americans imagining Land Back as a reverse colonization where your family is violently displaced from their home—just no, and there’s so much projection and anti-indigenous sentiment in that reaction that we need to unpack. in the same way abolishing private property does not equate to taking the personal property/housing from regular human beings, land back deserves your full attention in the actual demands and futurities that native people are calling for. this knee jerk resistance against land back needs to stop inventing hypotheticals instead of engaging with the reality of this which is A. a broader political call to rematriate land to indigenous communities, who currently have limited resources because this is a settler colonial state B. specific calls to return specific lands—often ‘public lands’ i.e. national parks, blm land etc—which often carry cultural significance and also very direct legacies of violence tied to the original displacement. C. a return to indigenous land management strategies, which are place-based and culture-based and offer paths to restoring/reclaiming/reconfiguring the ecologies and human communities most damaged by colonialism/capitalism/the world we currently live in D. land back is deeply tied to the movements protesting oil and gas pipelines, catastrophic mining, etc ongoing destruction of the environment that place indigenous communities on the frontlines yet threatens /everyone/ downstream who drinks water and has a body
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niki giving phil the flint and steel was cinematic poetry ok did you know every niki is fire she is her own match and own flame in every iteration. the association is always so ridiculously strong it literally writes itself— how likely was it that nobody else in the area had a flint and steel but her !!!!! in every metaphor in every universe etc etc
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so ive been thinking so hard about that transfem butch zoro au.
i feel like at the Very beginning (after kuinas death) she does try to present real feminine like but it doesnt feel like Her and eventually she stops doing it (and in any case its not like kuina was super feminine so why would she try to be like that??)
on the other hand she HAS to make sure everyone knows shes a woman when she beats their ass and becomes the worlds greatest swordsman. so sports bras (or equivalent whatever) and open shirts are a staple
i think she would do hrt (or equivalent Whatever) because again she wants to prove that kuina could have done it. unfortunately i do also think this means she trains about 1 million times as hard
trans sanji............. coming to the realisation that maybe she Wants to be taken care of by a hot butch........................ as a pretty femme
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it is hard to explain without sounding vain or stupid - but the more attractive others find you, the more you're allowed to do. the easier your life is.
i have been on both sides of this. i am queer and cuban. i grew up poor. for a long time i didn't know "how" to dress - and i still don't. i make my sister pick out any important outfits. i have adhd in spades: i was never "cool and quiet", i was the weird kid who didn't understand how "normal" people behave. i was bullied so hard that the "social outcasts" wouldn't even talk to me.
i got my teeth straightened. i cut my hair and learned how to style it. i got into makeup. it didn't matter, at first, if i actually liked what i was doing - it mattered how people responded to it. like a magic trick; the right dress and winged eyeliner and suddenly i was no longer too weird for all of it. i could wear the ugly pokemon shirt and it was just "ironic" or a "cute interest."
when i am seen as pretty, people listen. they laugh at my jokes. they allow me to be weird and a little spacey. i can trust that if i need something, people will generally help me. privilege suddenly rushes in: pretty does buy things. pretty people get treated more gently.
i am the same ugly little girl, is the thing. still odd. still not-quite-fitting-in. still scrambling. still angry and afraid and full of bad things. of course it became my obsession. of course i stopped eating. i had seen, in real time, the exact way it could change my life - simply always be perfect, and things can be easy. people will "overlook" all the other things. i used to have panic attacks at the idea others would see me without makeup - what would they think? even for a simple friend hangout, i'd spend a few hours getting ready. after all, it seemed so obvious to me: these people liked me because i was pretty.
i worry about how much i'm being a bad activist: i understand that "pretty" is determined by white, het, cis, able-bodied hegemonies. if i was really an ally, wouldn't i rally against all of this? recently there's been a "clean girl" trend which copies latinx aesthetics: dark slicked-back hair, hoop earrings. i almost never wear my hair like that; i can hear the middle school guidance counsellor advising me that i might fare better if i toned it down on the culture.
the problem is that i can take pretty on and off. that i have seen how different my life is on a day where i try and a day where i don't. i told my therapist i want to believe the difference is confidence, but it's not. and when you have seen it, you can't unsee it. it lives inside your brain. it rots there; taunting. i get rewarded for following the rules. i am punished for breaking them. end of story.
pretty people can get what they want. pretty people can feel confident without others asking where they got their nerve from. pretty people can be weird and different. pretty people get to have emotions; it's different when they get aggressive, it's pretty when they cry with frustration.
of course people care about this. of course it has crawled into you. of course you want to be seen as attractive. it's not vanity: it's self-preservation.
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absolutely wild to me the amount of people that don't understand Andrew's reaction to Ali hitting Aaron. it was not supposed to be an even retaliation, eye for an eye. it was meant to be a lesson. he wasn't asking for a fight, he was shutting it down before it started. the way Andrew grew up (and frankly, the way a lot of real people including me grew up,) you fight for dominance like dogs. what's mine is mine, what's yours is yours, and if you stay away from my shit, I'll stay away from yours. you cross a line, you get put back in your place. you don't fight about it, because that tells the person that as long as they can hold their own, they can get away with it. and that's not what you want. you cannot allow it to happen again, so you can't allow it to be a fight. Andrew even touches on this in the scene:
"A privileged child like you has never seen the real world. Don't speak of it like you understand."
I think it's hard for people who grew up in safe spaces around safe people to understand the kind of cruelty that you have to have to keep yourself safe in situations where someone is trying to hurt you. you don't hit back, you beat the shit out of them until you're sure they won't do it again 🤷♀️
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