’s performative nature in advance. after a suicide attempt she describes ‘[feeling] like a screen’ to her parents: ‘where everything from the front looks real and alive, but round the back there’s just dust and a few wires...an absence of character.’ here she details an experience of feeling disconnected from herself beyond her performance. the act of using performance as a means of openly criticising performance is certainly subversive, and is a device seen in more modern media, such as bojack horseman (‘i felt like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox...not my character’) and in bo burnham’s ‘inside.’ crimp uses his play to propose ideas about the nature of acting, particularly its role in the lives of women. the sentiment of acting being a survival tactic for women is echoed in much earlier texts, such as ibsen’s ‘a doll’s house.’ throughout the play nora caters to her husband’s infantalised fantasies of her whenever he is present, and doing so results in him giving her an allowance and certain limited but significant moments of freedom. torvald admits, ‘i would not be a man if your feminine helplessness did not make you doubly attractive in my eyes’ and repeatedly states that he wishes some ‘terrible fate’ would befall his wife so that he could have the pleasure of rescuing her. anne’s performance of suicidality, of feeling ‘beyond help’, would likely be received by men similarly to how nora’s childish facade is received by her husband, as a fantasy that involves saving her for their own sense of pleasure and accomplishment. however, what makes anne’s behaviour ‘radical’ is her refusal to accept help. she recognises that her feelings of hopelessness are fetishised and argues that ‘your help oppresses me.’ this sentiment is also reflected in ‘a doll’s house’; nora must refuse torvald’s money and help in order to pursue her own freedom in the final act. catering to his idealised image of a wife only served to help her survive her household, not to prosper or be her individual self. she had to leave the environment which forced her to perform behind entirely in order to discover who she is beyond the act. not accepting help is anne’s version of this, but the narrators consider the idea that even in isolating her act to only include herself, anne still cannot escape objectification. her ‘radical gesture’ of destroying herself and laying out the evidence of her behaviour is ‘simply one more form of entertainment, one more product… to be consumed.’ an earlier scene, titled ‘the camera loves you’ includes the line ‘we need to go for the sexiest scenario’, a statement which accurately summarises the likely reception to anne’s ‘dialogue of objects.’ arguably another aspect of what makes anne’s predicament ‘the sexiest scenario’ is that even within the text itself she is the subject of the conversation, but rarely a participant. anne is described by narrators, art critics, her parents, her family, etc, but only ever speaks for herself when her defiant statements are being quoted by one of these narrators. descriptions of her self-inflicted violence fit kupfer’s final framing: a narrative essential.

interestingly, the play consists of a somewhat non-linear narrative, where each of its 17 scenes has its own plot unconnected to that of the last. as a result, a narrative essential in ‘attempts on her life’ would be a device, or in this case an instance of violence, which builds our understanding of both anne and the play’s messages, rather than a traditional narrative essential which would drive the plot forwards. the play delivers multiple instances of various forms of violence, ranging from ethnic violence to self harm to forced pornography. anne’s self-injury in particular is framed just prior to and just after the midpoint of the play. before the midpoint, the audience learns of her ‘terrible detachment’ from the character she plays, how she ‘feels like a screen.’ the midpoint, a scene titled ‘the international threat of terrorism™’ opens with a brief analysis of a statement made by anne: ‘i do not recognise your authority.’ the speaker asks, ‘does she really imagine that anything can justify her acts of random senseless violence?’ ‘random’ and ‘senseless’ seem ill-fitting qualities to attribute to anne’s violence, particularly given that her parents state ‘she’s planned all this.’ however, this midpoint scene states ‘no one can find anne’s motive’, seemingly the reason that the speaker cannot see a possible justification for her behaviour. choosing not to recognise the authority of those around her is yet another aspect of our protagonist’s performance that is ‘radical.’ in neglecting to acknowledge the power of those objectifying her, anne is achieving two things; either she is allowing herself to experience her own body and emotions without it being for the sake of others, or she is allowing herself to be fetishised and is simply in denial of it. her defiance is complex and the results of it, and indeed the motivations behind it, are difficult to ascertain.

martin crimp’s use of 17 separate individual scenes rather than a traditional singular plot narrative allows the audience to gain a multifaceted understanding of many multifaceted issues. anne is placed and acts within varying contexts such as her own personal self destruction, destruction of land that comes with ethnic cleansing, the commodification of female bodies and two different familial structures. the scene ‘the camera loves you’ emphasises how anne is an ‘everywoman’ but rather than this term being used to describe an average woman in daily life, it instead refers to a woman who is, simply put, everything. anne is described in the scene ‘girl next door’ as ‘the girl next door...royalty…a pornographic movie star...a killer and a brand of car...a terrorist threat...a mother of three...femme fatale...a presidential candidate...a predator…’ by not allocating a specific speaker to each line, crimp allows the director to decide who describes anne and in what way. lines such as ‘what we see here is the work of a girl who clearly should have been admitted, not to an art school but to a psychiatric unit’ can be spoken by a parent, an art critic, a teacher, anyone, and the relation of the speaker to anne is what characterises the comment and thus characterises her. someone described as ‘self indulgent’ by a parent is very different to someone described the same way by a lover. this means that anne is not just every woman, but every woman to everyone. by placing this ‘everywoman’ in such a range of contexts, she arguably becomes a plot device used to convey meaning, and it can be argued that this negates the more empowered features of her character. it is entirely common for female characters to be reduced to plot devices, however most often when this occurs, the character is two-dimensional. anne, on the other hand, is consistently given additional layers to her character in every scene; she exists to be characterised. excessive use of character description in conjunction with limited speaking time is either evidence that crimp’s writing is atypical in style but not theme, or that it is poignant.

arguably, by giving anne countless traits and emphasising ideas of performance and media, crimp is using his 17 scenes as an extreme example of the commodification of female bodies. anne is sold to the audience as this larger-than-life persona, someone who fulfils a million roles in subversive ways that are interesting to watch, but she still ‘feels like a screen.’ again, this sentiment of the effects of performance on an actor is echoed in many modern texts and pieces of media, but ‘attempts on her life’ makes this point in specific reference to women. real life examples of anne’s treatment exist, and her ‘everywoman’ role allows audiences to relate anne to any number of women existing in media. the way that others only talk about anne when describing or evaluating her mimics the way that agencies and record labels create a solid branding for their actors, musicians, and so on. this brand becomes an intrinsic part of their genuine personality as they cannot be caught behaving in a way that is not consistent with it. acting becomes a constant, and these women are constantly selling a brand or persona, and have very little space to behave in ways that feel true to themselves instead. acting ‘out of character’ results in the loss of public support, funding from agencies, job offers, etc, and thus the character created for celebrities is vital to their survival in their respective industries. as previously discussed, traditional texts argue the importance of theatre for women’s survival just as much, namely ibsen’s ‘a doll’s house.’ the same way nora must leave the environment that forces her to act in order to be happy or individual, anne must do the same; but her attempts at suicide suggest that the environment forcing her performance is not a household or an industry, but ‘the patriarchal structures of late twentieth century capitalism.’ either she dies or ‘becomes her own victim’ in an attempt to escape constant performance, but even her death becomes somewhat performative. even dead, many female celebrities continue their branding through martyrdom. there is very little room for one to make art detailing suicide, sex, and the like without seemingly crossing the line between expression and glorification. women who suffer are not necessarily acting, but as their suffering is a part of their life experience, it becomes interwoven in their branding or public image: amy winehouse’s experiences with alcoholism and bulimia come to mind. winehouse never glorified alcoholism herself, but songs such as ‘rehab’ and documentaries covering her illness released after her death have certainly been accused of doing so. agencies and other creatives took advantage of winehouse’s struggles in order to perform their own ‘activism’ or ‘spreading of awareness.’

in light of ‘attempts on her life’ and the concepts surrounding performance that it poses, we must consider: is liberation from patriarchal constraints even possible, or do acts of reclamation serve to eventually end up catering to the male gaze regardless? it would not be accurate to the play’s style and purpose to try to make one singular conclusion to this question. crimp uses varying styles and contexts in order to showcase the various aspects there are to this issue; the necessity of performance, the constraints it leads to, the sexualisation of suffering, brand maintenance, and so on. anne’s lack of voice in this play can be read either as an example of the very thing the play criticises, or simply just poor usage of character, and the former feels most appropriate for crimp’s writing style. the play implies that victimhood can be intrinsic to womanhood, but presents anne’s defiance as ideallised, encouraging it. theatre can be used as both a survival mechanism and a method of empowerment, but the play posits that it is only empowering to a certain extent; it allows one to control the means by which they are objectified but not to actually avoid objectification. one can behave in undesirable manners, such as anne’s displays of suicidality and exhibitionism, but then we must examine their motivations. is anne behaving in this way solely based upon her low mental health? or is the fact that she is also engaging in a form of exhibitionism and forcing an audience evidence of her sexualising her own experience? if so, her sexualisation of suicidal behaviour likely stems from the ‘patriarchal structures’ she is working to avoid being a victim of, suggesting that it is not possible to liberate oneself from them. anne is evidence that women are not separate from the patriarchy, but active participants in it as it is a collection of ideals engraved into western society. it would be unfair and somewhat dejected to conclude that these ideals cannot be unlearned, but ‘attempts on her life’ certainly illustrates that unlearning them is a more active and difficult task than simply holding a feminist ideology.

i.k.b

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writingwithcolor · 4 years

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Including diversity where there may be little

Including diversity where there may be little: Black Radium Girls as example

post-scriptvm asked: [ask clipped for length]

I have an interest in the ‘Radium Girls’, groups of women who worked at studios in America from the late 1910s onwards painting radium onto clock faces, and later took their companies to court for the horrible impacts the radium had on their body.

I want to make a musical, just for fun. I’ve decided to use a fictionalized version of events, with composite characters based on multiple different women, rather than one of the real-life groups and the actual women from them. It will be mostly set in New Jersey, in the roaring 20s.

Neither of the two real-life groups I know of had any Black women in them, and I can’t see any Black women in any of the big group photos of the dial factories’ employees. But I know there’s a lot of Black history and culture in that time and place bc of the great migration and stuff, so I feel like if I’m not going to use the real life ladies, I should probably take the opportunity to also make some of them Black, bc making a whole cast of white ladies in the name of potentially wrong ‘historical accuracy’ seems like a bad thing.

My question is, should I? [ask clipped for length]

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were African American radium girls. Speculating People of Color/Women of Color’s involvement is far more realistic than portraying everyone as white. Go for it!

Perhaps look into what other races were predominantly in the New Jersey area for inspiration, too.

Hidden History

This section features just a few examples of PoC in lesser known historical settings.

The histories of People of Color are highly and actively erased. Women of Color especially get their stories left to footnotes in the textbooks. You hear about certain amazing women again and again, but there’s so many others that don’t get their time of day.

Hidden Figures (book and movie) is a prime example of that erasure and lesser known history. To summarize: It’s “the powerful story of four African-American female mathematicians at NASA who helped achieve some of the greatest moments in our space program.”

Here’s another example:

Photo of female firefights on Pearl Harbor, 1941. Identities unknown

It would be nice to know more about these women, and i’ve seen inquiries from people requesting info from anyone who may know. This struggle to find details is a prime example of that erasure in itself.

Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse, and an Unlikely Romance by Alexis Clark

The book pictured above is the true story of a Black nurse and German Prisoner of War who fall in love during World War II. They face many hardships (disowning from his family, racism, and shunning from towns) but stay together for their whole lives, marry, and have children (One of their sons highly informed the writing of the book!)

This book discusses the discrimination the Black soldiers and nurses faced. They struggled to even be allowed to serve their country, and were treated worse than POWs.

Video: The Unlikely Romance of a Black Nurse & German P.O.W. in WW II

Research

Research “[RACE] + Firsts” and find many more examples of little unknown bits of history where they’ve been involved.

First doesn’t mean it came without limitations, discrimination or hardships. But they happened, and many sooner than you’d think.

Explore beyond what you know about whitewashed history and learn the true stories of People of Color.

Making it “realistic”

People will question how “realistic” it is to feature a Black women in this position for the time period, unfortunately. It doesn’t hurt to provide an explanation until we get to a place where diversity isn’t interrogated when it shows up.

Giving her backstory.

You can briefly explain the journey to the job, such as shortages due to a war. Take a look at those real world firsts for inspiration.

Especially take a look at the specific region of the story. What firsts were there? Any government power influences? How did PoC break barriers to make the strides they did?

Use the web, but also go beyond. Seek books, historians, artwork. Search those “footnotes” for that one sentence mention. (That’s actually how the writer of Enemies in Love found their story. Just a quick sentence and a search for the story began. It helped that she was a journalist!)

Relationships with Peers:

“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” - Susan B. Anthony

White women weren’t, historically, welcoming to Black women. For example, white sufferists insisted Black women march in the back of the protests for, allegedly, both their rights. You’ll need to decide how your Black woman is treated in this situation.

You might face the following from peers, superiors, or others:

Hesitation to work or interact with her

Curiosity and intrigue (The “Other”

Unsure of how to approach or be friends with her

Microaggressions

Blatant racism

Your musical doesn’t seem like it is meant to focus too heavily on the hardships. It begs a mention, but just how much is up to you.

Call the Midwife, period racism example

Call the Midwife (BBC) is set in East End London, Late 1950s, early 1960s. The show features a Black midwife named Lucille Anderson. There’s a shortage on nurses so Caribbean nurses were being called in to support the growing population.

Call the Midwife is from a midwife, Jennifer Worth’s, memoir, so it’s based on history.

Check out this short clip: Nurse Lucille Anderson - Call the Midwife

Lucille on Call the Midwife (Take notes!)

The show handles racism and microaggressions very well. It’s not overdone.

Lucille is accepted by her peers and is especially close to one of the girls.

There’s an episode where she actively faces blame and discrimination during a case. It’s a major story line of the episode.

She does face occasional micro-aggressions where she is othered, but it is not every single time she is on screen and not every episode.

Her peers talk to her about her experiences and in the case where she had an aggressive family member to deal with, they tried to protect her by reassigning her from the family. Lucille asks to handle it her way and they respect her decision.

Lucille can mostly perform her job and have peace, and is treated kindly by patients.

She has a personality, a romantic life, family & friendships.

It’s about 90% allowing her to exist, 10% navigating racism/microaggressions. That’s a comfortable, realist balance for such a story and setting.

If you want to check out how they handled these issues for yourself, the show is on Netflix as of this post (2020). She’s introduced in Season 7. (I highly recommend watching this show from the beginning. I cry like every episode, and the diversity of several ethnic backgrounds picks up a lot mid season!)

I’ll kick you three scenarios for your Black radium girl:

Peer Acceptance, Initial Hesitation

awkward friendliness & initial hesitation, perhaps more fear of the unknown vs. hostility

Upon having interactions and talking to her, they become comfortable and accept her. It could take just one simple conversation. Perhaps they’re more used to listening to Black music or have Black staff who work for them, but haven’t had an equal one-on-one experience with WoC without a power dynamic or service involved. Now, with a Black fellow radium girl thrown in a similar situation as them, they could develop kinship.

This might not describe every one of the woman at all. Others might be just fine with her with no awkwardness.

Types of racism experienced:

some micro-aggressions (likely ignorance from peers)

no major racism experienced

Most Peer Acceptance, Racism From Some Peers

Most peers have no problem with her, even if they have their initial awkwardness. 1-2 more aggressive racists who don’t want her there.

Sometimes everyone else gets along, but there’s that 1 bully and their minion, and they feed off each other. If the BS isn’t tolerated by the other girls, it could shut them up to make peace or at least behave themselves. It’s likely someone like this would remain hatefully stubborn, but would grimace from the corner if outnumbered.

In the case you create a situation where someone is hostile to the Black girl but learns better: real apologies and efforts should be made if this occurs. It also doesn’t excuse their past behavior. Read our posts on redemption arcs for more info. We’re not fans, personally.

In an intense racial situation, it would be nice if the girls (with sense) protected and defended her instead of standing idly by. They’re strong enough to rise up against the agencies who poisoned them, so they can fight for their fellow radium sisters if one’s being targeted.

Types of racism experienced:

several micro-aggressions

maybe 1 major incident

Peer Acceptance, Racism from Other People

Radium girl acceptance within, but experiences racism from others she interacts with on/off the job.

The Call the Midwife example fits this one. Lucille’s peers are comfortable with her. It’s some of the ladies she care for and/or their families that may have negative things to say or show hesitance.

I’ll repeat what I said above: it’d be nice if the girls protected and defended her and didn’t stand by idly. Solidarity is important for establishing kinship and trust when it comes to white - woc friendships.

Types of racism experienced:

could vary from some to several micro-aggressions

maybe 1 major incident

Balancing race issues in the musical

Give the intersections of your Black girl’s situation proper attention. You can achieve this without overdoing it or making her whole arc about facing racism.

Perhaps the Black radium girl(s) has a song to express major woes, like segregation and poor treatment, or experiencing dismay over even less of a fighting chance in this fight for their rights.

If anyone does know anything but radium girls of color, please share!

–Mod Colette

#intersectionality #intersectional feminism #women #black #black women #woc #women of color #diversity #poc in history #radium girls #musicials #asks #submission

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galactic-magick · 3 years

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FIC REQUEST GUIDELINES

Below you will find my revised and most up-to-date rules for requests. Please read before sending an ask and let me know if you have any questions!

GENERAL:

Please make sure I’m writing for the fandom and character before you make a request, and make sure you specify what kind of request you would like (ex. headcanons, imagines, full length fics).

I take requests through my ask box.

I only write “x reader”, occasionally I will take requests for ships, but at the moment I’m just doing “x reader” fics.

I prefer to write gender neutral readers because I want my fics to be enjoyable and inclusive for everyone, and I want to avoid causing dysphoria as much as possible. Occasionally I will write a specifically fem! or male! fic, but only if the gender of the reader is vital to/effects the plot or if there are gendered terms used in the fic. So please ONLY request a specifically gendered reader if it’s ABSOULTELY NECESSARY.

I usually avoid describing the appearance of the reader because I want people of all ethnicities, hair types, skin colors, body types*, etc. to be included and see themselves in the reader. *Sometimes I will write something that mentions body image issues because I personally struggle with body dysmorphia and am recovering from an ED myself, but I still try to avoid describing the reader specifically because even though many people relate to my experience not everyone has the same insecurities and such.

I do NOT write smut or NSFW stuff, sorry. (I don’t mind slightly suggestive stuff I just can’t write any of the actual act if that makes sense)

I also don’t write poly stuff, I don’t have anything against it I’m just not great at writing that dynamic.

I usually avoid writing about uncomfy and triggering topics (ex. pregnancy, cheating, abuse, suicide, self harm, gore/intense violence, glorifying mental illness), if there’s something in your request that you’re not sure if I’m okay with feel free to ask but just know I have the right to not write anything I’m not comfortable with.

I’ve written for a lot of fandoms in my time here, but I get easily overwhelmed if I’m taking requests for every single fandom I’m in, so I set a limit at just a few at a time which will be listed below:

TYPES OF REQUESTS INFO:

Imagines:

Imagines are short fics (usually 400 words or less) with a simple scenario.

Imagines are the easiest and fastest for me to write. If your fic idea doesn’t have any complex plot and doesn’t need to be super long, this is your best bet.

Examples: 1 2

Headcanons:

Headcanons are bullet point fics usually describing how a character or characters would react in a scenario.

Examples: 1 2 3 4 5

Full Length Fics/Oneshots:

Oneshots are usually anywhere between 700 and 2k words with a plot and multiple scenes.

These fics take the longest for me to write so they’re best reserved for fic ideas that don’t fit into an imagine or headcanon format, these are the majority of what I write though because I really enjoy writing long stuff, just know it might take a bit depending on how busy I am!

Examples: 1 2 3 4 5

OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Please don’t be afraid of sending detailed or specific requests! The more you tell me what you want the easier it’ll be for me to write!

If you need request inspiration, here is a prompt list you can use! You don’t have to but it’s there if you want!

Sometimes if you send a request for a full length fic but it ends up short and simple enough for the imagine format, I’ll post it as an imagine, or if the imagine request is complex and long enough to be a full length fic I’ll post it as such. Most of the time I stick with what type was requested but occasionally I’ll be able to write something shorter and more concise than I thought or I get super inspired and get carried away. I care a lot more about quality than quantity so sometimes that affects length, just a heads up!

Please don’t send requests you’ve already sent to other blogs. Similar ideas are fine, but I’ve had people send literally the exact same copy pasted request to both me and my writer mutuals before and I didn’t feel comfortable writing them because I didn’t want to copy my friends.

Please reblog and interact with fics you requested once I post them! Interaction and spreading writing through reblogs helps authors so much!

If you’d like to be added to a taglist, send me an ask! Please specify what fandom and/or what characters you’d like to be tagged in fics for!

Happy requesting!

#requests

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meloncubedradpops · 4 years

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Repo! the Corona Opera: Part Two Fascist Boogaloo

Greetings fellow Repo! fans,

Here is my second installment of a series of three essays where I compare our contemporary times with the movie Repo! the Genetic Opera. My first piece detailed the similarities between the two worlds, and turns out, I have an awful lot to talk about still. I ended my last article by posing the question, "What went wrong in this dystopia to normalize the concept of death due to nonpayment?" No doubt, this movie is incredibly outrageous on many fronts, particularly within the dynamics of the Largo family. As mentioned in the previous piece, I highlighted the pervasiveness of GeneCo's power and influence towards the citizens in the city (is it called city of GeneCo? GeneCo-land? GenCity? An actual city in Italy??).

People who write stories often bend the rules to make their story compelling. Be it exaggerating social interactions, creating scientifically impossible scenarios, or even allowing the characters to use technology that does not exist yet. I admit the creators of Repo! applied all those tactics and more, which makes the parallels I draw that much more surreal. I want to acknowledge this before I dive deeper because yes, I truly think it would be impossible to have a company who can offer cheap and dirty surgeries with an absence of debilitating class action lawsuits resulting from botched procedures, infection, or their body rejecting the organ transplant. And while I admit Zydrate does not exist, yet, but we do have a long history with opioid abuse. If you asked me when I first watched the movie if I think the Largo family could be a mirror of an ultra wealthy family from real life, I would have politely disagreed with you. But times right now are freaking weird. A single day does not go by where something completely outlandish is blasted all over the news, particularly in the United States.

In my last essay I pointed out examples where the citizens in GenCity live a life after experiencing a mass extinction event. Besides the technological anachronisms, society and GeneCo have an uncomfortably close relationship with each other. GeneCo is not merely a corporation that offers healthcare and surgeries, it has an unyielding power politically too. I argue that GenCity is ran by a fascist government that is controlled and operated by GeneCo.

If you're not a person who is super familiar with fascism, basically it's an extremist right wing government philosophy. I find it interesting that in the song "21st Century Cure", Graverobber says: Industrialization has crippled the globe. Although plagues, war, and other hardships existed before industrialization, that paradigm of change accelerated the imbalances between man and nature. Fascism did not exist until after World War I, after all. Between the world war itself and the Spanish Flu of 1918, there was a lot of pain and suffering felt all over the world. Fascists took advantage of vulnerable populations and asserted that their political party is the only correct party, and those who oppose are considered an enemy. Historically fascist governments have blurred the lines between the spheres of what's considered "public" and "private", and often danced harmoniously with business allies in pursuit of profit. As an effect, fascist governments have required citizens to foot the bill of a private company's losses. With enough propaganda, fascist governments will have you believing that this is ultimately for the betterment of everyone. And if you give them enough time, they will normalize terrible acts against humanity that barely make a peep, if the truth even comes to light.

For the rest of this essay, I will be highlighting examples in the Repo! movie that correspond with characteristics of fascism, using political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt's The 14 Characteristics Of Fascism, which was published in the spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry magazine.

The 14 characteristics are:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

The world surrounding GeneCo occupies itself with the concept that this incorporated area derives a sense of nationalism, in the absence of much dissent. If you see below, there is an advertisement on the top right corner that says, "Your Birthplace for a new Heredity". GeneCo is not just a company that sells organs and surgeries. It is its own incorporated city. This ad, combined with GeneCo's relentless messaging that not only did this company save humanity, you must conform to the idea that only GeneCo can provide you the experience of feeling clean, safe, and perfect.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

Being able to legally repossess someone's organs because they didn't make their organ payments is about as disdainful as you can get. Nathan has a whole song called "Legal Assassin", and there doesn't appear to be many laws that would at least have the pretense that these repossessions are remotely humane. There are multiple instances in the movie where Nathan approaches a client who is already restrained, panicked, and powerless. From what I can gather from the media in Gencity, GeneCo proliferates the idea that the company would be dysfunctional if people could get financed surgeries and let those payments go to collections. When you're a mega corporation, they let you do it.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

While the career of a Graverobber is certainly creepy and macabre, the idea that they could be executed without a jury of their peers is especially strange. After I created my last essay, my friend Veronica pointed out, that per "A Needle Into A Bug", one of the deleted scenes from the movie, that street zydrate is not actually derived from the brains of dead people. He extracts zydrate from bugs that nest inside the craniums of dead people, which in my opinion is a huge distinction. So who is he really stealing from? Is it morally okay to dig up a corpse to get drug goo to sell to junkies? Absolutely not, and the idea is incredibly disrespectful for the dead. And while I am sure there are graverobbers in this world that likely steal things like jewelry from corpses, I still wouldn't justify being executed extrajudicially.

Further, Graverobber's relationship with the Largo family has me believing even more that GeneCo needs them more than their media campaign can justify. Rotti has access to incredible surveillance of the city, so you would think he would eliminate anyone who enabled Amber Sweet's addiction. My theory is GeneCo knows that street zydrate may result in more surgery sales. However they want to continue making money selling the lab-grown stuff. So the end justifies the means, if we can associate graverobbers and those who use street zydrate as criminals, we can continue believing that "they" are the enemies setting everyone else back.

4. Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. AND 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

GeneCo employs a private police force to carry out law enforcement. They patrol around a graveyard, a quasi-public space carved out for those who mourn. And because there is pervasive video surveillance, Rotti can demand that they do his bidding at any time. An example is his order to murder the repo man. We aren't aware of any sort of involvement beyond the borders of GenCity, but even the concept of a graveyard being a warzone is a special kind of hell.

5. Rampant Sexism- The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

Genterns! On the surface, it’s pretty cool that there is a large volume of female medical professionals who are skilled enough to carry out surgeries. However behind the sexy veneer is the reality that Genterns are not set up for success. They are not provided adequate PPE and work under non-sterile conditions. In the "Mark it Up" scene, one is killed by Luigi. Imagine going to medical school for years and years, only to be tasked with the job of organ warehouse worker. Then on one of your shifts you are stabbed to death because the CEO's son bumped into you while you were working. Not only that, but you are also expected to dress proactively for the purpose of selling the GeneCo product and experience.

6. Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. GeneCo has a monopoly on the media of the city. Politics, entertainment, healthcare, you name it, they have a direct stake in, and control over, the media. We do see from time-to-time tabloid clippings of the Largo family. But generally speaking, GeneCo puts a lot of effort in upholding their image. The best evidence is Blind Mag's story. She is a singer who acquired the ability to see after a GeneCo cornea surgery. And while she clocked into work day in and day out, singing and advertising for GeneCo for 17+ years, her departure resulted in Rotti murdering her. But why? Was he afraid of the things she would say? Rotti knew he was terminally ill when she declared her resignation, and yet killing her on stage is somehow less of a scandal?

7. Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. Fascist countries use fear as a tactic to keep the masses scared and compliant. The universe of Repo! is one filled with tragedy. Millions of people have died. I would imagine that the series of events that would lead to the creation and success of GeneCo was contingent upon people being scared for their lives. While dealing with the coronavirus, I find myself constantly checking my temperature, keeping my distance from people, and wearing a mask out in public. The human spirit is resilient, which is how we have survived so long. However sociopaths smell our fear and use it against us. The city of GeneCo is surrounded by plots upon plots of graveyards, signifying the carnage left after their public health crisis. I have a strong feeling that GeneCo was able to harness the threat of whatever caused the massive organ failure epidemic and as an effect created a power vacuum.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

This one is going to be a reach, particularly because there is an absence of religion in this story. I don't think religion would be on the creator's of Repo!'s purview, and honestly I don't blame them. If you look at the imagery of the story, however, it is very gothic. We have no idea if religion survives, and if it does, to what extent. I would imagine that people still have spiritual needs, and I argue that the GeneCo Opera is an example of how they get that fulfilled.

"If you want it, baby, GeneCo's got it"

The GeneCo opera is not your typical opera experience. GeneCo specifically tells their customers to "testify". People are singing in unison, praising GeneCo. Clearly GeneCo has taken several human rituals and blended them together to create an over-the-top entertainment experience that seeks to advertise their company behind the testimonials of its patrons. The benefits of the opera for GeneCo, as a fascist entity, are two-fold: have people associate their most nirvana moments with an experience only GeneCo can offer (zydrate and surgery), and distract them with religious-like concerts so they won't question their neighbors being murdered on the streets by that very same company.

9. Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. AND 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

Throughout the entire movie, the Largo family is front and center. We know Rotti is terminally ill, and he utilizes his final moments to tie up loose ends in his life. His children feel entitled to his estate and the company of GeneCo. At no point do we see Rotti consult with a board of directors at GeneCo, a private fiduciary firm, or with any government entity. I would describe the company of GeneCo to be a weird combination of an aristocracy, government body, and corporation. His children commit crimes with no recourse or justice. Rotti kills the doctor who tells him he's dying. Luigi kills multiple people throughout the movie. In one of the opening scenes, we see a photograph showing Pavi is cutting off a woman's face. In the credits we see Amber's body guards lying dead on the floor during her press statement. What sort of corruption took place to make these occurrences so prevalent and normalized?

10. Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

We aren't super privy to the machinations that make this city functional. But there is a clear stratification that has sustained itself long enough that healthcare is not a right in this city, and those who can't pay for necessary healthcare can finance it. In a just society, if we have the means to save humanity, we can figure out a way to pay for it. Be it taxes on the most wealthy or other cost-saving measures, if there is a will, there is a way. However if you give a company enough power and money, it will do everything it can to stay on top. The best examples I can think of would be Nathan and Blind Mag's tenuous career at GeneCo. Neither really wanted the job they were given, but they were forced into those positions by Rotti. Had Bling Mag belonged to a entertainment union, would she have had more protections? Would a proper investigation into the murder of Marni result in justice being served, and the opportunity for Nathan to live a better adjusted life? Rotti masterfully manipulates situations that create powerless outcomes for his employees.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts We don't see any particular evidence that GeneCo is currently hostile to higher education or academia. What we do know is the technologies of this world are akin to something we'd see out of the 20th century. However GeneCo is advanced enough to synthesize usable organs. In my last essay, I drew parallels to today by highlighting that there may have been a "brain drain" of intellectualism as a result of academics dying from their public health crisis. Outside of the opera house, we don't see many examples of art in this world. Maybe this is what happens when a government stops funding programs it deems frivolous or challenges the status quo?

14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Based off context clues in the movie, we know that there is a group of voting citizens who help determine whether or not a company can repossess financed organs that are passed due on their payments. We don't know who makes these votes, the election process, or anything like that. So it is hard to say if GeneCo goes beyond their media campaign convincing voters to keep repossessions legal. Despite this lack of knowledge, I would argue that GeneCo wields incredible power regarding the course of elections for laws that apply to them. Okay, you want to pass a law to make organ repossession illegal? Fine, we don't have to offer products on a payment plan. The very threat of being able to take away healthcare is something right wing governments loveeee doing.

Speaking of elections, the United States 2020 general election is approaching. Now that I argued the ways that GeneCo is fascist, I will tie together ideas from both of these essays into a final piece that I hope you will like. If you enjoyed this article, please send it to all your Repo! friends.

#repo! the genetic opera #repo #Fascism #halloween #election #geneco #politics #horror #2020 #coronavirus #zydrate #musicals

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rhgeog2260 · 3 years

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The End of a Semester...

Introduction

Wow. This semester has been so topsy turvy - going through a pandemic with multiple lockdowns, online learning, the stress of the world around us...I applaud all of us for making it through this incredibly difficult time!

I want to note that, like some of my peers, I would not have picked to take this course had it not been required. I prefer physical and environmental geography over human geography, so naturally I was planning on going in a different direction. I am now so grateful that I took this course!!! One of my career aspirations is to work with National Geographic, and it has now been made clear to me how vital it is to learn the intricacies of research and its methods/techniques. As someone who would rather do field work than a desk job, I am excited to one day apply all my new knowledge in research to the field I plan to work in!

Three things I know for certain about human geography research:

There are three things that stick out in my mind when I reflect back on what I have learned in this course.

First, the concept of the “visible backpack” has stuck with me. Not only while working through this course work, but also work for other courses, while watching documentaries for my own entertainment, and maybe most importantly in this day and age, when watching stories on the news. As we have learned in Week 3, the “invisible backpack” takes into account all the features of the researcher, including ethnicity, gender, background, and more. These factors can greatly affect the manner in which data is perceived. An example I think of often is the wealthy, young men who interviewed Agafia in the Serbian wilderness. With their backpacks, they could not have possibly fully understood all that Agafia went through, and continues to go through today. This is an important reminder that all research has room for potential error or bias, depending on the exact situation. This allows me to reserve all judgement, and try to see things from all angles before forming an opinion. The invisible backpack can also relate to critical reflectivity.

Secondly, the importance of ethical research has been thoroughly engrained in me through this course. In my opinion, data obtained in an unethical way should be seen as null and void. It can be as simple as asking for someone to make a statement, or as complex as invading a prohibited area to try and fetch data (think of the man trying to preach Christianity to the native people of the Sentinelese island, subsequently getting killed - though this is not exactly a research incident, it is very prominently unethical). Entire research projects can be rendered invalid if the proper ethics are not followed, so I am thankful that this subject was taught and emphasized so much during this course.

Finally, Professor Hooykaas taught us in a way that really engrained the importance of verifying and evaluating sources into our minds. I have been reminded that sources cannot just be blindly trusted - they must be critically evaluated, just like the article itself.

Three things I am still confused by:

The Week 8 activity of coding was certainly challenging at first. While once completed I see the appeal of the organizational technique, it was intimidating to begin, and I quite honestly dreaded that week’s blogging activity. After completion, however, it was very beneficial when narrowing down topics for my Digital Storytelling Project!

Second, I am unsure how to overcome the invisible backpack. No matter who the researcher is, they are not identical to their subject, and cannot fully comprehend their views. I am curious to learn more about how to overcome this and avoid any possible complications that may arise.

Lastly, I am still slightly uncertain about “when enough is enough”. When, while performing research, have you obtained enough data without simultaneously having too much information? I feel this may be remedied by experience.

Three things I know for certain about me as a human geographic researcher:

Firstly, while I know I would like to pursue research in my career, I now know that there are fields that interest me more than human geography. While no doubt interesting, I now know for sure that my interests lie in the more physical/environmental sides of geography.

Second, I know that I can approach research situations with an open mind. I am confident that I can avoid any foreseeable biases in order to have the highest quality outcome possible.

Finally, I feel that I could employ research in a way that has an overall positive impact on the world. Following ethics and my own morals, I know I can conduct research that holds importance in the betterment of our environment.

Three areas I need to spend time developing/learning in order to feel more confident in my skills:

As I mentioned above, I would like to get a sense of familiarity to determine when the amount of research I have done has become too much. I of course want to have all the information, but it still must be conveyed in a digestible manner.

Second, I would like to practice with what types of interview questions are the most beneficial, and what types of questions to ask per scenario. Knowing that will save some stress, help narrow down specific questions, and yield specific results that pertain more closely to the goal in question.

Finally, I would like to develop my skills as a student more. Transitioning to online learning was certainly challenging. By taking this course, I can more qualitatively reflect in on myself and the world around me.

Conclusion

Thank you to all my peers who interacted with my blog this semester! It was a unique way to connect with you all - especially in a remote setting! Be sure to reach out at any time :)

Your peer, Robin Hounsell

References:

Hay, I. (2005). Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Hooykaas, A. (2021). Lecture Notes from GEOG2260- Applied Human Geography.

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megdashwood · 4 years

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b99 podcast episode 1: getting the squad together

@cheddar-the-dog and I have summarised what we think to be the highlights of the first episode of the brooklyn nine-nine podcast. maybe those of you who can’t listen to the podcast for whatever reason can profit from it a bit

it’s under the cut because it has gotten quite long

Part 1 with Gabe Liedman, Dan Goor, Joe Lo Truglio, Terry Crews

Marc Evan Jackson’s name was misspelled in The Party and he has not forgiven them yet

Why B99: reaction to Parks in the sense that they wanted to keep elements but also improve

it was important to them that the comedic aspects were not about cops messing up because that’s actually very scary (in connection to that they felt pressure to make Andy believable as a cop)

MASH was an inspiration

Terry Crews: got involved even before Andy officially got involved and the character was named Terry because they’ve written it for him

There’s a “management/agent ban” on set (Video village) and table reads —> intimacy and closeness/getting to know each other—>family!

hired casting director before writing final draft of pilot to tailor characters to actors

Joe Lo Truglio: almost didn’t go for callbacks but agent made him go

Boyle: debate if he’s an alpha or not but decided to make him just root for Jake and it made the show go a certain direction instead of multiple alphas

Boyle was supposed to love Jake unabashedly to make the audience love Jake

Originally Jake was new in the precinct because he got in a fight with a jerky detective who’s the son of the commissioner and therefore got transferred to the 99

Original idea was a precinct so far out of Brooklyn it technically wasn’t Brooklyn anymore and the commute is ages (but jokes would be “no crimes” or “commute”) so they decided to just make it a normal precinct

If Jake was new everyone was gonna dislike him so that’s how he became the guy who had been there for several year and who the others “roll their eyes at lovingly” and Holt as the new guy instead

Ep 16 The Party inspired by real experience of Mike Schur

Originally wanted a gay actor for Kevin Cozner but show didn’t have reputation yet so there was no interest and there isn’t many middle aged male out actors

Some famous people passed on Kevin’s role (sorry didn’t catch the names)

Andy hated jokes about junk food and hygiene, he’s very sensitive to taste and smell

the scene in which they spray ketchup over Pimento made him physically sick

Intro is purposefully consistent and they had multiple themes to choose from (70’s cop feel) and theme was composed and is sung in writers room a lot

Flashbacks have been a thing from the beginning – sort of as a “signature device”

They had a debate at the beginning on whether Terry (the character not the actor) could lift a truck

Andre Braugher asks a lot of question about why and how and needs it to be grounded

Andre is very nice but intimidating and comfortable with silence, he is “such a weirdo”

He’s not easy to read

Marc Evan Jackson: when Andre yells at you, you’re yelled at. it’s terrible

But when he smiles it’s like a supernova (Joe)

They all agree that Joel McKinnon Miller has an amazing voice

Part 2 with Melissa Fumero, Linda Mendoza and Marcy Jarreau

They talk about their (Linda’s and Marcy’s) backgrounds (I couldn’t keep up with that) they start around 56 minutes if you’re interested

Marcy appeared in the show as Gina’s fan (”look at me!”)

When you’ve gotten a laugh out of Chelsea you’ve reached anything in life

Melissa and Linda love Amy and Gina’s relationship

Melissa directing the episode with Chelsea was a best case scenario

Two Latinas on the show: They were sure that one of them was gonna get cut after the pilot read

They love that the comedy is concentrated on the characters not their ethnicity and the like

Rosa has wavy hair and Amy straight because they didn’t want to look alike on the table read

They agree that it’s awful that they had to worry about that when males always look alike in shows (especially back in the day)

Mel felt like she had to play into the stereotype for quite a while when auditioning (and she had too)

Jake as the ally you want every man to be

The writers are still figuring Rosa out along the way

Mel likes that Amy was never written as “really offended by Gina”, they sort of get each other, Amy’s confidence matches Gina’s but in a different way, Picking on someone as Gina’s love language, Amy has known that since the beginning

Amy and Jake’s journey of sort of profiting from each other

“I know how to do this and therefore I’m going to win, instead of standing on the side lines and saying I told you so afterwards”

Uptight stuff as Amy’s internal struggle

Melissa hates the uniform because it’s very uncomfortable, she curses the day that they took her pantsuit away, the uniforms are not tailored for women’s bodies

She’s not a complainer but she complained so much about the belt that it’s now made out of styrofoam and only the bare minimum is on it

the show models what they wish the world was like in terms of communication and friendships and wholesomeness

But maybe it’s a prediction of a not too distant future

There’s a reason for the “incredible online following” – what a good note to end on

#b99 podcast #brooklyn nine nine podcast #b99 #brooklyn 99 #brooklyn nine nine

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arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

On June 2, 2020, a crowd of mostly white people arrived at a library parking lot in Bethesda, Maryland, to show solidarity with a Black Lives Matter rally. During the rally, one of the organizers had the crowd raise their hands and take a pledge to oppose racism. The attendees obeyed and repeated the pledge, many kneeling as though in prayer. A video of the event made its way around the internet, providing yet more evidence that America is experiencing a religious revival on the political left — and that the heart of this revival is the deification of group identity.

Until the last few years, identity politics — now commonly referred to as "wokeness" — has avoided serious scrutiny as a religious movement. Yet even before the Bethesda episode, political observers had an inkling of its religious character. Professor Elizabeth Corey's recollection of her experience at a 2017 conference addressing identity and the law offers one illuminating example. One of the presentations she described featured a call-and-response session that ended with an exhortation for political revolution. "I began to feel that I was not at an academic lecture at all," she wrote, "but at an Evangelical church with a charismatic pastor."

…

Scholars of religion tell us that the human person encounters the divine in two distinct ways: subjectively, as with matters of faith, and objectively, by performing rites in accordance with their faith.

The objective components of religious experience are those that onlookers can easily observe. They consist of what Wilfred Cantwell Smith calls "cumulative tradition" — the liturgies, processions, pilgrimages, public acts of penance, and other rites that faith communities celebrate. The behavior of the attendees during the Bethesda rally offers a useful illustration of such phenomena, as does the call-and-response session Corey described.

Within these cumulative traditions, people have personal encounters with religion. These encounters are subjective, in the sense that each person experiences the divine in a way that no outside observer can measure. Social scientists can record such encounters through interviews, but they can never experience them or reproduce them in their scholarship. Subjective religious experiences are very real, however, meaning that they cannot be dismissed simply because social-science methods cannot comprehend them. Gaining a full understanding of wokeness, therefore, requires an account of both its public rites and the subjective religious experiences of woke adherents.

We can begin our analysis of the emerging woke faith by probing its concept of the divine. Wokeness has an unconventional understanding of divinity that tends to disguise its religiosity from those accustomed to monotheism; in fact, the notion may not be fully recognized among its practitioners themselves. For the woke, identity is the source of divinity. Yet individuals are not divine on their own; they only participate in the divinity found in shared group identities.

Certain segments of wokeness also exhibit pantheistic traits in that they view the natural world as divine. For these adherents — particularly those who identify as vegan, green, and in some cases, indigenous — nature unmolested offers harmony within the individual and among the growing multiplicity of identities that make up humanity. For other segments of the woke community, human beings must adjust nature to render internal identities external. Gender re-assignment surgeries and hormone replacement or suppression regimens for transgender persons are among the most conspicuous examples.

…

What Wade describes is a central rite of passage into the woke framework. The transition typically begins with a person living an ordinary existence of production and consumption. Over time, the individual notices how this way of life is lonely and unfulfilling. Traditional authorities are hypocritical or incompetent. Nothing is as it appears. There is a sense of living in a "Cartesian nightmare" in which the world exists not because God created it, but because the devil — or what in traditional Gnostic texts is called the "demiurge" — did. It is only when the individual discovers a small collection of like-minded believers who have pierced the veil to see past the illusions of the world that he "awakens." Together, woke believers become a people apart from and above those who still labor in the corrupted world of appearances.

These like-minded groups of believers replace the un-woke families, neighborhoods, and religious communities in which the woke individual was raised. Scholars and activists call these voluntary communities "families of choice" — safe harbors for woke individuals who feel unsafe in a traditional family or community, often because of bullying or violence they experienced. Woke families of choice are grounded in the identities that woke individuals adopt. To share an identity with others after becoming woke is to subject one's personal identity to the rules governing that group, and in turn, to police those rules.

According to the woke creed of intersectionality, human beings are composed of not just one, but a multiplicity of identities, among which are race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, and sexual preference. In his book American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell classifies these various identities using the terms "innocent" and "guilty" in an effort to compare wokeness to a kind of decomposed version of Protestant Christianity. According to Mitchell's account, the guilty identity, or scapegoat — namely the white, heterosexual male — must be purged in order to restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other identity groups. He is the "transgressor," Mitchell explains. "All others — women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ persons — have their sins of omission and commission covered over by scapegoating" this transgressor, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.

Yet wokeness involves a complicated system of ranks that do not break down easily into two, mutually exclusive categories. It's more useful to think of woke identities in caste terms, wherein the highest-caste identities are "clean" and lower-caste identities are increasingly "unclean." Unclean identities are those born into "privilege," while clean identities are those that suffer under oppressive cultural forces like whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, cisgenderism, Christianity, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and even humanity (as in the presumption of human beings' superiority to the rest of the natural world). A person bearing all of these identities is maximally unclean, since he is thought to have experienced no suffering and only privilege. Those individuals bearing oppressed identities — including racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, transgender persons, religious minorities, and indigenous people — are considered clean.

…

The key animating principle of wokeness is the collective struggle against the evil geist that inhabits the privileged, with the ultimate goal being the reversal of the advantages inherited by the privileged in favor of those who have suffered. The cleaner identities, by virtue of their cleanliness, have the standing to determine how the struggle is to proceed. The privileged, meanwhile, must atone for their unclean status by struggling alongside the clean. All must struggle, but the privileged must struggle most of all.

The primary means by which the privileged may join the struggle is through "allyship" — the subordination of their privileged identities to those who have historically endured the greatest suffering. For this reason, Mitchell is not quite right when he says there is no possibility of forgiveness in wokeness; it's just not the kind of Christian forgiveness that he and others recognize. Forgiveness for the woke comes from becoming a good ally. There is no absolution, however, as privilege is permanent. The privileged, therefore, are required to engage in constant, public acts of atonement.

The willfully privileged — those who refuse to struggle alongside the clean — remain unclean. The firmer their attachment to their privilege, the less clean they are. Whites who refuse to reckon with their privilege make up the majority of this lower caste, with the least clean among them being white supremacists — among which include neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, Proud Boys, and even devotees to right-wing conspiracies like QAnon — who revel in their privilege. These are the untouchables of the woke hierarchy. Due to their willful privilege, they are thought to deserve any hardships they suffer.

…

The afterlife for the woke is not one where the soul awaits the judgment of creation. Rather, like the pagan Romans, the woke find life after death through fama, or the renown due to a person who lived a glorious life. Similarly, fate for the woke seems to lie in the continued caste struggle. Yet whatever successes the woke might achieve, they are never complete, and are always subject to reaction. This makes the outlook of the woke a rather bleak one.

…

As theologian William Cavanaugh observes, the claim that there exist boundaries between religion and non-religion, and that these boundaries are "natural, eternal, fixed, and immutable," is a relatively new phenomenon that came about "with the rise of the modern state." "The new state's claim to a monopoly on violence, lawmaking, and public allegiance within a given territory," he continues, "depends upon either the absorption of the church into the state or the relegation of the church to an essentially private realm."

In the latter scenario, state actors profess indifference on matters of faith, provided the faithful make no effort to interfere with the use of state power. This is the stance the woke ostensibly push for in the public sphere, especially with regard to traditional religious faiths (more on that later). Yet as philosophy professor Francis Beckwith has argued, such an arrangement is arguably incoherent, as matters of faith place the faithful under obligations to act on their faith in the public realm. To demand privatization of faith, therefore, is to ban it outside of the human heart.

The second possibility Cavanaugh raises is equally dangerous. In this scenario, the state absorbs the church and uses its monopoly on violence to impose at least outward compliance with the religious tenets of that church. In America today, these tenets are increasingly the tenets of wokeness.

If wokeness is a religion, it is a civil religion, in the sense that it merges one's duty to the divine to that of the state. For proof, one need only examine how in recent years, in cities across the nation, woke protesters have torn down statues of the old American civil religion of the founders, Catholic saints, and soldiers, and demanded new ones be built in their place to honor the gods of the woke pantheon.

For the woke, the state is the central entity through which clean identities struggle not only for justice, but to secure patronage. Eric Voegelin's Political Religions offers a useful example of how a religious patronage system works. Here again, we depart from Western — and indeed, modern — monotheistic faiths to draw comparisons between wokeness and a much older, polytheistic tradition.

In ancient Egypt, according to Voegelin, temples of the lower gods were linked in a patronage network that held the different regions together. The pharaoh patronized the gods of these temples by offering local priests and aristocrats prestige, money, and power. In exchange, the priests and aristocrats pledged their loyalty to the pharaoh. While rival cults disliked having to compete for state patronage, they all agreed that the worst outcome would be for the pharaoh to reserve the patronage for his own god and put the local cults out of business. And so they agreed to the arrangement.

The woke patronage network functions in much the same way. Patronage in wokeness takes several forms, the cheapest of which is recognition, or the state's acknowledgment that certain identities are deserving of respect and deference. Bearers of clean identities look to the state for such recognition, typically in the form of a holiday, a public display, or a committee or hearing on matters of importance to woke identities. From there, they seek out more significant forms of patronage, including financial and political investments. Examples may include academic chairs or departments at colleges and universities, along with monetary compensation covering expenses like medical procedures and the restoration of property.

…

This arrangement is merely an updated version of the Egyptian patronage system Voegelin described: The different identities that populate the city receive state patronage as they supervise the diversity, equity, and inclusion of clean identities in the public sphere. Thus when Ibram Kendi — a historian and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research — suggests establishing a department of anti-racism at the federal level, he is merely applying the logic of municipal governments on a larger scale.

To gain further leverage over the state, the woke frequently court influence in the corporate world. Such efforts date at least back to 2017, when Pepsi hoped to capitalize on Black Lives Matter protests by launching an advertisement featuring a short narrative of a self-satisfied consumer, played by supermodel Kendall Jenner, emerging from her private world to join a broader movement of individuals living out their own authentic identities. The participants depicted in the ad are unified in this endeavor through their attachment to global corporate brands — in this case, Pepsi — that support them in their efforts to win over the state's coercive power to work the will of the diverse identities united under wokeness.

…

Consultants like DiAngelo provide prestige for elite organizations seeking to adorn themselves with examples of their continued commitment to the moral issues of the day — in exchange for a fee, of course. Yet questions remain as to the efficacy of these arrangements. As Bonny Brooks argues in Arc Digital, "activism is now firmly near the top of many big-brand marketing agendas" because it "is a lot simpler to appropriate images of protest to sell soda than to ensure there are no exploitative practices in your supply chain." Helen Lewis of the Atlantic concurs, defining the "iron law of woke capitalism" to be that "[b]rands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival."

…

Some universities are looking to ground higher education entirely in the tenets of wokeness. The University of Tulsa, for example, has recently sought to re-orient the university around the twin pillars of business and social justice while cutting the traditional core curriculum to the bone. Among those angry at the decision are many of the students. Meanwhile, Ivy League institutions have owned up to their history of systemic racism by making the appropriate hiring and funding decisions — all while vigorously defending themselves from lawsuits made on behalf of Asian Americans claiming systemic exclusion in their present-day admissions processes.

Wokeness is the opiate of the elites. None of the patronage directly benefits struggling communities; it simply moves funds from state institutions, global corporations, and universities to diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants. These consultants, in turn, serve as moral and spiritual alibis, helping to rehabilitate institutions' public image whenever issues of prejudice emerge. Paradigmatic cases can be found, as Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, at global corporations like Alphabet, which generously donates to social-justice organizations while opening an artificial-intelligence research center in China — despite the latter's horrifying record of human-rights abuses (often in service to these very corporations). Like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, state entities, corporations, and academic institutions offer patronage to the woke gods in exchange for their loyalty. And like the priests in those old Egyptian temples, the consultants grant prestige and temporary absolution while keeping the money.

…

If states and public entities are increasingly patronizing woke identities and causes, are they also establishing wokeness as a government-sanctioned religion? In some respects, they surely are.

The Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman has set the standard for what qualifies as an unconstitutional establishment of religion in America since 1971. The Lemon test consists of three dictates: Laws must have a secular purpose, they must not have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion, and they must not promote excessive government entanglement in religious matters.

If wokeness is indeed a religion, then efforts to establish its tenets through legal and regulatory frameworks clearly violate the Lemon test. State-sanctioned endorsements of woke identities advance the woke faith, as do municipal commissions tasked with promoting identity-based equity initiatives. Distribution of state money to woke identity groups and causes fosters government entanglement in religion. The hiring of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators at public universities to oversee the representation of clean identities is akin to those universities hiring priests or rabbis to oversee their adherence to Catholicism or Judaism. In short, if the Supreme Court were to recognize wokeness as a religion, these state-sponsored patronage efforts would have to end.

This conclusion, of course, hinges on whether wokeness constitutes a religion for First Amendment purposes. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has never quite articulated a concrete definition of the term as used in the Constitution. Its earliest attempts included an 1890 description of religion as "one's views of his relations to his Creator, and to the obligations they impose of reverence for his being and character, and of obedience to his will" — a standard that confined religion to traditional monotheistic beliefs. The Court eventually abandoned the use of a belief in a creator as the hallmark of religion, declaring in the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins that the government may not "aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs." While this clarifies that a religion need not involve a creator, it offers little in the way of a distinction between religion and non-religious belief systems.

…

Such vague descriptions may not offer much to guide us, but given what the Court has deemed a religion in past cases, the legal classification of wokeness as a religion likely rests on firm ground. In the Torcaso case, for instance, the Court explicitly recognized both ethical culture and secular humanism — philosophies premised on non-spiritual moral traditions and the rejection of religious dogma — as being "[a]mong religions in this country." Even atheism qualifies for constitutional protection — at least under the amendment's Free Exercise Clause, which draws from the same mention of the term "religion" as the Establishment Clause. The bar for what legally qualifies as a religion is thus quite low. Given the deeply held and undoubtedly sincere nature of woke adherents' beliefs, along with the tenets of wokeness described above (the belief in the divinity of identity, the concept of the woke faith community, the Gnostic understanding of the world, notions of fate and the afterlife, and the moral code grounded in the struggle against oppression), one would be hard pressed to explain how wokeness is less deserving of the status than belief systems explicitly grounded in secularism.

…

If wokeness becomes a legally recognized religion in the United States, efforts by adherents to secure state patronage and enlist public entities in their struggle would violate constitutionally protected natural rights. Historically, such measures have provoked an organized political and legal response among disadvantaged faiths. And that is precisely where we may be headed.

Adherents to wokeness might object by noting that they oppose laws viewed as the product of church-state collusion — including laws that coerce prayer and scripture reading in schools, those that ban the teaching of evolution in schools, and those that mandate days of rest on the Sabbath — as well as displays of religious symbols on state property. This objection is not so much wrong as it is decades out of date.

…

With the decline of the old Judeo-Christian consensus, the woke have sought to establish themselves in the spaces left open by the success of secularization. But as their faith coalesces and their successes build, they are beginning to grow out of those spaces. It seems that at the very moment of its overcoming, the struggle is struggling with itself.

#national affairs #james m patterson

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gender-is-metal · 4 years

Text

Copper Alloys (Gender Alloy System)

Brief explanation of the Gender Alloy System: The Gender Alloy System is a system of terms and term creation to give simple explanations for complex gender traits of masculinity, femininity, or other linities. It gives a simple way to describe complex genders and experiences. It is not for naming genders or gender alignments, just what the gender ‘feels’ like. Whether a person's gender is made of multiple genders, polyfractal, layered, or complex, isn't important.

GENDER ELEMENT #3 - Copper (Cuprum, Cu, ♀ )

Copper (Cuprum) is the metal associated with being neither masculine or feminine, possibly unaligned, but not neutral. It's the s metal in the Metal Alloy System. A gender that is unaligned, or characterized by not being feminine/female or masculine/male, is known as Aeris.

(To save breath, even though masculinity and femininity are not inherently ‘binary,’ I used ‘nonbinary’ as shorthand for them in this post. So keep in mind, for this post, ‘nonbinary’ = ‘neither masculine nor feminine, not neutral or null, but still has some form of energy to it.’)

WARNING: This element was previously called Coer. It has been officially changed to Aeris. Any posts that associate Copper with Coer should be corrected or considered obsolete.

The Alloy System only describes the aspects of a gender. It is not a gender, or alignment, or presentation. A person can be any gender, present their gender in any way, and be adjacent (or not adjacent) to any gender, and its Metal Element will not change.

The pronunciation (that I use) is Uh-Riss, like the start of the word “umbrella” and the ending of the name Beatrice (the “riss” sound). So Ae-ris is Uh-Riss. Hopefully that makes pronouncing its alloy names a bit easier too.

AERIS ALLOYS

If Aeris is combined with another element, it makes an Alloy. An alloy is the combination of two or more metals, and in this case, the combination of two traits/aspects/linities. So if a gender is two elements or more combined, it has a degree of all of those metal's associated aspects.

Within this system, each Element has a prefix or suffix, so that it can be switched or combined with any number of other elements, and still make clear sense of which gender elements are included in one’s Alloy. A post describing how this is done will be made at a later date.

Below are described alloys (genders) made of S and one other element:

Nonbinary + Masculine (Copper + Gold// Aeris + Aur) = Auris/Aer

Nonbinary + Feminine (Copper + Silver// Aeris + Aren) = Aris/Aeren

Nonbinary + Agender (Copper + Titanium// Aeris + Tian) = Aetian/Tieris

Nonbinary + Neutral (Copper + Zinc// Aeris + Zin) = Aerzin/Zineris

Nonbinary + Fluid (Copper + Aluminum// Aeris + Lumi) = Aelumi/Lumeris\

Nonbinary + Other (Copper + Iron// Aeris + Fera) = Aefera/Faeris

Nonbinary + Ethnic (Copper + Nickel// Aeris + Nial) = Aerial/Nieris

Nonbinary + Midgender (Copper + Platinum// Aeris + Lan) = Aelan/Laneris

Nonbinary + Unspecified (Copper + Tin// Aeris + San) = Aesan/Saneris

Nonbinary + Aporine (Copper + Cobalt// Aeris + Kota) = Aekota/Koteris

Nonbinary + Neurodivergent (Copper + Antimony// Aeris + Ani) = Aerani/Aneris

Nonbinary + Xenic (Copper + Lead// Aeris + Lea) = Aelea/Learis

Nonbinary + Intersex (Copper + Mercury// Aeris + Mera) = Aemera/Meris

Nonbinary + Personal (Copper + Chromium// Aeris + Crom) = Aecrom/Cromeris

Nonbinary + Experience (Copper + Manganese// Aeris + Mane) = Aemane/Maneris

Auris are genders that are nonbinary and masculine. The gender isn’t 100% binary, but has masculine traits. Its flipped form is Aer.

Aris is a gender that is nonbinary and also feminine. The gender isn’t 100% binary, but it has feminine traits. It can be flipped to be Aeren.

Aetian is nongender, gendervoid, or is agender in nature that is also not binary. It can be flipped to also be Tieris.

Aerzin is a gender that is f and neutral in nature. It can be flipped to also be Zineris.

Aelumi is a gender that fluctuates between a nonbinary linity and another, or multiple, linities. It can also simply fluctuate within one linity. It can also be called Lumeris.

Aefera is a gender where being nonbinary is the only thing specified. What the rest is, if it's clear or vague, mentioned or not, large or small, is irrelevant to all but the person themselves. It can also be called Faeris. (Note: Questioning, confusing, or unknown genders DO NOT count as Fera.)

Aerial is a gender that is exclusive to a specific nationality, religion or race, that is neither masculine or feminine in traits. It can also be called Nieris. (Note: This can seem confusing. Let me explain: If the culture has its own ideas of masculinity and femininity, and the person falls outside those, then they can use this term. Even though it’s associated with being called ‘nonbinary,’ it also simply means ‘neither masculine or feminine, and not neutral or null.’ If this feels suitable, you’re welcome to use it. However, I understand if using this term while being in a culture with more than two genders feels inappropriate to use.)

Aelan is a gender that is ‘androgynous,’ that is it has characteristics of both or is indistinguishable from male or female, and is neither masculine or feminine. Androgynous is not inherently masculine+feminine, and in this scenario, is its own linity entirely, that does not fit the binary (some consider their midgender identity to be midbinary as well). It can also be called Laneris.

Aesan is an unknown gender where the only thing of it is that it’s definitely not masculine or feminine, with the rest unknown or unknowable. How much is known, and whether the person is actively exploring or not, doesn't matter. The gender can be confusing, indescribable, or unknowable. The second way of calling it is Saneris.

Aekota is a gender detached from any cultural binary/trinary, self-defined, that is neither masculine or feminine, and defined as having traits of something else entirely. It rejects alignments to any cultural categorizations or social roles. Autonomous or not, it does not necessarily have to be characterized by being ‘against’ or the ‘anti’ of binary/trinary, but instead is completely impossible to be defined by if it is binary or not. At the same time, the gender is f. They can also be called Koteris.

Aerani is a gender affected by an illness (chronic or neurodivergent), and is neither masculine or feminine, and might be something else, but not neutral or null. How the illness affects the person’s perception of their gender, or of gender as a whole, doesn’t matter. (Someone being neurodivergent doesn’t automatically affect their gender, or affect their perception of gender concepts -- just that for some people, it does.) The flipped version of this is Aneris.

Aelea is a xenic gender with neither masculine or feminine traits – rather it is something else. The flip is Leris.

Aemera is a gender exclusive to those with an intersex condition that has no masculine or feminine aspects. The flipped name for this is Meris.

Aecrom is a gender with such exclusive traits that the person themselves is the only one who knows or has it, and it has neither masculine or feminine traits or energy. More easily defined as an ‘egogender’ or ‘(name)gender,’ only the person themselves can experience this gender in the way they do, or their gender feels so personal and special that it cannot be ‘shared’ or felt or understood by any outside party. Exclusivity to maximum degree. The flipped version of the alloy is Cromeris.

Aemane is a gender founded deeply in one's life experience, religion, beliefs, nonhuman identity, orientation, or self-perception, that has neither masculine or feminine energy, but does possess an energy of its own. This includes spiritual experiences, memories, places they’ve been, otherkinity, emotional bonds, state of changes in life, anything that is connected to the person’s life as they live and experience it. The flip of this is Maneris.

If you see any typos on this post, please alert me.

#nonbinary #coer #aeris #alloy

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salavante · 5 years

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Odwain! The goodest.

Wow, featuring one of the more flattering drawings I’ve done of Odwain. Like last time, I’ll post all these guys separately and then do all the headshots in a masterpost. In the meantime buckle up for...a lot. (Thank you for giving me my favorite character.)

Full Name: Odwain Novak. In Ben Yit’gab, the Bennai language, his first name would be Oediwen, and it’s what his dad called him. His mother calls him Oddy and he does not like it.

Gender and Sexuality: Male and Bisexual

Pronouns: He/him

Ethnicity/Species: Odwain is a Ben-Aleth, a Human-Bennai hybrid, also called a mosshead if you’re in coarse company. His human mother Blanche Novak is mixed race. Odwain’s maternal grandfather came directly from Earth, Poland specifically, during one of the several accidental migrations of humans coming from Earth to The Road. His maternal grandmother is from a previous wave who were already settled on The Road by that time, but the family can trace her ancestry back to West Africa. Odwain’s father, Ashatov Novak, was a full-blooded Bennai, a plant-based halfling race. Ashatov took his wife’s last name.

Birthplace and Birthdate: Thinking about this trips me out man. Odwain was born in 1946, sometime in the summer, probably July or August, in Septor Secundis, a coastal, metropolitan city and the seat of The Road’s government. He’s 27 during his first adventure and right now, in Godslaughter, he is 69 (what the FUCK). He will live maybe 20 or 30 years longer than your average human, and is in better physical shape than a human would be at 69. He’s more like late 40’s or early 50’s.

Guilty Pleasures: A lot, probably - Odwain has just a bit of hedonistic streak just because he feels miserable so much of the time that he needs to feel good somehow. He smokes cigarettes for much of his life (but eventually quits), is a casual cannabis smoker and binge eats really truly terrible junk food (and has a bit of a gut because of it, but because he’s kind of lanky otherwise, he’s just kind of gourd-shaped). He likes beer, but doesn’t drink hard liqour all that often because he gets astronomically bad hangovers. Despite having a generally weak stomach, Odwain really likes frightfully spicy food, and his kids’ obligatory dad-gifts for him are probably hot sauces. When he’s not pounding down garbage, his favorite kind of cuisine is Thai. Not a guilty pleasure per say, but he also loves all things that have to do with insects, and when he and Rusty have a house together, Odwain takes up gardening as a hobby and plants an expansive garden of flora that are attractive to bees. (A Nice Thing: Odwain plants this garden when Rusty is pregnant because he found his love of insects through his father’s garden as a child, and wanted to give his kids the same opportunity) Odwain also maintains an apiary from the time that he’s living in a warehouse in the desert, to when he’s living with a partner and beyond. When he learns how to make Hot Honey it’s over for all of us. He has a modest collection of novelty bee-themed things that he’s amassed over the years, but he is not guilty about asserting his love of bees/wasps, like, at all. He’s also a little kinky but I’m not going into that.

Phobias: All of Odwain’s fears are existential - what if I push everyone away, existing in society is anxiety inducing, what if I’m just a bad person and my existence is making everything more difficult for functional people, etc. Though he’s kind of a sad fellow and has ideated suicide, and came very, VERY close to trying to kill himself after he dropped out of college, he also fears growing old and dying. I think death is more digestible to him if it’s on his own terms, but even then, I think what coaxed him off the edge was fear. If anything ever happened to his chosen romantic partner or any of his kids, he’d be besides himself, and is kind of one severe trauma and emotional breakdown away from becoming a bee-themed supervillian.

What They Would Be Famous For: Odwain is notable at a certain point in his career for being a pioneer in AI programming, and also for designing, building and patenting an invention called the Hercules Rig, which is basically a beetle-wing inspired jetpack. You can see it here. He holds the patent very closely and only allows it to be reproduced for recreation, construction, emergency rescue operations, etc. Odwain has taken a very firm stance on not allowing the military or any paramilitary organization to get their hands on it, though it has not stopped them from making shitty knock-offs that he is constantly suing people about.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Breaking and entering. Exploding something he shouldn’t. Buying illegal hazardous materials. Doing something petty that bites him in the ass.

OC You Ship Them With: To be honest there are not a lot of other characters besides Rusty that I ship him with. Bitter college rivals, thrown back together as late twenty-somethings, becoming better people together and learning to express empathy and vulnerability…it’s good. The only other character that I really go yeah, that’s the good stuff, is Jake’s character Finnick, who is kind of Odwain’s weird BFF and fellow mad scientist type. I don’t think they’d have a super stable relationship, and I think it would most likely be a “we yelled at each other and had weird sex enough that we like each other now” kind of scenario. But I do think they would come to love each other and have each other’s back to the death. Him and Hemlock, my dirty swamp witch who’s only picture was devoured during the great tumblr purge, also make a pretty fun couple for similar reasons. Iona too, but I think they are too explosive of personalities to ever find a stable middle ground. I also think he would find certain people attractive (August, Hare, Ganzrig, Ifechi the man I have spoken of but once, Jonquil in certain scenarios) but may not put himself out there to pursue them.

Neither of us have ever posted any art of her but here’s a few headshots of Finnick I did awhile ago, because she really is my favorite romantic partner for Odwain aside from Rusty, and is the only other one that’s really relevant in our games.

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Odwain is fairly physically fragile and to be honest I think that most people could kill him as long as they could get their hands on him - he’s very dexterous and has a lot of gadgets that let him get the upper hand, keep enemies at a distance or escape. He has a ranged fighting/add-spawn build so he is mostly out of direct harm unless he’s reeled in somehow. But uh, Odwain IS dead right now in Godslaughter, he died fighting an eldritch deity named Dreamer who sucked him into a nightmare dimension and flayed his soul out of his body. It’s ok though, as long as the party beats Dio, he’ll be fine. I didn’t cry you’re the one who’s crying.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Ok, so, first off HAHA Odwain canonically likes Transformers and collects them, which are a thing in circulation after the last human migration from earth in the 90’s. Imagine. Imagine your grown ass father with a genius level IQ and multiple patents collecting plastic robots. Him and Finnick have transformers sonas - ANYWAY, that aside, he doesn’t really read for pleasure, just information, and generally just puts on cable while he works for white noise (and in later years, whatever The Road’s TV streaming service is). Most of the media he consumes is incidental to him, but will get interested in strange things that pique his interest. He probably thinks true crime docs are neat and enjoys pulpy sci-fi stuff that he can complain about. Any documentary about bugs. He’d like Mystery Science Theatre if they had it around. He enjoys things that are the fun, good kind of “bad” and has a fairly high threshold for disturbing imagery.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Odwain is that guy who makes 20 minute long youtube videos lampooning movies for “not making sense”. If there’s anything that breaks his suspension of disbelief, his attention and tolerance disintegrates, even if it’s just one of those things that needs to happen to move the plot along. It doesn’t really matter what genre it is, though he is most hard on sci-fi and fantasy. There is a tipping point for him, however, where he starts enjoying the thrill of blasting something and circles back around to enjoying it.

Talents and/or Powers: Odwain is only a little bitty bit magical, and only because Bennai are the most magical race on The Road. He has latent magical ability that allows him to sense magical signatures and incorporate magic into technology, and maybe cast a low level spell if he tries really hard. If he was in a high fantasy setting, he’d be an enchanter. His staff (the big lightbulb thing I draw him with sometimes), the Hercules Rig, his Wasp Suite (robotic wasps with an AI and different spells loaded into them) and any other devilish, bug-based weapons and utility objects do his work for him.

Why Someone Might Love Them: Odwain’s a bit of a tough walnut to crack because I think that he shines in moments of sincerity and vulnerability, but he has to, well, get there. He’s capable of very great, thoughtful acts of selflessness and compassion, and deeply desires meaningful relationships with other people, but he gets insecure about how he expresses himself and can clam up. He’s passionate, emotional and expressive, but has been put down for being so, and was probably a very brilliant, curious child who was beaten down into a somber adult. I actually think that, at some point in his childhood, he was not entirely unlike Whitty in the way that he was eager to share things with people and explore the world around him, which is why Odwain feels very protective of his grandson. I think the most lovable thing about him is that when he’s at his best, nothing can stop him - he’s extremely intelligent, diligent, creative and innovative. He truly, deeply loves making things, and making them better, and when he’s not in a crash, creates prolifically. What he loves, he loves deeply and without compromise, which makes Rusty, a person that could also be said of, a good match for him. I also think his cattiness makes him very witty, he’s a genuinely funny guy who can engage in some really goofy shenanigans when he’s feeling up for it.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: Oh, lots of reasons. Odwain is an acquired taste to many, or just not to many’s taste at all. He is very petty, blunt and catty, and as a young man is extremely bitter and negative. You’d be very hard pressed to get a positive statement about anything out of him between the ages of 16-25. He’s very confrontational, can become very loud and intense if it’s something that he feels is important, and is not afraid to cut people out of his life if he feels that they aren’t good for him. Sometimes, he will end relationships/friendships prematurely because of this. Being such, he is heavily prone to self-inflicted isolation. He has no childhood friends, and only kept in touch with one person from college. He just cuts and runs. Odwain’s self-loathing runs very deep, which makes it hard for him to accept, or ask for, emotional support or affection. And that can be hard on the people around him who care about him. His executive dysfunction can also be abysmal, making it seem like perhaps he is messy or lazy, but he’s just kind of a mess himself, hah.

A weird non-psychological one but I think is enough to get someone’s hackles up is that Odwain doesn’t like animals very much unless they are insects, invertebrates, etc. He finds mammals loud, messy and needy, and that “I’m the only one in my house that is allowed to be all of those things”.

How They Change: As Odwain ages and gains a stable support network of friends, his edges soften and he learns how to ask for help more effectively. He also learns how to better choose his battles, and how to exercise the compassion that he knows he has, but has been too insecure to utilize. He manages his mental health better, but is never entirely free of it, because you never really are. Most importantly, I think, he learns how to forgive the people who deserve forgiveness, and give people second chances, accepting that people can change. Which means the same can be said for him, too.

Why You Love Them: I’ve talked about this before, somewhere, I’m sure. Odwain is one of those characters that has a very big slice of my personality, and has a lot of my more negative traits, though they are ones we’re both working on. My first session with Odwain was a scene where Odwain’s dad died after being ill for a very long time, and as it happens, it was on father’s day, on the first or second father’s day after MY dad died, after several brutal months fighting with the cancer that eventually killed him. I had to put down the dice, so to speak, and for a short time, thought that Odwain might actually be a character that I scrapped completely. He came too close to something very painful and personal. I don’t remember how, exactly, but the solution to this problem of mine was that if he’s getting close to me on his own, then I might as well just let him in on everything. I can genuinely say that doing that has changed the way that I empathize with my characters and how I make them, and that there is something I share with Odwain that I don’t have with many of my other characters. Also, I like bees.

#odwain #tyromedico

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atomkrp-blog · 5 years

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WELCOME TO XAVIER’S, KIM DOHYUN !

… loading statistics. currently aged twenty-three, entering first semester of xavier’s in seoul, south korea. decrypting files… mutant has the following records: strength +4, durability+3, agility +6, dexterity +5, intelligence +7. currently, he is classified under tier omega.

BACKGROUND.

From an early age, Kim Dohyun had always known that he was different; and not in the traditional sense. As a Korean child growing up in England, he had always known that he looked different, and maybe even acted a bit different than the other kids, but this feeling went beyond that; it alluded to something that went deeper than his families ethnic background. This suspicion of his had laid dormant in the back of his mind, until one day it finally decided to manifest into reality. While playing Monopoly with a group of friends, the eight-year-old discovered that if he wished hard enough, the dice would miraculously fall on the numbers that he had wished on. The first time it happened, he wrote it off as a fluke, something that his overactive imagination had conjured up. However, after the sixth and seventh times, he started to note somewhat of a pattern. It was at that moment where that sneaking suspicion began to morph into a terrifying confirmation; he was definitely different, and he needed to keep this a secret.

Eight years later, at the age of sixteen, Dohyun had known for certain who he was, what he was, and that he needed to hide this part of himself from his parents. They were traditional, and their beliefs had led them to believe that mutants were unnatural abominations that went against the will of their god. They had even gone so far as to moving the family back to South Korea after hearing one of their neighbors had a daughter who was exhibiting signs which they classified as “unholy, unnatural, and ungodly”. Without proper training, or a proper support system, he quickly found himself slipping into the “wrong crowd”. Under the cover of night, he would sneak out of their apartment and slink away to the underground casinos and gambling corporations run by the shady men and women who called the streets their home. His unassuming and innocent exterior worked in his favor, allowing him to manipulate and scam scores of individuals out of large sums of money. initially, he had only meant for these places to serve as a training ground, a place where he could test the limitations of his ability, however it quickly morphed into something more sinister. He became consumed with greed, finding pleasure in his ability to secure risky wins just by willing the odds in his favor. He felt good being in control and knowing that he had a certain control over those around him; it was a feeling more potent than any drug and he had become seriously addicted to it.

For years, he had a steel tight grip on the underground, eventually earning enough money to cut ties with his parents and move out of the oppressive environment that they had unknowingly created for him. It didn’t take long for news of his success to spread throughout the underground, and people began creating all sorts of explanations for his success. They began calling him Chance, the baby-faced genius with a golden hand, and Dohyun had absolutely thrived in the attention that he was receiving. Without his parents breathing down his back or the threat of ever losing any gamble, he lived his life recklessly and without consequence. He was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted and thought nothing of the damage that he was potentially causing. However, living a life without consequence oftentimes yields consequences that are far worse than what one would expect.

Without proper training and only his own research and experimentation to back him, Dohyun never thought to explore possible outside weaknesses to his ability. He had seen himself as invincible and unbeatable, as evidenced by his perfect winning streak over the span of seven years. All it took was one moment of carelessness for his empire to come crumbling down. He became too overzealous, not taking heed of his weakening physical state. His opponent was a stranger, a mysterious individual who exuded the same cockiness and greed that fueled his spirit. No matter what pathway he chose, the odds never seemed to work in his favor, and for the first time in years he felt himself slipping. As his frustration grew, his control over his own abilities gradually began to decrease, ultimately rendering him useless against his opponent. Eventually he felt himself succumbing to the rage that welled up inside him; he knew that there was great danger in losing control over his abilities, and had he been in the right state of mind, he might have thought against aiming his anger towards those around him. However, Dohyun wasn’t in the right state of mind, he hadn’t been for a long time, and the last thing he remembered feeling was a terrible rumble under his feet before everything turned dark.

When he awoke, he found himself in what looked to be an interrogation room, sort of like the ones he had seen on television. It didn’t take too long for him to piece everything together, and he knew that he had royally fucked up. Dohyun knew that he needed help, which was what led him to confide in the officer that had walked in to question him. He answered all of their questions, even going so far as to explain more about his ability and all of the information he had gathered over the years. No matter how helpful and candid he was, he knew that it wouldn’t erase the damage that he had caused and the lives that he had ruined. After what had seemed like forever, he was visited again by more officers and officials who had regarded him with interest. A few moments passed before one of them spoke, offering him a choice. He could accept the legal punishment for the damage that he had caused over the past seven years, or accept an invitation to an academy, one that would help him learn to master the ability that had caused so much destruction. So, being a man who spent much of his life picking and choosing the paths that would benefit him the most, it was almost too obvious which choice he went for.

MUTATION.

Dohyun’s mutation allows him to manipulate probability, or the likelihood that certain things are to occur. This essentially allows him to manipulate the outcome of any given event or situation, so long as it is something that can feasibly happen. Probability manipulation also grants the user with the ability to see many different outcomes, essentially giving them a quick glance into a probable future. Until they have a better grasp on their powers, inexperienced users often use an aid (such as a coin or six-sided die) to help them understand their power; this allows them to learn how to control their abilities by training them to manipulate the outcome of the dice roll. Most inexperienced users are able to manipulate probabilities that have more than a 50% chance of occurring in real life with little to no trouble. As the ability is developed, users will eventually gain the ability to make more improbable events happen with less of an energy expenditure.

STRENGTHS.

As a result of the mutation, the user is able to view and calculate multiple different outcomes to any given situation, and essentially choose the most desirable path. In essence, the user can calculate approximate odds of multiple situations, allowing them to pick the route that is most beneficial to them/the scenario at hand

As soon as the user chooses a route or pathway, the effects happen almost immediately after the user wills for it to occur. As long as the user has the energy to expend, they can make multiple things happen at once.

When their power is used, the user is the only one who notices that a change has occured. The change seamlessly fits itself within the timeline, making it seem as if things were supposed to happen that way.

At their most powerful, users can spontaneously manipulate odds or outcomes at will. This grants them the power to shift ratios with low probability to having a higher probability.

WEAKNESSES.

In order for the user to cause or prevent a situation, the probability of it occurring in real life must be within a certain range. In order to cause an event to happen, there must be more than a 0% chance of it occurring in real life; and in order to prevent a situation from occurring there must be less than a 100% chance of it happening.

In order to change the probability of a given situation, the user must exert an amount of energy equal to the event that they are trying to prevent or create. Events with a less than 50% probability of occurring will consume a lot more energy than events with more than a 50% chance of occurring. In short, this makes it more difficult to make more unlikely events occur.

As this ability consumes energy, there is a recharge period between uses. Recharge time depends on the amount of energy consumed, meaning that it can vary between a few hours to several days (this is dependent on the situation that was altered).

While it is relatively simple for the user to change the probability of a future event, changing the probability of a past event proves to be more difficult. In order for the user to change the probability of a past event, that event has to be something that was witnessed by no other person but the user themselves.

The ability of probability manipulation has no effect on other users of the same or similar ability (abilities that fall into this category include certainty manipulation, uncertainty manipulation, etc.) meaning that if two mutants with the ability of probability manipulation were to face off against each other, the combined use of their powers would cancel out, making them powerless against each other.

In order to properly control their ability, users must be of sound mind and body. if the user attempts to access their powers while under extreme stress or during times of emotional instability, they have the potential to skew probability, which could possibly cause cataclysmic events.

Without control, this power is extremely unpredictable and extremely dangerous. Inexperienced users, or users who haven’t been properly trained may only be able to trigger events that have a limited number of outcomes. Essentially, this means that they would be able to change the outcome of something like a dice roll or a coin toss but wouldn’t have the ability to change the outcome of an actual event

#at:profile #tw gambling

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theliberaltony · 3 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Wednesday, a mob of pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results. But as shocking as Wednesday’s events were, they were, in many ways, the culmination of the past four years of Trump’s presidency.

President Trump has long spewed lies to his supporters about the election, refusing until very recently to concede, and routinely has shown his disdain for both the integrity of America’s elections and its tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. And right before the chaos broke out on Wednesday, Trump had just finished urging his supporters to protest Congress’s vote to certify the election results, telling them “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Within an hour, the Capitol was under attack.

This violent episode raises many questions about the future of democracy in America — not only its continued health, but the extent to which the U.S. has already become less democratic. So let’s first unpack this question by diving into this data point: Polls show while the majority of Americans condemn what happened on Wednesday, a plurality of Republican voters support it. What does that say about the current state of democracy in the U.S.?

jennifer.mccoy (Jennifer McCoy, professor of political science at Georgia State University): It shows that Americans are terribly divided over the perception of democracy itself — including whether it is even under threat and who is responsible for the threat. This makes it extremely difficult to propose solutions. But it’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about 15 percent of the population, maybe 20 percent, who said they condoned the violence.

lee.drutman (Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Democracy requires parties that are committed to free and fair elections and will accept the outcome — even if they lose. So if the dominant position in the Republican Party is that the only free and fair elections are those where Republicans win, and anything else is “stolen” and fraudulent, then we’re on the precipice of not having a democracy.

But as Jennifer said, the one silver lining here is that the overwhelming majority of Americans reject the anti-democratic rhetoric of Trump and his allies. This is important.

cyrus.samii (Cyrus Samii, professor of politics at New York University): I find it helpful to place this moment in a broader historical context, as I think there are two trends at play here. First, decades of mobilization and a fight for a more democractic, inclusive society have brought about generational changes in America’s politics, including more women, people of color and other long-excluded groups now having a seat at the table. That has made our politics more inclusive and more democratic, but there is a second trend here — a politics of resentment that cannot tolerate this growing diversity. This mindset is particularly rampant within the Republican Party, and part of what CNN’s Van Jones has called a “whitelash,” or conservative white Christian Americans mobilizing against the type of progress embodied by President Barack Obama’s time in office. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has also written on the pendulum swinging between moments of progress on inclusion and white resistance.

Last Wednesday embodied this dynamic in the span of a few hours: We had the historic election of two Democratic senators in Georgia, followed then by a mob, including a number of white supremacists sacking the Capitol in the name of Trump, and most Republicans to date being unwilling to do much about it.

jennifer.mccoy: Yes, and I think the question now is whether this unwillingness to condemn the mob, or call out their colleagues who are perpetuating the myth of a “stolen election,” is the dominant position in the Republican Party or only a faction that can be contained.

sarah: Do we have a sense of what is driving these attitudes?

jennifer.mccoy: The politics of resentment, written about by a number of scholars, including Kathy Cramer and Arlie Hochschild, who wrote definitive books on the topic, derives from perceptions of unfairness or injustice that accompany the diversification of one’s workplace or community, changing the power structures that Cyrus spoke about. The urban-rural divide in America’s politics exemplifies this. Rural Americans, mostly Republicans, perceive urban dwellers, more Democratic and more racially diverse, as receiving more than their “fair share” of tax revenues and opportunities. With wage stagnation and the growing service-based economy, white males without a college degree, in particular, feel a loss of social status that can lead to rage and support for more authoritarian politics. This is why “identity politics” are arguably more of an issue for the GOP than the Democratic Party today. What’s particularly troubling here, though, is that the political rhetoric from politicians and media personalities are really whipping up latent attitudes of resentment to create the politics of outrage we saw on display last Wednesday. Republicans have gone further than Democrats in using vilifying language and painting horrific scenarios if the “radical, liberal, socialist Democrats” and their “anarchic mobs” take over.

lee.drutman: To follow up on Jennifer’s point about politicians driving some of this, take what Vice President Mike Pence said at the Republican National Convention this summer. He said that the election was about “whether America remains America.” Those are incredibly high stakes, so when you add that kind of rhetoric to our winner-take-all election system, you have a recipe for a very angry minority convinced that the system is rigged against them. As we saw last Wednesday, one response is to take matters into their own hands through violence.

We also know that opposition to democracy is much stronger among Republicans who have beliefs that political scientist Larry Bartels has called “ethnic antagonism,” a measure of “unfavorable feelings towards Muslims, immigrants and other out-groups … [and] concerns about these groups’ political and social claims” in his research.

The chart below is extremely striking as it shows that among Republicans, the higher the level of ethnic antagonism, the more likely they are to say they don’t trust election results, use force as an alternative and support authoritarian stances. (Bartels “normalizes” the distribution so that half of Republicans are above zero on the ethnic antagonism scale, and then presents the data two ways — using statistical analysis to estimate values (left) and reporting the actual data in the limited survey sample (right).) Overall, though, the takeaway is clear: Bartels finds troublingly high support for these sentiments among Republicans.

sarah: Is what happened Wednesday, then, a somewhat expected consequence of what happens when a sizable portion of the electorate loses faith in our elections and institutions?

jennifer.mccoy: To be clear, the research we have doesn’t necessarily show that losing faith in elections and institutions leads to violence. It can, for instance, have repercussions like withdrawal and political apathy. We saw this in Venezuela when the opposition cried fraud, without evidence, after losing a referendum to remove President Hugo Chávez in 2004. They had trouble turning out supporters in governor elections right after, and then called for a boycott in the 2005 legislative elections, handing total control to Chávez’s party and enabling them to name loyalists to all of Venezuela’s political institutions. It took another decade before Venezuelans could mobilize to win back the legislature, but by that time, Chávez’s successor had turned even more authoritarian and remains in power today.

However, if political rhetoric is drumming up violence, using demonizing and dehumanizing language and glorifying battle language, then yes, supporters are likely to engage in violence, thinking their leaders are urging that, as we saw last Wednesday.

lee.drutman: Jennifer’s point about political rhetoric is extremely important. The level of nativism, or anti-immigration sentiment, has been roughly consistent in the population for a while now. But there are signs that it has become a much stronger partisan issue in the last decade or so as Trump and other Republicans have played with rhetorical fire. It’s true that far-right leaders have been stoking this issue in multiple western democracies, and as the chart below shows, it’s evident among Republicans in the U.S.

jennifer.mccoy: And the future of the Republican Party is absolutely key to what happens to U.S. democracy. Early signs after Jan. 6 are not encouraging — the party reelected Trump’s hand-picked candidates for the RNC, chair Ronna McDaniel and co-chair Tommy Hicks, and many party leaders have also avoided calling for any accountability for Trump, instead saying that this will further divide the country when we need to unify.

sarah: Some historians have argued if there isn’t accountability, this will all escalate. Is that accurate? How are you all thinking about the importance of consequences for what happened Wednesday for democracy moving forward?

Historian of coups and right-wing authoritarians here. If there are not severe consequences for every lawmaker & Trump govt official who backed this, every member of the Capitol Police who collaborated with them, this "strategy of disruption" will escalate in 2021

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) January 7, 2021

cyrus.samii: If there is no accountability, then the lesson for Republicans will be that they can continue to use illiberal means to maintain a grip on power. And on the left, this might play into the hands of those who would say there is no point in sticking with liberal institutional processes when the other side doesn’t. A clear recipe, in other words, for escalation.

jennifer.mccoy: And if there isn’t any accountability for what happened Wednesday, it gives organized citizens, as well as the next generation of political leaders, license to engage in the same — or worse. Political learning is a real thing, and it can be positive or negative.

If Congress or others fail to act, the road remains open to Trump (and anyone else) to continue to act with impunity, run for office again or support future violent acts. Congress has the ability to impeach Trump and take the extra step of disqualifying him from running again, and the power to censure and even expel the members of Congress who spread the same disinformation about the election and voted against the certification of results in two states. This is important because failing to condemn the exclusionary and hate-filled rhetoric Trump used in his presidency means that catering to the fears, anxieties and resentments of a portion of the electorate might remain a viable political path moving forward.

sarah: Let’s take a step back. In November, The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz wrote a feature on how civil resistance can stop authoritarian-style leaders from cementing their power, comparing what’s happened in the U.S. under Trump to other parts of the world. “In the past 15 years, there has been a marked global increase in what international relations scholars call ‘democratic backsliding,’” wrote Marantz, “with more authoritarians and authoritarian-style leaders consolidating power.” To what extent is there democratic backsliding in the U.S.?

lee.drutman: If democracy depends on a set of shared rules for free and fair elections, we are definitely in a period of backsliding.

cyrus.samii: I don’t know, the term “democratic backsliding” is problematic in my opinion insofar as it fails to clarify how the conflict in the U.S. is between those using democratic means to achieve progressive change (and succeeding at some moments) versus those who want to push back against that change by undermining democracy. The fact is, a lot of progress is occurring through the ballot box, the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia being a prime example, and this is precisely why Republicans are intent on throwing up obstacles to its broad-based use. Republicans have been trying to disenfranchise minority voters, for example, and these efforts are subject to heated legal fights.

sarah: So as Cyrus said, democratic backsliding may be too toothless of a term, but how would we describe the trajectory of democracy in the U.S.? Are we less democratic than one year ago? Four years ago?

jennifer.mccoy: According to international rankings, U.S. democracy is eroding faster than what we see in other major western democracies — it is more on par with Brazil, Bangladesh, Turkey and India, according to the global think tank V-Dem Institute’s 2020 democracy report. The Economist Intelligence Unit also downgraded the U.S. to a flawed democracy in 2016. Expert surveys of political scientists, such as Bright Line Watch and Authoritarian Warning Survey, also measure higher threats.

Each of these groups measure democracy using different measures — electoral integrity, rule of law, media and academic freedom, civil liberties, to name a few. But one measure I want to zoom in on is “toxic polarization” (which I call “pernicious polarization” in my research with Murat Somer), as we’ve found it’s especially delegitimizing and on the rise. Essentially, it’s when society is divided into two mutually distrustful camps and there is increased demonization and delegitimization of opponents. Our research has found that it can often result in calls to violence, too.

It’s also something V-Dem uses in its assessments. It found in a 2020 paper that the Republican Party was on par with autocratic parties in Turkey, India and Hungary on their new illiberalism index, especially in their use of demonizing language to describe political opponents, disrespect for fundamental minority rights and encouragement of political violence.

lee.drutman: (If you’re interested in how these various surveys evaluate the quality of a country’s democracy, here’s a great paper that outlines the different ways they measure democracy — summary table below.)

sarah: It’s true that in survey after survey, Republicans, as you all have said, have expressed less support for democracy than Democrats, but I was hoping we could unpack a little more the debilitating effect that this has had on American democracy writ large.

For instance, in the wake of the protests in Portland, Oregon, last summer, FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth and contributor Shom Mazumder found evidence of members of both parties holding anti-democratic views.

As the chart illustrates, this was especially true among Republicans, so I’m not trying to “both sides” this, but I do want to unpack the effect that severe polarization might have on democratic erosion. That is, how do you factor in polarization when looking at how the U.S. has become less democratic? Is it the number one factor driving what we’re seeing? Or is that too simplistic?

cyrus.samii: Breakdown by party is exactly the right way to look at it. Democrats are involved in a bottom-up struggle to broaden political inclusion while Republicans have been fighting to limit that, including in this past year’s elections. And so it is not so much a question of democratic backsliding at the country level, but rather in terms of whether parties see themselves as being competitive democratically or whether they need to use anti-democratic strategies to maintain their grip.

lee.drutman: Jennifer’s work on pernicious polarization is incredibly important here, and has really influenced my thinking. When politics becomes deeply divided in a binary way along cultural and identity lines (as it is now in the U.S.), democracy is in a really dangerous place.

jennifer.mccoy: And this type of polarization is more likely to lead to democratic erosion because it is based on an “us vs. them” division, not just disagreement on issues.

lee.drutman: On that chart, Sarah, showing support for strong leader/army rule, I’ve co-authored two recent reports on the topic, one in 2018 and another in 2020. And it’s true, we did find some support for these alternatives to democracy on both sides, which is worrying. But again, the overwhelming majority of Americans are in support of democratic institutions.

But here is where political leadership is so important. That some voters have weak connections to democracy is not a new problem. In fact, research has found that is typical among those who are the least educated and least politically engaged. The new problem is having political leadership that encourages and stokes these anti-democratic sentiments.

jennifer.mccoy: And as partisan antipathy grows, perceptions of out-party threat grow, and that leads people to challenge democratic norms so as to keep their own party in power and keep the others out.

cyrus.samii: The way I interpret the question, Sarah, is: How does polarization affect Republicans’ thinking on whether or not to abandon the strategy of limiting democratic processes to retain their hold on power, rather than seeking new coalitions, broadening their appeal and making themselves more competitive democratically?

In other words, it’s all about the strategy that the Republicans pursue. So when you take that into consideration, increased polarization — by which I mean distancing oneself from and dehumanizing outgroups — could sustain Republicans’ fixation on limiting democracy because they cannot see themselves forming any new alliances with people outside their traditional white Christian base.

lee.drutman: Cyrus — that is the central question, but I think there is a significant division among Republicans. So let me reframe your question slightly: What will it take for Republicans who want to build a more inclusive, pro-democracy party to triumph over those who are committed to ethnonationalism and grievance?

cyrus.samii: Yes, Lee, exactly.

lee.drutman: And as long as we think of this as a zero-sum Democrats vs. Republicans fight, we’re stuck. But if we think of this in terms of the forces of democracy vs. the forces of ethnonationalism (or whatever you want to call it), I do think we can make some progress.

sarah: Are there institutional changes (abolishing the Electoral College, reforming the Senate, etc.) that would bolster American democracy or make it less vulnerable to similar challenges in the future?

lee.drutman: I’ve written a lot about what would happen if the U.S. moved to a more proportional voting system, and I do think that would enable a center-right party to operate independent of a far-right party. It also might allow for a broader governing coalition that could keep the far-right out of government, as has happened in many Western democracies with more proportional voting systems.

And maybe we see this play out a little in the U.S. That is, I could see a pro-democracy faction within the Republican Party joining with Democrats to support electoral reforms (such as the Fair Representation Act, a piece of election reform legislation that would establish multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting).

cyrus.samii: Institutional changes to the Electoral College or the Senate would certainly make a difference, since those institutions are a part of what Republicans currently rely on in the anti-democractic aspects of their strategy. But changing them is probably too hard, politically.

Of course, once, say, Texas goes blue, those institutions will come to have the opposite effect and lock out Republicans — unless they change who they can attract. Also, Sarah, I think the idea that “overall trends point to increased illiberalism” is only true when it comes to the kinds of strategies that Republicans are using to try to maintain a grip on their power, rather than with respect to U.S. democratic politics as a whole.

lee.drutman: Yes, changing the Electoral College or the Senate would require constitutional amendments. Enacting proportional representation, interestingly enough, is entirely within Congress’s power, though.

jennifer.mccoy: I want to go back to an earlier point about HOW we get here. I’ve written with Somer about how democracies could solve this dilemma by “repolarizing” along democratic lines vs. authoritarian lines, and what we found is very similar to Lee’s and Cyrus’s point about inclusive movements vs. exclusionary ethnonationalist movements. That is, shifting the axes of polarization to the principle of protecting democracy instead of a divide between different partisan and social identities could actually help protect democracy, as long as it’s not done with demonizing or hyperbolic language.

And that’s important, because as political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has written, a principled conservative or center-right party is essential for a functioning democracy. Even President-elect Joe Biden has reiterated the need for a Republican Party for the health of our democracy. The problem is our two-party system is currently mired in toxic polarization and so the extreme elements within the parties are amplified. We need institutional reforms to allow for political incentives to change.

lee.drutman: I do think the events of Jan. 6 have been a tremendous wake-up call to many on the urgency of democracy reform.

cyrus.samii: It certainly was a wake-up call, Lee. I also think that the incredibly tumultuous times that current 18- to 35-year-olds have endured — 9/11, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, Trump’s presidency, the events that inspired the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, and of course, COVID-19 — could generate a political consciousness that we haven’t seen since the 1960s or 70s.

lee.drutman: Cyrus — yes, there are lots of similarities to the Great Society Era which was the last era of major democracy reform and included major voting rights reform. There are also lots of similarities to the Progressive Era, which was the previous era of large-scale democracy reform.

So if you believe in political scientist Samuel Huntington’s theory that there is a 60-year cycle of democracy reform movements — that every six decades or so, American democracy falls short of its democratic ideals and reform movements emerge to expand our democracy, we’re right on schedule.

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