#like i know why it became a thing and the larger cultural context for why etc etc but it just makes me so fucking SAD and MAD

[sanstropfremir]

In one of your posts you talk about how (simply put) performance in general and kpop dance in particular always require some sort of acting. It reminds me of a concept of "duality" that kpop fans LOVE to bring up constantly in regards to their favourite idols. My problem with it is that it's usually used when comparing a person on stage and off stage. "Oh, he's so sweet and bubbly in real life, but he's so scary on stage! Duality king!"

Wouldn't that just be an expected part of performing? Not that it's not worth praising, but why have a separate word for it? And even if we use it for idols who can switch between different personas on stage, wouldn't that still be being simply good at acting? Do you think "duality" refers to anything tangible at all?

no it doesn't refer to anything, it's a fucking stupid 'concept' and it was literally just invented wholecloth by kpoppies who do not understand the concept of acting. point blank. the whole 'oh he has a different personality offstage!!!!' is literally just. acting. that's acting you absolute dipshits i don't know what to tell you other than how on earth do you fundamentally miss the very BASIC IDEA OF PERFORMANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ITS TO BE A DIFFERENT PERSON FROM YOURSELF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sorry this particular kpop stan turn of phrase makes me absolutely INCENSED like how. how are you so stupid. are they teaching NOTHING in schools anymore??? i know the answer to that is yes but it's still so disappointing. i know i shouldn't be so mean bc the majority of kpop fans are kids but it's just.............idk. it makes me really fucking upset about the future of performing and performing arts where people are heaping praise and lauding literally the most basic of skills.

#honestly i dont even think it's worth praising al all bc its literally just. acting. its a basic skill #you NEED it to be a performer. some of the extremes i guess you could argue for but personally i have higher standards #like our bit about hongjoong deserving an egot is very much a joke but also deep down it's not a fucking joke #he is SO unbelievable talented for someone who's never done real acting training and i need to sink my claws in him so fucking bad #and the fact that he only gets recognized for being a '''demon''' or whatever people say is so fucking SHALLOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THE REST OF IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #'DUALITY' MY FUCKING ASS HE HAS THE FUCKING RANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #im gonna direct him in a shakespeare in 10-15 years and you all will SEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #kpop questions #truly every time i see the phrase it flips a little rage switch in my brain #like i know why it became a thing and the larger cultural context for why etc etc but it just makes me so fucking SAD and MAD #text #answers

[somerabbitholes]

Books you would recommend on this topic? Colonial, post colonial, and Cold War Asia are topics that really interest me. (Essentially all of the 1900s)

Hello! An entire century is huge and I don't quite know what exactly you're looking for, but here we are, with a few books I like. I've tried organising them, but so many of these things bleed into each other so it's a bit of a jumble

Cold War

1971 by Srinath Raghavan: about the Bangladesh Liberation War within the context of the Cold War, US-Soviet rivalry, and the US-China axis in South Asia

Cold War in South Asia by Paul McGarr: largely focuses on India and Pakistan, and how the Cold War aggravated this rivalry; also how the existing tension added to the Cold War; also the transition from British dominance to US-Soviet contest

Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World by Robert B. Rakove: on the US' ties with the Nonaligned countries during decolonisation and in the early years of the Cold War; how US policy dealt with containment, other strategic choices etc

South Asia's Cold War by Rajesh Basrur: specifically about nuclear buildup, armament and the Indo-Pak rivalry within the larger context of the Cold War, arms race, and disarmament movements

Colonialism

India's War by Srinath Raghavan: about India's involvement in World War II and generally what the war meant for South Asia politically, economically and in terms of defense strategies

The Coolie's Great War by Radhika Singha: about coolie labour (non-combatant forces) in the first World War that was transported from India to battlefronts in Europe, Asia and Africa

Unruly Waters by Sunil Amrith: an environmental history of South Asia through British colonial attempts of organising the flow of rivers and the region's coastlines

Underground Revolutionaries by Tim Harper: about revolutionary freedom fighters in Asia and how they met, encountered and borrowed from each other

Imperial Connections by Thomas R. Metcalf: about how the British Empire in the Indian Ocean was mapped out and governed from the Indian peninsula

Decolonisation/Postcolonial Asia

Army and Nation by Steven Wilkinson: a comparative look at civilian-army relations in post-Independence India and Pakistan; it tries to excavate why Pakistan went the way it did with an overwhelmingly powerful Army and a coup-prone democracy while India didn't, even though they inherited basically the same military structure

Muslim Zion by Faisal Devji: a history of the idea of Pakistan and its bearing on the nation-building project in the country

The South Asian Century by Joya Chatterji: it's a huge book on 20th century South Asia; looks at how the subcontinental landmass became three/four separate countries, and what means for history and culture and the people on the landmass

India Against Itself by Sanjib Baruah: about insurgency and statebuilding in Assam and the erstwhile NEFA in India's Northeast. Also see his In the Name of the Nation.

I hope this helps!

#anonymous #answered #book recs #india #south asia #historyblr

[dissociativediscourse]

Understanding the difference between systemic oppression and social stigma: Why endogenic systems aren't oppressed for being plural, and why that doesn't mean that their struggles are unimportant

Time for the newest syscourse topic, one that I’ve actually been thinking about quite a bit lately. I had a conversation with my very pro-endo friend about it a while back, and it caused me to realize that the entire issue is really that we don’t understand the distinction between oppression and social stigma, and why exactly endogenic plurals are stigmatized, but not oppressed. And why this doesn’t mean that struggles that they do face are “invalid” (boy, do I hate that whole concept. I hate the whole valid thing. It doesn’t do anything any justice.) 

To start off with, it's important to clarify each of these terms. Oppression refers to the systematic mistreatment, subjugation, and denial of rights by those in power against a specific group. On the other hand, social stigma involves societal disapproval or mistreatment directed at individuals who possess certain characteristics or identities. While the two concepts may intersect, they are not synonymous. 

Endogenic plurals, despite facing challenges in the form of social stigma, do not experience systemic oppression in the same way as historically marginalized groups. The comparison I drew in my conversation with the previously mentioned friend was to communities like furries and therians, who similarly encounter varying degrees of societal rejection. While they may be subjected to ridicule, bullying, or social ostracization, these experiences are not the same as being actively oppressed by institutions and systemic structures.

I would also like to highlight that the challenges endogenic plurals face are largely only present within the Western context. Outside of that, they not only ‘would be’ but are very easily accepted, sometimes for religious/spiritual reasons. I had someone from the Middle East (not going to specify which country because I don’t know if anyone knows who this is and would prefer to not dox them lol) describe to me that they once thought that they were endogenic – they were open to their family and community about this, and were very widely accepted for it. It was seen as creative, and a beautiful thing! But once they discovered that they had formed their system through trauma, and that they had DID, it became different. Suddenly it was something to be shunned – this is largely because it isn’t the system that’s the issue. It isn’t the concept of plurality that is an issue, by and large, it’s the trauma. It’s the fact that this is a disabling condition. It’s the fact that when you have DID, you have a rare mental illness. It’s the fact that you are experiencing trauma responses that are unpalatable to those who don’t understand them. 

That’s far from the only story I’ve heard of that type, and I’ve particularly seen a LOT of Asian systems speaking about acceptance of endogenic plurality vs. rejection of DID in their cultures. This is a very West-centric argument, and also goes to show how narrow of a perspective many of the current larger syscoursers pushing endo oppression as a concept have on the subject of oppression. 

You may say, “But, there’s a potential for systemic oppression and violence against endogenic plurals! We just don’t have enough data, because they’re not “out” yet.” My friend said this! I appreciated the point, because it allowed me to highlight my above argument about endogenic plurality outside of the west and also the fact that historical patterns of systemic oppression and the reasoning for such and the examination of parallels with other marginalized groups and their histories with oppression reveal that such concerns are really just… Not warranted. Genuinely, the struggles that endogenic plurals face are much closer to that of the furry community, or that of the therian community. These groups also have to deal with with societal misunderstandings and negative perceptions. Just as with endogenic plurals, the issues they face stem from a lack of understanding rather than a deliberate effort to oppress. If either of those groups were to be open about their identities, they’d face similar struggles – and they do. It’s not exactly the wisest thing to talk to your boss about being a furry or a therian, and it’s liable to get you some hate/bullying/mistreatment directed towards you at some point. It’s stigma.

While endogenic plurals may experience interpersonal mistreatment and possibly even limited job opportunities due to being open about their identities, these challenges are primarily driven by social stigma and negative perceptions. It's worth noting that any systemic violence or marginalization they encounter often stems from an intersection with already marginalized groups, such as the queer or neurodiverse communities. Sure, many endogenic plurals are queer or otherwise neurodiverse, but that intersection and further the violence directed towards it can’t exist without the existence of those other identities. A cishet, white, NT and otherwise non-marginalized endogenic plural isn’t oppressed. A trans, ND, POC who is an endogenic plural is, but not because of their plurality, though it does create a different (and notable) intersection with a few of these aspects. 

It's really important to recognize that conflating social stigma with systemic oppression oversimplifies the experiences of truly systemically oppressed groups, while at the same time not even doing any justice to the issues endogenic plurals themselves DO face. If we can just… Understand that these are two very separate issues, the distinct challenges that endogenic plurals DO face can be more accurately and effectively addressed and advocated for. If we can just ACKNOWLEDGE this, that’s already contributing to a broader, more informed discourse that fosters so much more inclusivity and empathy than what we’ve got right now.

#syscourse #plurality #syscourse unaligned #? i guess that would be the right tag #oppression

[comradekatara]

if this comes off as a really weird and pretentious ask please just delete it but since iirc you've been in this fandom since 2019 or before 2019 i need to know . how do you deal with such in bad faith takes ??? i scroll & move on & filter tags as much as i can but it's astounding how anybody from any corner of this fandom will have piss poor takes whether they support canon or fanon

lmao not a bad question at all. some background context feels necessary: i’ve been very into atla since i was a kid, and before i used this blog i talked about it (and lok, because korrasami melted my brain) a lot on my primary blogs. in november 2018 i convinced my friend to start watching atla, and she got extremely into it. we talked about atla every day for months. eventually, my friend started this blog in summer of 2019 to talk about atla and invited me to join. it was mostly a repository for our inside jokes and for me to post the fanart i had been drawing on my phone. it was really just a space for our circle of mutuals to have some laffs.

the atla fandom was very small at the time so we were really one of the only blogs actively talking about the show. by complete accident, however, some of our posts got popular, and we accrued quite a bit of a following. we didn’t really know what to do with all the attention (some of it extremely negative and unhinged at that), and it would only get worse after “the atla renaissance.” we got more followers than we knew what to do with, at which we considered just abandoning the blog. my friend did, and handed over the reins to me.

for her, atla was a recent interest that had soured after the fandom became too much to handle, but for me it was an interest that had endured since childhood, and i found that despite all the negative attention, i still really enjoyed having a space where i could unpack my feelings towards this thing that felt like such a significant cultural touchstone, feelings towards characters i had been so deeply moved by for so long, and i enjoyed making art on a consistent basis for an actively receptive audience who praised my skills as an (extremely amateur) artist.

i’ve been drawing atla characters for a very long time, long before i had this blog, but it feels like the incentive to draw for an audience is what motivated me to improve my art over the years, so that’s genuinely been a really nice thing. and i enjoy analyzing art, literature, and media, so trying to pick apart one single text (or multiple connected texts if you wanna bring in lok, the comics, and the novels) for so long is very fun for me.

however, as much as i’ve tried to avoid engaging with bad faith takes, i am nonetheless aware that there is a not insignificant contingent of the fandom who viscerally hate my guts for whatever reason. it’s definitely less prevalent in my daily life now that the fandom is less active (cannot begin to emphasize enough how much the atlassaince ruined my life), but at the time a lot of people wanted to make their hatred of this blog known, loudly. which, especially when you’re in the middle of a lockdown and you cannot leave your room for fear of possibly dying, is not a great feeling.

that’s not really what you’re asking, but since i have had to deal with “bad faith takes” in the most personal possible way, my advice would simply be to try to shut it out. i follow maybe two or three atla blogs, and they are blogs that do not interact with the larger fandom. i do not seek out what other blogs have to say, and confine my scope to my friends and responding to my inbox.

for some reason, atla does seem to be a bad opinions factory, but actively seeking out those opinions is simply not conducive to one’s mental health or a productive use of time, which is why i keep to myself and try to mind my own business. i cannot control how i am perceived, which i am viscerally reminded of every time i see someone reblog an older post from this blog that i didn’t even make (and sometimes straight up do not agree with), but i try to remind myself that this literally has no bearing on my material existence whatsoever, and bad posts aren’t real they can’t hurt you <3

#making this nonrebloggable for obvious reasons #dogsinspaces #asks #housekeeping #running this blog has been such a strange surreal experience #but also. i am just minding my own business it’s fine. this is fine.

[imustbenuts]

@theotherseapancakes

i mentioned ill rb a post about majima's sexuality/gender identity in the context of 1980s-2010s japan but i never got to it bc i cant find the post ;;

but gist of it is, the majima everyone knows is... kind of putting on an act. everything about the zanny funny majima everyone mostly knows is an act he puts on mostly to mess with kiryu. this video kinda sums it up succinctly:

even his kansai dialect is... fake as shit. (the meta explanation is that his voice actor isnt familiar with kansai accent and the director was like 'its majima its ok just roll with it')

it's probly hard to hear but his dialect is multiple levels of wrong. another joke video here but that isnt how kansai dialect sentence structure works! also his crazy persona is really how he behaves, mostly.

dont wanna inflate this post but theres plenty of kansai dialect language videos on youtube to hear what a usual kansai dialect phrase sounds like

majima's sounds like he smooshed standard tokyo japanese with some random stuff he picked up from osaka, which tracks with his backstory...

^^ he speaks with standard jp here. this takes place technically before y0 (i think)

anyway. so. the 'mad dog' persona both in universe and out he has is mostly an act and his character growth from 0-8 is largely like this: sane -> goes through SHIT -> plot -> snaps -> loses his sworn brother and is likely very depressed -> messes with kiryu for some semblance of normalcy -> kiryu helps stabilizes his life both directly and indirectly, thereby stabilizing his mental state -> sane but wears the mask bc hes made a name for himself as the mad dog

so all of that is important bc in a manner of speaking, LGBTQ in the 1980s to 2010s is considered... an 'act'.

super short summary of why: confucius idea dictates that men must pass on their bloodline to offsprings bc its honorable for the family bloodline. confucius bleeds into bushido, morphs, which bleeds into the larger fabric of japanese culture.

MEANING, its totally ok to be gay and play so long as a male offspring is produced. LGBTQ then is seen as a juvenile thing that most people will grow out off eventually. (at least prior to TV era)

then TV era brought in western media, and back the the mid 1900s, LGBTQ became synonymous with being a western idea. lots of tropes of flamboyancy is closely linked to westerness in characters. so queer became a foreign idea. JP TV then perpetuated this with okama stereotypes and sometimes made a mockery out of them, which continued pretty much until 2000s.

some also see it as a evil western mental virus/illness too.

(negative okama stereotypes are portrayed as highly thirsty male hunters dressed in a less than flattering drag with facial hair. often used to elicit"EW DISGUSTING GET AWAY FROM ME" reactions from other characters.)

smoosh that with existing cross-dressing theater arts and the idea of some 'kiddy phase' and suddenly being LGBTQ is more or less equated to an act.

add in the fact that transitioning is a very difficult thing to do if one doesnt conform fully into a binary Male or Female gender identity, suddenly genderfluidity looks very campy in JP media context.

which. majima kinda is. left: y0 appearance, taking place 1989. right, y1 onward, starting 2005

leather and TIGHT leather has some associations with the BDSM scene, which intersects with the sleazy night life and sexually related things. (queerness is perceived to be mostly this bc demonization in a similar fashion to... everywhere basically)

and also, there was one time where majima was goromi:

the context for this: Majima Everywhere was a system that y1k had, where Majima would spawn absolutely anywhere and everywhere to fight kiryu. for fun. theres a lot of interesting character moments bc his act or mask out slip off every now and then. this is one of those.

anyway, goromi is an interesting case of a more positive okama stereotype bc theres absolutely zero malice in the writing that i can tell. key thing: kiryu reacts bewildered but positively to this encounter

so all of this to say

yeah majima is really, really not straight.

#Youtube #majima #rgg butt lore

[uncloseted]

Can you explain to me the point of music reviews? Like that one white YouTuber guy who does them lol. I get movies and tv shows because that's more of a time investment and I think there's a more technical understanding of how a movie or TV show is ""good"", but isn't music more subjective? I don't get how people can listen to a song and not know whether or not they like it enough and they have to listen to someone else's opinion to tell them what to think. It's just a song, what do they lose from a song being "bad" besides not listening to it?

What's the point in any type of art review, really? Movie reviews, TV reviews, visual art reviews, music reviews, video game reviews, they're all kind of doing the same thing, right? They're not really telling people if they'll like a piece or not. They're looking at the technical aspects of the piece, the meaning of the piece, the larger cultural context for the piece and how it fits into that context, the aesthetics and emotions of the piece, and overall, they try to help people understand how to engage with the piece. Regardless of the medium, it's not really about whether the reviewer personally enjoys the piece or thinks that other people will enjoy it. It's more about the external cultural value of the piece. That's how you can get 13 hours worth of cultural criticism about the Nickelodeon TV show "Victorious", a show that got generally mixed reviews for its entire run. To reviewers, it doesn't matter whether people liked it or not. What matters is the show's cultural legacy and what we can learn about our culture through the lens of this piece.

Taking movies as an example, "The Godfather" is widely recognized as one of the best movies of all time. Personally, I don't care for it as a movie. But I can still accept that it's culturally valuable- that it's "a good film". It transcended and reinvented the gangster movie genre, it was both commercial and artistic at the same time, it took a cynical look at the American Dream, it used innovative shots and filmmaking techniques, it managed to be captivating for the entirety of its 3 hour long run... I don't need to like it to see the appeal or to "get" why it's important.

Similarly, with music, you don't necessarily have to like a song, album, band, or musician to be able to appreciate its cultural value. For example, a lot of people don't like The Beatles. But I think it would be hard to argue that their music has no cultural value. They made a huge impact on music, both when they were making music and in their legacy. They have the most #1 hits of any band, which showed that they could be commercially successful, but also wrote very complex and artistic songs that are valuable from a composition and technical standpoint. They made huge innovations in artistic presentation, recording techniques, and production techniques. It's hard to overstate the impact they had on culture, not just in terms of music, but also in terms of 1960s counterculture and political activism. Generally, I think music reviewers exist to help us understand the cultural value that music has more than they exist to tell us whether or not we "should" like a piece.

On a kind of separate but more practical note, music reviewers are holdovers from a pre-internet world. Before you could easily listen to an album on Spotify or find a rip of it on YouTube, you had to decide whether or not to buy an album before ever hearing it. Up until 2000, when LimeWire and Napster started allowing people to illegally download music for free (or 2008, when Spotify launched and this practice became legal), there was real money on the line. Each album cost about $33 in today's money. Music reviewers helped people to guess whether they would like an album or not so that they could make better decisions about whether it was worth it to spend their money to be able to listen to the album.

These days, I think the practical value in music reviewing is helping people narrow down the content that's available to them. There are 70 million songs on Spotify. Assuming each song is 3 minutes long, it would take you 400 years to listen to them all if that's the only thing you ever did. And of course, the music on Spotify isn't even all the music that exists; Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Coldplay, Adele, and other big artists have pulled their music from Spotify. And there are millions of other indie artists out there whose music is only on TikTok or BandCamp.

Music critics can help us to decide which out of those 70 million songs are worth paying attention to, and which we might enjoy. Sure, that's not super helpful if you're trying to decide if you like Billie Eilish's latest album or whatever, you'll just listen to it and decide. But it's really helpful if you're trying to find new artists to listen to since otherwise you would never be exposed to the musicians they're talking about. For example, right now I'm looking at NME's list of 100 Essential Emerging Artists for 2022. I never would have heard of any of these artists otherwise, but now I know that I might be interested in Anz, whose music is "kaleidoscopic dance music from a club culture polymath", and that a good song to start with is "You Could Be" (update: this song is actually a bop. Glad I looked it up). Or I might be interested in Eades, because NME suggests them for fans of the Talking Heads and they describe themselves as “David Byrne and Lou Reed’s dyslexic child playing out of a Motorola Pebl”, which sounds like a vibe I would like (update: it is).

Of course, you don't have to like music criticism or care about it. If you prefer to discover music organically and make your own assessments about whether it's good or not, that's totally fine. But I do think it has a point, both in terms of the larger culture and just practically speaking.

[nbtenvs3000w23]

The Role of an Interpreter

When I think of my ideal role as an interpreter, a few things come to mind for me. I’m fortunate in that I’ve actually spent two summers working as an interpreter, which gives me some insight into what I enjoy about interpretation and what I find challenging about it.

Thinking about skills that are important for the role, of course public speaking is way up there. I lead groups of up to 30 people on tours, and so it was important to have a clear and confident voice, and to be familiar with the material I was sharing. Knowing how to effectively manage a group of this size, while leaving room for questions along the way and covering all the material as my work dictated, was essential to the role. However, theres more than just the ability to speak. Being a storyteller is important too. My favourite moments in the role came from small groups and unstructured interactions. I loved when people would approach me and ask about their curiosities, or especially when they shared something they found interesting at my museum. It was moments like these where I felt I could really connect with the visitors, and engage them in a dialogue that would teach them more than just the plain answer to their questions would. I was able to do this well because I had taken the time to learn about much of the natural history, cultural history, present conservation issues, the general points of interest around the site, and most importantly I was able to understand how these various concepts mixed to form the larger story of the site. This allowed me to address visitor’s questions, while placing them in context of the wider story of the space.

I went on a guided hike where I saw just how well interpretation can be used to impact someone’s understanding of a place. This was a bucket list day for me since I got to go and see the Burgess Shale fossil bed in Yoho National Park! My guide was very knowledgeable about the burgess shale, but I was most impressed by the stories she told, and how she wove them together to make the day so impactful. She told us about how the mountains in the Rockies formed, and how the animals of the burgess shale became trapped in the sediment and preserved, with the use of some interactive games out on the trail which I thought was very cool. But as the day progressed, she told of how the fossils were found in the first place, why they are so important today, and how the protection of these fossils is layered with the protections of the national park we were in and why it’s so important.

When I spoke with other members of the group, I could feel how her interpretation had sparked interest and passion through her stories and activities. Also, the fact that we had been hiking all day and using our bodies to get to the remote location added a lot to making the day feel very special. I would love to lead the Burgess Shale hike one day.

That’s all for now,

See you next time

P.S. Heres the proof I was there :)

[astarab1aze]

the worldeater - is an extremely complicated entity that is equally as extremely intertwined with very old, old lore i share with ( @elysiumtouched ). we're talkin' years, baby!

they eat. a manifestation of the universe itself. they who devour the stars, the very gods, the heavens, the hells, themselves. they eat, and within them is born a new universe, a new time, a new land, with new names, new cultures, new people, new gods, new suns and moons. they are the embodiment of rebirth, chaotic in demeanor, but rigidly adherent to the structure and function of sunjatta as a whole, which is why every outer god, ascendent or not, must also serve a purpose ( take, for example, loux and his eventual ascendency - his purpose, to stoke and carry the flame of ambition, passion, love, and courage, heroism in a place you least expect to find it (in a bastard of a scoundrel), fire itself ).

they represent more than just rebirth, but new beginnings, atonement, obsession, parenthood, grief, transformation and change, vanity, pride, snakes, lizards, dragons, demons-- they can take many forms and have many names, but few have persisted over the unfathomable amount of time they've existed, and such are the forms of a man with white hair and a wyrm spanning the milky way's diameter, perhaps larger in fact. nox, nocturne, endrbinger, worldeater. on the surface, they are a forgotten god - too old to remember the prayers for, the magic required to commune - but in reality, they are ever-present, inevitable, a viciously unpredictable being ( by mortal standards ) who has no moral code to speak of until it pertains to the things that are important to them specifically, and even then... perhaps even more so.

they are not the first of the gods to exist nor will they be the last, but they are the god and they will not be disobeyed.

i've included under the cut a story of sorts about them and their relationship with their mate, from another time, another place, another version of them - but no less canon.

     Nox was the prince of demons. Truly the baby of the family, no one really wanted him to take the throne or to be god of gods, king of them all, but they’d little choice. It was prophesied. He was king regardless of what they felt was wrong or right.

     So his eldest brother, the schemer and maniacal god of death, chose to play the long game, and propped him up. Paraded around as his only true support, carefully selecting male and female consorts to stand at his side when it came time to produce an heir, gathering armies, etc etc.

     While at the same time plotting to use him as a tool, to manipulate him into doing as he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. Nox could trust him! He’d given him support when all their other siblings sought to lead him to slaughter, to tarnish his reputation and somehow put an end to his reign before it’d ever even begun.

     He meets his mate on the night of his coronation.

     A young god of only a few centuries old, thrust into the arms of a lesser demon a mere few thousand years older than he, whose bloodline had been carefully modified in order to meet the requirements laid out by the gods themselves. Ade, who was extremely bitter (and rightly so), wanted little to do with Nox and abused him regularly, but being foolish and young, believing his own manipulative siblings had his best interests at heart, he really didn’t know what was good or bad, so abuse became a common theme in their dubious and unwilling relationship.

     A few centuries go by and Ade has come to…at the very least, seem like him, so the abuse between them slows to a halt and they’re able to live their lives as normally as two demons might. They are gentle with one another now, loving even, and have so decided to mate properly and without the context of ‘king and consort’. In this universe, dragon- and otherwise reptile-like creatures are capable of reproducing asexually or with any gender as their populations have been so devastated that only a few remain. This goes double for the gods, especially those of primordial origins - like Nox.

     And so, Nox lays his first clutch of eggs.

     But on a day he is away from his nest, to bathe in the Oblivion Pools, one of his siblings (the god of assassination and trickery), destroys his nest and savagely murders Ade.

     As Ade’s bloodline had been altered by the gods for one specific purpose, he is reincarnated over and over and over again, to suffer the very same fate…over and over and over. And Nox is helpless to stop it as he has no understanding of what’s happening or why. He may be primordial, but he is not omnipotent, and over the many thousands of years this process repeats, he is forced to lay his clutches or watch Ade lay his own, and summarily suffer through loss after loss.

     This gradually pushes him into embracing his role as the demon king and Endbringer his brother was shaping him to be in the first place. A disconnect forms between himself and his memories of Ade, and he can no longer recognize him as his mate, so the cycle of abuse returns at full force. Though, Nox had become the abuser.

     He regularly mistreats Ade, goes out of his way to personally destroy each and every clutch they have between them (if he doesn’t, someone else will, and he’s not willing to suffer at the hands of anyone else again). So much time passes that he forgets why he’s as cruel as he is anymore, he forgets what made him, he forgets why he made the choices he did, why he loved Ade. And this cycle repeats for another thousand years.

     It isn’t until Nox is gearing up for a mass-scale demonic war and Ade is reincarnated for the millionth time that he realizes (or even begins to think) that what he’s done is wrong.

     He knows he is beyond any redemption of his own, so he doesn’t bother to seek it out, instead choosing to cease causing Ade any further pain and treating him more neutrally than anything. Jarringly so. He keeps a close eye on Ade from the time he comes of age until he has a few thousand years on him, protecting him through the use of his most valued and trusted spies and advisors.

     As Ade grows older, he grows colder, and rightly so, and this instills within Nox so heavy a feeling of regret, he eventually comes to rethink his decision not to seek out his forgiveness… Every step taken is slow and thoughtful, every word spoken careful and ringing clear with his intent to mend their bond. In this time, he realizes everything he’d done, who Ade truly is to him, and desperately tries even harder to fix what was broken.

     Ade is unkind to him, entreating him to much of the same treatment he’d endured for the many lives he’d lived as Nox’s consort. Yet, though it may have taken centuries more, Ade had begun to soften and in so doing he came into his role as an Endbringer, a Worldeater. Despite an equally broken heart, Nox was proud of him, happy that he had become his true equal.

     After yet more time, they left the Hellplane - together - and now live within Nox’s own belly, a temple built from stardust as a testament to what they shared, both for better and for worse. In effect, they are married, consider themselves so, and have had only one successful clutch of eggs between them insofar. Of course, they are open to the idea of more as children just grow up so fast, don’t they?

#☿ || Headcanons. #elysiumtouched #toxic relationship / #/ lots of tragedy in the worldeater's former lives #/ not entirely sure how to tag it #/ the tragedy itself is very important to how nox functions cognitively. how they think. that sorta thing #/ were it not for ade. nox would never have found their way back #/ he/they pronouns for them #/ even though it doesn't really matter since - as not just any god but kinda THE god...yanno?

[qqueenofhades]

Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all). 

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

#politics for ts #long post #anonymous #ask

[dwellordream]

“I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath and can in many ways be considered a bathing culture, much in the way that say, Japan is now. Medieval people also very much valued being clean generally in an almost religious way. This is not to say that getting clean was as easy for medieval people as it is for us now.

But medieval people were very clever and had ways of getting around that. So, say you are an average-ass medieval person. That means you are a peasant, because 85% of the population or so were peasants. This meant that you were working very hard doing manual labour in a field. How would you stay clean? Well you would probably wash daily at home. This usually involved filling an ewer with water, heating it and then poring it into a larger basin which allowed for ease of scrubbing….

Say that you couldn’t or didn’t have time to heat up water though, what then? Well people would just bathe in a local water source… So, fine, regular people figured out how to get wet, right? Well, the other thing that is important to note here (and I can’t believe I am saying this), when washing at home medieval people used soap. Yes. I am serious. They did. In fact soap is a motherfucking medieval invention. Yes. It is. The Romans – whomst I don’t see a bunch of basics going around accusing of being filthy – did not, in fact have soap, in contrast. They usually washed using oil. Medieval people? Oh you better believe that they had soap.

It was first introduced from the East, like most good stuff was at the time, but it took off rather quickly. Your peasant ass would likely have been making soap at home, and books of secrets often included various recipes for soap, all of which can still be made today. The general ingredients were usually tallow, mutton or beef fat, some type of wood ash or another, potash, and soda.

However, soap could also be purchased. As early as the seventh century soap makers guilds began to spring up , trading it as a high value commodity. If you were fancy enough to be buying soap you could also get the good imported stuff initially from Aleppo, which was traded heavily and involved laurel oil rather than animal fat. After importing rather a lot of this to Castille, in the twelfth century the denizens there got to thinking that they could probably create a similar product using the local olive oil. Voila! Castille soap was born and also became a popular trade good.

Even if you couldn’t get the good fancy soap, many people would scent the water that they bathed in, often with thyme or sage. People often used herbs not just for washing, but in deodorant as well. Yes. They had deodorant. It was often made of bay leaves, hyssop or sage. In fact, one of the more popular medieval deodorant recipes came from Dioscorides, a Greek physician active in the first century AD. His De Materia Medica was super popular throughout the medieval period and advised readers on how to make a deodorant using salvia and sage.

Medieval people also regularly washed both their hands and faces both before and after meals when in between baths because – stay with me here – they knew that dirt and grime could be hazardous to their health if ingested. Yes. They did. They really really did. In fact, the whole washing after eating thing was an explicit health concern, because as medieval medical writers such as Magninius Mediolanesis noted, If any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.

Our girl Hildegard of Bingen even had a recipe for face cleanser because apparently she was a skin-care bitch. She advises that, one whose face has hard and rough skin, made harsh from the wind, should cook barley in water and, having strained that water through a cloth, should bathe his face gently with the moderately warm water. The skin will become soft and smooth, and will have a beautiful color.

So yes, medieval people, even regular old peasants were pretty clean types of people. In fact, they were so clean that for them bathing constituted a leisure activity. So the average person would likely wash daily at home, but once a week or so they would treat themselves to a bath at the communal bath house. That is where the party was at.

…You, my gentle readers may have picked up on something here, and that is that our girls the sex workers be showing right TF up in the public baths. This meant that whether or not you admitted them made the difference between whether you were keeping a bathhouse or a brothel. Here in London, of course the Stews in Southwark were essentially brothels where you could also have a bath (and were largely owned by the Bishop of Winchester (as you do).

Having said that, there were plenty of people who went to bathhouses just to go to bathhouses and by 1292 in Paris, there were at least 26 running that could give you just a bath. Medieval people related to this very much as we do having a spa day, and medieval bathhouses often included steam baths along with big wooden tubs where you could sit down and enjoy a meal. In order to stand out from the crowd, the Parisian bathhouses would even employ criers to advertise themselves.

And, I cannot stress this enough, this was just for regular ass people. Rich people? Oh, you better believe they were bathing, and often had dedicated rooms for washing unlike the poors. They also might go places simply to bathe, like Bath in England, or the thermal baths in Pozzuli in Campania, which was so famous it had a whole ass poem, De balneis Puteolanis written about it. They could also afford that nice soap and perfume and all that good stuff. In fact they were so into poncey baths that most medieval knighthood ceremonies involved having a scented bath.

So OK, clearly, fucking clearly medieval people bathed and were clean and into it. So why am I telling you all of this? Well the idea that medieval people didn’t bathe is a persistent myth that some basics on twitter will come at me with at least once a week. Why is that? Well part of it is a modern misunderstanding of the idea of bathing. It’s true that we have medieval sources which warn against “excessive” bathing. But here’s the thing, that wasn’t really about being clean, it was about hanging out naked in bathhouses with the opposite sex. They didn’t want you to not be clean, they wanted you to not be going down the bath house and getting your fuck on.

And yeah, some holy people didn’t bathe, notably saints who would forego bathing themselves but bathe sick or poor people. But if you bring that up you are missing the point. Medieval people thought that bathing and being clean was really nice, so giving it up and living with your stank was a sign that you had given up on the corporeal world and only thought of heaven. It was holy because it was uncomfortable, like wearing a hair shirt, or eating vegan, and hitting your chest with rocks and sitting in the desert trying not to wank. You know, standard saint stuff. It is mentioned because it is uncommon and uncomfortable.

These things, while they make sense in context are often taken by people who have never learned a damn thing about the middle ages and read in the worst possible light. If you intrinsically believe (and it is a belief) that the medieval period is the Dark Ages, and very bad, then you read stuff like this and just assume people are gross and dirty, even if there’s no real evidence of that.

You know what else helps? Well, in the modern period sometimes people were gross. In both the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there were times when some doctors claimed that bathing was harmful. This was often linked to the idea that bathing with warm water would open the pores and allow contagion in. And here’s the thing about that – a lot of people just don’t know what the medieval period is, but they are pretty sure it is when stuff was gross. So if they hear about doctors telling you not to bathe they are like, “LOL medieval people were gross”, even if that is going down smack bang in the modern period.

Now on the one hand we can see this as a historical quibble. After all it’s not like I don’t have a history of getting big mad about someone incorrectly relating to the medieval period. But here’s the thing, allowing myths like this to perpetuate allows us to keep upholding harmful ideas about the medieval period that furthers our colonialist ideas about history, and simultaneously allows us to gloss over all the harmful and gross stuff that we as modern people do. If we always blame medieval people for everything difficult it allows us to deny their humanity and write off a thousand years of thinking and culture that still influences us now. So, like, could you not?

- Eleanor Janega, “I assure you, medieval people bathed.”

#eleanor janega #hygiene #medieval #history

[iwanthermidnightz]

When she was 18, Taylor Swift wrote a song called “Fifteen.” “Back then I swore I was going to marry him someday, but I realized some bigger dreams of mine,” she sang, sounding more like a wizened great-grandmother than a rising senior.

“Fifteen” is evocative, if a little sanitized: Nimble mandolin strums mimic the nervous-excited butterflies of the first day of high school, as Swift sings of wide-eyed hope that “one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, ‘You know I haven’t seen you around before.’”

There was a certain emotional truth to the lyrics — do several years’ age difference ever seem more consequential than when you’re a teenager? — but some older listeners were skeptical. “You applaud her skill,” wrote a critic for the Guardian in a mixed review of Swift’s second album, “Fearless,” “while feeling slightly unsettled by the thought of a teenager pontificating away like Yoda.”

Swift, now 31, sings, “When you are young they assume you know nothing,” on “Folklore,” an LP that is both compositionally mature and braided throughout with references to the specific, oft-denigrated wisdom of teenagers. By the end of that song, “Cardigan,” the narrator has excavated such a heap of florid but emotionally lucid memories that she must conclude, with the force of a sudden revelation, “I knew everything when I was young.”

Though it’s not as flashy a topic as exes, fame or A-list celebrity feuds, age has long been a recurring theme in Swift’s work. A numerology enthusiast with a particular attachment to 13, Swift has also released a handful of songs whose titles refer to specific ages: “Seven,” “Fifteen,” and, of course, “22,” the chatty “Red” hit on which she summed up that particular junction of emerging adulthood as feeling “happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time.” Like her contemporary Adele, Swift seems to enjoy time-stamping her music, sometimes presenting it like a public-facing scrapbook that will always remind her what it felt like to be a certain age — even if, with their millions of fans and armfuls of Grammys, neither of these women is exactly typical.

Swift’s critics have often seemed even more hyper attuned to her age. Perhaps because precocity played such a role in her story from the beginning — at 14, she became the youngest artist to sign a publishing deal with Sony/ATV; at 20, she became the youngest to win the album of the year Grammy — many listeners have been fascinated with how her evolution into adulthood has, or hasn’t, played out in her songs. People comb Swift’s lyrics for allusions to sex, alcohol and profanity as meticulously as MPAA representatives do a borderline-PG movie. Particular attention was paid to her 2017 album “Reputation” and its several mentions of drunkenness and dive bars — even though Swift was 27 when it came out.

The relative puritanism of Swift’s music up until “Reputation” did feel like an intentional decision: Unlike the female pop stars who broadcast their “loss of innocence” as a sudden and irrevocable transformation, Swift seemed acutely conscious that she did not want to repel younger listeners — or lose the approval of their parents. At best, it felt like an acceptance of her status as a role model; at worst, it had the whiff of a marketing strategy.

But the mounting obsession with whether Swift was “acting her age” also reflected a larger societal double standard. Famous or not, women face much more intense scrutiny around age, whether it’s those constant cultural reminders of the biological clock’s supposed ticking or the imperative that women of all ages stay “fresh-faced” or risk their own obsolescence. (“People say I’m controversial,” Madonna said in 2016. “But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around.”) And while girlish youth and ingenuity are rewarded in some contexts, they’re also easily dismissed as silly and frivolous as soon as that girl strays too close to the sun — as Swift has experienced time and again.

Despite having once been a teenage girl myself (unlike a lot of music critics), I confess that I am not completely free of these internalized biases. I was initially dismissive of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” a song that appeared on Swift’s 2019 album “Lover.” The first few times I heard it, I wondered what a grown woman on the cusp of 30 was doing still writing about homecoming queens and teenage gossip.

But over time, I’ve come to appreciate the song and its dark vision, which acknowledges cruelty, depression and the threat of sexual violence (“Boys will be boys then, where are the wise men?”) more directly than any of the songs Swift wrote when she was an actual teenager. The senior boys in this song are not the sort who wink and say to freshman girls wholesome things like, “Haven’t seen you around before” — which, unfortunately, makes them feel more authentic. Even the title “Miss Americana” alludes to a larger world outside the high school walls, and the greater systemic forces that keep such patterns repeating well into adulthood.

“Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” now feels like a precursor to some of the richest songs on “Folklore,” which finds Swift returning once again to her school days with the keen, selectively observant eye of an adult. Consider “Seven,” an impressionistic recreation of her perspective at that age. The second verse, charmingly, plays like a first-grader’s breathless sequence of unguarded observations:

“And I’ve been meaning to tell you, I think your house is haunted, your dad is always mad and that must be why/And I think you should come live with me and we can be pirates, then you won’t have to cry.”

But “Seven” is not cutesy so much as poignant, because of the tensions that result when Swift’s adult perspective interjects. “Please, picture me in the trees, before I learned civility,” she sings in a yearning soprano, prompting the listener to wonder what sorts of feral pleasure she — and all of us — have exchanged for the supposed “civility” of adulthood.

Quite a few songs on “Evermore,” Swift’s second release of 2020, also toggle between past and present, conscious of what is lost and gained by the passage of time. The playful “Long Story Short” passes a note to Swift’s younger self (“Past me, I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things”), while “Dorothea,” like “Seven,” revisits a fevered childhood friendship from the cool perspective of adulthood.

Most striking is the bonus track “Right Where You Left Me,” a twangy tale of a “girl who got frozen” (“Time went on for everybody else, she won’t know it/She’s still 23, inside her fantasy”). That language echoes something Swift admits in the 2020 Netflix documentary “Miss Americana”: “There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous. And that’s kind of what happened to me. I had a lot of growing up to do just trying to catch up to 29.”

But Swift’s recent songs, at their best, understand that “growing up” isn’t always a linear progression in the direction of something more valuable. Take the “Folklore” songs “Cardigan” and “Betty,” which use an interconnected set of characters to chronicle teenage drama and celebrate the heightened emotional knowledge of youth. “I’m only 17, I don’t know anything, but I know I miss you,” Swift sings in the voice of James, a high schooler who broke Betty’s heart and has shown up on her doorstep to ask forgiveness. Maybe that is a melodramatic thing to do; maybe it is the sort of thing adults could stand to do more often. Swift’s music helps us to remember that growing up doesn’t automatically mean growing wiser — it can just as easily mean compromise, self-denial and growing numb to emotions we once felt with bracing intensity.

In a gesture to regain control of her songs, Swift is currently rerecording her first six albums (her master recordings were recently sold by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings to the investment firm Shamrock Capital). Last month she released a note-for-note update of her early hit “Love Story,” and has promised to release an entire new-old version of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” later this year. It has been amusing to think of Swift going back and inhabiting the voice of her teenage self: On the face of it, “Fifteen” is particularly surreal to imagine her singing as an adult.

In another way, though, “Fifteen” — with its distant reflections on the youthful folly of expectations — makes more sense and carries more emotional weight being sung by a 30-something than it does an 18-year-old. Perhaps Swift was preparing for such an exercise when she made “Folklore,” an album that shakes off years of scrutiny and finds her reveling in the creative freedom to be as young or as old as she wants to be.

#posting the whole article with my emphasis because i thought this was very interesting #taylor swift

[sapphire-wine]

narumayo shippers DNI (you, a Pearl role-player, are counted and exiled with the rest of them) /j

[Written after everything else: I *knoooow* this is a joke ask and I'm apologizing for this rant in advance and none of you are obligated to real this entire *essay* of personal mess.

However if it helps even one person with seeing certain aspects of an adult's behavior when they're young then I'll consider my service done. Because sometimes joking is not just jokes, no matter how much you want them to be. Sometimes isolated incidents are part of a larger pattern and it's sometimes up to you to see them because the adult will actively avoid letting you know.]

Me, about to take this opportunity to share a really personal experience that hopefully gives my opinion on narumayo. It has a lot of icky vibes in it despite not being too graphic and nothing really happening, but I think it will help describe the very visceral reaction I get seeing Maya and Phoenix be shipped in the original trilogy. I've long since stopped being embarrassed for this and usually talk to people about it, because you can't beat yourself up over things you don't realize or don't want to realize in the moment.

This is very long and I apologize for being very personal on main. TW for harassment, sexual implication(?), general creepy and slimy man

The long story short is, any adult that willingly and actively tries to get into a relationship with a teenager ("legal" or not because if you would date them at 18/19 when they're barely legal you would likely date them at 17) is not a good person.

So, I've been wanting to tell this story for a while just as kind of a warning tale, because a lot of it I only recognized in hindsight as fitting together.

When I was 19, I became friends with this older guy who joined my job. He was working on a project and I offered to help him with it, running a machine that could either be run with one or two people. He would drive me places and we would hang out both at and outside of work and I thought it was cool. We would make fun of some of our coworkers for things and he could make me laugh until I cried. He would tell me that I was so sure of myself at a young age and it takes some people a long time to get to that level.

He would also say things to me that in all honesty should have made me uncomfortable, and many times did (he would tell me how many women he slept with, etc.). But for the most part I took it as jokes, because I thought that was what our friendship dynamic was. I would joke that I was reporting him to HR, and he would freak out. I thought the freakout was funny and part of a bit.

He would occasionally tell people that I'd "seen the inside of his room" with no context implying that we slept together. He would tell me that he was "a very attractive man" and I wasn't "appreciating" that. He once tried to get me to come over to his apartment during finals week and when I refused, less than an hour later he was telling me about a "tinder date who fell asleep on his couch."

Nothing happened. Except when I officially shut down his advances by saying I had a boyfriend (which was a lie but I had lightly been seeing a friend at the time), he started becoming extremely cold and distant. He started demanding my professional time to help him with his project more and more while not talking to me personally, at the expense of me learning other techniques. To the point where he was emailing my boss telling him that I wasn't doing my job and that my boss needed to email me to force me to work that day (because he made it as though the machine would not be run if I wasn't there despite there being two people assigned that day and I had originally emailed him to see if he could cover for me). It was an incredibly slimy move to try to force and bully me to do something because he couldn't get with me personally. Luckily, my boss was extremely understanding and knew me, and I was able to talk to him and leave that specific project.

I've left out many details, both because I don't remember them and because I don't know how to fit them into a post like this.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that saying narumayo should be canon especially during the original trilogy just does both of the characters a disservice, at least by US standards. I don't know the culture in Japan and I'm not going to pretend I do. Narumayo would ruin Phoenix's character (for me) because instead of being a funny lawyer man who is incredibly smart, he becomes a slimy man who preys on teenage girls. I don't want that for either of them. The characters, especially Maya's, are much more deserving of a better fate.

I focus on Phoenix in this because it's the job of the older person to make sure lines aren't crossed. Do I think Maya had a bit of a teenage crush on Phoenix in the first game? Maybe, but that's entirely different than an adult actively encouraging a relationship with a teenager.

Maya being in a relationship with an adult so young, whether it works out or not, would make her sick. I know it would, because looking back on the interactions I had with that man and the things I didn't want to think about at the time, made me sick. I used to say I was 17 around him and eventually he would tell me I had to stop because "it was making him uncomfortable the things he was saying." But why would you say things to a 19 year old that you wouldn't say to a 17 year old? And thinking of Maya as *actually* 17 in the beginning of the series is what makes it so awful for me.

I just associate such awful situations with an adult and teenage ship outside of the general illegality. It's a measure of grooming and a power dynamic that's always going to be there. You're at different stages of life and it's going to be so evident especially at that young age. I say it's on the responsibility of the adult to not get in that situation, but there are enough adults out there that won't do that, and you have to look out for yourself.

Anyway I think the connection I made was a bit incomprehensible but I hope what I'm trying to say comes across.

#ellies asks #tw harrassment #tw sex mention

[gatheringbones]

Minnie Bruce Pratt, from Standing Up to the Literary Academy, from Happy Endings: Lesbian Writers Talk About Their Lives And Work, by Kate Brandt, the Naiad Press, 1993:

["Crime Against Nature went on to win great acclaim for Pratt, including a 1989 Lambda Award, an honor given by the Academy of American Poets for a poet's second book. But Pratt's award, prestigious though it is, might never have been noted outside poetry and academic circles had it not been for her acceptance speech. In her talk, Pratt noted that, as a lesbian, she could still be regarded as a criminal in her hometown of Washington, D.C. She also publicly credited the women's and gay and lesbian liberation movements for inspiring her life, her politics, and her work.

While Pratt's words delighted much of her audience (and, later, the larger gay and lesbian community as word of her brave and eloquent speech became widespread), they apparently shocked the two chancellors of the Academy of American Poets who sat on stage during the acceptance speeches. These men tried to cut off Pratt's speech before she had finished talking by interrupting her and by passing her a note. Pratt, however, continued speaking and reading from her award-winning poetry, as audience members vocally expressed their displeasure at the chancellors' rudeness.

When asked why she chose to give such an explicitly political speech at the award ceremony, Pratt explains, "I felt like, this award is taking me out of my usual context, my cultural/political context, and moving me— for the evening at least!— to the front of the stage in mainstream literary life. And I know how typical it is, in that situation, for the folks in the mainstream to see the person who is the 'minority' as an aberration, or as a dancing dog, or sort of an individual talent, right? Who somehow managed to overcome this disability of her minority status and actually write good poetry.”

"I was determined to bring my context with me. And for [the mainstream] to experience me as much as possible within my own culture. And the only way I could do that was to talk about where I had come from, so that they didn't delude themselves into thinking I was rising like Venus on the half-shell out of the ocean," she laughs. "You know? Miraculously appearing in front of them with this book that appeared out of nowhere!

"I felt it was really important and I knew that there were going to be people there who had made the culture that I had come from. [Publisher] Nancy Bereano was there, [writers] Barbara Smith, Jewelle Gomez, Judith McDaniel, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Joy Harjo, Elly Bulkin, [photographer] Joan E. Biren [JEB], my sons— you know, I asked a lot of people to come. Plus, there were other people who weren't literary people, but who were significant movement folks.

"And I just thought, am I going to get up in front of these people and act like I just stepped on the stage— again— out of nowhere? No! It wouldn't have been courteous, it wouldn't have been respectful, it wouldn't have been accurate. So, [the speech] upset folks, but— too bad."

Yet Pratt admits that she hadn't anticipated the hostile reaction of the academy chancellors, who, she says, "clearly had never read these poems. That was the irony of it! They were being hostile to me for the very thoughts and behavior that had enabled me to write the book that [the academy] was giving me an award for.

"They just weren't in touch with what the work was about. They really didn't care. They'd never heard of me; they just didn't care. And that was the thing that was most shocking to me, actually, about the whole evening. The homophobia was horrible. But what was shocking to me was the lack of passion about poetry. I'm used to folks taking it seriously. It is about life. It is about living. It is about the World Out There beyond the walls of the Guggenheim. And I was shocked at the insularity and the narrowness of their feelings about poetry."]

#minnie bruce pratt #lesbian literature #history stuff #wasteland radio

[fursasaida]

do you have sources or opinions about the uh. development of the idea of the 'veil between the worlds' stuff and how it relates to how we understand ... space and place? question brought to you by "i just read some fantasy fiction that royally hacked me off"

lmao did you know one of my big “i don’t work on this but i lowkey develop expertise in it as a hobby” things is fairy tales and folklore

Anyway, I don’t know very much about the history of the “veil” thing, but I am given to understand it originated with the Victorians. Google Scholar has been unforthcoming on this point, so while I do not have sources, I do have opinions! My opinions are these:

As previously discussed, most people in most places were not, until recently, of the opinion that the world is made of space and space is the universal extensive backdrop, the dimension in which things happen. Moreover, even if we more or less think the world is made of space semiconsciously and in our uses of language, it's not really how most people think most of the time, even in contexts where space in this sense (as opposed to "room") has been invented/internalized. Instead, the knowledge of the world was and is structured much more around places, routes, and regions (which are just a kind of place distinguished by being part of a larger whole). Places have insides and outsides. They are distinct from one another. (Although, as with regions, they can also nest or overlap; this isn't state territory or administrative boundaries we're talking about. Those are spatial artifacts.) Therefore, in a spaceless world, there is nothing contradictory about believing that there are, simply, places where magic is stronger or where the gods dwell or where time behaves differently, and so forth. Just because things aren't like that here means nothing about whether they're like that there. To be clear: I am not saying people in the past (or who practice such traditions today) had or have no sense of a visible/invisible, mundane/extraordinary, or material/immaterial divide. That, I think, is pretty truly universal, and simply a product of human cognition. We have myths in many cultures about a deep past when knowledge (or ignorance) was perfect and the world was immediate, young, more alive, partly because, for whatever reason, the way we experience reality includes the sense that there are some gaps in it, or a little too much room. ("A mystical experience" is basically--and across many traditions--an experience of the full immediacy we normally don't have.) However, places like Olympus or Tir-na-Nog or the realm of Ereshkigal are, still, places. You may not think you will find yourself in Hades or the land of the ancestors if you fall down a well,* but you can still think it is possible for someone to go there in a non-metaphorical sense. They may need extra steps or divine/magical assistance, but going is still going. You know, like people do in the stories.  And at the same time you can very easily accept that some extraordinary kinds of creatures or spirits really are here in this realm, and that their personalities and behaviors differ from place to place (animism, genius loci, some types of ancestor-honoring practices, etc).

(*Or in other words: to think you will end up in Hades if you fall down a well is actually to think about it spatially, or indeed geologically, as simply being what is found at a certain distance down. Why should Hades/Hell/etc, as a place, be under this well, all wells, any wells, just because it's under the Earth? These places have defined entrances, in the same way that you can walk up to a city wall as much as you like and this means nothing about whether you’ll get in if there’s no gate there.)

So I do think plenty of archaeologists, anthropologists, folklorists, etc. who study this kind of thing and look at the iconography or narratives as "obviously" portraying distinct realms in the sense of dimensions are unwittingly applying their commonsense, spatial sensibility to something that is much more ambiguous--because almost none of them have thought seriously about place as anything other than a location in space. They see a line or a boundary drawn and assume this means two existential dimensions, rather than two places. What now follows is basically the speculative explanation for how we got into this situation. It is based on a lot of things I know for sure, insofar as "for sure" can be known re: intellectual history; but I have not demonstrated a direct link, only surmised it. In Europe--more particularly, to my knowledge, in England, France, and Germany--space in our current sense really starts to get cemented in the 17th century. Notably, at the same time, people suddenly get interested in the scientific question of "the figure of the earth." It had long been known the Earth was round, of course, but suddenly it mattered to people what its precise shape could be. Is it a perfect sphere? An ellipsoid? What kind? What is the precise length of a degree of longitude? Is the Earth longer than it is wide or vice versa? This was the first time that intellectuals in these countries started seriously trying to reconcile the Biblical narrative of the Earth's formation with ~Science. They cared about this for some obvious reasons, like figuring out whether Newton or Descartes was right about the physics of motion, and testing Newton's gravitational theory; and there were practical reasons as well (the modern science of geodesy, which is what you need to make "accurate" maps for consolidating your state and conquering places, and to, say, build a railway, gets born as part of this). But they cared about it for another reason too. Namely: after the Thirty Years' War, there was a real sense of dislocation in Western Europe. This dislocation was religious, political, and social all at once. There was thus a serious need to realign political and social order with the cosmic order, and the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution are significantly responses to this. Empirical knowledge (especially math) was to be the universal language that would allow people to communicate across differences rather than engaging in bloody warfare (they were quite explicit about this, especially Leibnitz, but if you know to look for it you can read it in Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Descartes...there was a reason they all suddenly got obsessed with reason), and the "Quest for the Figure of the Earth" was part of that. So was the emergence of geology a bit later, as the history of the earth becomes increasingly scientific rather than Biblical; the questions that created geology came out of these initial struggles to conceive of the Earth as a "natural" artifact to be known by science. This matters here because it means a redefinition of what the Earth is and what can happen there that is not just a matter of scientific debate but is fundamentally connected to social and political understandings of the world. In other words, it redefines what “the Earth” is as a place and in its cosmic place. One consequence of the new rational empiricism as a reaction to a war understood as being caused by religious ontological commitments and enthusiasms was a transformation in what counted as real. On the one hand, things that under the old Aristotelian paradigm were treated as real but imperceptible and therefore impossible to study (like magnetism) became newly study-able. In the Newtonian, empirical paradigm, you don't have to be able to say what something is or even what physical qualities it has; only to demonstrate its reliable and reproducible effects. On the other, things not observable in these terms become defined as unreal. At the same time, the shift from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian science is itself, precisely, a shift from a world explained by regions to a world explained by space. "Regions" here means places, but it also means directions like up and down. Aristotelian physics held that substances behaved in certain ways (like smoke rising and rocks falling) because it was in their essential nature to belong in different places. In other words, different areas of the world, as well as different substances, were ontologically different in real ways that had real effects. In modern empiricism, this is not at all the case. The laws of how things behave are universal laws. They are not about belonging, difference, and places/directions that have their own meanings and hierarchy; they are about forces interacting contingently. It's exactly Newton who formulates the idea of "absolute space" as an infinite and homogeneous, but insensible (like magnetism) extent over which things are distributed. Forces’ specific interactions may be locally different, but the forces are translocal and indeed universal, because they happen in the single homogeneous substrate that is space. So all of this percolates through various levels of society and fields of knowledge through the 18th century and into the 19th (and up to today). One effect is the redefinition of ghosts, fairies, elves, and so on as not real. It takes a very long time for this news to really reach everybody, though; I've read accounts of rural peasants in the British Isles and Ireland who still fully believed and practiced fairy lore into the 20th century. You also see some wobbles, like the famous hoax involving fairies and Yeats, in part because new technologies are making new things observable and therefore potentially “real” in the Newtonian terms. Thus Spiritualism, for example, was in many ways a practice of reliably producing observable effects of things that are not themselves observable; its attempt at credibility was pursued in Newtonian terms.

At the same time, after initial big achievements in geodesy, the figure of the earth keeps getting refined, details filled in, and so on. The same thing happens to the underground with geology. It similarly takes a while for this to really settle in; you have older formats like isolaria and cosmographic maps overlapping with properly spatial, cartographic mapping. (An isolarium is a world atlas that doesn't try to put all the pieces together but treats every landmass individually as an island. The islands tend to get filled in with what we would now consider fantastical stuff because the mapping enterprise, with isolaria, was all about places and their different characters; things did not have to be consistent, there was no homogeneous substrate. That fantastical stuff is part of what's called "cosmography.") So by the time you have people studying folklore in the 19th century, in these same countries and others, as part of nationalist projects and what have you, these educated elite types are likely to have accepted the following. 1) We know the shape and nature of the earth--not in every particular, but we know that physical conditions are basically the same everywhere--and 2) what is empirically unobservable is not real; and 3) space is a dimension, it is homogeneous, it is the dimension in which things that exist exist. (Plato is howling somewhere.) To be clear, #1 especially matters here because it means the idea that there might be places where things behave/occur abnormally gets ruled out. Long before the maps had actually been filled in, there were "no blank spaces" on them anymore. (Insofar as they ever did get filled in, that still hadn't happened by the turn of the 20th century. I actually have a personal theory about where the blanks are now, but that's a whole other digression.) Therefore, if you want to collect and make a fuss over stories about unreal beings and events occurring in places where the universal laws of physics and histories of geology do not seem to obtain, you cannot fit these beings, events, and settings into the world in which you understand yourself to live. There is quite literally nowhere to put them. They cannot exist in a physical, geodetic, geologic world of space; they cannot coexist with its elements. Let us now note that in the 19th century we also get the Spiritualist movement, which conjures up lots of ghosts and puts them behind a Veil. Ghosts in this framework are real, but they cannot be here. They can visit, but only by "piercing the veil." I therefore further surmise that, likely without being fully conscious or intentional about it, these folklorists and such had to assume that when people talk about a fairy court, etc., they are talking about another dimension, one different from the spatial dimension that we live in. (This is the same assumption the experts I was dumping on at the beginning make; this is what I mean about a commonsense spatial sensibility.) The language of "the veil" may well be influenced by Spiritualism, or may not; I think the "thin places" and "times when the veil is thinnest" stuff is even more recent than the Victorians, like mid-20th century. But what matters more IMO is that the two moves--what happens to ghosts in Spiritualism and what happens to fairies etc. in folklore--are parallel. They both get kicked out of here, they get made not part of "the world." The world is one place, and what is "not real" has no place in it. So in order to talk about interacting with those things that have no place here in the world, it becomes natural, maybe inevitable, to talk about what separates them from us. You need a barrier to explain why something that exists (if you believe it does) is not visible and testable all the time and everywhere, or to make sense of how other people could believe such a thing exists.

There is a very deep irony to all this, though. In making the world a single place with a single set of conditions and a single set of possibilities for what can happen and what can exist, right, we end up creating this “other realm” where all the other stuff is. In physics there is talk of a “quantum realm” exactly because the conditions, behaviors, objects, and so forth found there seem to behave differently from the “classical realm” of our experience. But "realm” is a very unstable and ambiguous word, not clearly spatial or placial. The irony is that what we have here is, still, in fact a discourse about two places. We just don’t even know that, because our formal thinking has become so spatialized. Thus the nature of the barrier between the two or how it could be possible for conditions to be so different in the “other realm” remains fundamentally mysterious--let alone what “crossing over” could possibly entail. Hence a metaphor like “the veil” becomes important and necessary not just to generate another place to put these unreal things, and not just to explain why these unreal things are not here in the real world/place, but also to paper over the basic absurdity of the whole premise. We have come full circle in that we are still basically talking about there being other places where things are different, but we have made it much more mysterious and confusing than it was (I believe) when it was just accepted that the world contains many places where things may be different.

#dieinct #space and place #waiting at the threshold #in this context i should note that this tag refers not to the threshold between two realms in the sense discussed #but to liminality in human life #but that is the fairies/folklore/etc tag

[uncloseted]

What are your thoughts on critical race theory and how it's being taught or should be taught in schools? Everyone seems to have a different idea of what is being taught and it's hard to keep up. I've heard extreme stories about certain schools but I've also heard that those are mostly people on the right exaggerating. Thank you for answering these political questions and giving such well thought out responses!

Okay so... there's a lot to unpack within the discussion of "critical race theory". I'm going to give a primer of what it is, how it is (and isn't) being used in schools, what the controversy is, and then I'll give my opinions at the end.

What is Critical Race Theory?

"Critical Race Theory" is a previously obscure academic concept. It's an approach to studying US policies and institutions and is typically taught in higher-education institutions like law schools or schools of social work. It's been in use since the 70s, when law professors began considering how racism shapes American law. Basically, Critical Race Theory states that intentional and unintentional racial bias are baked into the way our institutions and legal system functions. CRT is a way of examining how "racism is sustained more through law, policy and practices than through individual bias and discrimination," in the words of Boston University law professor Jasmine Gonzales Rose. It's focused on shifting our attention away from individual people's bad actions (what we commonly think of as being "racism") to instead center how systems uphold racial disparities.

Where did the Controversy about Critical Race Theory Come From?

After the murder of George Floyd last year and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests, these same topics were introduced to public consciousness. Is our police system racist? Are people of color disproportionately likely to be arrested and imprisoned for crimes, even though white people commit crimes at the same rate? (The answer to these questions is yes, just so we're clear). Are there ways in which racial bias is baked into our legal system? There were a lot of people around that time who became aware that our systems are discriminatory, and, as with everything, a lot of people who pushed back against anything actually changing.

Here's where the whole thing gets a bit convoluted. The debate over "critical race theory" can be traced to just one person- Christopher Rufo, a fellow at a conservative think tank. On September 2nd of 2020, Rufo appeared on Fox News's show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight". On the show, Rufo claimed that "critical race theory" had "pervaded every institution in the federal government" and called on President Trump to ban "critical race theory" in federal workforce trainings. It's somewhat unclear why he thought this to begin with. In that same conversation, Rufo deemed "critical race theory" "divisive, un-American propaganda". From there, this idea that "critical race theory" (used as "a catchall phrase for any examination of systemic racism" or even as a catchall phrase to denote anything advocating for social change, as opposed to the principles of Critical Race Theory that are actually used in educational institutions) is infiltrating our government took off on Twitter.

By September 17th of 2020, Trump was denouncing "critical race theory" and had created the 1776 Commission to "promote patriotic education". The 1776 Commission was in direct opposition to the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize winning, long-form journalism project developed for The New York Times, which aims to explore American history through African-American perspectives. The 1619 Project was being used as a tool in public school curricula to help students understand the impact of slavery on modern society. It's important to note here that at no point was Critical Race Theory being taught in schools except at the university level, and that the 1619 Project is not based in Critical Race Theory. When discussing the 1776 Commission, Trump said, "we want our sons and daughters to know the truth. America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Our country wasn't built by cancel culture, speech codes, and crushing conformity. We are not a nation of timid spirits."

To recap: Rufo introduces this concept of "critical race theory" to the conservative media on September 2nd. In his context, "critical race theory" has no real definition and has been divorced from actual Critical Race Theory. 15 days later, Trump adopts "critical race theory" as a major theme in his campaign, using the 1619 project to justify his claims that "critical race theory" is being taught to "our children" in schools, and he founds the 1776 Commission to provide an alternative narrative of American history. Conservative media outlets jump onto the "critical race theory" debate, but without a clear idea of what Critical Race Theory is (which is why it seems like there's a lot of different ideas about what it is and what's being taught) in an attempt to push for limits on teaching practices relating to racism.

In 2021, Joe Biden dissolved the 1776 Commission, but bills were introduced in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas to "restrict teaching critical race theory in public schools". In some cases, these bills single out the 1619 Project in particular, even though it is not based in Critical Race Theory. Other bills have an even larger ban on programs that involve social justice in general.

I'm not familiar with any "extreme stories" about "critical race theory" being taught in K-12 schools, but if you want to send ones you come across my way, I'm happy to discuss the veracity of those claims.

As for my opinion, I think it's good that students are being introduced to the ways in which our country's history has impacted the way our country's systems are built, and it's good that they're being introduced to the ways in which those systems are discriminatory. 48% of Gen Z are POC. 50%(ish) of Gen Z is female. 15.9% of Gen Z is LGBT. We're becoming more diverse as a society, and so the ways in which people are discriminated against are more visible, even to kids. It's important that kids understand (in an age-appropriate way) what discrimination is, why it happens, and what they can do about it.

Kids who are POC or female or obviously gender-divergent don't get the luxury of being able to ignore discrimination. Black kids are aware of "critical race theory" (the way that society systemically discriminates against them) from the get-go. Nobody is arguing that we should be telling white six year olds that they're evil for being white or that their parents are evil for being white. They're saying that a white six year old will notice that they're being treated differently than their Black best friend, and they'll know that's unfair. It's better to respond to their questions about fairness with an acknowledgement that things aren't fair, but we can work to fix them, instead of insisting that there is no problem, and that we are the "Greatest and Most Exceptional Nation In The History of The World".

Our current educational system does a lot of whitewashing when it comes to US History. Just think back to any celebration you had of Columbus Day or Thanksgiving in school, where they make it seem like the colonists and Native Americans were friends. It's important that instead of whitewashing our history, we acknowledge that many people were, and still are, hurt by that history. It's important to center non-white voices in those curricula, because without them, the story we're telling isn't true. History classes should not be a stage for American nationalist propaganda, and yet that's what they become when we insist on only teaching about the "good" things we've done.

Do I think that the 1619 Project is the way to go about that goal? Not necessarily. There are legitimate criticisms that can and have been made about that project, and I agree with some of them. Likewise, I think actual Critical Race Theory is too advanced for your average K-12 student, and it's not the best framework for teaching these topics. There are educators much smarter than I am who can (and have) come up with age-appropriate curricula to talk about these topics. But it's important that we allow for and encourage discussion of those topics, and putting a blanket ban over anything social justice related isn't going to make that happen.

[whenrockwasyoung19]

It’s Time to Talk about a Bespectacled Elephant in the Room

I’ve been in the Beatles fandom for 8 and a half years. I have had a Beatles blog for the entirety of those 8 and a half years, and I have watched as discourse about these four men evolve. The discourse inside and outside the fandom has become so toxic that I don’t think I can engage with it in the same way that I could before. Let me explain. 

When I entered this fandom 8 and a half years ago, it was in 2012, quite an infamous year in tumblr history. That was the pique of “”cringey”” fandom culture. The Beatles fandom was as steeped in fandom culture as any other fandom. I know this because I was part of two of the top of fandoms at the time, Doctor Who and Sherlock. Believe me, I have seen cringe. 

The fandom at the time was totally aware of the John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s flaws as individuals, but most fans tended to simply enjoy Beatles fandom as if it were the 60s. Some might call it ignorant bliss. If you asked me at the time, I’d have said it was self-aware ignorant bliss--if that even makes sense. At the time, there wasn’t a person with a Beatles icon who hadn’t heard the line “John Lennon beat his wife.” Everyone knew it, but everyone also knew the real story, and so everyone just made peace with it. As a result, people didn’t think about every bad thing the Beatles ever did on a daily basis. It was more like a once-a-month kind of thing. Otherwise, fandom discourse was quite fun and relaxed. There were no shipping wars, no one fought over who was the best Beatle, everyone gushed over the Beatles wives, and we all just had fun with fics and fan art. 

Of course, in this period, people engaged in conversations about one bespectacled Beatles problematic behavior. These conversations usually came from outside of the fandom. It was usually randos coming into the tags or into someone’s ask box and ranting about John Lennon’s violent behavior. Some of it came from within the fandom. Some people really didn’t like John and gave others shit if they listed John as their favorite Beatle. A lot of the discourse boiled down to: ‘hey, I see you like John Lennon. You should know that he beat his wife. And now that you know that, you should feel bad about ever liking him in the first place.’ And the response was often, ‘Actually, John Lennon didn’t beat his wife. They weren’t even married at the time. And also he didn’t beat her, he slapped her once in the face, and then never did it again.’ No one’s minds were changed. The fans had made their peace, and the antis came off as cynical and pretentious. 

When Dashcon happened, and Tumblr took a hard look at its cringey fandom culture, the Beatles fandom evolved as well. The fandom became, frankly, less fun. It no longer felt like a group of people who found the Beatles decades after the 60s and were fangirling like it was 1965. There was still some of that left, but a lot of it kind of faded. So, most fandom interactions were reblogging pictures of the Beatles from the 60s and various interview clips and quotes. But the barrage of antis never really went away, and the response didn’t evolve. 

Then, the advent of cancel culture came on. I always waited for the Beatles to get, like, officially canceled, but I also felt they were uncancel-able at the same time. Let me explain. I have been a Beatles fan primarily in an online space, rarely engaging with fans in real life. But I have met fans who are life-long Beatles fans, people who are a lot older than us and who’s fandom isn’t tied to the internet. They don’t give a shit about any of our discourse. They may or may not have heard it before, but they seem totally indifferent to all of it. I’m sure most of them have never heard ‘Mclennon’ before. These are the people that flock to see Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in concert (and pay astronomical prices for it). These are the people who go to record shops and buy vinyl. These are the people I run into at flea markets who buy up all the Beatles merch before I can even arrive (true story). So, the Beatles will never be canceled because there will always be people who love the Beatles and don’t engage with online discourse. Rarely said, but thank god for Gen-X. 

As cancel culture took over the internet, fandoms changed. It’s not as noticeable in fandoms without problematic favs. For instance, I’m also steeped in the Tom Holland fandom, and that boy is a little angel who has done no wrong. No one has discourse about the unproblematic boy who plays an equally unproblematic character. But in fandoms with ‘problematic favs’ the mood has shifted. I’m also in the Taron Egerton fandom. Taron Egerton, for those who only follow me for my Beatles stuff, is a genuinely sweet and kind person who has had zero scandals in his six year career. There were some rumblings when he was cast as Elton John, and some people took issue with the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay man. This discourse seemed to die quickly as a whole lot of straight people played gay people in that same year (Olivia Coleman as queer Queen Anne, Emma Stone as her queer lover, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury). Why jump on this boy who at the time was still technically on the rise. He’s not exactly the same target as someone like Scarlett Johansson who has her pick of roles. Taron doesn’t have quite that some power in Hollywood, and I think most people made peace with the fact that this was a big role for him, and it’s not really fair to take that away from him. So, all in all, the closest thing to a scandal was something that died pretty much on arrival. 

That was until this summer when everything changed. When George Floyd was murdered, celebrities flocked to social media to mourn his loss. Taron’s social media account was silent. For weeks, Taron said nothing about Black Lives Matter or Floyd’s death. This caused outrage in the fandom. Many raced to defend him, starting a hashtage #IstandwithTaron. Others sought to tear him down and anyone who supported him. The kind of mania this one incident caused tore through an otherwise peaceful fandom. What I saw was two sides in a total panic. The antis were people who once had faith that Taron was a good person and were now questioning that. Andthe defenders were people who desperately wanted him to be a good person and were afraid that he wasn’t. In essence, both sides could feel Taron about to get canceled. The defenders wanted to stop it, the antis wanted to ride that wave. 

What this long drawn out Taron example is meant to convey: is that cancel culture has put fandoms on edge. One’s fav has to be perfect, otherwise it can jeopardize the existence of the entire fandom. I’ll admit, I was afraid that I’d be some kind of pariah for standing by Taron through all of this. My actions were to basically reason with the antis but still defend Taron. I defend him mostly because I felt that his silence was the result of a needed social media absence and that trying to shame him back onto social media was an invasion of privacy. But I was genuinely afraid that he would get canceled, and the fun of the Taron fandom would be lost. 

In the Beatles fandom, it often feels like the Beatles, mainly John, have already been canceled. I see this coming from two different sources: antis from outside of the fandom and antis within the fandom. The outside antis are just the same as the ones from 2012. These are people who like to drop in that John Lennon beat his wife, posting this in the tag (which violates an ancient tumblr real by the way--no hate in the tags). 

The antis outside the fandom speak to a larger anti-John Lennon sentiment online. I see references to John Lennon ‘beating his wife’  on Tiktok and twitter. The tone of anti-John Lennon posts has shifted. Before, it felt like the antis were being smug but also argumentative. They wanted to have a conversation about this bit of info they read on Reddit with no context. Now, “John Lennon beating his wife” is practically a meme. It’s a running joke online that John Lennon was a wife beater. I can’t look on my instagram explore page because every so often a John Lennon beats his wife meme will pop up amongst the other, normal, memes.

This change in discourse suggests that the internet has just accepted this as fact now. I should note that back in 2012, it seemed as if few people knew this fact. The fandom knew it, and these random antis knew it, but few others did. Now, because of how common these memes are, it seems to be widespread knowledge.

Consequently, the Beatles fandom, who used to ward off attacks from antis, seems to have given in. I recently saw a post from a Beatles blog (had the URL and icon and everything) that confessed they felt guilty for listening to the Beatles, and I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed in the fandom. People tend to put disclaimers in posts about John or even all four that John is an ‘awful man.’ It seems like the self-aware ignorant bliss has completely gone away. Occasionally, I still see posts joyously talking about Mclennon or reblogs of old photos from the 60s. But the culture has shifted. 

Online, it no longer feels comfortable to be a Beatles fan. It feels like you have to own up to 8 decades of mistakes by four men you’ve never met. And, I should note, this is kind of how it feels to be a fan of anything right now. Taron is not canceled today, but he could be tomorrow. It’s this pervasive feeling of guilt that the person you’re supporting may or definitely has or is doing something wrong.

I’ll admit this uncomfortable feeling has expanded into other parts of my fandom life. I listen to their music, and I feel elated--the way I always have. Then, I get these intrusive thoughts which sound like all the worst parts of Twitter combined. It wasn’t always like this. Back in 2012, when I knew almost nothing about them, I saw them as four young men who were full of happiness, love for another, and talent. Back then, listening to their music was exciting and joyous. Sometimes, I fear that I can never feel that way again. Next year, when I finally go to Liverpool, will I be filled with excitement or guilt? 

I say all this for a few reasons. One, I love John Lennon. I appreciate all the good he did for the world not just as a musician and an artist but also his advocacy and charity work. I love him, and a part of me will always love him, but observing the change in discourse has enlightened me as a historian. Part of my job is to observe people’s legacies, and John’s is perhaps the most interesting legacy I’ve ever observed. When he died, he was hailed as a saint. But tall poppy syndrome set in, and the antis started. This culture grew and grew to the point where it seems to, at least among the younger generation, taken over the sainthood. 

But as a historian and a fan, I have never seen the saint or the devil. I’ve only seen the man, the incredibly flawed man. The thing that these antis never understand is that John Lennon was painfully aware of his own flaws to the point where it made him all the more self-destructive. In essence, his past mistakes caused him to make additional mistakes. But John, aware of his own flaws, always tried to change and was often successful. I’ve talked about this before, but John demonstrated that he was capable of being a good person, like properly so, again and again. After he struck Cynthia, he never hit her again. His shortcomings as a father to Julian weren’t repeated with Sean. He worked on his drinking, his drug addiction, and his anger, trying to overcome those demons till the day he died. By all accounts, the John Lennon that died in 1980 is not the John Lennon who struck Cynthia Powell at school. That John Lennon was living a cleaner, healthier life. He was a better father to both his sons by that point, and was trying to repair his relationship with Julian. He was a good husband to Yoko and saw himself living a long and happy life. 

John Lennon cannot and should not be boiled down to just his flaws. It’s one thing as a fan to acknowledge that John is a flawed human being (news flash: they all are), but he is also much bigger than that. 

So once again, why am I writing this long, rambling post, once again talking about John Lennon’s virtues? Because if I can’t engage with healthy discourse about the Beatles and John Lennon, then I can’t engage with discourse on the topic at all. So, I probably will post less Beatles stuff because I find it hard to go through the tags or even my dash (well, I can’t really go through my dash anymore for other reasons I’m not going to get into right now). If any of my followers have noticed a lot of Taron posts lately, it’s not just because I love Taron, it’s because Taron’s  tag is pretty much the only location on tumblr I feel 100% comfortable in. Any foray into John or the Beatles tags becomes uncomfortable and guilt-ridden quickly. 

So, I probably will post less about the Beatles until I can find a blog or a tag that doesn’t give me bad vibes. My fandom will likely outgrow tumblr and the internet. I have a ton of Beatles books; maybe I’ll rely on those. I am doing official scholarly research on them now. Maybe that will be my outlet. I’m sorry if I post less about them now, but it’s really for my own well-being. 

#John lennon #the beatles