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grimmmviewing · 2 months

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S1E10: “Organ Grinder”—B, I think… (Watched 3/9/24)

“You know, I’ve been at this job a while, but it seems like this town is just getting weirder.” – Hank (brushing up against the revelation that he’s a character in a weekly fantasy procedural series)

First, the Hansel and Gretel connection: After the opening quote, I actually forgot until a scene later in the episode where Nick and Juliette approach a homeless brother and sister and I made the connection between this “Gracie” and “Hanson” and the fairy tale. That was a fun little jolt. I did wonder how well this story about a newly-introduced kind of Wesen harvesting human organs was going to dovetail in any sort of way with the source material aside from just the concept of children being some type of cannibalized, but then Hanson ends up using bits of the puka shell necklaces that had been present throughout the episode to leave a trail for the cops to find when the brother and sister are themselves abducted at the climax. I groaned when I realized what was happening. Like, it… works, but it still has that little bit of cringe in its modernization that really makes it (and Grimm as a series doing this adaptational thing episode after episode) sing.

One thing that both has to be addressed about this episode but that also feels kind of awkward to bring up in a casual, little write-up like this, though, is the depiction of the “Geiers” (henceforth, “Gs,” just to be safe)—a species of hook-nosed monsters that abduct human children to harvest their blood and organs for Wesen medicinal use. I thought I might be misremembering the exact particulars of the antisemitic concept of blood libel, but after a post-viewing Google and Wikipedia… I have mixed feelings about rating this one too highly.

I’m obviously not going to claim that Grimm is intentionally deploying that conspiracy to some sinister end, just that there’s an incredibly unfortunate combination of imagery and plot in this episode. There are some early mentions of vampires, for example, and my one thought was that the Gs might have been meant to resemble Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (the vampire itself potentially being an antisemitic design), and the exaggerated nose was added as some sort of “original character, do not steal”-style measure that just made things even worse. Or maybe it’s a visual synthesis of Orlok and the hooked beak of a vulture given the apparent association between “G” and that animal, though the relationship between the concept of a vulture and the word/name and Jewish stereotypes stills seems fraught. However the combination of the elements, visual and narrative, in Grimm was achieved, the end-result does not look good. I was tempted to say “This episode hasn’t aged well,” but it really seems to have just been born old, in this regard.

On a lighter note, here’s an exchange between Captain Renard and Sergeant “Comrade”(?) Wu that I enjoyed a lot, after they find a bunch of human organs drying for processing (a pretty strikingly grotesque image): “Well, whichever way you look at it, it’s still cannibalism.” / “Uh, I think it’s pronounced ‘capitalism.’”

The fact that it’s the clinic—part of the American healthcare system, a notoriously blood-thirsty branch of capitalist living—that’s ultimately revealed to be keeping the vulnerable kids healthy just to cut them up for parts to be sold in a sort of apothecary with a certain upper-class vibe (to a secret race of non-humans, but I’m not dipping back into that again) feels like it could be taken for something meaningful: Raise up and support the youth just enough to cannibalize/capitalize on them, literally consuming their lives.

If I wanted, there’s plenty of fun stuff here to recount, like the premise of flipping the exotic animal parts as… “enhancement” to be animal-like beings using human parts for that purpose. That Monroe tells Nick this and also throws in a quick mention that, actually, there’s no truth to the exotic animals thing is fun for me since it feels like the writers/people behind the show coming through in the writing a bit. Almost like they felt a moral responsibility to throw in a quick mention, like activism in miniature. It’s cute.

This bit from Monroe during the aforementioned conversation is also very cute: “You probably didn’t know that your testicles— I mean, not your testicles specifically. . . .” This is over a little dinner with some wine, too!

There’s some great Juliette stuff in the mix. The episode focuses pretty hard early on about whether Nick should tell her the truth since her not knowing is becoming dangerous. Then, we get this sequence where Nick and Juliette take Gracie and Hanson out to dinner, and Nick more or less ends up interrogating them, cop-style, but we can see that Juliette is picking up on something he isn’t, and she figures out Gracie liked one of the other boys who disappeared and is then able to get more information by empathizing than Nick was with his more forceful approach. When he compliments her afterward, we can read between the lines to connect back to the conversation with Monroe—Nick’s clearly wondering if Juliette can handle This, and in the strained silence they enter into just before he gets an interrupting phone call, you can feel him trying to decide whether to tell her or not.

When I saw the intense shaky camera in the woods during the opening scene of kids on the run from their captors, I thought the show might be losing its touch, but despite some further goofiness with the visuals (like the use of slow motion when the head G is about to fall into her own bonfire while fighting Nick), it still has this deft hand with weaving together visuals and plot elements or themes that make me want to just recite my full list of Fun Bits I couldn’t help but write down as they happened.

#nbc grimm #dude there is a friggin BREITBART article of all things about this episode #chekhovs puka shell necklace apparently #tv series #review #rewatch

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aberration13 · 7 months

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Lotta fake progressives and centrists coming out in support of the right wing extremist government of Israel in its effort to do ethnic cleansing.

Even assuming everything is as cut and dry as they claim (it's not) these people are still supporting reprisals against thousands of civilians because there happen to be terrorists there too (again, it's still not that simple).

Imagine if when kyle rittenhouse came from Illinois to do some terrorism in Wisconsin, the state of Wisconsin then decided to use that as an excuse to bomb Illinois, shut off the water and power for everyone in the state, and then started stealing the land and letting people from Wisconsin kick people from Illinois out of their own houses and lay claim to them.

Oversimplified still but that's the general idea of what the Israeli government is doing to palestine/gaza.

And many people, (even people in Israel) are opposed to those horrific actions.

This is not a jewish people vs muslim people issue like the media is making it out to be. This is a highly conservative fascist government colonizing a neighboring region issue while using religion as a justification even against the will of many who are of that faith both living under that government and globally as well.

Many of the harshest critics of the Israeli government are Jewish organizations and claiming that criticizing Israel and or zionism in general is antisemitic is the same as claiming that Israel speaks for all Jewish people and as a result makes anyone who does this guilty of stereotyping Jewish people as a whole; trying to lump a very diverse group of people together under one belief and erasing the politically inconvenient variety of thoughts and opinions held in favor of an ideological monolith that's easier to swallow.

They end up being guilty of the same antisemitism they accuse others of.

#anti zionisim #fascisim #fascists #israel #palestine #free palestine #conservatism #colonialism #ethnic cleansing #genocide #apartheid #antisemitism #my stuff #my post

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separatist-apologist · 1 year

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You review ": From Blood And Ash + the other books. Look. When are we going to discuss the absolute antisemitism that ribbons through these books? I guess its fine since Casteel is so hot, but lets not pretend the whole shadow elite drinking the blood of innocents for eternal youth/power isn't just repackaged blood libel because it absolutely is. Ignoring that, JLA is a bad writer with no editor pumping out book after book to bleed her fandom dry. How many 500 page books of no plot are people willing to read before they move on?

Gurl, i-. i was onep of the people kinda follow the booktok book reco back inthe day. When ut was hyoe and love all across the booktok fandom. But gurl. I WANNA BE MAD AT HOW BORING THE BOOK AND HOW I WANA SLAP BOTH ML AND FL. I was so mad by how hype the book is. I feel betray by the booktok community.

Then i give chances to the Kingdom of wicked. Like hellooo?? This book is dar below kingdom of ash. AT LEAST, i remember that cassteel is the ML,pretwnded to be a guard, climb a tree wuth the maiden FL and black hair. But this ML in KoW?? I remember nothing of the guy. He so bland,no spice at all,all salt and thats is that. But I did remember he had a good body. The rest? Wth am I reading? Is this a fever or what? I dont even remember whathappen in that book. But i know the FL hs twin and FL grandma sounded fun to have in holiday and her cook can solve world hunger

How the hell tiktok love this book. Half of the booktok reco is a scam. Now, the only reco i take from booktok is non fic or anything not YA,fantasy and romance

I think my issues fall into two categories: is it bad technically (craft/pacing/writing/etc etc) but not harmful

Or is it bad (all the same) AND harmful. I have a rant, I'll put it under the cut

So like- who cares really if someone likes garbage? I like garbage too, we all rummage through the trash and pick our faves and while it's not for me and I don't like a lot of it, I don't begrudge people who do. Kingdom of the Wicked is here. It's boring, it's got a plot that never made sense and it's clear the author didn't have a plan when she went in. Whether she wanted to write her books as quickly as she did or was pressured, I think the constant pumping out books for consumption like it's television seasons diminishes the quality. I would guess publishers are riding author's hard to write faster in order to captialize on hype because it makes them money.

I also think the way a LOT of self-published author's write like they're publishing to AO3 is part of the problem. So like- leaving me a rude review is mean because I'm doing this for free and it's a hobby but author's ask you to consume their work, often for money and its disrespectful when they don't, for example, hire an editor to catch their mistakes and then turn around and make people feel bad for leaving poor reviews or send their followings after reviewers for pointing out the lack of quality and consistency.

Those things are, in my opinion, bad and I dislike it's usually white mediocrity being put on this pedestal over and over when there are very well written, GOOD stories by poc author's that are ignored in favor of another mid story of a dark haired abuser and a spineless sassy LI.

But then there are bad books that are also harmful and that's where I don't feel so nice and I AM judging people like. Very hard. ESPECIALLY when it comes to the blood libel because Jesus goddamn Christ it's like every 4 months it's another author saying "oopsie I accidentally put antisemitism in my book" like look at the Haunting Adeline author. At least she's sorry but it's really exhausting AND highlights what a good editor could catch if they had any respect for their readers.

JLA is offensive in my opinion because she doesn't care so long as people keep buying her padded books. She'll keep churning out books and if you say "you know maybe it's okay to be critical of what you consume, even if it's just for fun" you get railroaded with people saying you have internalized misogyny and can't stand to see women enjoy themselves. I personally support women's wrongs EXCEPT when they're perpetuating hateful centuries old conspiracy theories that have gotten people killed and are still spewed on Twitter by, for example, Kanye West.

And the fact that so many of these author's rush to write whats in their heart and what's in their heart too often is racism is a conversation I feel like booktok isn't interested in having and so people still uphold Haunting Adeline when it never deserved the hype (but at least the author said sorry I guess, and reworked her issues) and will say they don't notice the antisemitism in FBAA (lucky them) and they're just trying to have fun without ever considering whose expense they're having fun at or like. How the self-publishing model COULD disrupt who we make popular if people could move away from the same four tropes strung together by shreddable plot and a dark haired man with tattoos.

#haters book club but with feeling

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huntunderironskies · 1 year

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Can I ask what 'premillenial dispensationalism' is ?

oh no i have to explain the scofield bible

Side note, I picked a bad time to finish this, I meant to have it done earlier but I've been super busy. Everything here is dead serious, sadly. If I get another follow-up to this, as a warning I will take forever to respond because I try to make these as informative and respectful as possible.

I'm going to put this below a cut. As a content warning, this talks about end-of-the-world stuff and touches on conspiracy theories and antisemitism, so take care if that's a touchy subject for you. It's impossible to talk about this in any depth without it leading into these topics. I'm going to try and keep to the things I know about so I don't make any missteps which is why I'm focusing more on the academic/scholarly aspects.

Alright, so. The idea of the apocalypse most people in America are familiar with is the one that starts with the Rapture. Unless you've been raised in certain groups or God zaps up all the good people to the sky and then there's a bunch of bad stuff that happens and then Jesus shows up to establish a Kingdom of God and after a thousand years of perfect rule and then there's one final battle against Satan and then the world gets destroyed, and everyone either goes to Hell forever or goes to Heaven.

Anyways, that's all about like, three hundred years old, tops AFAIK? More specifically just regarding the Rapture and what comes after it, the eternal misery thing is way older. To be clear, no serious religious scholar would think that this was what anyone who scribed early transcripts that would be compiled into the Bible saw as true, and most serious religious scholars aka people who didn't go to Liberty University or its copycats OHHHHHHHHHHH BURN sorry i'm bitter don't even think that this is close to what apocalypticism was preached by Jesus and those who came soon after him.

Now, I am not stupid enough to argue that apocalypticism isn't a core part of Christian texts (again, Jesus was definitively an apocalyptic preacher, there is zero doubt about that in any serious academic environment) but Revelations was a book added in by the Nicene Council three hundred years after the death of Jesus, and it was one of many apocalyptic texts. It just happens to be the one that made the cut, and it's one of the most metaphorical ones that has lent itself to people making some....very odd interpretations. Its writer also may have been tripping on cave shrooms but, while that does make a very fun story to tell at dinner to make religious studies sound less dry as a field, much like Satre and the mescaline crabs with philosophy, it's not a generally accepted theory.

But Satre really did take a bad hit of mescaline that made him hallucinate crabs for months, that actually happened.

Anyways. Highly metaphorical text. There's a case to be made that this was deliberate, because yelling "I HOPE GOD HITS NERO WITH A LIGHTNING BOLT" in a crowded forum will not end well. For example, you may or may not be familiar with the scholarly theory that the Number of the Beast is supposed to be a numerical cipher for Nero, and a lot of apocalyptic texts were just people saying "no guys, really, everyone who fucked us over is absolutely going to get smoted by God, because God told me so" as a morale boosting exercise. It's just that the Roman Empire happened to be most of the known world at the time, and it's not like even modern people have the best conceptualization of what a global society looks like anyway because our brains are mostly incapable of doing so. This isn't far off flood myths being based on catastrophic river flooding and then things getting embellished over time. Again, that little geographic reason was their world.

Though, I mean, if they were trying to say the fall of Rome would happen, they were right, it's just that the oppressive march of time would've ensured that happened eventually.

The problem is that you end up with morons a thousand and some spare change years down the line who decide to impose entirely different geopolitical standards onto it and that's where the Scofield Reference Bible comes in.

So the Scofield Reference Bible traces its origins to just before World War I, and the sharp among you in the crowd may begin to see where this is going. World War I was a brutal, horrific experience, and it was (probably, I've only taken 200 level history courses) the first global experience. And the Book of Revelation describes plagues (Spanish Flu), horrible afflictions (side effects of chemical warfare), and...well, yeah, war. While the Scofield Bible predates the war, it exploded in popularity because at the time it felt real.

Mister Scofield Reference Bible (Cyrus Scofield) was inspired by the preacher John Nelson Darby, with whom he was roughly contemporaneous with, and don't worry, you will never need to remember those names again because that's the only real contribution they've ever made to theology. Darby wouldn't have called himself a dispensationalist, the term was coined post-publication against his will after he died by someone who didn't like him, but that's the term we landed on.

To break down the name: dispensationalism refers to the idea that you can neatly divide up the history of the world into what amounts to theological epochs defined by a cycle of divine test > failure > judgement ending with the final dispensation, which will be Judgement Day itself. The "millennial" bit does not refer to an actual millennium but rather the Millennial Kingdom, which will be the actual-factual physical Kingdom of God.

This is the one thing that's probably kind of accurate to what pre-Nicene Christians would have believed, most people assumed that the Kingdom of God was just a restored version of Israel before all the invasions happened ruled by a divinely appointed prophet. No heavenly firmament or fluffy clouds or whatever.

The part where it's not accurate is the fluffy clouds Kingdom exists and that's where all the believers go to chill while the apocalypse is happening, though. That's a core concept of things, and that's the Rapture that pretty much any American would be familiar with

The modern version of this also includes some weirdly specific things like? For some reason it's generally accepted that people will go to Heaven naked and leave their clothes behind. I don't think this is in the Scofield Reference Bible, and I honestly don't know where this originated from. Could be as recent as Hal Lindsay for all I know. It was definitely in Left Behind, which was the other thing that caused a massive resurgence despite being probably one of the worst pieces of fiction ever published, theologian/blogger/fellow Gemini (<- most important quality) Slacktivist took like eight years to get through covering the first two books both in terms of how bad the theology is, the characters not acting like actual people, the plot not making sense, and how much the books reveal about the neuroses of both writers.

While that's fairly harmless, it's had some pretty sinister effects. Aside from the obvious, if you keep up with global politics at all, you're aware of the fact that America is extremely interested in keeping Israel in power as a state. I am very stupid except on very specific topics that are not this (and there is so much going on with colonialist interference in the Middle East to cover), not Palestinian or Israeli, and too tired to deal with attracting the bad kind of weirdoes to my blog so I'm going to put it this way. One, apartheid is bad, free Palestine. Two, and more within my wheelhouse so I can speak more in detail about this, the only reason that this is happening is because premillennial dispensationalist Christians think that Israel needs to exist as a geographical and political concept because the battle of Judgment Day is supposed to happen there, at which point the armies of God will defeat Satan and the world ends.

Not before all the surviving Jewish people convert to Christianity, the ~*~true religion~*~, though.

If it wasn't clear, the tildes and asterixes were a sarcasm tag, I just realized if you didn't spend an unfortunate amount of your life on Livejournal that might not be clear.

So, to be blunt, these people do not give a shit about actual Jewish people. Do not mistake this for anything other than a means to an end and they'll let anything happen to make sure that end comes about. Or actively help, for that matter. I said that I would get into conspiracy theories, the bit about needing Israel so the end of the world can happen is not a conspiracy theory. The saturation rate of evangelical dispensationalists in US government is incredibly high. Evangelicals actively drive public policy. When you know what to look for it's blatantly obvious I can get together a reading list at some point or another but it might take a while and this post is already very very long and meandering and sometimes barely on topic.

Anyways. The short of it is: From a sociology of religion perspective, it's accepted that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher. Apocalypticism was very in vogue at the time and we can say with reasonable certainty (note: when a religious studies scholar uses the term, they mean "this definitely happened, it's just we can't perform necromancy to 100% confirm it") he was not the only one running around. He's addressed as "rabbi" by his disciples if that wasn't immediately clear. A refusal to acknowledge the realities of the world circa Jesus's life and treating the Bible as an unerring word of God (except when it's convenient to ignore certain bits) instead of a historical source, and all the issues that comes with it, has led to some extremely bad things. Ammon Hennacy was right, we are in Hell.

#thanks for the ask!#sorry this took forever i was trying to not write an entire academic paper on the subject #other fun philosopher facts: john stuart mill was a wife guy #rene descartes died of not enough naps #none of these are april fools day jokes #i mean the dying of not enough naps thing is reductive b/c it was more lack of sleep killed his immune system #still technically true #wish the history of the scofield bible were a joke it wouldn't be funny but at least it wouldn't be real

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mayedays · 10 months

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Spent the morning overthinking (re-writing and re-writing and re-writing) a hate-speech report on a Tumblr post that seemed like cut-and-dry antisemitism, but I kept second guessing whether Tumblr would agree that it was hate speech because it didn’t explicitly call for violence...just made what amounted to an “oven dodgers” joke and implied that Jews were uniquely unworthy of power (because Israel).

Weird mix of “I feel stupid and like Tumblr is gonna dismiss my report as ‘not hate speech’” and “I feel proud of myself for speaking up regardless of the outcome” and “I feel kinda sick about encountering it at all”. The last part is weird because usually I can shrug it off if its just some rando (or I get angry enough that the anger obliterates other feelings) but something about the fact that no-one else had rebutted it and I had to spend enough time thinking about it to write the report (and worrying that my concerns would be dismissed) that it stuck with me more than usual.

#mayedays

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angrybell · 3 years

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So... there was a gang of Hamas and Fatah supporters out in LA the day before yesterday. Now this is not exactly new. A few days ago, in London, another caravan of Hamas and Fatah supporters were out and about.

They flew their flags. And said things like “Fuck the Jews” and “Rape Their Daughters”.

They were flying their flags from their cars, shouting their support for murderers who indiscriminately fire high explosive rockets into Israel.

And then they came upon a sushi restaurant that’s popular with the Jewish community down there. And they started yelling antisemitic slurs. But they didn’t stop there.

Some of them parked, dismounted and started looking Jews to attacks.

The media has chosen to downplay this.

The police still have made no arrests. Even if they did, the LA District Attorney has made it clear he does not want to put people in jail. And I doubt he will change his mind because some Jews got beat up in his jurisdiction.

This is happening in California and London. Two unbelievably progressive places. It follows members of Congress trying to cut off shipments of weapons to Israel, because they’re unhappy that there are not more dead Jews to make the fighting “proportional”.

This is happening because the Left is encouraging it.

This is happening because of a fantasy that the Jews have somehow created an apartheid state, despite the fact that Arabs, Druze, and other minorities are fully integrated, legally and practically, in all facets of Israel.

This is happening because the Left has ceased to be able to call evil by its name. Hamas, Fatah, and all their allies are evil, make no mistake about it.

The Jewish community needs to realize that looking to the Left for protection is foolish. They no longer want us, they only want our checks so that they can cash them and pay for more intersectional programs that will further “other” and isolate us.

You want to get the Left to clean house and take seriously the problem of antisemitism? Because you can’t pretend it’s just those backwards Ultra Orthodox in Brooklyn getting beat up anymore. You hung them out to dry by not demanding De Blasio and company take the problem seriously.

But the sacrifice didn’t work. The Antisemites on the Left have only learned one thing: they can get away with it.

Now they’re getting bolder. Now they’re going after assimilated Jews.

Who are you in the Tikkun Olam section of our community going to be willing to sacrifice so you can maintain your place in Leftist politics? When will you demand the Left confronts the antisemitism it has nurtured for decades?

How long before we have an American version of Sarah Halimi?

And before you say “oh if only Israel...” don’t. Israel has a right, a duty, and a responsibility to defend her people. She is doing that. The pack of Hamas and Fatah supporters didn’t pause to ask if their victims were Zionists or J Streeters. They just care about one thing: were they Jews?

#Jews #Reform Judaism #American Jews #antisemitism

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kai-n-ali · 4 years

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In the Fields of Asphodel (My Regrets Follow You to the Grave) | Chapter One

Eleanor Blum didn’t know what to think of this man, this Peaky Blinder devil that made all of Small Heath cower before him, this almost-stranger with his dead wife and dead stare, but she wished he’d stop showing up at the flower shop she worked in. And that he’d stop looking at her with those blue eyes of his.

Follows aftermath of Season 03 throughout Season 04. Tommy x OFC.

Warnings: Depictions of child abuse, antisemitism towards OFC (slurs), canon-typical violence, canonical deaths, sexual themes, etc.

Word Count: 5K

Chapter Two ❀ Chapter Three

Chapter 1: Citron (Ill-natured Beauty)

The bell let out a series of chimes as the door creaked on its hinges, and in a small florist shop tucked between a gelateria and an abandoned butchery, Eleanor Blum officially met the devil of Small Heath.

She wasn’t impressed.

Flora’s, the little florist and botanical shop, had become a haven for the twenty-three-year-old in the time that she’d lived above Cora Evans’ storefront: only a few short weeks. Flora’s, partially named after Cora’s granddaughter, Florence, was a bright spot of color among the grit and grimness of Birmingham, with flower boxes brimming with asters and foxgloves, strawflowers and marigolds. Along the south-facing wall, honeysuckle crawled up the scratched brick, and the thick, sweet scent of the flowers almost washed out the stench of shit wafting up from the nearby horse stables or the sour-milk scent from gone-off gelato dumped in the dumpster, left to fester in the summer heat.

Inside, the shop was cluttered, bouquets dotting the window display and trailing back in colorful bunches all throughout the front of the store, some put in ornate vases, others in ribbon-adorned mason jars, and a few placed into half-rusted buckets. Petals and leaves dotted the floor, and the room reeked of lavender and fresh-cut stems, grassy and clean. In the back of the store where the rare plants were, packets of seeds labelled in Cora’s handwriting, and now in Eleanor’s own scrawl, lined their worktable in rows.

When he first came in, she didn’t bother looking up from her spot bent over one of the tables, hands streaked in dirt from potting snapdragon cuttings—they were very fashionable right now for front gardens, apparently—and the charcoal from her pencils. She’d plucked a honeysuckle bloom off its stem earlier in the morning and was practicing the loose lines of it on paper with strokes of a pencil.

The bell chimed, and Eleanor heard none of it, not until a voice cleared its throat a few paces in front of her. Eleanor jolted up, pushed a few curls out of her eyes.

The man in front of her was beautiful in the way most wild things were when trapped behind glass. The way vines were beautiful when they were confined to the cracks of cobblestone, peeking out in glimpses of brilliant green. With cheekbones that looked like they’d split the pads of her fingers if she reached out to touch, that looked like they were meant for dinner parties as much as they were for being flecked in blood, Eleanor felt herself stiffen. She knew this man. Sort of.

That newsboy cap was just ridiculous.

Thomas Shelby, the husband of Grace Shelby, stood in her new place of employment. The last time she’d seen him, Eleanor had been at a gala in a new dress, gems dripping from her throat and beading trickling off her hem while she grilled his wife on her new orphanage and its living conditions for the second time.

He was a ghost. Some half-wilted thing.

Eleanor tilted her head, taking in the stiff lines of him, the strained civility held in the pale blue of eyes, and thought: how disappointing.

She hadn’t taken Shelby for the kind of man to wilt.

Meanwhile, it seemed Mr. Shelby was studying her as well. The startling blue of his eyes trained on her, cut across by the thicket of his lashes. He swept up and down her form, and she avoided fidgeting just barely. It seemed he recognized her, perhaps from the charity gala for the Shelby Foundation that went so wrong. Eleanor herself had only seen glimpses of him at said event, dressed in a black tux, the cut of his jaw severe and the stretch of his coat across his shoulders making her mouth go dry. She’d seen him as a dark shadow lingering behind his wife, his hand curling around her pale shoulder or tucking a loose, golden curl behind her ear before he was up and off again.

Though, she realized she’d lied before. The last time she’d seen Thomas Shelby, it’d been a black-and-white photo shot from quite a distance, his back ramrod straight as he stood over the coffin of his dead wife. Surrounded by chrysanthemums and hydrangeas. His family stone-faced beside hordes of men in full military garb.

The thought of Mrs. Shelby made her wince, and if anything, that made him stare harder. Something in his eyes questioned, how do I know you? Eleanor wasn’t obliged to answer.

She locked her jaw and crossed her arms over the dirt-streaked cotton of her blouse. “Can I help you?” she asked, “or did you come just to ogle?”

Somewhere from close behind, Eleanor heard a small squeak. She turned to face the noise. Florence, or Flora, sat on one of their many wooden benches, nearly toppling over a vase of petunias with every swing of her feet. Her eyes were very wide. “Ella,” she said, high-pitched, in a more-than-loud whisper. “Ella, that’s Mr. Shelby.”

Flora was a girl of thirteen, with straight, dark hair cut right below her ears, and a smile that grew more lopsided the harder she grinned. When the chores were through and if the shop wasn’t busy, Eleanor would sit down and entertain her with little doodles, half-formed sketches.

Right now, however, she was white as a freshly bleached sheet, her gangly legs jiggling with nerves. She hadn’t grown into them yet, but Eleanor found them endearing—almost coltish. Her eyes darted for her grandmother, but Cora was long gone on an errand.

Mr. Shelby seemed unaffected, clearing his throat again with a cough. One hand rested on his pocket-watch, as though already eager to check the time. “Ella, eh?” She’d never heard him speak before, and the coarseness of his voice made her stomach flip-flop alongside the annoyance burning away at her. “Well, Ella—”

“Eleanor.”

There was a slight furrow to his brow now. It really was painfully fucking charming. He just sort of looked at her, head cocked, considering. Eleanor let out a gust of a sigh.

“It’s Eleanor. My name. Not Ella.” Not to you, she thought. There was a pause, and she heard more than saw Flora place her head into the palms of her hands.

“Tommy Shelby,” he said, as if she didn’t know that, and offered her his hand. Eleanor looked at that hand, the deceptive slimness of his fingers and the narrow taper of his wrist. His callouses were faded, softened with time.

There was dirt under her nails and specks of dried mud up to her wrists, but she shook Mr. Thomas Shelby’s hand like she was wearing silk gloves. All lowered lashes and a coquettish flick of her wrist bone. The high-society ladies back home would surely applaud her if they saw.

Then she ruined it.

“What kind of grown-ass man still goes by the name Tommy?” she blurted before she could stop herself, her hand still in his. His hand had looked almost delicate before, but it engulfed her own. The shocked jerk of it against hers sent a vibration up her arm, and she suppressed a smirk. His eyes narrowed in on her face, a sudden intensity there he hadn’t possessed before. Like he wanted to peel back her skin and look beneath. Off-to-the-side, Flora let out a distressed little sound, akin to a mourner at a funeral. Viewing the body one last time before it lowered into the earth with the worms.

The next sound past his lips was a huff that could’ve been taken for a laugh. If he were any other man. “One without a stick up the ass, I bet.” He tossed a glance Flora’s way, quirked up his mouth. He really had a lovely mouth. “Miss Eleanor.”

And Eleanor couldn’t hold back a grin. “Hm. Agree to disagree, Mr. Shelby.” She crossed her arms over her chest, leaned over the countertop until her curls swung into her face. They were close enough now she could almost feel his breath ghosting the top of her head. “So, what’re you here for, then? Haven’t got all day.” Now, she sweetened her smile so the next bit wouldn’t bite, only sting. “Not even for the likes of you.”

“Y’ know,” and his voice was a slow drawl that made her spine tingle and her hair stand on end, the way his lips formed around the words with the barest hint of threat, of teeth, “people rarely speak to me this way, Miss Eleanor.”

“Not to your face, I’m sure.” She paused. “Mr. Shelby.”

Was it just her, or was he almost smiling? “Fair enough. Just a bouquet for me.” His eyes hadn’t left her face. “Of your choosing.”

“Right away,” she said, but something nagged at her. Taking a glance at his clothing—well-pressed and well-tailored, with a dark coat that had to be far too hot for the late July humidity and slacks with a crease down each leg—and thought he looked like a man heading to a funeral. Or a gravestone. Eleanor swallowed. Thought back to that black-and-white photo from near a year ago. Chrysanthemums and hydrangeas.

Despite herself, she wondered if those had been Mrs. Shelby’s favorite flowers. They weren’t the flowers of funerals. Of mourning.

Eleanor cast her gaze around the shop, but there was no arrangement that caught her interest, that fit the bill. She worried at her bottom lip. “Gimme a moment,” she muttered, almost to herself, and stepped out from behind the table. She felt his eyes on the back of her neck.

Off-to-the side, pressed against the wall, were paint buckets filled with loose flowers, rows upon rows of color and texture, bunched together and stems kept in nutrient-enriched water. Among them, she found what she was looking for: chrysanthemums, white and ruffled with their pale green centers; hydrangeas, their purple petals in clusters. She also went for baby’s breath, as sparse and dainty as it was. A good filler for a bouquet, with the bonus of a powerful meaning. Everlasting love. Not that Thomas would know that.

From a pail on one of the many counter spaces, she hunted for a ribbon. All knotted up in a ball, it took her a moment before she found the perfect one and managed to untangle it from the rest. Silky, sage green embroidered with indistinguishable little white buds. Perhaps a touch too long. Plucking and tweaking until it formed into a proper flower arrangement, if not a bit of a rustic one, she made a simple bow around the bundle before turning back to her customer. Taking quick steps to get back behind the main counter. “All done,” Eleanor said. She couldn’t look at him. With the heft of one shoulder, an almost-shrug, she offered the bouquet forward, level with his chest. She traced the pattern of his vest with her eyes, the stitching.

The bouquet was smaller than a lot of the ones on display, less elaborate.

But it felt right.

Reaching into the pocket of her skirts, she rifled for the few spare coins she kept there for emergencies with her spare hand. He’d yet to take the bouquet. She slapped them onto the space in front of him with a clink. Just enough. Flora was strangely silent. “And already paid for.”

Thomas’ eyes felt hot on her face. Almost a brand.

He didn’t say a thank you, just gave a hum under his breath, and when he reached out to grab the flowers, his fingers grazed her own. She wondered what he thought of the scar tissue stretched across her knuckles, her fingers, if he could feel it against his skin, bumpy and rigid. This touch felt different than when he’d shook her hand, and it sent pinpricks of sensation up her forearm. When he let go, she shook out her hand away from view, trying to force the odd tingling away. It lingered.

“Good day, Mr. Shelby.”

“Eleanor.” And when he left, it was with a chime of the shop’s bell.

For a moment, the whole shop was suspended in a hush, as if the world itself had paused, reverberating with that single chime. But then Florence was up in a flurry of movement, flinging herself into Eleanor’s space with a string of expletives that didn’t belong in the mouth of a grown man, not to mention a fourteen-year-old girl. Eleanor laughed despite herself. Threw back her head with the force of it.

“Language,” she chided.

“D’ you ‘ave a death wish?”

Florence’s round eyes were roving over Eleanor’s face, her hands on her hips. She looked very serious—or would’ve, if not for the spot of dirt on the side of her nose.

Eleanor smiled. “Not recently, no.”

The younger girl didn’t seem to find that very funny, and a scowl twisted her features. “That’s Tommy Shelby you just ran your mouth off to, Ella,” she stated, jabbed a finger at her chest. Adorable, Eleanor thought. “Tommy. Shelby.” The stress on these two words was punctuated with another two jabs.

“I know his name.” I’ve met his wife.

“You don’t get it,” she said, and there was a franticness to her voice, her posture. Her hands twitched and fidgeted. “’E’s the leader of the Peaky fuckin’ Blinders. People say ‘e’s worse than the devil ‘imself."

“Language.” But Eleanor’s head was already tilted in curiosity. Worse than the devil? “Peaky Blinders, huh?" She snorted. “Cute.”

“Not cute, Ella, not cute. Dangerous. Deadly. They’re the biggest gang in Birmingham. Turned businessmen. They own us.” She puffed a stray hair out of her eyes. “You get a glance at his cap?” At Eleanor’s nod, she continued. “They sew razors into the brim. You fuck with ‘em, they cut out your eyes.”

Huh. “Is that very effective?” she asked, eyebrows raised high on her forehead. “I mean, that’s a bit of an awkward angle, isn’t it?” Flora groaned, flopping onto a stool besides her, propping her elbows on the counter and resting her forehead in her hands. Eleanor rubbed her back. She seemed to do this quite a lot when Eleanor was around.

Her next words came out muffled by her palms. “The Blinders ain’t no joke, Ella. They set fire to The Marquis for messin’ with one of theirs. Their enemies get found in The Cut without their faces.” Her voice became very quiet, near trembling. Almost tearful. “You shoulda never spoken to Mr. Shelby like that.”

Despite her best efforts, Eleanor felt a shiver run through her. Only she could be stupid enough to meet a devil and reach out to shake his hand. With a smile, no less. Well, it was too late now. She leaned until her shoulder pressed into Flora’s own. “Hey,” she soothed. “Look at me, huh?” Eleanor tapped at the girl’s cheek with a nail until she peered up at her, eyes a bit puffy. “Relax, sweetheart. I doubt he’ll be back anytime soon. Not with the warm welcome I gave him.” And she smiled until Florence couldn’t help but smile back.

The second time Eleanor saw the devil of Small Heath, it was a week later. At Flora’s. And it would be the same as the first.

That damn bell chimed.

It was with relief that Eleanor noted Florence was out of the shop when a Mr. Thomas Shelby arrived for the second time, having been sent off by Cora to the gelateria with just enough money for scoop of her favorite, strawberry swirl. This time around, it was just her and Cora in the near silence of the shop, the record player in the back a mere whisper of jazz. Instead of being up to her elbows in damp soil, she had a paintbrush in her mouth and another clutched between her fingers and thumb, making a new display sign with some thick paper and her tin of watercolors. A sketch of Flora, blowing petals out of the palm of her hand. It was as she was halfway through mixing a color for the shadows of her face that the front door opened. At her side, using twine to bind their loose flowers for the paint buckets, Cora gave a sharp intake of breath.

“Mr. Shelby,” the older woman greeted, hurrying to stand. A strong-featured woman of near fifty, Cora Evans wasn’t one to show fear, or much emotion at all beyond a muted amusement at her surroundings. This sort of “why the hell not?” air of being that she'd clearly perfected over her years. Yet, while her own blue eyes were unwavering on Thomas’ own, Eleanor detected the tense line of her broad shoulders, hiked nearly up to her ears and tickling the grey-brown of her hair. Thomas inclined his head at her boss, and if he looked her way, Eleanor didn’t see it, because she had already turned back to her work, watering down a vermilion for the high spots of color on Flora’s youthful cheeks.

If she didn’t look at him, maybe she wouldn’t be compelled by whatever urge had struck her before—a sudden desire to pick at and tease, to wrestle up a smile on that pretty mouth.

Eleanor shook her head, a minuscule gesture, and huffed a curl out of her eyes. Get it together.

“’Ow may I ‘elp you, sir?” And Cora’s voice was polite, restrained, the normal warmth in her Brummie accent stripped into something foreign to Eleanor. “On the ‘ouse, of course.” At that, she felt her lips pinch despite herself.

While Cora hadn’t been upset when her granddaughter had finally told her the story of Eleanor back-talking to a Peaky Blinder, she had gone a bit pale, setting down the pot in her hands with a heavy clunk on their scraped-up work table. Staring at Eleanor with new eyes. “Pretty fuckin’ stupid of you, love,” she’d said. “They’ve set fire to businesses for less.” And she’d shaken her head. “Messin’ with that Blinder Devil—thought you had some wits about you.” In the end, though, Cora shooed her off when she hastened to spill out apologies, holding out a hand to pat her on her shoulder.

“That Thomas Shelby is more sensible than most of ‘em put together. Not like his mad dog brother. It’ll work out for the best, I bet.”

But now he was back yet again, in a suit lighter than the one before, a pale grey waistcoat with no jacket in sight. His tie was missing, she could tell even from where she hunched over her work, the top button of his dress-shirt undone at the throat. Still looking unbearably hot for the weather. Even the thin material of her house dress clung to her skin with the sweat of being trapped in the shop all day. She didn’t know how he bore it.

“No need,” he said in that already familiar rasp, and she ducked her head further down instead of looking up and catching a glimpse of his face like she wanted. “Found myself in need of another bouquet.” And she could hear the amusement in his voice. “Eleanor. If you would.”

The empty space to the upper right of her drawing distracted her. Should she fill it with roses? Lilies? There was a pause that could be felt hanging in the shop, like a physical touch against her skin, but she kept her gaze to that expanse of untouched white.

“Eleanor,” Cora said, touching gentle fingers to the bared skin of her upper arm. She very rarely wore short sleeves, but with the heat, it felt unavoidable. The circular burns that peppered her arms like kisses—they weren’t even that noticeable, not anymore. Still.

(On another August day, one from over a decade ago, she recalled the press and hiss of the cigarette when it hit her skin, and the way the mud never dried in that miserable backyard back in New York. Before her uncle came and packed her off to London. The backs of her knees were slippery with it as she squirmed and kicked. But the older girl kept a firm grip on her, and Eleanor stayed in place, sinking into the mud and dead, yellow grass. The cigarette was pulled back, still fizzling, and with the click of a lighter, was relit again. And again.)

Eleanor blinked. Blinked again and rubbed a hand over her eyes, eyes that felt much more tired than before. She pulled the paintbrush from her mouth, set it on the countertop. “Of course, I can make you another bouquet, Mr. Shelby. Anything in mind?”

She couldn’t see him, no, but she knew his eyes were smirking at her. Her fingers twitched on her remaining paintbrush. Smug bastard. “Oh, just something to brighten up me office, I think.” And Eleanor clenched her jaw, because that sounded like such shit to her. Why’re you here again, Thomas? She nodded nonetheless, kept her eyes down. You make it very hard to behave. She set down the brush with a clatter.

“I can do that.”

She searched for the most spiteful fucking flowers she could think of. Valerian, an herb frequently used for insomnia, green stems bloomed with clusters of white flowers. Readiness. I could take you, Mr. Shelby. Borage, or starflower, brilliant blue with hints of blush from the blooms with their white spines. Rudeness. Bluntness. And buttercups, their delicate yellow blossoms. A personal favorite and a good splash of color against all the blues and whites. Childishness. And, finally, Love-in-a-mist, or Nigella damascena, with their needle-point leaves and rich indigo petals ending in jagged points. A confession more than anything else, not that he’d know it. You puzzle me.

In her youth, she’d gobbled up all the books on plants and herbs that she could find in her botanically obsessed uncle’s extensive library, and that included tomes on the language of flowers. The knowledge had stuck. And now more than ever, she found herself grateful.

Eleanor plucked all the respective flowers out of their different buckets, organized by color, and set to work gathering the right amounts of each. She took a canary yellow ribbon from the ribbon pail with a flourish, flicking it in the air to get the kinks out. Grabbing a random empty vase that had once housed a beautiful but boring bouquet of a dozen roses—bought by a very frantic man in worker’s clothes and sturdy boots an hour prior, who looked like he was running quite late—she set the mass of flowers inside and set to arranging them.

Flora, who hid a chuckle with a cough at the sight of her flowers of choice, left with a quick word to the backroom and a warning glance that burned into the back of Eleanor’s head. She tried not to fidget.

She was wrapping the ribbon around the hunk of stems when a throat cleared from right by her side. Fuck. Eleanor started, spasming fingers losing the ability to form a bow. Fuck.

“What’s a rich socialite like yourself doing in a flower shop in Birmingham, eh?”

But, God, she couldn’t help but spin to face the man now. Thomas stood with his hip propped up against the table she was using, head tilted and pieces of the unshaved part of his hair near falling into his eyes. Seemed he recognized her now. He looked curious. Hungry. Up close as he was, their shoulders near brushing, she saw the hint of freckles beneath his eyes, on the bridge of his nose. It seemed even devils tanned in the sun.

Everything about him was all graceful command, words spoken in a way that showed he expected to be answered, obeyed.

It reminded her of his wife.

The first time she’d ever seen Mrs. Grace Shelby, it had been at a luncheon held at The Midland Hotel, for the sake of convincing the richest of London society to donate to her cause—the Shelby Foundation, whose first action was building an orphanage in Birmingham. When her uncle, Samuel Connolly, had told her the news, alongside the fact that he’d been invited to attend a luncheon on the subject, she’d begged to be brought along.

“If anyone would have a stake in this,” she’d said at their breakfast table, pointing at his chest with a grapefruit spoon, “it’s me, don’t you think? Let me see how genuine this is.” Sam had set his hazel eyes on hers, lips pursed, but he hadn’t disagreed.

“You’ll have to dress up,” he’d warned, and she’d stuck out her tongue at him, taking a stab at a section of fruit.

Eleanor remembered the way the beading of her dress weighted her down that afternoon, and how all she wanted was to be back home in a pair of trousers, lounging with a book in her lap and Fennel, Sam’s Spinone Italiano, laying on the tops of her bare feet. Keeping her warm. But the rich had an ability to do any good works as half-assed as possible, and with all of her blunt Brooklynite manners from childhood, she had sworn to dig out the truth from this Mrs. Grace Shelby even if it meant pulling out the plyers and using some old-fashioned elbow grease.

That hadn’t been necessary.

The waitress that escorted them both to the hotel’s largest dining room was a near-silent woman, who meekly commented on the pale jade color of Eleanor’s dress before showing them to a room with a table longer than she’d ever seen. A rich, dark-colored wood leaning near black. The napkins were a fashionable rose, the plates rimmed in gold and dotted in florals along the edges. All the candles smelled of faint vanilla and sandalwood.

Even for Eleanor, who had spent her teen years and beyond in Sam’s by-no-means-minuscule manor and had attended many a party due to his notoriety, it was extravagant beyond measure.

At the head of the table, not yet seated and chatting with a plastic but pretty smile on her painted lips, was a woman with honeyed hair and aristocratic, well-bred features. She radiated old wealth in a way Eleanor never could, brought into the fold far-too-late.

(“Oh my, it’s the little orphan bastard.” One of the wives of some business mogul whispered to her friends behind a glove. They all tittered away at her remark, and Eleanor, all awkward limbs and pale pink scars at fifteen years old, sunk back into the shadows of the sitting room. Uncomfortable in her new dress. Uncomfortable in her new life. “How quaint. It seems he really did pick up a new stray, after all.”)

Most of the night was a blur, filled with soft, exaggerated laughter and mutual back-patting. In the dining room, the lighting was dim, almost sensual despite it being only two in the afternoon. Flattering everything into a near dream-like state. At the front of the table, Mrs. Shelby had glowed. Almost an hour prior, her hand had been soft and unblemished in Eleanor’s own. Even her handshakes felt soft as silk. But when Eleanor had cornered her later in the evening over a round of drinks, her own whiskey-sour in a fine crystal glass that felt like a paperweight in her hand, she had revealed pure steel beneath the refined veneer. Eleanor could barely recall her barrage of questions now, from over a year ago.

“What of the orphans with surviving family? Will they be entitled to visitation? And the staff—what of them? Would they be receiving proper background checks prior to their employment?” It had gone on-and-on, and Grace Shelby had answered with assurance blanketing her tone, and a blade tucked beneath her tongue, ready to wield. Her eyes steady. Demanding trust. Eleanor had, though begrudgingly, given it. And promised to have more questions the next time they met. Mrs. Shelby had seemed, almost, like she was looking forward to it.

But, well, the second and last time she’d seen Grace Shelby. Well.

In the present, Eleanor zeroed back in on Thomas. He was studying her.

She knew the red of her lipstick must be smudged. That there was surely charcoal streaked on her face from using her pencils earlier in the day. That the nape of her neck was sticky with sweat, soaking the curls there.

Still, Eleanor arched her brow at who, apparently, was the most fearsome man in Birmingham. “I used the wrong fork,” she drawled. “Perilous mistake.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They locked eyes, and Eleanor wasn’t going to be the one to blink first. Without looking, she knotted the bow and pulled tight. “All done,” she said. She rambled off a price, perhaps one a little higher than necessary. She couldn’t help herself.

He blinked at her before reaching into his pocket for the money, and Eleanor let out a gust of air when his eyes left her. How were they so blue? Reaching under the table for some tissue paper to wrap the bouquet in, she offered it forward, gripping it by the bottom of the stems. His own fingers grasped it above her own and tugged it out of her hand. He was oddly gentle about it. “Have a nice day, Thomas,” she told him, a clear dismissal, and he quirked a brow at her in a barely-there question. Whether it was because of the curt tone or the usage of his first name—it had just slipped out, she didn’t know why—she wasn’t sure.

Either way, he left. And Eleanor slumped, boneless, against the countertop. What the honest fuck.

Now, she knew better than to believe this would be the last time they saw each other.

And true enough, they met yet again. This time at no fault of their own.

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ohahsoka · 3 years

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have you ever talked about this? what are your thoughts about people saying snk is pro imperialist pro nationalist pro nazi and pro fascist? i get concerns of antisemitism tropes but when you see the holocaust imagery the jews are the victims still which is whats true right so it cant be all bad right? but it still might have that both sides are wrong mentality which is bad when we have oppressor vs victims. im confused and idk how to feel. i want to keep liking it. how do you deal with this?

i haven’t talked about this, and i was hesitant to answer this message, because, tbh, anon, there is no right answer here.

i recently saw a post about atla and how it gives the imperialistic side of the conflict an uncomfortably sympathetic look. the sexualization of little girls in asoiaf is awfully blatant. equally troublesome is racism in the Essosi storyline. there is an ongoing conversation about Wanda’s whitewashing in the mcu. those are all valid points, imo. still, i engage with these stories, to some extent.

i don’t believe snk preaches ‘both sides are wrong’ mentality. the oppressor’s pov is almost entirely cut out. the heroes are all Eldian. i keep reading this story because I don’t believe it’s pro fascist or anti-Semitic. if it was, i would drop it. my opinion doesn’t really matter, because it’s just one opinion, and i’m not Jewish. i could write paragraphs arguing about how inclusive and anti fascist the manga’s themes are, but it wouldn’t get us anywhere. because, at the end of the day, how you feel is the only thing that matters.

if you’re feeling uncomfortable about snk, either because of its content or what other people say about it, you should drop it. everyone has their limits, the moment that makes you give up on a story. i had that moment while watching ‘the last jedi’ and seeing how badly finn was treated. i don’t think people who enjoy that movie are awful, but i did block/mute them to clear my dash/timeline.

i know my answer sounds very dry, but it wasn’t my intention. i’m not even sure if i expressed myself clearly. what i meant is, all opinions and feelings are valid, and conversations around problematic aspects of our favorite stories are very important. at the same time, i will keep caring about this manga, and i don’t want to partake in the discourse around snk being fascist propaganda because (1) i strongly believe it’s not true, (2) i want to engage with the story itself, (3) i’m very tired of that kind of negativity. i’ve been in various fandoms and seen too much shit. if this answer makes you (or anyone reading this) think i’m a bad person, it’s okay, you can block me

#snk #my mail #anonymous #i decided i had to reply #because there is this narrative that snk is pro fascist #and it's wrong imo #snk negativity #but honestly it's just not the discourse for me

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5lazarus · 3 years

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Hey Laz! I'm very curious a about Fire in the Empire and Josephine, Leliana, the panties 👀🔥

And also Hilda if you feel like it because I love the name ❤️

hey!! thanks for the ask :) Fire in the Empire is the next chapter of Fen’Harel’s Teeth, based off this song. I like it because I think it describes every character’s state of mind as they tear through the Exalted Plains--Briala, Lavellan, Hawen, Solas, Blackwall, and Iron Bull. Especially Solas, Blackwall, and Iron Bull. here’s a snippet. I’ve always been fascinated with how you find the Soul Canto in the trenches, so I opened the chapter with it:

The girl is bleeding out all over the table, but under her is a leatherbound book that remains dry. Imladris tugs it out from under her, gently pushing the still-warm corpse aside. She can see the girl’s eyes through the grill of her armor. “What was she reading?” Iron Bull asks. Imladris examines the title. “The Tome of Koslun. Is she viddathari?” “Nah,” Bull says. “We moved all our spies out when the demons came.” The book is battered and the pages are thin and cracker-hard; it’s been left out in the rain before, and carefully dried. Carefully Imladris turns the pages, staining them with the grime and blood of her gloves. She reads aloud, “You have seen the greatest kings build monuments to their glory, only to have them crumble and fade. How much greater is the world than their glory? The purpose of the world renews itself with each season. Each change only marks a part of the greater whole. The sea and the sky themselves: nothing special. Only pieces.” She snaps it shut, thinking-not-thinking where she has heard it before, a Qunari woman in prison once, intoning those four words like a prayer to an atheist god, nothing special only pieces nothing special only pieces. The sounds of the fighting stops abruptly, and Blackwall comes crashing into the barracks. “That’s the last of them,” he says, panting. “The last of the demons. And the fucking Orlesians. Are you alright?” Imladris glances at the corpse, who turns its sightlesss eyes to gape at her. She blasts it with fire, leaping back towards the stairs as Iron Bull cleaves it with his huge greataxe. When they are done the girl is eviscerated, but whatever took her has returned in tatters to the Fade. They leave the room behind, but Imladris takes the Soul Canto with her.

For the Josephine/Leliana story, I signed up for Sapphic Solstice and my girlfriend ended up getting assigned me. This is the story she’s not writing, because I decided I wanted to do it. I decided I wanted to write more femslash in DA after she told me it accounts for less than 10% of fanfic, and why not them? I have only one line: “The food was bad and the shoes were worse.” Hilda, though, is a short story I’m working on, loosely based off my own grandmother. It’s about a whole host of things--how Eastern Europeans assimilated into USA whiteness & thus respectability, the rage of older women who have cut themselves into pieces for an ideal that has always lied to them, the sex work of bad marriages. I’ll put the rest under a cut. My original work tends to be very, very intense, though I've written some sillier stuff ("Nice Try, FBI" is the fucking funniest thing I've ever written, and I'm very proud of it). This one, though, is very much serious. Probably one of the nastier things I've written about, though I hope the fact that I'm writing it with compassion comes through. (but that's another conversation--I don't believe in writing with dislike!)

My grandmother was a Czech and Russian Jewish woman whose first language was not English, who told everyone she was Irish Catholic like her first husband, my grandfather, who died when my mother was a child. She kept having children to try and get that boy, put kept pushing out daughters, even as the family fell more and more into poverty. They’d move every month to avoid avoid getting evicted by the landlord when the rent was due, for example. And then my grandfather died, and my grandmother put herself to work as a secretary to explicitly seduce and marry her bosses, and netted three of them. She once told my mother, “Some women are meant to be secretaries. Others are meant to be married. I’m meant to be married.” That was the only two options she presented, and the only two options she still considers acceptable.

So it’s about those angry, hateful old women who never had any chance to be anything besides a helpmate for a man, who refused any chance to be anything besides a wife, who actively sabotaged her daughters and granddaughters who tried to be anything besides wives. There’s been this tendency in recent family epics I’ve seen from other white Americans writing about their ancestors’ “immigrant & assimilation experience” in very romantic terms, though the Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna pushes back against that for the Italian-American experience, and was what made me think that maybe it’s time to tell these stories that before, only get whispered after a few drinks while the women are cleaning up after Easter dinner in the kitchen. It’s experimental, and I suppose it's a very USA story! I want it to be fully drenched in its time--a small town half an hour outside of New York City, from the perspective of a woman who was born a bastard in 1938, raised by drunks and who married drunks. I’m writing it in the 2nd person and in stream-of-consciousness, and I took a break before I get to the climax. Here’s a snippet, content warning for the protagonist’s memory of antisemitism:

You do the dishes and run the water too hot, and you think about how you want a new kitchen, with enamel finishings, and little hens to pretend you have the comfort of a country life. Your mother was from the country, in the old country, and she hated New York. Too dirty, too loud, too prying. The neighbors would listen when she cried, and the whole neighborhood knew about the traveling salesman, and that he was a Jew, too. She’d cry over your curls; she herself was a perfect blonde, just like Jayne Mansfield, with the swoop of hair and a birthmark too. You hated it, you hated your hair, and so did your mother and she burned you and the kitchen too when you were a girl, trying to iron it out. The fire department all came and they laughed and they were rude to your mother, and the neighbors heard, and all the girls at school did too, and even after the birth of your third daughter, the women would smirk when you’d go by. You’re angry, you’re angry that you bleached your hair and you’re losing it, you’re angry that Shirley Temple had those curls and she never straightened them, everyone loved them and you had the same exact curls and nobody loved you, did they? Except those men. They loved something. At least you kept them away from your girls. Better than your mother, that’s the truth.

#ask #writing #wip #inquisitoracorn

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swifty-fox · 4 years

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Please tell me about 1920s Russian socioeconomic policy

PLEASE LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT 1920′s RUSSIAN SOCIOECONOMIC POLICY

so 1920′s Russian socio-economic policy was in a few short words. entirely fucked. Granted the issue goes farther back than 1920′s! basically up until then Russia had been functioning as a mostly closed society in that they rejected the industrial age of the mid to late 1800′s. They believed that they were superior as a country and did not want interference from other religions and cultures (the Great Schism took no prisoners) So essentially at the turn of the 20th century Russia was still almost in the middle ages (granted there was some technology leakage etc. it was more prevalent in upper society to be more modernized) BUT they still had peasants and serfs and people living as they had done hundreds if not thousands of years ago (something like 80% of Russians were impoverished and working as serfs ((that might only be white Russians there's like 32 ethnic Russian groups nobody likes to talk about)) )

cutting for length

so naturally people are like mad pissed about that right? they want to be part of the progression of the world they want to be educated and to travel and to have access to medicine and technology and all the benefits of ‘modern’ society. but Tsar Nikolai says no. This is a huge part of his downfall, his unwillingness to change (also vague antisemitism ((they used to conduct these things called Pogroms which was basically localized exterminations of Jewish people. it was fucked up and vastly condemned by a lot of people but the powers that be used the Jewish people as a scapegoat because uhhh 1800′s and 1900′s be like that)), being REALLY bad at war, Rasputin, excessive spending and wealth, a little spice of police brutality and a few massacres as well as aggressive heavy-handed tactics against terrorists. Great family man. Bad leader.)

Anyways fast-forward through the Russian revolution that's a whole can of worms

Now we have a new government. not a better government but a NEW one with vastly different ideas of what they’re going to do.

Another sidetrack, lets talk about Communist Theory for a sec. I’m going to go into Karl Marx’s original intention as Russian Communism is actually a twice bastardized idea of Communist (Lenin developed his theory of communism from people like Georgi Plekhanov and Nikola Chernechevskey’s book What Is To Be Done? who were also putting their own spin on Marxism)

ANYWAYS. The basic idea of of Karl Marx’s Communist theory is that society will eventually, over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, develop through capitalism and unto a utopian world where we have no need for things live government or taxes or money. The concept here being over hundreds or thousands of years and NATURALLY.

The Bolsheviks (Led by Lenin) Looked at that and said mmmm no lets do it in like twenty years.

it’s 1921 and Lenins NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (fondly nicknamed NEP) enters STAGE LEFT (get it)

The basic idea of NEP was to blend capitalist (i.e a private market) with communist ideals (i. e. no market) and Fast-Track us to glorious utopian communism in not a few hundred years but in a few years!

sounds doable right?

the basic idea of NEP was that there would be limited private property that would ultimately be mostly owned by people that Lenin approved of (allies, benefactors, heroes of the glorious revolution for mother Russia and so on) There were things called prodravzyorstka which was forced grain requisitions by the communist party for the good of the people basically soldiers would come in and take most of the famers grain and left them to starve. There was also an imposed a tax on farmers that could be paid in -you guessed it!- more grain! NEP abolished that and instead allowed for a cash payout the harder that farmers worked. Productivity went up like 40% in the years following! Pretty great!!

It also incentivized and supported the formation of unions (they were communists remember, those bitches love unions) All in all it was....pretty decent? It wasn’t exactly communist as essentially it was just tax returns or the government buying grain from peasants rather than the peasants having to sell the grain themselves. Pretty great right!

But it created an imbalance. Again, that Russia wanted to do was industrialized! they wanted to become modern but they didn't want to follow the way any other country did it and they wanted to do it in a fraction of the time! As the government and the ECONOMY began relying on the small farms for grains and vegetables and resources, the big factories and institutions that were privately owned were STRUGGLING! as a result, they had to raise their prices to try to pay for themselves. But now those same farmers couldn't afford the industrial things they needed! like equipment for their farm tools and tractors or household goods. So now they have to raise THEIR food prices in response. It was a great way to inflate the economy after WII and the revolution. But obviously we all know where this is going.

And then Boom. Lenin dies. The man had one too many strokes and croaks out in his country home without a successor named. The government is in chaos. Nobody knows what to do. Shortly before his death lenin wrote a (frankly quite funny) letter saying all his successors were fucking idiots and he hated them all.

In steps Stalin. If you think Lenin was bad...Stalin is a fucking bastard. The guy is even MORE antisemetic, brutal, corrupt, mysogynistic and RACIST. The man really hated the chinese. he also hated Georgians (the country not the state) which is pretty funny because he was Georgian.

Anyways, he abolishes NEP and implements something called the Five Year Plan (NEP 2 for the jokesters out there)

Stalin shifts the focus away from boosting agricultural development and focuses on rapid industrialiation in, you guessed it, FIVE YEARS. The stats on this plan are fucking insane man get this:

Staling wanted an 111% increase in coal production, 200% increase in iron production and 335% increase in electric power!!! in FIVE YEARS.

(he also eliminated a class of people called “kulaks” which were richer farmers by turning the poor farmers against them. By elimate I mean they were murdered and their property distributed amongst the poorer farmers.)

I could go on and on about all the ways this failed, all the brutality, unethical and unsafe work enviroments, the continued programs, the amoutn of people who were murdered, the prison(slave) labor used, the rounding up and mass murder of anyone who spoke out against Stalin, the Five Year Plan or the russian government. This is really where the Soviet Union as we know it as westerners got its reputation.

Also he caused TWO famines because he made all the farmers move into the city to be industry workers so they ddint have any food and didnt accept help from the Red Cross or other countries because MUHHH MOTHERLAND

but you know what it kiiinda worked? Capital increase was almost 160%, consumer goods increased by 87% and total output was up almost 120%!

But also it caused one of the worst famines in the western world with an estimated 6million (some people argue as many as 10million. We will never know the true number because it was mostly peasants and ethnic people suffering) people dying across the entire Soviet Union. Poeple were dying out on the streets in broad daylight, people were selling their dead children to be food. You can see pictures if you google it but they’re very graphic.

Generally, the Five-Year-Plan was lauded as a massive failure and a hotbed of absolutely disgusting human abuse and cruelty. And you knwow what Stalin said? He said nah it went well and implemented about FIVE MORE (theres been twelve in all but they exent up into the early 90′s) I wont touch on them as they were all pretty much iterations of Stalins original one and they all sucked.

Basically Russian Socioeconomic Policy is a hotbed of bad decisions, human rights violations and a LOT of interpersonal drama that i do not have the time to get into. (like the fucking DRAMA between Stalin and Nadezhda Krupskaya (lenins wife))

theres also a LOT more to it I just tried to condense like 40 years into one post so please feel free to go out and research your own! I used Peter Kenez’ “A History of the Soviet Union From the Beginning to its Legacy” while in class. It’s a little dry but effective

theres also this book by my professor who is a DELIGHT https://www.amazon.com/Red-Arctic-Exploration-Soviet-1932-1939/dp/0195114361 and while I havent read it im sure its told with the same humor and zeal that he conducted his lectures

also this bOOK THIS BOOK RIGHT HERE is SUCH a good read!

https://www.amazon.com/Vasily-Grossman-Soviet-Century-Alexandra-ebook/dp/B07P9HJMLM/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=the+soviet+century&qid=1589727805&sr=8-4 if you read any of them read this one! it examines the entire rise and fall of the communist party through the story of Grossman who was a jewish-russian writer and pretty famous in his own right though he died penniless and scorned. He’s got a couple movies based off his books out there two which were shelved for criticizing the party for decades! please read it i beg you

#a few things were factchecked via google as I dont have my notes with me #but most of this is just word vomit lol #*me leaping up out of bed to write this*#please know some of ths might be condensed or not entirely accurate #I only studied it academically for a year since then it's just books I can get my hands on #russian history #russian socioeconomics of the 1920 #discussions of antisemitism #im sorry im sure you were not expecting all of this #swiftytalks #it might not be having a cut break in it?? tumblr please work

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marxsgrandson · 4 years

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“You’re not Russian, you’re just American with some Russian blood”- my Israeli PS professor (who is neither Russian nor American nor knows anything about me)

Long post ahead: read it if you’d like but mostly just hoping there’s someone else who can relate to the feelings I’m about to express. So here goes:

Had an unbelievably shitty day today.

I’m in this one political science class. It always ends up somehow ruining my mood. It’s the one with the shitty German men who confronted me in a group after class accusing me of being uncritical towards the Soviet Union, being an antisemite (lol these aryan guys were calling me an antisemite. Like they’re confirmed non-Jewish) and being a dumbass for not idk sucking Gorbachev’s dick personally would be the next leap there. Idk if I posted that here, but it’s necessary context.

Anyways today we were talking about Russia’s motive in x place and just jumping around to every unrelated topic about something about Russia because our class always gets sidetracked and never finishes the lesson we were supposed to do. And of course the Europeans were being pieces of shit.

And the prof said something like “I wish we had Russians in the class to offer maybe a Russian perspective too... like gosh that would be nice. Do we have any Russians?” And I sort of tentatively raised my hand half way because I’m half Russian and when she was looking around the room and didn’t see me, I said “I’m half Russian and this is actually something I heard and talked a lot about growing up, I could take a try at it”

“You’re not Russian, you’re just American with a little Russian blood” she said, dismissing me entirely as the class laughed like it was the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. I now realize what it means when people say they feel stung. I was paralyzed by those words and I don’t really know why. What makes it hurt more is that starting two seconds later she called on a series of five German douchebags to try and explain Russia’s motives and says “huh that’s an interesting idea” after each of them say something painfully obviously wrong. And I felt frozen.

If given the chance to unfreeze myself, I wish I said what I was feeling but didn’t have words for: “Hey. That’s not true. Russian was the language I said my first words in. It’s the language of my childhood and my soul. It connected me to something I felt distant from during the school day. I taught myself to read this language as soon as my mom taught me the alphabet as a little kid. I went to Russian school on the weekends when I was young. I worked hard to keep up this language even though I went through shit from my peers for it. I was the only speaker of this language I knew that was my age after the age of 10. The only other time I’d hear it was when my mom criticized me, wanted to manipulate me (because I told her she sounded sweeter in Russian so she used that to her advantage in making my life hell) bc my brother stopped speaking at a young age.

The only reason I have this connection is because I’ve never worked harder for anything else in my life. I took years of Russian lit courses (in Russian) at the local uni when I was in high school. Until then I’d only done math and reading (just for fun not for school) in Russian. Having learning and sight disabilities and being expected to keep up with both college and high school class and workloads was overwhelming at times. Like I was 14, this wasn’t an “easy A” as my friends joked, it was a college level literature course. But I loved it like nothing else. It was an oasis of peace during my adolesence just getting to hear my dearest language spoken by both native speakers and those who adopted it just because of their love for it. It was the first time I realized that this aspect of me isn’t shameful. Plus, the college kids treated me like I was such a hotshot because I grew up speaking the language and I was like a tiny 14 year old in a russia Olympic jacket and a bowl cut so that made my life. Just getting to be around places where for once, I understood everything that was being said in the exact emotion it was intended, having my cultural touchstones be the norm and that I got to interact with instantly more people in this language was really special.

Maybe what pissed me off so much is not only that I think it’s wrong, but that I think she’s right. My experience is different from a Russian experience, which is why I never claimed to be Russian even when I was the most Russian person in that classroom. My experience of being Russian (Jewish) (Italian)American is as much a story of love and connection as it is of shame and disconnection. It is the story of pain feeling inadequate to everyone, always. When I was six, kids were already refusing to play with me because their parents told them I was a spy or an enemy (which wtf who parents their kid like that) just because I talked about visiting my family in the summer (which is a normal thing to do) and gd forbid they live in RUSSIA. The bullshit hasn’t stopped since. My entire childhood, my mom was vigilant about who I was allowed to tell about being Russian because of it. I thought Russian a really important language to people here. I thought they cared about us. I thought someone else who didn’t have to care about us, fucking cared about us Russian Jews. How can a fellow Jew, an academic, not understand the inherent pluralism of Jewish and Russian experiences when she’s lived in this country surrounded by Russian Jews her whole life?

And I get it. I’m not technically Russian. I don’t have a Russian passport. I didn’t grow up in Russia and that still means there’s always someone more qualified to answer certain questions. But I didn’t think it was going to be some goyische fucking German. Cuz at least I saw saturated with these types of discussions about Russian politics, not being allowed to voice my opinion bc these are Russian jewish middle aged and older people lol kids don’t have valid opinions to them, but listening intently since infancy. I watched Russian news and tv shows (we didn’t have money for both English and Russian language tv so my mom chose the Russian tv channels) on the rare occasion I sat in front of the tv. I hung around Russian speakers more than English speakers (of my parent’s age and older) for most of my childhood until this year. And it’s not just the language, it’s the culture too. It’s the fact that no one around me shared these cultural touchstones growing up. and I didn’t share their American ones even though I grew up in the US.

But trips to Russia didn’t make me feel understood in the ways I craved it would. My family always commented on how amazingly I spoke Russian «просто без акцента!» (without an accent) *insert kisses from relatives you don’t even know who they are but they know everything about you* so I was always kind of aware that I couldn’t seamlessly fit in there either. Especially when in my mom’s small town, children who played with me had literally never seen someone with my color of skin and told me I looked “dirty” which catalyzed my whole washing my hands till my arms got dry and peeled and being frightened that I wasn’t getting “cleaner” and then getting diagnosed with my second subset of OCD at the age of seven. I had so many fond memories of my mom’s hometown. So much nostalgia. But I also have memories which pain me, like the many times I was chased out of stores or once in a doctor’s office because the person assumed I was Roma because of my appearance (like I said, small town). Things got even worse when the school I went to summer camp/summer classes in my mom’s hometown found out I was JEWISH. Oof. My mom convinced me that I was betraying my culture and my ancestors and alienating myself from my grandmother when I came out to her at 11, when I cut my hair after three years of her daily verbal harassment in my mother tongue (she knew it hurts more like that). She said if I wanted to continue “on this path” I would lose all connection to Russia.... “and you don’t want that, do you?” Suffice it to say, I got the message pretty young that I don’t belong in Russia either.

My whole life I’ve been translating half of my world to the other half of my world. And within each of these worlds I must translate my contexts many fold times more. (My Babushka still doesn’t know why I’m putting “poison” in my body for what she sees as a character flaw because she just doesn’t have the context for what ADHD is and the way I was taught to translate it in Russian is «дефицит внимание» or “deficit of attention/carefulness” which as far as she’s concerned is just an American invention for what could really be solved if I just sat more still.) And this has made my world so much richer to be lucky enough to have two native languages in which I learned how to express myself and gave me two whole realms through which to intimately understand the world and all of its nuances. You gain a family when you speak a language. It’s unlike anything else! It was even more special that I got to add Arabic at 12 and now Hebrew. I’m so lucky. But an inherent downside of being taught world views that conflict with each other in some very fundamental ways is really hard when you’re autistic and have ADHD because you have to juggle not just one set of social cues and norms, but two (or more, shout out to the multilinguals from childhood). It’s hard but it’s important and I’m so lucky that this was my birthright. I just wish people would take two seconds to try and understand. Or at least think about if something they said might make someone else feel like this, especially if they’re jewish. Like to ya it’s not a new thing to be torn in many directions. Even here where it’s the dominant culture, I expected her as someone who lives here and is an academic, she’d be better.

#jewish #class #school #study abroad #russian #russian jewish #queer #trans #russian jew #jew #adhd #autism #diaspora tag

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eb-the-gamer · 5 years

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STEVEN UNIVERSE THE MOVIE REVIEW (SPOILINGS)

Lets see here....

I wont lie Steven Universe has become something of a guilty pleasure for me since it premiered. E;R's video (as well as the Fanbases bad kind of fans) kind of jaded solidified it as not as good as everyone praises it to be. The video:

(Warning, he does not sugarcoat his opinions, and his fake antisemitism reviewer persona can be a bit much sometimes, which yeas he has confirmed to be not actually like that)

https://youtu.be/0RCL3ERdhhA

Lily Orchard goes more in depth. https://youtu.be/flLEr_sYC-k

- but I still love the style, music, story and all the twists and turns. It has a ton of real problems with its contents dragging, but warts and all I love it. So when a movie was announced, you could bet that I was low key excited. Even though the story was over, I was wondering what could happen for something like this. Is it good or bad?-

STORY: After Steven tames the Nazi Homeworld Diamonds (yes) and brings peace to Earth two years after the series ended, a new, cartoonish gem comes around and begins poisoning the planet with a giant Injector. She and the crystal gems have their memories wiped after a pretty one sided battle/jazzy villain song and Steven has to figure out how to get their memories back in order to stop Earth from being destroyed.

- MY THOUGHTS: the movie's not so much about Steven as it is Spinel's story arc surrounded by a Steven Universe episode where he's a teen. He is STILL being selfish and not learned his lessons from the series (he even mentions how the movie scenerio is the series plot all over again at one point too), the worlds ending and he complains about how he wont get his happily ever after... The memory loss plot was handled well, with how the gems regaining their memories not being as cut and dry as it would seem, but the Gems themselves are not really too much of a factor, why arent Peridot, Lapis, Bismuth and all the saved Gems not in anything aside from reforming Garnet? Why dont the gems - with finality - accept that in the end Rosie Pink was not a good person? Why do the diamonds only show up at the start and end? Why does Steven fuse with his father?!? Spinel's plot is great, but I think she could have served a better purpose in the series itself, rather than have a whole arc crammed into this, and its not really consistent with the series. Wouldve been better than filler .... 8/10

CHARACTERS - Spinel and Steven are the main characters, There are also The Diamonds, Connie, Lion, The Crystal Gems, and Beach Cities' citizens.

MY THOUGHTS: No surprise that the Manic, self hating cartoon clown that is Spinel is the best girl, and as much as I dislike how they handled her happy ending, its genuine when I feel happy for her and sad for her, and upset when shes so broken that she cannot accept that someone wants the best for her. Steven and the Crystal Gems are the same as before really, which is kinda dumb considering how much he supposedly learned...but I suppose thats the point... The Gems are more plot device than characters due to memory loss, everyone else is a background character honestly, even the rescued gems... Spinel - 9/10 Everyone Else - 7/10

MUSIC AND SOUND - the same synth background stuff like in the series. Its a musical movie too, so there are quite a few vocal songs ranging from female barbershop to a rock song.

MY THOUGHTS: Again Spinel wins out in pretty much all her songs. "Other Friends" is a great Electro-jazz villain song, "Drifting Away" is a somber, suitably depressing look at her backstory, Her Duet with Steven immediately after is suitably heartwarming, and the "Let Us Adore You Reprise", while part of a scene I do not like, is a charming barbershop tune. In comparison most of the other songs are not that memorable...except "Its The Truth" a soft supportive song about changing and moving past negativity...set to a fight scene. Honestly I dont think it needed so many, if it was mostly Spinel's songs and like two or three others, this wouldve been higher for not feeling so bloated. 7/10

ART AND ANIMATION: Steven Universe, but far more grand/nice looking on a movie budget. There is a lot of disney movie reference.

MY THOUGHTS - Its not much different at a glance, but the consistency of the characters between shots and the added details like the haunted look of Spinels eyes during her flashback and callbacks to previous episodes makes it so much of a labor of love. AGAIN Spinel is a standout, especially in "Other Friends" where her manic energy is at its peak. Spinel in general is a wonderful homage to classic animated movies and shorts along with the opening and ending sequences but thats dissappointingly as far as it goes, funnily enough an app game featured a story about a being bound by a book trapping others in her world! Imagine if they incorporated that hand had Spinel, running with that classic animated movie vibe? Oi.... Also props to the grisly looking purple and red Ruins of Beach City. SPINEL - 9/10, IN GENERAL - 8/10.

CONCLUSION: Its a pretty good movie all around, the reason to watch it is for Spinel, its her movie more than Stevens, which is a little bit of a problem, but whats good here is REALLY good. - 8.5/10

#Steven Universe #Steven #Universe #review #movie #the movie #steven universe the movie #Spinel #crystal gems #gem #gems #cartoon #classic cartoon

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ayellowbirds · 6 years

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Keshet Rewatches All of Scooby-Doo, Pt. 13: "Which Witch Is Which?"

("Scooby-Doo, Where Are You", Season 1 Episode 13)

AKA "That Voodoo You Don’t Do"

In a misty marsh, a strange, hunch-backed figure pushes a punt boat through the water, pausing to look behind him so the camera can see his face.

What a looker.

Not far away or long after, the gang are taking a shortcut on their fishing trip. They've gotten lost due to Fred’s terrible route-planning (seriously, I may need to start keeping track from here, i feel like the gang getting lost while on the road becomes a trope later on), and catch sight of a figure by the road, holding a lantern but apparently not visible enough to register as anything strange. While Scooby “fishes” in the back of the van by dipping a line tied to his tail into a bucket full of water, the Mystery Machine pulls to a stop so Shaggy can ask for directions.

Fleeing in terror from the “zombie”, the gang arrive in a community evidently named “Swamp’s End”, if the sign on the General Store is any indication, still quite badly lost.

While Scooby raids an open tin of beans (wouldn’t they be dry? I can’t imagine wet beans being left out for sale in a non-refrigerated environment), the gang speak to the store owner, a thickly-bearded fella by the name of Zeke. He tells them that the zombie was created by an old witch with “voodoo magic”. Zeke and his buddy Zeb Perkins first caught sight of her six months back, having gone into the swamp for some frog gigging.

Seen above: the landscaping concept for my fallback retirement plans. The witch chants above her fire, “Smoke of darkness, demon of evil, take the form of the living, and come forth from the flame!” and the logs and fire fade away, replaced by the zombie. He’s even already got his lantern!

While Zeke relates that the town is abandoned except for the two of them and that Zeb has been scared so bad he won’t go outdoors, Scooby’s inattentive eating wind up giving him a mouthful of jumping beans, leading to him bouncing around and hiccuping.

This was a popular bit in older cartoons, especially Hanna-Barbera ones, but it seems like nowadays, “jumping beans” aren’t really part of popular culture. It’s probably because the reason they “jump” is that they’re parasitized by a caterpillar, and novelty items powered by insect larvae are not as popular as @bogleech might hope.

While Fred, Velma, and Daphne clean up Zeke’s shop after Scooby’s bug-induced hopping fit, Scooby and Shaggy are tasked with checking on Zeb. They arrive to find his cabin showing sings of having been inhabited, but dusty and full of cobwebs—there’s no sign of Perkins himself.

Well, except for one.

Shaggy assumes that Zeb’s been shrunk, but Velma explains that it’s a “voodoo doll” made in his likeness. “Voodoo” is tossed around a lot in this episode, and that could be blamed on it being the mistaken assumptions of white people and pop culture about any folk magic practices, but pretty much everything observable about the swamp witch except her zombie servant is actually rooted in European and especially English and Germanic folk magic and superstitions.

Her “Halloween witch” looks draw on the typical mishegoss of stereotypes of feminine villainy that include a vaguely antisemitic hooked nose, and a hat style that i’ve ranted about before (and others have noted is linked to the beer-brewing traditions in Europe, along with things like the broom, solitary old women, and having cats around); the “voodoo doll” is in fact an English-style poppet and most of the connection to voodoo/vodou is based in racist propaganda. Even her hut looks more like something illustrated by Arthur Rackham or Ivan Bilibin.

The gang take a boat out into the swamp and catch sight of their targets, but lose them among the reeds and waters. Continuing further on, they find signs warning them to BEWARE and GO BACK, but press onward, and find the witch’s "shack”—complete with pin-pricked poppets in the likeness of Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy propped up against a mirror! .

Velma thinks it’s “phony baloney”, but Scooby can’t resist testing it out.

Ah, the loyalty of Man’s Best Friend. “Coincidentally”, Shaggy backs into a fork just as Scooby literally stabs his likeness in the back, and the witch appears in a puff of smoke. “So, you dared entered the swamp in spite of my warning signs!”

Daphne’s response?

Everyone else is stunned by her sick burn, but i notice in this moment that there’s a portrait of the witch up on the wall. What an oddly extra touch on the part of the villains! How long do you figure it took them to make it, or did they acquire it somewhere and tailor the witch disguise to match it?

Enraged, the witch casts a spell on Daphne, bidding the “smoke of evil, make her vanish!” and causing the redhead to disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving only her footprints behind on the rug where she was standing.

The bright pink rug that was not visible in any prior shots, in spite of Daphne’s full body and shoes on the bare wood floor being on-screen.

But Velma and Fred realize that the way Daphne’s footprints seem to slide backwards mean that there’s a trap door, and find it when investigating below the house. Following footprints further into the swamp in hopes of finding their friend, they catch sight of a derelict river boat and the zombie’s punt... which has an odd little extra.

The end of the punting pole is embellished with a metal tip that has clearly had more intent and care put into its design than the episode’s villains themselves (not to mention such things as bright pink rugs), with extra little indentations and rivets that are far from necessary to convey its role in the scheme.

The gang go to investigate the riverboat, unknowingly watched by the cackling witch and her undead minion, who begin to terrorize the foursome as they split up and search the boat.

While Shaggy and Scooby flee the zombie, Fred and Velma hear a muffled voice behind a wall with no clear entry, and try to find a secret entrance. Velma tries tugging on a lantern because “it’s always done that way in the movies”, but instead pulls it clean off the wall and tumbles backwards, knocking over an old bucket and sending a bar of soap flying at an emergency axe mounted on the wall—which was the actual trigger for the secret door.

Why is there always a secret door? It’s never just that the door is somewhere else and they happened to take a wrong turn, there’s never just a dead end.

Finding a grunting sheet-clad shape inside the secret room, Velma initially mistakes it for a ghost, but pulling away the sheet quickly reveals it’s Daphne... and a search of the room finds a very modern electrical winch, cutting torch, and set of power tools.

An aside for observation on characterization: i’ve joked a lot about Velma being not as skeptical as she makes herself seem, but i think the “credulity to skeptic” scale of the gang goes something like this:

Shaggy

Daphne

Scooby

Velma

Fred

I rated Scooby in the middle, though it varies in later series, because he actually seems to wind up noticing something isn’t supernatural faster than the others, either due to circumstance or canine senses. When he doesn’t, he usually reacts to a threat because the others are reacting to it, taking cues on what to fear based mostly on Shaggy. Much of the time, he seems innocent to what something could be except “big and angry”, and only really reacts with terror when one of his human friends says something.

Speaking of fear: the witch and zombie take advantage of being a team to terrorize both divisions of the gang at the same time, including the witch seeming to fly after them. But the discovery of a modern fan-powered airboat tucked into a passage in the riverboat also leads to the discovery that the flying witch is nothing more than a painted sheet thrown over a balloon, a cheaper trick than most Halloween decorations.

The airboat’s throttle gets stuck, and Scooby tosses down an improbably large anchor. The jarring stop brings up a lot of swampwater... and an entire armored bank car. Soon, the gang have improvised a rope-and-pulley system with some sturdy trees, and pull the truck to shore, finding sacks full of money with big old dollar signs drawn on, in case you were confused about what the enormous bags secured inside an armored bank car could possibly be.

Fred’s trap this time around is to leave some of those bags out in the open, where the witch and zombie—who the gang rightfully conclude have been hunting for this, using the metal-tipped pole to sound out the swamp floor for the metal roof of the car—can find them. Without breaking character, the gruesome twosome run up to the bags, cackling and mumbling with glee.

Of course, the bags are mostly filled with Scooby and Shaggy.

Kasem’s delivery on this line is magnificent, by the way. Leading the costumed crooks into a trap, the plan almost goes off without a hitch, but as usual, Scooby gets knocked along with the villains into a waiting wagon that rolls downhill towards the open back of the armored car. It’s only Shaggy demonstrating improbable line-casting skill that keeps Scooby from being trapped with the villains, as he uses a fishing pole to snag the bag Scooby is still wearing and pull him back uphill.

Jinkies, but Shaggy is strong. Why is this boy scared of anything? He could probably lift most of the villains of the week with one hand. I feel like there’s a lot to be said about the fact that Shaggy is a jock who doesn’t realize he is one, especially when we get into the episodes and movies where he actually competes in sports.

The gang meet up with a sheriff outside of the General Store, and it’s unsurprisingly revealed that the witch is Zeke, while the zombie is Zeb, explained as having hijacked the armored car in the first place, sinking it to find it later after the heat died down. The Scooby wiki notes that this episode seems to feature a rare example of a character from outside of the gang being reused: the Sheriff originates in the very first episode, as seen in this model sheet from a now-defunct Cartoon Network page, though the episode number doesn’t match up.

The episode ends with the gang musing on this having begun as a fishing trip, and Scooby is still dipping his tail-strung line into a bucket in the back of the Mystery Machine. “Give up,” says Fred, but less than a second later, Scooby pulls a hooked fish out of the water!

As Scooby defies the laws of physics and common sense once more, the gang share a laugh, and... fade to credits.

(like what i’m doing here? It’s not what pays the bills, so i’d really appreciate it if you could send me a bit at my paypal.me or via my ko-fi. Click here to see more entries in this series of posts, or here to go in chronological order)

#scooby doo #KRAOSD

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coldtomyflash · 7 years

Text

Because I fucking hate Earth X

Since the CW verse is all about their alternate worlds and evil version of characters ...

What about an alternate Earth X that wasn’t about literal Nazism but was still a dystopia - a violent one with all the bad hallmarks and brutality and hatred that all fascism engenders?

What if there was a regime that didn’t come out of WW2 or the Nazis or even Germany - what if it came out of America? Or America and Britain together? What if the shows actually had a half-decent political message to deliver about police states and surveillance states and runaway hatred and fear in society and how that can spiral fast?

I’m not talking Star City 2046 or even a future where companies/conglomerates are now nations, I’m really talking about a message about where our world is actually is / is headed in terms of politics and xenophobia and global crises, but dialed up and stylized.

And what if our heroes weren’t literal fucking Nazis but were still the good guys? What the the story’s message was one of “our heroes are good people because they grew up on Earth 1″ but “our heroes are good people because in any universe, they will learn and fight and claw their way toward what is right”?

Because to me, it’s infinitely more interesting to explore the plight of a good person in a world where evil is the norm than to say “here’s an evil version of this character” with no real motivation? This isn’t Savitar or Red-Kara or League-Oliver who are distorted, drugged, or desperate. On top of being antisemitic garbage, it’s also dull and trite and shock-value-esque. Even Doomworld (which I found pretty lackluster) afforded more respect to its heroes.

I mean hell, this isn’t even the animated Flashpoint elseworld with evil Wonder Woman because at least evil Wonder Woman had her own agency? The current Earth X “heroes as villains” are just cogs in a war machine. And if the story you want to tell is “your beloved heroes are just obedient drones” then you’ve really got to prepared for that story and what it means, and I’m certain the DC CWTV writers...aren’t.

So, an elseworld dictatorship that grows out of the political West, particularly America, with our heroes as jaded freedom fighters in a world full of that violence and oppression? In a world where war is on the home front, is the home front, and it’s violence-as-resistance rather than war on an international ‘battlefields’ sort of way?

And with this setting, if you want to keep some of the Earth 1 heroes as being on the Evil Side on that earth then fine, okay, it becomes less atrocious if you change up the worldbuilding elements, but at least make it fit that character? Like Barry and Oliver have both canonically resisted forms of indoctrination (if you’re confused about how Barry has, consider that for 15 years, ever since he was a literal child, people have been gaslighting him about his mother’s death and it’s frankly bizarre from a psychological standpoint that he still believed in his father’s innocence given the repeated and consistent messages sent his way from trusted people like police and therapists and his foster parent that would make him doubt his worldview). These are people with incredibly strong cores of right and wrong and truth and lies, at least as we know them? So saying they’d sign up with the Evil Regime is hard to make sense of, and you’d have to do a lot of storytelling to make me understand and accept it.

Anyway, what if the crossover focused on the dynamics of the Earth 1 heroes seeing alternative versions of themselves as jaded, tired fighters, and the startling clash and interpersonal dynamics? Of course they have some major battles to fight etc, but what if the message the shows explored was how ‘what it means to be good’ isn’t so cut and dry. A message that directly puts hope and the approach that says “violence is always wrong” against an approach that says “this is the only means we have to survive” and highlights how that moderate thinking fails in the face of truly evil intent.

“You’re killing people!” Barry shouts at the mirror image of himself, staring in horror at his blood soaked arms.

“Don’t you understand yet -- if I don’t kill them, they kill us! Parents, children, infants!”

He recoils from his doppelganger, feeling sick. “You can reason with --”

“We tried that! I tried that! You think I want to kill? If I try to reason with one of them, they live to kill ten of us!”

“That doesn’t meant you have to...”

“What else can I do?” He’s scathing now. “We spent years letting them bowl over our protests and watching the news tell us not to fight violence with violence. We spent years sitting in our homes watching them gain more power because they were willing to do anything to take and we didn’t want to fight dirty like they do. I spent years not killing them, even after the fighting started. Years of watching them get back up and kill my friends, Barry. The only way to fight an enemy that would rather see everyone you love dead is to stop that enemy before it ever gets the chance to hurt them.”

He thinks about Eobard, about Zoom. About Savitar. He can’t pretend that’s not who he sees when he looks at his doppleganger, but he also can’t pretend he doesn’t understand. He does. And yet...

“This isn’t --” he looks at the carnage surrounding them. “This isn’t the way.”

“This is just survival.”

Or what about them seeing their counterparts fighting the good fight, and instead of righteous judgement (instead of what their counterparts might even be expecting from them), they receive compassion instead?

What if the Earth-X heroes flinch expecting a lecture, a blow, because they remember how they used to be, and instead get a hard, tight hug, and a whispered ‘thank you’ from the Earth 1 heroes, the ones who understand?

What if we saw Felicity and Oliver take in the sight of Oliver-X, another freedom fighter, after being steeped in blood, and Ollie is cringing. He doesn’t want Felicity to see any version of him killing so freely, not now, not when murder is in his past. So imagine his surprise when she goes up to his Earth-X counterpart and hugs him, and thanks him?

Because she knows, she understands. She’s Jewish and she knows her history, and fighting fascists is a different world than killing henchmen of drug runners on rooftops. This is war, for freedom and survival, even if it doesn’t look like war in the typical sense. No tanks, no bombs. Just surveillance and paramilitary and neighbors snitching on neighbors and people hiding and going underground to survive.

Wouldn’t that be a better story than ‘Oliver and Barry are literal Nazis on Earth X and somehow Felicity has to live with that knowledge now’?

Anyway, obviously the CW is never going to give us anything half so raw as that, nor so radically left as to say we should fight intolerance with extreme measures (but uh, we should. not murder but like, punching a Nazi is the morally right move, even if it’s not the legally right one).

But this is what I mean when I say that writing mirrorverses full of Nazis and making heroes fascists isn’t just morally apprehensible and wrong but also fucking lazy? It doesn’t think about the characters and their motives and doesn’t take the effort to consider the message it invokes for its viewer. Writing an evil version of a hero should be a character study or should provide some insight into the person or into human nature. It should carry a message. Savitar carries one (even if I have some issues with it), as did Red-Kara. What will we learn from Earth-X? My guess is... very little.

So instead of giving us insight, it’s making characters evil as an easy out for forcing a conflict and driving up the emotional stakes without really giving us a reason to care. It’s shock-value writing with no meat to it. It’s shallow and reeks of a sense of hopelessness. It promotes this idea that we’re all drones who will obey because we’re told to.

And I’m not here to knock the very real power of indoctrination, but the real world doesn’t work like that. People tend to know when what they’re doing is wrong, that oppression is wrong, and if they’re genuinely ignorant to it, then learning tends to open their eyes. And after that it’s up to choice - they choose to throw their head in the sand and continue being evil, or they choose to do better. And literally all of the heroes we’ve been introduced to in the DC CWTV universe choose better. So...?

The story is weak, and the message is... insidious. Do better, DC CWTV. If I can come up with a better elseworld in an hour, you have no excuse.

#anyway i hate #the crossover clusterfuck #crossover episodes #crossover spoilers #gotta go for lunch now #and then do something OTHER than be angry about this mess #i think i'm done talking about it for good now #i've had this in my drafts since last night so i figured i ought to post or delete it #anyway #antisemitism tw #nazism tw #nazis tw #elseworlds #long post #long post for ts #hence the cut

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