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#they have a lot of like groundwork for something deeper

amourdivine · 7 months

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𝐏𝐈𝐂𝐊 𝐀 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐃 💌 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐈𝐑 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 𝐓𝐎𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐒 𝐘𝐎𝐔?

At last, another Tumblr pick a card reading. After reading started on Youtube, I've realized I missed the written PAC's I used to make once I got to Tumblr. Today, let's take a peek at this person's intentions! I hope you enjoy it & please don’t forget to provide feedback, if you will; If you liked this reading, please consider booking a paid reading or tipping me at @ [email protected]! xo. ♡

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none of the images are mine unless stated otherwise.

how to choose your pile. take deep breaths for a few minutes & look at each and every one of the piles separately. which pile sparks a feeling inside you? which pile gives you a strong memory or calls out to you the most? take your time and feel free to come back to it later.

♡ ♡ ♡ pick a card masterlist & information.

disclaimer. this is a general reading for entertainment purposes. tarot is a divination tool & is not a substitute for medical and professional advice, nor is it meant to be taken as such. i do not take responsibility for any choice(s) made by you or others regarding my readings.

amourdivine. 2021 - 2023 © do not copy, redistribute or edit my content.

PILE 001.

the artist • the lovers • the hierophant

It is possible you are in a relationship with this person, and if not, they wish to be in a relationship with you soon. This person wants commitment, they have a vision of a life with you, but they may be wrapped up in perfectionism - nothing major. They want to make sure you have a solid foundation to grow upon, like laying the groundwork for a good relationship to blossom. This person is very patient as well, I'm sensing Capricorn or Taurus. They think you're very beautiful, pretty much the whole package, pile one.

The Artist in this deck is an extra major arcana card (I'm using the Ethereal Visions Tarot) that speaks of vision and I honestly believe this person envisions more than just a casual relationship with you. Even if they take their sweet time, they want to make sure both of you are compatible, ready for something deeper, for a responsible and mature relationship to one another. Overall, I see very pure, gentle and benevolent intentions from them towards you. ♡

additional messages. pluto in scorpio, long distance relationship, long term commitment, far away/distance, old school, 95, 90, travel, sagittarius, 333, 888, ten of cups, lover of mine, forever, secure attachment.

channeled song. caroline by patrick droney.

♡ ♡ ♡ if you enjoyed this reading, please consider tipping me via paypal @ [email protected]!

PILE 002.

judgement • justice • ten of pentacles.

Whether romantic or not, this person wants to apologize to you. They want to make it right, correct their wrongs and come clean to you. If this person lied or screwed up big time in your connection, they want to tell you they've learnt their lesson. It probably came as a bitter, rude awakening or some sort of very unwanted wake-up call. I think they reminisce on a lot of memories the two of you made and it's possible you've known them for a long time - I see some sort of family tie here. Either you know each other's families or you are literally like family to one another.

They want to talk to you so bad, pile two. There are so many songs in my head (and shuffled in my playlist) about apologizing, righting one's wrongs and wanting to be in one another's life again. I think they want to make amends and finally be honest. I get the energy from you that you're "done" with them, you may have gotten tired of their excuses or empty promises... but if you haven't, consider hearing them out. They're sorry and want to provide you some closure at the very least. ♡

additional messages. scorpio rising, end of the world, bad blood, bastille, wild youth, reckless, "you were my best friend", "how could you", ten of swords, teen drama, betrayal, party animal.

channeled song. blender by 5 seconds of summer.

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PILE 003.

queen of pentacles • ten of wands • seven of pentacles

The energy of this pile feels more platonic, but it can still be romantic for some of you. Either way, this seems like someone who wants to care for you in some type of way, to ease your burdens, to let you rely on them. Their intentions are pure, but you may not be used to accepting help from anyone, pile three. It's understandable.

However, I think this is someone other people may often label as a "safe person". I also heard "earth angel", so some of you may resonate with the term. This person wants to offer you a way out of a difficult situation and I don't see them being forceful or pushy about it, so they'll wait until you ask for them to help you or to accept their help. They see the potential in you to have a brilliant and good future. For some of you, this could be an older figure, like a mother or grandmother, maybe a teacher or someone who's already well-established in their profession. This person wants to ease your anxiety and to make sure you don't feel so alone. They care for you a lot. I think your guides want you to rely on people a bit more often, pile three, to become more interdependent, especially if you're going through something. ♡

additional messages. "count on me", sit on the rooftop, friendship, reconnect, burnout, 777, growth, sustainability, college, agriculture, blossom, bloom, midlife crisis, triggers, red alert, hypervigilance.

channeled song. thinking about you by forester.

♡ ♡ ♡ if you enjoyed this reading, please consider tipping me via paypal @ [email protected]!

PILE 004.

five of swords • the emperor • the fool

I was really hoping all piles would pass the vibe check (lol), but it seems that this person's intentions are muddy... I feel like I'm slowly drowning in quicksand but it's hard to tell if I'm truly in danger or not. Their intentions aren't all that clear, but these intentions aren't good. They seem to be someone driven by a need for control towards others. If you have argued or had a falling out with this person, they do wish to reconnect but I don't think they have changed. The Fool here feels more so like you, as if they want to make a fool out of you.

I wouldn't consider this person an enemy, but they're more of a frenemy. They may say things that hurt you, but talk their way out of an apology. Here's the thing, even if they do wish to reconnect, as I mentioned, I don't think they want to make right by you. They miss some sort of power they felt or even had over you. This person could be very competitive and perhaps having you in their life gave them a kind of advantage over others - they may see things as very "black & white", no nuance or dialogue. It will definitely do you good to stay away from them, pile three. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you already caught onto this person's sneaky ways. ♡

additional messages. player, loser, aries, gemini, "i could never figure you out", "i hate you for what you did", drake, leave me blue, trouble, playlist, dubstep, losing faith, outta here, liar.

channeled song. who by lauv ft. bts | twin flame by montana janel (bonus song + the lyrics are very relevant)

♡ ♡ ♡ if you enjoyed this reading, please consider tipping me via paypal @ [email protected]!

amourdivine. © do not copy, redistribute or edit my content.

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greenhikingboots · 1 year

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Jon’s Pre-Canon Crush

Okay, Jonsa fam. I’ve seen a lot of great posts, especially in the last few months, about Jon’s reactions to Val. Among them, there’s one particular vein I like to assume everyone loves as much as I do. That is, when Jon thinks of Val’s hair as silver vs. when he thinks of it as the color of dark honey. You’ve seen those metas, right? They explain the likelihood of Jon’s future connection to Dany being negative — The air tastes cold. / My tongue is too numb to tell. All I taste is cold. — while his future connection to Sansa will be positive — It had been a long while since Jon Snow had seen a sight so lovely.

Well, in this post I want to expand on the angle of Val-is-sometimes-a-stand-in-for-Sansa. Only, I don’t want to speculate on what will happen between Jon and Sansa in the future, if we ever get GRRM’s last two books. Enough people have already done that, and they’ve done it so wonderfully that I have little to add. Instead, as the title of this post says, I want to focus on Jon’s pre-canon crush. More specifically: I want to focus on what Jon’s thoughts and feelings about Val say about his thoughts and feelings about Sansa.

But let me lay some groundwork first, okay? Until a few weeks ago, I went back and forth on pre-canon crush theories. I agreed they held a lot of potential and were a lot of fun to daydream about — a great premise for a one-shot, to be sure! Oh, and I’ve always loved it when people said things like, “Hey, Jon, your Targaryen is showing.” That’s classic stuff. But did I really think GRRM meant to hint at prior feelings rather than just laying a foundation for future feelings? Again, until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t totally convinced either way. But now I am fully committed to the Pre-Canon Crush Camp, assigned to cabin Jon-Had-Feelings-for-Sansa. [Did Sansa have feelings for Jon too? Ummm maybe? I think there’s some evidence to support that, but not as much. But, hey, that’s not the point of this post. Sorry. Moving on.] So what changed? Well, basically some ideas I’d previously had sunk in on a deeper level. It started with this post from @sherlokiness. It talks about GRRM commenting on a discrepancy in the books, two occasions where Jeyne Westerling’s physical descriptions do not match up. GRRM said the discrepancies were a mistake, a really unfortunate one because it distracts from the times when he intentionally included discrepancies of physical appearances. And basically us Jonsas loved it. Like, “Yep! Make sense! We assumed as much already, Mr. Martin.” And that’s because of the canon line mentioned earlier, right? You know the whole thing, don’t you? Oh, but you want me to quote it here anyway? Okay, fine, I’ll oblige.

They [Ghost and Val] look as though they belong together. Val was clad all in white [bleh, bleh, bleh] …but her eyes were blue, her long braid the color of dark honey, her cheeks flushed red from the cold. It had been a long while since Jon Snow had seen a sight so lovely.

Direwolf. Lots of white. Suspicious ellipses. Blue eyes. Long braid the color of dark honey. Right, okay, got it. [BTW. Did you know there’s also a point, early on, where Val’s described as having high cheekbones? You know, a feature Sansa has as well!?!?] Anyway, when I saw sherlokiness’s post about GRRM’s comments and the Jonsas relating it to that canon scene with Ghost and Val, I reblogged it. Naturally. And in the tags I said something like, “I’ll have to double check but I’m pretty sure the willowy creature line comes after this line. As in, maybe Jon knew exactly who Val reminded him in that moment and he was trying to talk himself out of his pre-canon crush coming back to the surface.” I’m paraphrasing here. My tags were probably not as clear as that. Also, I was being a bit facetious. It was a thought I’d had before, but just a passing one. Again (AGAIN! Do I say that too much?), I’d been going back and forth about pre-canon crush theories for a long time. But @agentrouka-blog saw my tags and was like, “You might be onto something there.” And then @zimshan saw my tags too and did the double check for me. Thanks! And guess what? GUESS WHAT, JONSA FAM!? I was right about the order. First, Jon sees Ghost and Val, thinks her eyes are blue and her hair is like dark honey, and it is a lovely sight. Second, this line:

Val looked the part [of a princess] and rode as if she had been born on horseback. A warrior princess, he decided, not some willowy creature who sits up in a tower, brushing her hair and waiting for some knight to rescue her.

But guess what else? The order isn’t even the most striking thing. The most striking thing is how closely these two lines appear to one another — within just a few pages!!! That's what zimshan said. So I went back to read it myself. Not just the two lines to check the order, but a little before, and a little after, and everything in between. If you want, you can do the same. It’s ADWD Jon XI.

Want to know what stuck out to me most? The willowy creature line actually seems… so odd, and out of place, and unnecessary. I swear to you. Let me try to explain.

Basically, by that point in the chapter, Jon has already clearly established his take on Val. She’s beautiful, everyone knows it, but she’s more than that. She’s strong and capable. She found Tormund and brought him back to Castle Black when Jon’s Night’s Watch Rangers couldn’t manage it. Like, Jon’s thankful for Val, okay?

Oh, and he also seems aware that he holds her in higher regard than the rest of the men who keep calling her a princess even though she’s not one. I think he feels smug about it, to be honest. Like, he wouldn’t use these words because it’s ASOIAF, but he knows he’s a budding feminist and he’s proud of himself for it. Like, “I’m so much better than these asshats who don’t respect women and think all Val has to offer is her pretty face.”

How great is that? I love book Jon so much.

Where was I, though? Oh! Oh, oh, oh! This next part is key. Up until the willowy creature line, Jon has not had a single disparaging thought about Val. Val being cruel about Shireen’s greyscale hasn’t happened yet. But for some reason — *Getting too executed. Brain malfunctioning!*

AH! I SWEAR JONSA FAM! If you read the willowy creature in fuller context, it comes across as if Jon’s correcting himself for having a disparaging thought about Val, like he’s reminding himself of who she truly is. She’s a warrior princess, not a willowy creature. But like, why? Why does Jon feel the need to do this? He hasn’t had a disparaging thought about Val, so why correct himself as if he has?

Just because she’s beautiful? Just because he’s tired of other men calling her a princess? I mean, I guess that could be the whole story. That’s certainly how we’re supposed to take it, if we’re taking it at face value. But I’m not convinced. Go read it again, and I think you’ll see that when the willowy creature line happens, it actually feels like a weird logic leap.

The dots aren’t connecting because one dot is missing!!!! Let me put a pin in that for a moment while I turn to other mini metas in our Jonsa fandom. Antis like to say, “Jon doesn’t like girls like Sansa. He doesn't like willowy creatures, he said so himself.” But we know that’s crap, right? The boy who liked Ygritte’s gentle side? The boy who helps Alys Karstark by marrying her to Sigorn? The boy who dreamed his mother was a highborn lady with kind eyes? The boy who wanted to show his hypothetical wife Winterfell’s glass gardens and bath with her in the hot pools?

Yeah, that boy is a budding feminist, like I said.

So again I ask (AGAIN!) why would Jon — who is not especially critical of women in general and has not been critical of Val at all up to this point — feel the need to correct himself by thinking this critical thing about willowy creatures? In other words, why does he lift up Val by putting down some vague idea of other women he’s never had a problem with before?

Well, obviously it turns out that I believe my facetious, tongue in cheek tags more than I realized when I wrote them. My position is that somewhere in the two pages between ...a long while since Jon had seen a sight so lovely… and ...not some willowy creature who sits up in a tower, brushing her hair… Jon realized Val reminded him of Sansa, he felt guilty and ashamed about it, and then felt the need to do damage control. And because guilt and shame are icky, confusing feelings, his damage control took the form of being critical of Sansa even though he isn’t normally critical of such women.

Am I making sense? How do I explain myself further? Like, why am I so stuck on this idea Jon’s willowy creature line being two pages after the Ghost and Val looking lovely together line must mean Jon had a pre-canon crush?

I think the crux is what I said about the willowy creature line feeling like a weird logic leap — like the dots aren’t connecting because one is missing. The missing dot is Jon being aware that he’s mentally swapped Val with Sansa. He just doesn’t acknowledge this on the page.

Let me be extra clear. I’m now differing from several others who have written about pre-canon crush theories in that I think Jon was aware of his crush. I’ve seen many say it’s all subconscious. But this stuff with Val makes me think otherwise.

I mean, I know Jon has a pattern of dissociation. For him, thinking, and speaking, and acting from his subconsciousness is a common occurrence. So, yes, he could have subconsciously thought Val looked like Sansa and subconsciously felt guilty and ashamed and therefore subconsciously decided to do damage control by subconsciously reminding himself Val is a warrior princess and therefore not a willowy creature.

But I think GRRM was hinting at an exception to Jon’s pattern with these canon lines. Because if the first part is happening subconsciously — Jon thinking Val looks like Sansa and that it’s a lovely sight — then he wouldn’t feel the need to do damage control afterwards? If he wasn’t aware of thinking of Sansa in that moment, isn’t it more likely he’d just carry on with taking Val to meet Selyse, and the odd, out of place, unnecessary line about a willowy creature wouldn’t have been included? What else, what else?

I said earlier that I think Jon’s crush is an innocent, not sexual thing. Let me expand on that. And uuuuuhhhhh... let me clarify that I think that might be changing some over time. My guess is when Jon was younger, his thoughts were more along these lines: “Sansa is pretty, and a proper lady, and everything men are taught to want. She’ll be a good wife for someone someday. Obviously not me. That’s sinful, I don’t want it, and I’m a bastard so I can’t marry a highborn lady anyway. But objectively, Sansa’s a good catch.” Which kinda matches how Jon thinks of Val at times, right? Like, she’s a catch but he doesn’t want her. He’s not taking Winterfell and a Wife because Winterfell belongs to Sansa and he’s a man of the Night’s Watch, dammit! But hang on a second. Sometimes Jon’s thoughts about Val are more elicit, aren’t they? He thinks about the size of her breasts and she’s the hypothetical wife he pictures romancing in Winterfell. Don’t worry, I’m not saying I’m secretly a Jon/Val shipper. What I’m getting at is this other thing we’ve talked about in the Jonsa fandom. Jone projects his general desires onto Val. He’s getting older. He’s unhappy at the Wall. Winterfell isn’t Robb’s like he thought it would be, and Bran and Rickon are thought to be dead. And Stannis is offering Winterfell and Val to him. Plus he’s now been intimate with a woman, Ygritte. So he knows that sex feels nice. All in all, Jon’s becoming more in tune with wanting Winterfell, and a wife, and a family, and wanting to fu—

You get the idea. ;)

Soooooo. If you buy into the premise that A) Jon considered Sansa a good catch when they were younger B) He’s thinking more and more about romance and sex C) Val is also a good catch and easy to project feelings onto and D) Woopsies, Val just reminded me of Sansa! Well, then where does all that leave Jon? Feeling like he needs to distance himself from positive thoughts about Sansa, right? But without ever thinking her name because of his pattern of dissociation and because GRRM is tricky like that. Am I making my point clearer, or just talking in circles? Like, I know plenty of people have already said Val is a switch-back-and-forth-stand-in-for-other-characters. The first two short paragraphs of this post mentions those metas. But holy smokes! If Jon is aware of A-D mentioned above, that adds a fascinating layer of subtext to his scenes with and thoughts about Val. Let’s talk about it forever!

Just kidding. I think I’m almost done here. Basically, I think the willowy creature line is Jon knowingly saying to himself, “Yikes, the thoughts I had about Sansa in the past didn’t bother me much because they were 99% innocent. But they are less innocent now and that’s a problem! You can’t like Sansa! Don’t confuse Sansa with Val, dummy! Val is a warrior princess! Sansa is a willowy creature and willowy creatures are bad!”

Okay, sure, Jon. Let me wrap up with one more canon line.

Of Sansa brushing out Lady’s coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

We often link this line to Ygritte for obvious reasons, but I’m now in the habit of linking it more to Val and the canon lines mentioned previously. I think GRRM wrote a the three lines — a sight so lovely + willow creature + of Sansa brushing out Lady’s coat — as a subtle continuation of one another. Us Jonsas saw the potential for underlying romantic feelings in the last one, that’s nothing new. But I want to add that it’s a direct contrast to the willowy creature line. As Jon is bleeding out, he can no longer be bothered to put up a front and pretend he doesn’t have feelings for Sansa, feelings that have gotten more complicated as of late.

Oh so subtle. Really not that much different than what others have said before me. But different enough I wanted to mention it. Now someone put it in a fanfic!!

#jonsa #jonsa meta #jonsa pre-canon crush #did this make sense?#it's a blur #i almost gave up on writing it #but people seemed interested #so i hope i don't sound like a crazy person

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utilitycaster · 7 days

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You described C3 as frequently feeling like it's accelerating only to pump the breaks, and that really perfectly articulates some of the mixed feelings I have about this campaign. There have been a couple of times now when I've been really excited and invested in where the story is going (Laudna's death, the party split, Ashton blowing up, now with FCG's death, etc.), and then it's felt like that momentum has been either derailed or softened (either immediately or after an episode or two). It's all moments on the darker end of the emotional spectrum, so I wonder if it's folks wanting to pull back from it, but it feels like it's been a theme in this campaign in a way it wasn't in C1 and C2. Maybe there's something else going on that I'm not thinking of though?

So I think this post about pacing I made earlier this week covers this indirectly. I think it's a mix of the early groundwork for the party developing a culture of checking in with each other, working through conflict, and deciding what to do being constantly interrupted; and the fact that this is a more heavily railroaded campaign. I want to be clear - I don't think the railroading is bad at all! But I think that the prep for a campaign that had a more defined plot, especially starting quite early on, needed to be more extensive. I think it should have probably had a session zero that was a tradition one - not a playtest of two or three characters who knew each other, but the main cast members sitting down and saying "oh, huh, no one here has a high INT score" - or a heavier hand from Matt.

I think, for example, Ashton exploding was great and the choices afterwards were sound, it's just that the party doesn't have the tools to resolve this sort of conflict and so they shy from it. I also think some of the players who tend to embrace difficult choices and conflict that ultimately lead to those darker places and, in my opinion, better story, have chosen to take a back seat; and some of the players in the position to make those bold decisions have declined to make them, which is their right in terms of agency but is less of the story I personally wish to see.

I do want to note that like...they have interrupted the story but they have not yet been proven to have pumped the brakes now; it is possible the cast will pick up seamlessly with the next episode. It's really just that like...as you said, it feels like a pattern.

I suppose the next thing I'm going to say is going to be unpopular, but let's be honest, that has never once stopped me. I think a lot of Campaign 3's more passionate defenders are people who prefer what I'd consider quick, easy, feel-good highs, with a trade-off of a deeper narrative since that requires effort. The people who unironically said "must a story have conflict?" The people who just want weeks on end of downtime after this moon plot (and look this campaign has surprised me many times, and as this question indicates, not all were positive nor narratively satisfying, so I absolutely could be wrong here but I'm just increasingly like...what will they do after this moon plot. Name a significant plot hook that isn't part of the moon plot.) The people who are like "why would the party attack Bor'Dor simply because they tried to kill them? Why would Orym contact the person he clearly has a massive crush on when he's upset when other people are right there? Why would the people of Gelvaan have reservations about mind readers? Why doesn't Ross, the largest friend, simply eat all the other friends?"

But getting back to the original point I really do think that because of the different nature of this campaign - and it is different, structurally, and I don't think that's the root cause - more intense prepwork needed to be done both leading in (character creation) and in the early stages, and I think because it was going to be so tightly plotted later on I think it needed looser plotting earlier to allow the party to mesh and be easier to guide.

#cr spoilers

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chuuya-fan-page · 7 months

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Your thoughts about Stormbringer? (And Chuuyas'relationship with the Flags, Murase, Adam and or course, Dazai)

Hi Anon!

I. LOVE. STORMBRINGER.

It has my overall favourite characters (Rimbaud and Verlaine mwah ily) and the overall story is just SO GOOD, plus the insight we get into Chuuya's character and why he does the things he does. The way we see him go from a liability, someone who's ready to leave the mafia at the first chance, to calling it his family? It's INSANE.

Asagiri truly outdid himself with everything going on, it's insane to see Stormbringer in comparison with all the other light novels, there's such a massive difference in length. Not to mention some of the language is just beautiful, and the descriptions feel like a gut-punch.

Chuuya gets so much depth through Stormbringer, it's really what unlocked his character for me; we now see why he's so loyal, why he allows himself to be controlled, just what he's been seeking, it makes him understandable. Dazai's "dog" jokes suddenly get a deeper meaning, Chuuya is like a dog in many ways, like a dog who returns to an abusive master because he's so damn loyal it hurts him. And god he's so forgiving, just, god.

Shirase stabbed him in the back (literally), and yet he goes to great lengths to protect him, Verlaine uproots Chuuya's entire life, and yet Chuuya forgives him, Dazai is Dazai, but Chuuya puts his life in his hands time and time again.

FUCK he hurts me.

As for his relationships (and I know you didn't mention Verlaine but god I love his relationship with Chuuya) with all of the above;

The Flags have a really interesting and unique relationship with Chuuya, they're a really important step in Chuuya claiming back his past. They solidify the groundwork of Rimbaud's final words from Fifteen; Chuuya is Chuuya, and that's enough for them.

(Tackling them one by one now)

Pianoman seems to see himself as a sort of mentor figure to Chuuya, he is of course the leader of the Flags, and therefore protective of all of them, but he goes to lengths to make Chuuya feel included and cared for. His form of affection seems to be annoying Chuuya with little gestures to make him accept them slowly, he's aware of how volatile Chuuya is at this time and handles him with care. Pianoman was the one behind the whole "one year anniversary" that the Flags threw for Chuuya, so it's clear that he pays attention to Chuuya, and cares for him a great deal. Pianoman is very blunt about some things, he confronts Chuuya out right about his motivations and troubles in order to assist him.

Albatross has a similar form of showing care; by being a little shit. He's a lot less subtle than Pianoman, as he outright pisses Chuuya off on purpose, but in ways that are clearly jokes, a way to add levity to the tense air around Chuuya joining the mafia. He does take notice of Chuuya's moods, tries to calm him down when he gets too riled up, and clearly doesn't want to push him over the edge to the point that it's no longer funny. He's the closest of the Flags with Chuuya, as they live in the same building, and they go on missions together, or rather, Albatross drags Chuuya on missions with him as a forced bonding method, despite the fact that he messes with Chuuya, he also cares about making sure that he's not upset.

Lippmann takes a slight protective air towards Chuuya, similar to Pianoman. He jokes about taking Chuuya under his wing and is also featured laying a soothing hand on Chuuya's shoulder, which leads me to believe that this is something he does often. Lippmann is an actor, and that comes through with some of the calculated ways he guides conversations, carefully pointing Chuuya towards the fact that he is a part of the Flags and ensuring that he feels included. Lippmann is able to read Chuuya's behaviour, that is part of his job, and he tailors his interactions to suit Chuuya's needs, he is described as being gentle, particularly when it comes to topics that are fresh wounds in Chuuya's past.

Doc is a weird little fuck, and I love him dearly. His form of affection seems to be threats??? Which is uh, unique...i guess? The best way I can really describe the way he interacts with Chuuya is just that he's weird, and generally off-putting, although he seems to quickly include Chuuya in with the rest of the Flags, at the very least he treats them all the same. Doc is weird to analyse because everything he says is just one curveball after another. Due to his weird relationship with death and God, I'm inclined to believe that he respects Chuuya for being a fighter, he does comment on the fact that "Poison isn't enough to kill Chuuya", which almost sounds like a begrudged compliment, as Poison is his self-admitted way that he's killed lot's of people. He also put a ton of effort into tracing back Chuuya's medical history, which shows care if not affection.

Iceman is another interesting one to analyse. He, like Albatross, takes care to ensure that Chuuya feels comfortable, he admits that he didn't want to hold the celebration for Chuuya, because he thought it might upset him. Iceman is very blunt and upfront with Chuuya, he doesn't sugarcoat or lie to him, he makes it clear that the Flags all believe in Chuuya's strength, and calls out his unnecessary violence, as well as revealing Pianoman's true intentions in watching out for Chuuya. Iceman respects Chuuya, after all, Chuuya was managed to escape being killed by Iceman when he was in the Sheep, and holds no grudges. Although they have the most tense relationship out of Chuuya and the Flags, Iceman still allows Chuuya to see below his cold facade, and shows him his true nature.

Chuuya overall is conflicted when it comes to the Flags. In many ways, he interacts with them the same way he interacts with Dazai, because that's just how he is with people. Anger is a shield for his other emotions, when he's overwhelmed by their kindness and care for him, he threatens to leave and accuses them of trying to make him "weepy" so that he'll apologize. He does let some of his guard down around them, and they're the people he's closest to in the Mafia at that point, he fights well alongside them, and despite their few scuffles, trusts and cares for them.

Murase and Chuuya's relationship is short-lived, but adorable. In some ways, Chuuya and Murase have many connections, Murase's relationship with N can be compared to Chuuya's relationship with Verlaine, mainly in that they have weird-ass older brothers who are batshit insane. There is something to be said about how N inadvertently brought about the end of his younger brother's life, and through his influences drove Murase to be a better person and help people, which is why Murase is so determined to bring Chuuya into the light (Odasaku moment). Murase is such a daggy-dad, every part of me wishes he'd managed to pick up Chuuya before everything had happened. He shows so much care for him, and even though Chuuya insults him flippantly, he doesn't give up on trying to improve his life. God dammit Asagiri, why are you like this.

ADAM. MY SWEET SWEET ROBOT MAN. God I love him. He's got Chuuya's back 10000% and he's there for him every step of the way. I can sooooooo draw a million and one parallels between Verlaine and Adam, but for now we're only talking about one synthetic human. Adam is SO caring, he immediately places Chuuya as the most important person in his system, he buys snacks for him before they go out on their mission, he stands up to Shirase for Chuuya's sake, and god he shows how much he truly admires and cares for Chuuya. Adam is fascinated by human nature, and to him there is nothing more human than Chuuya. One of my favourite scenes is when Chuuya calls Verlaine human, and Adam is overjoyed, thinking that Chuuya has drawn the obvious conclusion that due to his and Verlaine's similarities, if Verlaine is human, so is Chuuya! Silly stupid robot man i love you so much. And he SACRIFICES himself for Chuuya, god, he DIES for him, and we know he did that of his own violation, which makes it WORSE. Chuuya begrudgingly comes to care about Adam, and from the beginning calls him reliable and trustworthy (HE TRSUTS HIMDVJHBJHFG), and is genuinely happy at his return. They make me so sad oh god.

Slotting Verlaine in here real quick because his relationship with Chuuya is one of my favourites. They're besties, they're worsties, they brothers from two different continents. Verlaine is quite literally the stereotypical overprotective brother, except he's also the king of the assassins, so he shows his love by murdering Chuuya's friends. The most painful thing about his actions to me is that he genuinely thought he was helping Chuuya. Verlaine is too lost in his own pain to realise that his and Chuuya's situations are different, that his own past is not what he thought. Verlaine projects heavily onto him, even calls Chuuya his "other self", and he spends most of Stormbringer in denial about his own relationship with Rimbaud, and consequently Chuuya's relationship with those around him. Verlaine's pain runs deep, and it cuts into Chuuya as well.

NOW WE'RE ON TO THE BIG GUNS.

TEEN SOUKOKU BABY, WOOOOOOH I LOVE THEM

Stormbringer is SUCH a turning point for their relationship. There was a trust forged in Fifteen, but that kinda went to shit after Dazai pulled that whole thing with the Sheep. Even so, there's something there, Dazai is still the one who nullifies corruption and takes Chuuya to see the Flags, he's still the one who allows Chuuya to tie him up and spin him around by the ankle as "revenge". And he's the one who gives Chuuya what might be the first choice of his life. Stormbringer shows something very, very important for Dazai's character, which is that he was always capable of change. While many people point to Odasaku as the reason Dazai changed so much, which is true, he was able to change before he met him. It's so important to remember that Dazai always had it in him to change, he just needed to right push, and Chuuya was one of those pushes. Odasaku was just more of a shove. Dazai not only deliberately puts himself in another person's shows for Chuuya, but he gives him a genuine and real choice, one that he intends to uphold. Stormbringer reforges that trust between Soukoku, it shows them once again as equals.

They're perfect.

TY FOR YOUR ASK ANON <33 I love Stormbringer so much

-T

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iintervallum · 16 days

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episode 11 was pretty good! i think they're starting off the rest of season 1 well, still feels like we're setting up and laying down groundwork for a big climatic reveal and tragedy, which is exciting.

some thoughts under the cut

im interested in knowing what the hell Celia is up to, she's the character I'm most invested in understanding her deal with her obvious link to the old tma universe. who is jack??? I'm foggy on the details of tma characters but that has to be a previous character somewhere

also the case was pretty good too! nice to see life altering tattoos make an appearance again, ink5oul as a character will be fascinating to encounter in the future since they're definitely going to make more reappearances, possible villain of the season? i don't think so but it's not going to be the last we see of them for sure.

something about this season is that it's more fan servicey in some ways, but i don't particularly hate it because i have a feeling it's going to go horribly wrong. it's too saccharine, i don't trust it when things go well in tma it's a precursor to sadness lmao

like the "office romances" to me just feels like a bait, i don't believe tmagp will just earnestly have a romance story that isn't tragic, (because that would make me drop the show) because it would be a little anticlimactic also someone will die for sure by s1 end i just don't know who it will be

a part of me thinks it's Celia because she knows more than the rest, but also Colin because he's close to finding out, or maybe Gwen will kill Lena who knows! anything could happen

I'm also starting to actually believe that Alice is hiding something because her insistance to not follow through and connect anything is a giveaway. but not for nefarious reasons, just because she cares for Sam and doesn't want him to be further involved. and considering Colin wanted to speak to her in reference to the computers she must know something, even if it's just how the programming infrastructure works

also Alice's beef with Gwen seems to run a lot deeper? i don't think it's just bickering it seems like she actually has animosity towards her. maybe it's a class disparity thing because she's mocked her for being rich and it seems that she's financially supporting her younger brother, maybe she resents her because Alice has to work this job for stability and can't leave but Gwen could be anywhere else and has the audacity to lecture her on doing her job, idk I'm just speculating. toxic yuri amiright

half joking on that i still don't see or fully support any ships because i tend to be a person who wants to see the canon unfold first before being invested in ships, i like having the full picture to work with in regards to fan interpretation. that being said seeing the ships the fandom is cooking up is sweet.

regardless the rest of the season seems to be interesting, i like the format of mid season hiatuses, i think it has a good chance of keeping the fandom a little bit calmer? because they have time to digest and think rather than jumping the gun week to week.

and with the speculative nature of the fanbase it's enough time to go back and understand the story to pick up plot threads too, because reading the transcripts once over during the break was pretty helpful, highly recommend them they have a teeny bit more info that adds a little extra to the scenes. not necessary to read them but they are nice

my only complaint is that sometimes the episodes feel too short, but that's more just because I'm invested and i wanna know more :)

#tmagp spoilers #tmagp #aster listens to tma #the Magnus protocol #the Magnus protocol spoilers #aster.txt #also Gwen being a bonzo fan was a pleasant surprise #now i wanna draw fanart of a younger Gwen watching sos and sending fanmail #because it seems like she loved bonzo as a kid which makes her fear especially interesting #I'm making my posts non reblogable because they are my own thoughts #i like keeping them here

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dailyanarchistposts · 12 days

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TFSR: Could you introduce yourself for the listeners? Your name and pronouns and any other information that you’d like people to know about you?

Cindy Milstein: First, I really want to thank you for having me on the Final Straw and preparing so well ahead of time for this. My name is Cindy Milstein. And I use they or he for pronouns. And yeah… prior to the pandemic, I was doing a lot of anarchist organizing, including anarchist summer school, and was part of the Montreal Bookfair Collective. And I focus a lot on doing care, solidarity and grief projects. And I also do books! So I’m on the show today about the latest anthology I just did.

TFSR: Yeah, I was really excited about this book: “Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart – Mending the World as a Jewish Anarchist” which is out with AK Press. Particularly for me as like a queer anarchist Jew to see all this writing that you put together by people who are navigating those things being queer, anarchist, and Jewish. And I think the book provides a really beautiful take on all the kinds of feelings that I’ve tried to work through for myself, and my relationship to Jewishness, and the book as a whole makes a case for how Jewishness fits into queerness and anarchism… As an ethical, political way of living in this world, which is also the way that I’ve heard you define anarchism before that I find really helpful. But before we dive into some of the stuff in the book, I want to just talk… mention, you know, the recent widespread attention given to Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine. It always comes up now and again, in the mainstream media, but we know that this is an ongoing thing… the state’s genocidal treatment of Palestinians. So I wanted to ask for your thoughts on how Jewish anarchist specifically can speak out and respond to the ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation.

CM: Yeah, I also wanted to start off and saying that my heart is really heavy with all the Palestinians who are having to deal with… yet again, massive amounts of death and destruction. It’s too bad this keeps happening. And I was thinking about how as Jewish anarchists, you know… maybe this plays into, in a way, why the anthology came out too… And why there’s a resurgence of sort of Jewish anarchism… I was thinking about a lot of people that were anarchists or anarchistic who did something called the International Solidarity Movement. Was that like 20 years ago or something? Mostly? And people would go to the occupied territories and help with olive harvests and be there as, you know, bodies in solidarity doing both contributing through to helping Palestinians with things they needed, also being bodies against the Israeli state.

Anarchists Against The Wall was another project. Again, not everyone was anarchists in it, but it was Israeli, including anarchist Jews. So there has been a tradition of Jewish anarchists engaging in really tangible direct action and solidarity in Palestine, and the State of Israel. And then you kind of flash forward and the past few years… I was thinking about this a lot. It’s not, again, by at all anarchists but some Jewish anarchists have been really involved in groups like “If Not Now”, and “Jewish voices for Peace” and other groups like that. And that have been doing a lot of work within Jewish institutional structures in larger Jewish communities on Turtle Island, and other places to try to switch away from this conflation of Judaism with Zionism and there’s been a lot of groundwork.

So then we come to this moment. I don’t know, it’s just felt really powerful to watch! It’s been really moving. The solidarity demonstrations are massive. They were instantaneous and in so many places. But just the one I went to, which wasn’t huge, in Pittsburgh. I felt this even there with a few 100 people. It was, you know… Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Christians, anarchists. And it felt so much a deeper form of solidarity, where it wasn’t as unusual in a way for there to be people coming there with the fullness of who they were in a solidarity. It just felt really moving. And myself included in that I and a couple other queer Jewish anarchist decided to make some banners and one of them we made there was “Solidarity With Palestine. Abolish the State.” We had lots of kind of debate about that. How do.. should we be bringing a perspective? I thought we should. But I was really struck ahead of time and when we brought it to the solidarity demo people were really receptive to having Jews there naming that they were Jews bringing their views. There were other signs that other Jews had brought there weren’t anarchists that were… you know, “Judaism Does Not Equal Zionism” and all these things! But that would make it clear that they were Jews and I think and… as many people by listening have seen images of the solidarity demos, there’s so many demonstrations in which Jewish anarchists and also radical Jews were being really clear about who they were at the solidarity demonstrations.

Now, why is that? It’s not to be like “Hey, look! Here I am.” But I think that’s because Jews are told we should have an extra responsibility to that struggle. For us to be contesting the way the State of Israel is instrumentally using what we understand to be the beauty of Jewishness and Judaism to uphold the state and occupation and colonialism. I think it’s really powerful to say “No”. This is not this hegemony of a viewpoint. And I think the other thing a lot of Jewish anarchists have been doing is holding spaces for the grief of people being killed.

Again, I was part of a… I didn’t organize this, but some Jewish anarchists in Pittsburgh organized a really beautiful Kaddish a mourning prayer for a half hour in the Jewish neighborhood on Shabbat. Which means a lot of Jews are walking around seeing us do this, and it was a half mile from the Tree of Life Synagogue. It was the same corner where they had done many different vigils, grief rituals, and other things around the white supremacist murders at the Tree of Life only a little over two years ago. So it just felt really powerful to be there and say that we understand because of our own traditions of mourning, why those traditions actually compel us to be in solidarity with other people and their pain. When they’re sick, or dying or after death. And it actually… it isn’t just those traditions don’t just apply to us, they compel us to be here for other people. It was very beautiful.

So I want to say just to wrap this up with Jewish anarchists… because I’ve just been watching around I think it’s like a lot of anarchists, but Jewish anarchists have been really throwing themselves for Palestinian solidarity forms of direct mutual aid, and doing a lot of really beautiful speaking and writing and organizing. Again, very visibly. And I think that’s a change. It’s a real palpable change this time. Not just Jewish anarchists. But there’s a sea change in the kind of incredible attachment to Zionism, among Jews, and I feel like Jewish anarchists… I’m proud in a way that we’re at the forefront, because we’re anti-statists. So I guess the last thing to say is… I think the difference of what Jewish anarchists bring to this moment is that we bring the things we’re speaking like it isn’t just the State of Israel, it’s all states! It isn’t just colonialism in this region, It’s colonialism everywhere! It’s not just occupation here, et cetera, et cetera.

And the last thing I want to say is a form of critical solidarity that said, “we will be in solidarity with the Palestinians to become liberated. And when people are liberated, we understand how liberation has often gets perverted into states and ends up doing exactly what people want it to liberate themselves from. And we will be in solidarity and when people liberate themselves, we will be in solidarity with those who are then looking for forms of autonomous self determination that are outside states.”

TFSR: Yeah, that seems so important because in addition to the way that people talk about the responsibility of Jews to speak out against Israeli state violence against Palestinians, then you add the responsibility of anarchists to provide a take on these situations, that’s also anti-state. That was solidarity… but not saying “well, we need to support anything that’s going to be against that state.” Some leftists or state communist type people will like just take whatever side is against the US or Israel. So it’s a more nuanced approach. And I think that’s… I’m really glad you brought that up. To think about those two things kind of overlapping and the Jewish anarchist response.

CM: You know, there’s also anarchists who aren’t Jewish, who are doing profoundly beautiful work right now. In terms of creating all sorts of actions, beautiful actions, direct actions and other forms of organizing. But I’ve really appreciated at this moment, where in a way maybe the responsibility… The mosque that was being targeted during Ramadan. I was breaking my heart for my Muslim anarchist friends and Muslims in general that were having to have the Ramadan hurt. But some of my friends were Muslim anarchists. I understood the meaning of them trying to do Ramadan in different ways that are outside often the normative ways that get done in Muslim communities. Doing it in anarchistic ways. And also the pain of that during a pandemic. And then to have that sacred space be turned into a war zone.

But I really… that mosque just really touched me as an anarchist. Because I’m like, “here is a space. That’s a sacred site.” It was a sacred site for all different peoples. Centuries and centuries ago. And it’s because of a state and colonialism, it’s been turned into this horrible battleground, right? So in a way as Jews, for us to say Jewish anarchists have a special relationship to say “could we envision a time when we could come to different forms of solidarity again?” Across our various understandings of our of who we are and stop essentializing it.

So I guess that’s my last thing I think Jewish anarchists bring really to this moment is looking at people is deeply, fully human and messy and flawed. And instead of just going “The Palestinians” being like, “there’s a range of viewpoints within the Palestinians!” There’s a range of viewpoints… and there’s no category that is some essential… pure… right? I feel like Jewish Anarchists have been helping against this sort of essentialist politics. Which leads more toward fascistic forms of thinking when you just flatten people out to one category, instead of seeing the fullness of people and being in solidarity with them through moments and then through other moments being again, in critical solidarity. I think that’s a much more respectful way to look at each other as full human beings and see the pain.

Even the solidarity demo I went to was just so beautiful because I was just watching… it was kind of… the people hosting it were more liberal… you know? I’m still glad we went. But they were so sweet about anyone that came up and wanted to talk and I was really struck by people just wanting to come tell their stories of their relationship to that place called Jerusalem. It was a very moving to listen to people’s histories and personal stories of their connection. And then not wanting it to be both an occupation, a battleground, and a state. A place where the state and settlers are engaging in it… you know?! Human is a flawed term. But anyway, from a very experiential thing where it broke across these kind of barriers. Anarchists seem often good at doing that, in a way where we’re able to see kind of the messy fullness. And Jews are definitely good at that. So combine Jewish anarchist and wrestling with all the complexities in the questions.

TFSR: Yeah, what you said really struck something in me to think about why it would be that Jewish people, specifically Jewish anarchists, who would be positioned in a good way to kind of take apart those essentializing identities. There’s something particular about how the history of Jews in all these different places they’ve been let in and kicked out and harmed and I don’t know… used for things, that allows them to think about identity… for us I guess… to think about identity differently than we get told to from our dominant culture. That that’s really exciting idea. I don’t know if you have any other thoughts about that, like why we’re as Jews and Jewish anarchists in such a good place to kind of articulate identity not as flat or singular thing, a decentralized thing?

CM: Yeah, I mean the more I’ve come back to my own as part of what this Anthology, this sort of resurgence of Jewish anarchism, which just feels so beautiful and moving. I think we’re all in this incredible “we’re so glad to find each other! and we’re so glad to all be like learning so much from each other and challenging!” I like feel so challenged, and in a good generative way, of myself. like “Wait! I never understood that. I understood this!” You know? And so some of it for me is a lot of: “Well, this is who I am” or “This is the culture I was raised in.” And then the generosity of so many people right now who are Jewish anarchists, who … it’s a range of experiences.

But a lot of Jewish anarchists are really going back to Torah, and teaching it in ways often, almost all overwhelmingly, well, maybe it’s the people I hang out with. They’re trans and queer Jewish anarchists. And I think there’s something to this, like when you go back and you start looking at the text. I’m no scholar in this yet, but I’m really enjoying going and scrutinizing. The whole structure is intended to be a communal, educational, ongoing investigation and you have all these things written down, but then it’s this living… it’s intended to be argued with and interpreted and debated and questions are elevated. It intends for you to question.

I keep going back to this word, but I think it’s a really prominent within Judaism is “we wrestle”, you know? We wrestle with everything. And even a friend of mine who does believe in God. I don’t. At one point I said, “I don’t believe in God” and they’re like, “but there isn’t that notion of belief in God.” In Judaism. There’s like a wrestling with what God is in what context, and where, and how that plays itself out because it’s different depending on… there’s a bunch of different names or time periods or context.

But it’s also… “Do you do trust in it?” Like if you start translating some of the words that are originally connected? Do you trust and in some kind of thing that’s greater than us? And I go… “I don’t know?” It’s like all these, it just raises these different questions. There wasn’t, there wasn’t an answer. I don’t know. I just… somehow you combine things that we think are just our cultural things and you say, “well actually even if I’m not religious” let’s say or “I didn’t come through that training. I don’t believe in God, I’m a product of the culture of 1000’s of years of people that have used those tools to keep together.” So I don’t know, somehow that you bring that to anarchism, which is also about questioning everything and not believing in authority.

I think that the two together work really well because there are plenty of Jews that will still believe in authority and will wrestle with and debate and raise all these questions in order to solidify authority whether it’s justified or not. But there’s very conservative and hierarchal forms of Judaism. But then anarchism is questioning hierarchy, and you bring those two together, and it’… Yeah. I don’t know. I think there’s something. I still don’t even know what the answer is to it. But there’s so many stories within Judaism and the Jewish experience and Jews throughout history that have had to rebel and had to figure out ways, it’s just, it’s also just so prevalent.

So many Jews have had to become, or desire to become rebels or resist the dominant culture, because the dominant culture mostly did not, and still doesn’t in a lot of ways accept. Whatever the rationale for why you need the state is because we’ve been pushed out across the world, most Jews have never had citizenship or been parts of states or been protected by them, or before that empires! We’ve all we’ve been our own autonomous communities for most of our history until the very recent history. The State of Israel is so young. It’s such a baby, right? And it’s not the whole, it’s such a minor part of Jewish understanding of how you stay together. And in a very anarchistic way before that.

TFSR: The state is a relatively new invention anyway.

CM: I mean, I guess maybe for even for this idea that Jews connecting, I was saying protection. Okay. Yeah. So, I understand at some point most people that face enslavement and displacement, and genocide, and destruction of all their institutions, their languages, etc. At some point we’ll turn to trying to figure out ways to protect themselves. And Jews have engaged in a variety of ways to protect themselves. Some Jews thought that the state would protect them. Others of us like anarchist Jews understand that states do not protect us. But I get how…you know. I think one thing that gives us stuff specially positioned to understand that states don’t… we understand that almost nothing has protected us. And that we have to protect ourselves. And other communities have experienced that too, not specifically just Jewish. If you’re Black and Jewish. If you’re Black, other communities…indigenous, or indigenous and Jewish, a whole bunch of other categories of people have experienced that.

When you combine that again: Jewish with anarchism, there’s a special … we’ve been pushed across all borders. We don’t really belong to any nation states. Whenever there’s been moments of mass antagonism toward us. It’s turned into violence. We’ve only pretty much… sometimes other people protect us, but they’ve been people, not states. Communities, not states. And that, in a way, is beautiful, too, right? It’s like we figured out how to protect our community. Self defense and community resilience. And now you have this moment. I think that our Jewish anarchists, feel such affinity with people who are like…. the Palestinians that are like… we were having to figure out how to protect ourselves, and we know how to protect ourselves, and we know how to resist and we’ve been doing this now for a while. And in a way, there’s this recognition of like “we get that that’s what you have to do to keep your community together.” Yeah, because most Palestinians are in diaspora now, too, right?

TFSR: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. And it’s interesting because that main narrative of the necessity of the State of Israel to protect the people often blinds people to the fact of what’s going on between Israel and the Palestinians, where it has such a reminiscence to the things that the Jews have experienced from violent states in the past. I really would like also, just to go back… One thing I heard and what you were saying was like the idea of… instead of belief in God,like wrestling with God made me think about, committing to wrestling with God and committing to the question. Its also like the way to enter just sort of commit to the struggle as, like not an endpoint that we’re going to reach, but something that we have to keep doing and keep asking. So that we can always counter where power starts to collect and do its thing.

CM: Yeah, but you know in a way… I think why it’s been really increasingly powerful to me as, a like, non binary, queer, Jew and an anarchist is to bring all these things together. But within anarchism, we do wrestle as anarchists with things all the time. Constantly! Like, okay, there’s a pandemic, let’s wrestle with what this means now and how the world’s going to shift and what we should do to respond. But we don’t really have places that bring us together to do that regularly. I know a lot of us are, myself included, are grappling with… this has been a hellish or one of the most hellish 13 or 14 months, a lot of us are… collective trauma. A lot of us are doing really badly. As anarchists, I know, all of us need to be talking about it, and thinking about it. And working through wrestling with what just happened to us. And we’re not. There’s no place to go to do that. And as a Jew, who’s an anarchist, I know I have places to do that, because Judaism for 1000’s of years, Jews have survived.

Jews have been around almost 6000 years or 1000’s of years. Any diasporic peoples in a way that haven’t been protected by states or empires or, you know, church hierarchies, have figured out how to create community without states. Yeah, and have kept their culture together without a state. And part of that within Judaism is a really intricate amount of ritual and holidays and time and creating time for things. And so I was especially struck by it this year, maybe because this year has been so hard, but during Passover, eight days, you don’t necessarily celebrate every day, but that time period asks of us, and it has for 1000’s of years, to get together and for hours wrestle with the story of what it meant to be enslaved, what it meant to engage in forms of resistance and direct action to get out of that. And then to leave and not know where you’re going. To be liberated, but not free.

The first moment in this year, it really struck me, was to create this temporary space to start bringing people together. And that felt sacred, that we could begin to sort of process it and heal from it. Feel whatever! I’m not gonna describe it religiously, but some people might. This space that… like as anarchists I mean… here, we are in Asheville, and yesterday, you and I went to Firestorm: anarchist feminist queer collective bookstore, 13 years birthday party in a park. I’m visiting. For a lot of us it was the first time we’ve been with queer, feminist, anarchists together in this beautiful space of celebrating and gathering, which is what our spaces are usually. Right? And it just felt like “Okay, this is what all of us need!” Right?

Within Judaism there’s so many places like that. And so we set up these spaces really regularly in Judaism. During Pesach we come…. Passover, we constantly are debating “So what does it mean to liberate yourself? And then, how do you? In the story, you have 40 days where people are wandering around trying to figure out how to create freedom, or how to begin to understand that? But you really, every year, wrestle with it. Are we good enough to be free? How do we be free? How do we liberate ourselves? Do we do a good job of it? Blah, blah…

And this year, the conversation I went to online about it, someone pointed out because Jews like to go “Hey! But there’s another piece to the story. You can go a few more pages ahead in the Torah, it talks about how there’s this whole debate about how do you treat slaves well!” And they go “why would we have done that after we just liberated ourselves from slavery?” And it was like, “well, that is a part of wrestling.” If you become the person that suddenly is free, maybe you’re not as free as you think. And what if you start enslaving other people? Shouldn’t you start wrestling with why you’re doing it and how you’re treating them? And then maybe you’ll start thinking “Hey, this isn’t what we want to be doing.” So we have this really nice conversation about how does sometime liberation turned into the opposite? Which is exactly what’s happening right in the State of Israel.

And I’m just like, “Okay, this is why as a Jewish anarchist I’m just really appreciating spending more time within radical Jewish circles.” In one person’s conversation, [they] said “Why do we think even as radicals and queers…. “ (they weren’t anarchists in this space, but it was definitely a queer space, radical space…) “Why do we think what it’s telling us in this passage is that all humans have the capacity to enslave other people.” And if we don’t continually revisit that, remember that, and reject it. We’re prone to doing it again. More than if we forget to talk about each year. And I thought that, “I feel like anarchism needs more…” It needs grief rituals for when things happen our communities instead of maybe it happens sometimes maybe it doesn’t. It needs holidays outside of capitalist time. There’s such a richness within Judaism of ways to create community without states ways to create solidarity without states.

TFSR: Yeah. And also like practicing, almost like practicing conflict, in a way, like the arguments and the reinterpretations…. in a way that doesn’t divide s community up. Or tear everything apart or make you enemies. There’s so much arguing and disagreement that is actually a richness rather than a problem or something to run away from.

CM: A lot of Jewish anarchists are very generous people. It’s really interesting. It’s because Judaism, there’s such a compulsion, you need to be studying and teaching and learning all the time to whole your life that’s completely another value within Judaism. The reason there’s so much sacred out of capitalism time in Judaism is meant used to spend time studying and learning and teaching and sharing ideas. And so, I was mentored by and learned a lot from Murray Bookchin. And he was very generous. Another Jewish anarchist. Murray was such a lovable and such an intense… So Jewish! Eastern European Jewish. Ashkenazi Jew. But like when I first met him, he was like encyclopedic, his mind was just like, amazing. The first year I was like, “Okay, I know, there was critiques of his ideas, but I can’t [argue], like he’s just… I can’t figure out the way…” And then when I did and start arguing with him… he loved that.

And everyone was kind of scared because he really argued intensely. But then when I started we became … in a way…. I feel like that’s we broke through and had a loving relationship. when I would argue back… could finally argue back. He was teaching me to be able to argue back with him, even though it pissed him off. It’s kind of like, “I don’t want you to disagree with me, but I want you to argue with me. But that’s how all of us feel,” you know? Like, I want to argue things! But then I understood within, like Bookchin and a lot of his argumentative style, you could on the one hand find there’s a host of other reasons… his bitterness, blah, blah, toward the end of his life which I kind of understand the older I get… It’s like, how can we not be? Yeah, I’m not going to get bitter. But you can get tired being an anarchist for a long time, because people don’t stay anarchist for life or a whole bunch of other things.

But Murray had a really great mind about wrestling with ideas. Some phenomena would happen and he would want to debate, and argue it, and think about it, and really intensly! And we’d be almost nose to nose, almost screaming at each other about an idea. And then we would stop I would go “I love you” and hug each other. And that’s so…. at least culturally, how I understand Judaism to me. Yeah. So I never took it as he was upset with me. And I get that I do that sometimes when arguing. And I’m like, I’m not being intense because I’m angry. I’m just enjoying, like, so enjoying that our minds are moving so intensely, because none of us know the answer. And I did appreciate this about Murray. He was like if I teach you nothing else, I want to teach you to think critically, and always imagine something else. Even if he ended up disagreeing with me, that really is what he wanted. That’s such a Jewish thing. I want you to learn to think for yourself. And then I want us to continue to argue and none of us know the answer. And we’re not going to…. always based on the context.

If you look at his body of his work… let’s stick with Murray for a bit. His work is mostly very dynamic. You can disagree with different periods of different shifts. But he’s this… he’s constantly trying to reinterpret his own ideas through lens of society and reinterpret society through the lens of new ideas, bringing in other theorists. Because he’s only one person he didn’t… there’s a whole host of things he ignored and didn’t bring in right? Queer theory, colonialism… you know but what he did was so similar to a Jewish practice of continuing to push yourself and challenge yourself, wrestle and, you know?

As anarchist, I think we could stand to bring in, whether they are Jewish or not, a more generous sense of wrestling with ideas. I create a lot of anarchist spaces where I’m like, let’s all come into the room and pretend none of us know the answer, because none of us do! And have a big conversation about it. I’ve been so perplexed, I’ve tried that experiment so many times. It is really hard to get a roomful of anarchists to set aside with their preconceived notion of the answer they think is right to solving capitalism. I’m like… if any of us knew we would have done… or whatever the question is. And I think it’s so much more interesting to me, and I really am coming to understand this be more than my Judaism and my anarchism is: that it’s actually okay for us to come in with questions, not answers and then together, question the questions and wrestle with them and come out with more questions and maybe a little bit better understanding, that’s probably the best we can hope for. I don’t know. I guess I’m wandering around on different topics, which is another very Jewish trait, you wander around and you come back to somewhere, but a very diasporic trait, you wander around, but you know, kind of where you’re going.

TFSR: No, I love that. I mean, that’s something I share too. And it’s an experience I’ve had to with people that are close to me being like “my wanting to argue about that is love!” It’s not, like anger or anything. And my intensity sometimes can read that way. But I am always wanting that and I love just like having to face the conflict, rather than let it sit. Because that’s when we like get silenced and don’t work together. And I don’t know, it’s much better to work those things through. So I can see that, you know the opening this line of like Jewish anarchism… trying to bring some of that Jewishness into anarchism, too. And it does seem, again, I said this in the beginning of our conversation, but this book seems timely in a way to me because I’ve been part of communities doing the same kind of thing that this book represents. And then, through my conversations with you around the book and meeting more and more people, who are all like “this is a moment to rethink it all.” And so actually a question kind of along that line and going back also to how you’re saying there’s a sea change in terms of like the way that people are starting to distinguish Jewishness from the State of Israel from Zionism… Your book also shows how there’s different forms of Judaism. And like, even what you’re talking about, it’s not a uniform thing is not a one centralized hierarchy of like thought and beliefs. And new book contains all of these counter narratives to those stories. So I was just wondering if there’s more of these kinds of perspectives that you might want to share here. Things that get left out, when we think about what a Jew is, what Judaism is, what being Jewish means… the diversity of the practices that go to make up Judaism?

CM: Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure I can answer that whole question. Because Judaism is… again is so enormous. And there’s so many different understandings of it. I’ll speak to … maybe within the like radical anarchist Judaism that has led to this anthology is like, me generally. Especially before the pandemic, which made it harder, but finally me being like “Hey, I’m just I’m so much more comfortable in the diaspora, being diasporic. Both maybe from my own trauma and ancestral trauma, just this compulsion to move.” I’m realizing that’s part of how I protect myself and safety in a way. But also this way in which diaspora is like making connections and being really intentional about community and scattering seeds. And I don’t know… I like doing that. So for a few years I was just going. When I was in all of these different communities across Turtle Island, and a little bit of other places. It was so striking to me. Suddenly, everywhere I go, people go “Hey, you happen to be staying tonight in a house where everyone’s queer Jewish anarchists! We’re also going to have a Shabbat dinner!” And then you’d sit down, people would start talking about how they’re doing language… Latino and Yiddish language classes or they did a demonstration together as anarchist Jews, or blah, blah. I was “What is going on?!” There’s suddenly… and then I started being looped into friends going, “Hey, we’re gonna start every month meeting up some of us who are queer and trans for Rosh Chodesh.” Which is like the new month and do conversations and rituals around that. Which I’m still doing! And so I thought “okay, something’s going on.” I think that’s one reason I logged in diasporic.

Two is, I really like seeing the bigger picture about trends that are happening. And I was like “something’s going on.” And so then this Anthology… between putting out a call and asking people to write. It’s actually been surprising to me since it’s come out. Almost some things I was intentionally trying to do. Other things have been like this beautiful surprise! So there’re about 40 contributions to it, magical stories, really heartbreaking. A lot of vulnerable, really moving, poignant stories, very honest and open, poems are at work.

And I mean, I definitely had a viewpoint in things that I like. I wanted pieces that were not assimilationist not Zionist, not statist. I want people, all the pieces to be challenging white supremacy, to be anti-colonial. There were things that I without saying that… anti fascism is like a big theme, that are threads through it. But I really wanted people to speak from their own experience and their own trauma. And I think one thing going into this anthology that really struck me is, and maybe it’s because for me, I’m just like, “well, I don’t know what else to do but say the truth of what I see in the world in myself.” Which also feels like I understand coming a lot of my cultural Jewish experience kind of a directness because we put out what we want and we start wrestling with it.

I just realized how many people that are kind of coming in new to both their Jewishness and their anarchism and saying “well, maybe I can do both, and my queerness!” Not everyone in the anthology is queer or trans, but a lot of people are. And a lot of people were like “Who am I to say?” Because, within the wider anarchist and left and radical progressive circles… people see Jews as like, “What do you guys have to complain about? You’re not facing any difficulties. You’re not, you know… you’re fine! There’s no antisemitism, there’s nothing going on. You don’t have any trauma. You don’t have this.” And I was like “I know that’s wrong.” I don’t want our whole story to be one of trauma, but we have profound amounts of trauma ancestrally and contemporarily. From how we’re treated, including as Jews, and there’s still globally but it also in United States, there’s antisemitism is not going away and it shifts and it changes, but it’s not gone. And it can be deadly as we found out as expressed in the anthology. There’s a lot of pieces on the Tree of Life, because that was kind of a pivotal moment that happened during the anthology being produced.

So the differences that struck me in this was I really wanted people to speak to their experiences with a forcefulness and a boldness and not hide that, because I understand that it isn’t a contest. We have just as much stake in fighting white supremacy and fascism. Because white supremacy and fascism are fundamentally anti-Semitic. See Jews as other. See us as a threat to white supremacy. A threat to states. And we are! I want them to. But I also understand that they target us as people they want to kill. Right? I’m not saying it’s all the same. The history of anti blackness is not the same as a history of antisemitism, or anti indigenous understandings, or anti… all the other anti’s that are part of the founding of… let’s just say, the United States. But there’s a pretty serious connection between them all, there is a very powerful and real connection between them all. And our fights, our fates are linked, our liberation is linked, our pain is linked.

And so to come back to your question on the differences. I want people to be like “it’s okay to say that. It’s okay to say that.” Because, I really felt the pain of a lot of Asians lately. A very flattened out category, because I know that does not encompass all the diversity within that phrase. So my apologies for using that as a shorthand for Muslims or other people that go “why don’t we get named as often?” Or “why don’t people see us?” Or “Why do people buy into the stupid stereotypes that make it seem like we’re not in the bullseye of fascism or the state or hate or all these other things.” Right? And that pain of like, I know, we can’t just have a laundry list of things. So I wanted this anthology to humanize. I feel like when people see pain, each other’s pain, they understand colonialism has stolen a lot from all of us. Capitalism has stolen, the state has. That pain feels similar even if the histories are different and through that pain, we can understand that the way to lessen those losses and create liberation. Freedom is going to be a shared struggle.

But the experience in this anthology, to come back to that question, really surprised me after reading. So many people want to write about their relationship to coming to spiritual practices. Whether that was going to Rabbinical school, or embracing trusts in God or understandings of God. There’s that which in another Jewish anarchist book wouldn’t have gotten there. And there’s a profound amount of sort of wrestling with spirituality and rituals and other huge… people engaging in a lot of ritual. Different understandings of how you can use it as a personal practice or a political practice or combination there of. I think it also shows the spectrum of people coming in through, and what their relationship to Judaism was, whether they were raised to be religious or not religious or Zionist or not Zionist. Or whether they were Jewish or converted or not. How they came to it. I really wanted people stories to be their own unique stories to really show that it isn’t there isn’t this one path there never is.

But I really wanted that to be like… the differentiation of our experience is a strength. Not just Jews. In any understand whether we’re queers or feminists or indigenous. But there’s something I think I like showing in anthology is like a dialog that shows you know how difference can not end up meaning that people have to be antagonistic to each other. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of what your question about, like different kinds of Judaism? I don’t know. I think I’m not answering the question as well as like, what different types of Judaism there were in it, because I think a lot of them it’s more an emphasis on how they choose to approach their Jewishness or their Judaism or their political practice.

TFSR: I think you answered again, in a way that I wasn’t expecting. But it’s by having every contributor be forcefully, vulnerably sharing their experience, you show that each person’s experience of Jewishness is different. And yet also kind of is Jewishness right? Or Judaism. So then it’s like, that becomes the kind of multifaceted version. In a way, my question kind of would leave, like, “there’s these different kinds of Judaism and like a, and b, and c” but actually you’re telling me through the book that what we see is that there’s all these different ways. They’re all these strategies, rituals, practices, struggles. And for me reading, it was so helpful as almost like, therapeutically because it’s something that I mean, maybe as you’ve said, my Jewishness is something I’m constantly struggling with. Actually, that made me think some of the stuff you were saying that maybe, in a way, I feel like Israel as the focus, and then the kind of history of the legacy of the Shoah, as a kind of defensive of why Israel needs to be. The same way that we see identities get flattened out, antisemitism, I feel like gets flattened out into this one thing. I could relate to the book a lot of the ways that I’ve been brought back into Judaism beyond just sort of a cultural identity has been through trans Jews and seeing how they … because I’m always like, “I can’t be Jewish and be queer, and be a feminist” and now I’m seeing all of these trans Jews finding ways to do ritual, and in the book there’s one piece that I thought was so beautiful about hormones, like a ritual, a Jewish ritual around having your hormone shot. So for me I was wrestling with that my own internalized antisemitism of the fact that I couldn’t be like anarchist and Jewish or queer and Jewish. And one of your pieces in the book that I found really important and beautiful was heartbreaking is you kind of going through all this sort of everyday antisemitism. I think non-Jewish people don’t realize that like we as Jews face … all the time. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, the experience of sort of mundane antisemitism, not like the big violence, but even in like left spaces that should be on the side of Jews. If you have some thoughts about that you would like to share.

CM: Maybe it speaks to all the different experiences like… or what I was saying about wanting people to be able to speak directly to their experiences, because I’ve had so many experiences where in general, people do not see antisemitism or take it seriously. Like the January 6th Capitol assault being very recently… the far right, we have explicitly a whole bunch of symbols, explicitly antisemetic symbols and words and practices. Because white Christian supremacists, evangelical prayer as part of it, which I feel like is an assault against all sorts of things that aren’t white, that aren’t Christians supremacist. But there was very little conversation about antisemitism or Q Anon, or all these recent phenomena. A lot has shifted, where abolition is being named, or anti Blackness is being named, or white supremacy. And that’s a phenomenal leap, because those things were not being named. But antisemitism still, it’s almost never spoken.

And for years being in radical spaces, it’s almost like… antisemitism-lite in this sort of sense. “Antisemitism isn’t real because you all have power.” And that’s at the heart of a lot of the conspiracy theories, right? The Jews are behind the scenes pulling the strings. So when you’re in leftist or anarchist spaces and people are basically saying, “We don’t need to hear from you because you have all the benefits of society.” And I’m like “we’re also anarchist for a reason!” And we’re talking about the liberation of freedom of everyone and hierarchy. I mean we can look in every category of people that are seen as oppressed or targeted people and find some people that have better off situations. So I think it’s this mythology that Jews are somehow both all fine and have lots of power.

I just kept thinking how much that hurts is when you needed people to come to your aid because you were being targeted for antisemitism. And nobody… people just got angry at you or laughed at you, or went on with what they’re doing and ignored it. The pain of how that feels no matter what our identities are, right? And the peril to me as I understand is you can keep ignoring it until something awful happens. So one of the stories that I talked about that is [when] we happen to be in Pittsburgh, and some swastikas were painted on anarchic spaces a week or so before the Tree of Life synagogue murders. It’s not a direct relationship but you know, those two spaces made a choice not to tell anybody it happened and to buff it over. To not publicize it. To not take it seriously. To not warn even the people that use that space, some of whom are Jewish, and they know that! Or queer! So this way in which “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything and we’re not gonna take it seriously.” And then a few days later, white supremacists walks into a clearly labeled Jewish space.

As Jewish anarchists we get that it’s all these things are dangerous, right? I used a quote at the beginning from a piece I really like called Feminism Hurts by Sarah Ahmed She talks about how patriarchy hurts because it’s still happening, you know? And so I really liked that piece. It’s feminism hurts or feminist hurts. I can’t really remember the exact title. But she talks about all these little moments that happen in your daily life if you’re treated as female or treated as hetero-normative. That the patriarchy just makes all these assumptions and you keep trying to tell people about them. People don’t take them seriously because they’re like, “Oh, that’s just someone…” There’s just all these little things you can almost not get words to.

And I was trying to show in a way with antisemitism. A lot of us who are Jews have just had so many experiences. I’m like questioning, thinking we eat odd foods, to joking about practices, to not taking seriously when people like are treating us with antisemitism. And then now I think another reason why there’s a resurgence of Jewish anarchism is because there’s a resurgence of fascism around the world and we viscerally understand. So many of us have parents or grandparents or know people that survived Pogroms or Shoah or other attacks more contemporaneously. And I think people think it’s like the some far off distant thing and I think it’s not… I don’t know if to call it antisemitism but this way and not taking seriously. The pain is when people kind of go “You don’t understand what it means to have your people tried to be killed off by structures” and I was like, “I mean it’s horrible that the Holocaust industry, whatever you want to call it, turned it into almost a parody.” I don’t know where.

In the State of Israel was using it. But that was like a massive genocide and it wasn’t just Jews. It was Roma peoples, and queers, and people with disabilities, and all the anarchists pretty much. It wiped out so many people. But underpinning that was antisemitism. So you can’t understand especially in German forms of fascism, national socialism, you can’t de-link antisemitism from it. But even contemporarily now, in the last four years, the number of like, all the neo-Nazis in the swastikas you still don’t hear people talk, like suddenly that’s completely de-linked from this history of antisemitism. And as someone who’s Jewish that feels so disturbing. I don’t understand how you can stop saying Nazis have anything to do with an anti semitic logic and they have it in the room. I mean, we can go into the analysis of like “what does it mean theoretically, antisemitism” or “what does it mean historically?” But there’s just a pain in which people not taking it seriously when not that long ago, they were trying to annihilate every single Jew in the entire world, including every single space and every single book and every single grave, and there was going to be one museum left that had pieces of Jews… so you could go look and see to show how weird Jews were. That was the end result of it, you know.

It’s like, even if that didn’t happen, which it didn’t. I don’t understand why that pain doesn’t…. Of course we have pain, you know?! I was thinking I saw this thing the other day (I copy edit books for a living) it was in a book. Totally unrelated… Just a little tidbit about the schools in New York when there was a wave of immigration or a lot of Jews trying to get away from Pogroms before Shoah and poured into New York City especially, and had really huge Jewish communities. A lot of them spoke Yiddish and the public schools in New York were like “we will not allow Yiddish to be spoken in the public schools.” And so they would wash the kids mouth out with soap if they spoke Yiddish. They would punish them. And it’s not equivalent history. There’s the pain of being like “I lost Yiddish.” My Great Grandparents spoke Yiddish. And my dad spoke it, and he wanted to teach me. He was really young. And I was like “why do I want to learn this language?” Because they screamed at each other all the time in it so I wouldn’t understand what they were yelling at each other. But now I’m like “that language was intentionally killed off by the State of Israel officially, and the Nazis were trying to destroy it.” And then you have a contemporary history in New York and I think about the residential school history. It’s not the same history. I’m not but where we’re going to take indigenous children away, and we’re going to beat their languages out of them, like, quite literally.

And the pain of people losing their languages. That’s a pain. And there’s so much more that happened in those residential schools that is horrible and painful that continues to this day. And for us to understand that, again, I really want to come back to that the pain I feel over loss of language. And a lot of this research as a queer Jewish anarchist. It’s like “let’s relearn languages.” There’s many different kinds of Jewish languages. And same with indigenous languages. And the beauty of relearning them is, you tell different stories about the world, you understand the world differently, you reconnect to the natural world. Because language has all, diasporic and indigenous languages have a connection to the natural world in a way that a lot of dominant colonial languages don’t. And you understand that we come from a pluralism of people that didn’t know borders, that knew sharing space together in different ways….

I don’t want to romanticize indigenous peoples or Jewish peoples or any diasporic peoples. Peoples had conflict. People had asocial behaviors, people have things that… community riffs, etc. But they had all sorts of rituals and structures and ways without carceral logics. Without states without colonizers. To deal with them in a totally different ways. And if we bring back even those languages, let’s say we will have different words for understanding how to deal with things, conflict in our community, that isn’t about prison industrial complexes, for instance.

So, to come back to emphasize antisemitism hurts on this really personal level. And I want people to take it seriously because the more… when the Tree of Life happened, I went to this beautiful solidarity rally, but I know a lot of, almost all, the solidarity rallies that happened made this huge connection to white supremacists are coming into Jewish spaces and killing people that they can clearly see are Jewish. They’re coming into black churches, they’re going into mosques. They’re going into places where they can find the people that they think are who needs to be eradicated.

I think the resurgence of this new Jewish anarchism is like a lot of people are starting to wear visible signs of being Jewish, Kippahs and embracing how they look and embracing practices in public spaces that clearly signal. Holding up a sign that says “I’m a Jew at a demonstration.” Two years ago, I know a lot of my friends were scared to do that because of the fear of being targeted by white supremacists. And now, we should be able to do that, right? I don’t want us to have to hide any more than anyone else should have to hide who they are. So people not seeing the antisemitism within…

To come back to that lastly it really has been painful to me. I expect antisemitism is in the world. And I know most people don’t see it or take it seriously. But what’s painful is when your own community doesn’t. In the same way when my own anarchist community doesn’t take patriarchy seriously, or doesn’t take forms of hierarchy seriously. It pains us extra because we’re like, “but we should know better.” It’s not any worse, I would say, but it’s more painful. And I think the last thing I learned is that a lot of Jewish anarchists have this really weird fear of when push comes to shove… who’s going to protect us? We are going to protect everyone else. Like anarchists are really good at protecting each other and other communities… mutual aid and solidarity.

But I think part of the trauma of being a Jew is history has not been on our side. We have had by and large to protect ourselves way too many times. And whether that’s a false narrative or just a feeling or trauma… but you know, it brings that up for me in my anarchist communities, if you don’t take antisemitism seriously now and it’s just someone being a jerk to me about it in a public space. What happens when, you know, they come into our Jewish spaces and kill…. People say “Okay, yeah, fine, still, it’s only a synagogue. It’s only Jews.” I don’t know, I think even to some degree, the Tree of Life… there’s a couple really poignant pieces in the book. There’s a bunch about the Tree of Life. But there’s some about Charlottesville and other moments where, you know, fascist were yelling, blatantly antisemetic phrases, or targeting synagogues. And no one was thinking to protect those spaces or taking seriously again, those slogans.

The hurts! Of course it hurts. But it just doesn’t hurt it has consequences in terms of who’s going to ultimately get killed or targeted when it gets worse. And I think unfortunately, it’s going to get worse again. Like that Capital assault was just the beginning of a euphoria from what they know their capable of… White supremacy, and White nationalism, Christian evangelicalism, White supremacists know what they’re capable of and I feel like the reorganizing. It has not gone away.

So in this moment if we could take more seriously anti-Asian, anti-brown people, anti-Black people, anti-indigenous, the anti-queer, anti-disabled, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, and say “Okay, this isn’t just a fucking laundry list. This is our lives.” And that “We care a lot about each other and that we have shared pain, and that we have marvelous…” I guess that’s what I want to say with the anthology is a lot of stories of pain. In the Shoah, I think that’s also the other problem is like “Oh, this whole stupid narrative. The Jews went to their death, like sheeps!” Total crap. There’s so much resistance. You know, it wasn’t just the Warsaw Ghetto, which is an amazing story. If you read the story, it’s a gripping story, because there was a lot of socialists and anarchists organizing that went into that. But there was all sorts of acts of resistance by Jews and non Jews, but especially including Jews during that time period that has gotten erased.

A beautiful book, I just remembered the other day again is Blessed is the Flame – about what resistance looks like. When you’re at the last moment when you’re about to be, you know, shoved into the crematorium or something. I read about 100 autobiographies of people who barely survived Shoah and each of them talked about what resistance is possible when almost no resistance seems possible. And that’s what the Blessed is the Flame is about. And yet people still resisted. And we still are. But we resist in ways that also are about resilience and joy and beauty and creating life. So a lot of the forms of resistance that happened, as why I point to this book Blessed Flame, but also looking at a lot of these autobiographies and what people did was they wanted to have a Shabbat before they knew they would be killed in a concentration camp, or they wanted to write down their name to keep or some or things they wanted to keep alive. The spark of the beauty of how they understood their Jewishness or their Judaism or their rituals. It wasn’t, you know, just trying to pick up arms or trying to do other forms of direct action or blowing up a crematory – which were good, incredible forms of resistance that happened too. But yeah, just the way in which even in the worst moments people want to create life. Because that’s what we do… and beauty.

So this anthology is full of all these Jewish anarchists. “Okay, the world’s really bad right now we’re facing fascism and ecological ecocide and now this pandemic, and capitalism…” There’s so many things that are so overwhelming, and we’re going to do it as joyfully and beautifully and lovingly and resiliently and queerly as we can till the last, very last moment, and that is resistance. You know? That is resistance because they don’t want us to live. Us living is resistance. But us living… I don’t mean just like surviving, I mean, trying to thrive, to love. There’s a lot of really beautiful pieces like that.

I am diverging off the antisemitism part. But maybe coming back to the queerness and the trans-ness, I think I wanted people with this anthology to see both the pain and the beauty. And so with antisemitism, you can see here’s the pain, but the beauty of it is, there’s a lot of Jewish anarchists that are doing beautiful anti fascist resistance. And they’re using their rituals as part of that, or their wisdom and their queerness and trans-ness. Part of that I’ve been really struck by is that there’s another thing have been stolen from us and indigenous people and Black people and a whole bunch of other people who have been made diasporic and colonized and destroyed by states… we’ve had a lot of things stolen from us, like elasticity and dynamism in gender.

Within Judaism from the beginning, there’s all sorts of ways, there’s stories of people without pronouns, and there’s five or six different ways of understanding gender, and there’s a lot of spaces. A friend of mine was talking me recently about how trans-ness, or non binary people, non conforming people are often associated with Twilight. Within Jewish writings… with liminal spaces, with in between spaces, and they are considered the most holy and the closest… if you believe again in some kind of holiness framework. Because they have the most ability to see in a way.

In a way, bringing Judaism, and queerness, and anarchism, and trans-ness together creates a wider frame to see more. You know? Non-binary people, you’re not stuck in this box. You see a spectrum that so much more beautiful and offers so much more possibility. And so we see antisemitism, we see anti-Blackness, and we bring those together… we’ll see a better way to struggle against it. But we’ll also see all the practices we share. They’re so beautiful. How we’ve kept communities together without states, and how we’ve done community self defense without police. How we resolve conflict without cops. We’re not going to have to expropriate from each other steal from each other. We can learn and borrow from each other. We can share land together without having to be a state.

There’s plenty of diasporic people of all different genders and colors, and indigenous or non indigenous, that had all sorts of ecological and harmonious relationships with land and using it for different seasonal harvesting or gleaning or commons.. We’ll have so much more wideness of a lens, and I think that’s why I want people to see both how much we’ve lost as Jews. How much has been stolen from us, and how much we’ve been devastated over the centuries. It just widens the lens with each moment in history and there’s more.

I just learned this thing recently about the witch trials, I love Silvia Federici’s book – as a lot of people do – about the witch hunts been this massive way to kill off healing arts, and mending arts, and queers, and non binary and feminists in a way to rein in massive amounts of queer women, healer people murdered in the name of being witches. And then I overlaid that recently by learning about how much of that was tainted with antisemitism and potentially why some of the understandings of what witches look like because people equated them with Jews. A lot of antisemitism that led into who got killed during that time period. That only broadens the horror of that moment. And gives us more understanding, especially as queer anarchist Jews to be like “Wow, of course, we’re going to fight against those things with other people.” And we’re going to try now. There’s a whole bunch of Jews that are doing healing arts, grief rituals, and mending rituals. Because we’re reclaiming this beautiful thing that was killed off at this moment. 500 whatever years ago.

TFSR: You bring up a lot of really, really interesting, important parallels, in listening to you. Thinking about how… this is making connections in my brain. I connect like the kind of State based thinking with the kind of like universalism of Christianity in ways that tries to narrow our…. make our narratives uniform. That’s what cuts out the histories of resistance both with like Jews or Black resistance during the time of slavery. It makes it seem like this like simple thing. In a way I connect that with “leftist spaces” where they’re, like “look like your particular problem as a Jew – with like antisemitism that can come later. We’ll deal with that later. Because there’s more pressing issues right now.” I’m not saying that we should be playing the oppression Olympics, but to secondarize whatever kinds of experiences of oppression that we have based on like embodiment, or like perception. I think there’s the history of antisemitism going back. You know, it’s completely entwined with the development and the subtilization of oppression that comes with like the formation of the state and the development of capitalism and markets. I don’t think we can disconnect that from all the other things. Again, there’s always like, risk in analogizing. You’ve been very careful to say “it’s not the same what happens to different groups of people, but…” And I really like the connection you made with feminism because like with Sarah Ahmed too, like she talks about being like a kill-joy. My internalized antisemitism… sometimes I’m like, even just bringing up antisemitism is like “Oh, that’s like an annoying Jewish thing to do.” You know what I mean? And it’s so prevalent because people are ignorant of how much antisemitism is just basically woven into… implicit antisemitism is woven into our lives. Even just thinking Jews are powerful and therefore can’t be experiencing kinds of oppression because there’s been some kind of assimilation. That was really helpful to me to kind of tie these things together and I thought you did a really…. just bringing those parallels up was important and kind of building off the resistance and ritual…that’s something else that really struck me from your book from various writers. You have mentioned a few times how the kind of horrors of the Tree of Life massacre kind of shadow the book and there’s a lot of responses to that. Your previous collection of Rebellious Mourning is about grief and mourning. So I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about like Jewish rituals as forms of resistance or even direct action. One of the things that gets talked about in the book is particularly mourning and sitting Shiva as a kind of communal thing. So I don’t know if you have more that you want to say about that. But I would really love to hear more of the kind of Jewish resistance.

CM: Yeah, I think for variety personal reasons have been really drawn to loss, grief and mourning, but also because it’s a part of life, you know? And as queers, anarchists, and Jews, and other identities, they’re probably listening to this. We know, we are gonna experience a lot of loss. And so how do we handle that? We want to lessen unnecessary loss. And we want to… I don’t know, skipping over it doesn’t make it go away. And not using it as a form of instrumentalness, but to both allow us to fully begin the journey of processing it so we don’t…. people need each other to do that. Otherwise it is almost impossible to ever kind of integrate. Grief doesn’t go away, you just have to integrate it in ways that allow me to journey forward with your grief in a better way.

What I love about Jewish grief traditions, just to focus on those. Traditions around sick, dying, and post death… I think they all pretty much ask of you to do it in community. And so you’re not supposed to leave a body alone that is dead, until it is properly buried. Is that possible? I think that’s why the grief of when police murder people and the bodies are left in the street… The horror of that! It is horrifying. It’s horrifying for the people that know that person and love them. It’s horrifying for those…

I’ve been around many of those, unfortunately, watching those bodies for hours in the street, and the indignity. There’s so many levels, it feels horrible. Then denying people the capacity to be with that body and stay with that body. Right? And do it in community so they can process it. And I think why those moments when the police do that. That felt horrible and powerful to people is that you stand there for hours together and you create your own sort of communal space of helping, I’m gonna just wash the time again, you can see the pain and people instinctively want to be with other people. To be there for the friends and the family to help them process the horror of this for that moment and not skip ahead.

And Daunte Wright… I was just struck by that, because I love Unicorn Riot when they’re right at the scene at the very beginning and some other live streamers right when he was first murdered. I would just watch for hours where people were like “Before we go to the police station, we have to sing songs to the ancestors” which they did. “We have to circle the body and be here with it, we have to write.” And so what I appreciate within Judaism, is it’s understood for 1000’s of years we need… we don’t want people to be murdered by police. There’s also a long history of Jewish songs and tradition. Jews have not liked police for a long time. We want to get back to a time when we can stay. It gives you things that are already there to turn to that makes sense, right?

It’s like you should be with a body, but also sitting Shiva is 7. Shiva means 7. It’s like when someone you have a loss or someone dies, you’re supposed to, as a community, stay together for seven days and talk and laugh and cry and eat and sing and be there. And if anyone has experienced someone who they love dying, you know, especially, I mean, there’s so many different things that happen with grief. But that first week, especially, it’s almost just… it’s so unreal and you just don’t know what to do. And the capitalist industry tells you to start worrying about buying things – coffins or arranging funerals. But the beauty in just being with other people is really profound. And knowing that that’s the beginning of the journey.

And then there’s a lot of different traditions, but how do you come out of that week? There’s a lot of intentionality. One thing I’ve heard was like, with people, you walk outside and you walk around a block together to help you transition back into the world. Okay, so these are such beautiful moments, right? And so a lot of Jews and there’s a whole bunch of other traditions I could go into. But a lot of Jews have been doing a lot, as Jewish anarchists and others, like with the Tree of Life. You know, again, I think it was just because that was people’s practice. It’s like that happened and people started sitting Shiva in the street around where it happened because this is what they do as their practice as the ritual.

And because the community was in pain, and because it’s in a extremely long term Jewish neighborhood. It’s everywhere you walk. Like, it feels powerful to me, because I don’t really ever experience being around lots of things, where there’s so many Jews, you know, even if they’re not all my type of Jews! You see yourself in a way, you know, but yet here they are completely feeling like everyone sort of been a target. And in this neighborhood that’s clearly a target, you can easily find Jews in this neighborhood, and people chose to sit in the street again and be visible and do this grief ritual. Then it became a direct action blockade in a sense too. But I’m not even sure that was, who knows whether that was the intentionality. But who cares! It doesn’t really matter? Right? How do we use these rituals, not in the sense of “We are going to do the Shiva so we can have a blockade!” But be like “We need to be together now, we can’t go home.” We have to be here together.

And then over in Pittsburgh, there was a lot of intentionality for that first year. In Jewish rituals every month you’re supposed to do something, then after the first 11 months, and the 12, then there’s every year, it never ends, if you have someone that dies within Judaism, there are moments to remember that person, because remembering is keeping them alive, and the love alive, and the honoring. So that Jewish anarchist queer community in Pittsburgh was doing like, a lot of monthly and weekly rituals and ceremonies and on the one year did a really beautiful -which I end up coming to – a really beautiful Shabbat, that combined grief rituals, but also, were doing political organizing at the same time. I don’t think they could have if they didn’t have the community to be processing. They don’t have to also happen in the same place.

But when we seen how profound it is… a lot of direct actions lately where people are like “You’re destroying sacred land with pipelines. You’re killing off sacred bodies with your cops.” I think people are creating grief spaces around them, whether they’re doing it explicitly or not, and bringing them because a lot of Jews are going “It’s okay to be both anarchist and Jewish now.” Which is a new thing again, and this is what’s really distinct about this moment. And if you read the anthology it’s so different than any other Jewish anarchism before… and to be spiritual.

That’s been challenging for me, because I’ve never understood myself as religious or even believing in God, or even believing faith or having even spirituality. It’s been really recent. “Oh, that’s just that’s like, you know, higher… That’s something I don’t know.” I just always felt like it’s something outside myself. And then I’m like “No! How can we do we do it ourselves?” Spiritualities, the non-hierarchical ways we are taking these rituals and making them queer, or bringing out the queerness in them or bringing our politics to them and making them anarchist.

Just a couple weeks ago, I was sitting under a beautiful stars with a bunch of queer anarchists in a backyard and we sang for like two or three hours: these beautiful songs about healing and solidarity and resistance and anti cops and under the moon. That’s been Shabbat. We’re waving to the sky change. And then it’s just like “what are we doing?” We’re having an anarchist hang out in the backyard! But we did the Shabbat. Which was lighting candles and every Friday (you’re supposed to for 24 hours, slow down, stop, be with each other, be in community) you know? And again, politically, you’re also with your buddies who are anarchist, and you’re talking about other things. In fact, three days later, we’re making banners to go to the Palestinian solidarity demo.

And because you see each other regularly and you build relationships, and you’re like when things happen, okay, we need to be there. Right? So I don’t know. There is an interrelationship with them. But I think there’s something especially profound this moment where so much of what we’re experiencing is loss and death. And that’s what our resistance is responding to: loss of beautiful forests that we love, loss of human beings to pandemics, loss of, you know, fentanyl, or whatever. We can go on and on about the horrors of what’s happening. And as queer as queers, and as Jews and as anarchists… When you bring all those three identities together, that are all about having to make our own families, or on practices own on communities, each has its own lens, but I think you bring them together and you end up having this like “greater than the sum of their parts” way of understanding how do we create.

I was not able to be integrate my Judaism and my anarchism as much. Both my biological parents, I helped them die. What could have been horrible death and beautiful death. But I inadvertently sat Shiva with in both cases. Because they were both in hospice II type situations, a lot of other people were around. I just hung out there for a week and it was beautiful. But I went, I had to leave the anarchist world because I know the anarchists understood. They’re like, come back when you’re done. I’m like, I don’t understand that I’m gonna be done with grief. And then when I came back I was like “Okay, this isn’t enough.”

As an anarchist, it’s not going to be enough to keep me. I had such a lack of faith in anarchism at that moment. And I think that’s what led me to think “faith is a promise”. It’s not a belief in a god, it’s a faith that you will be there for me when someone’s dying. It’s a faith that we will be there for each other when a pandemic is really hard. We did sort of okay during this pandemic, we also did woefully inadequate as anarchists. As Jews, I think we did better. I think Jewish space that got created was what helped. This has been a horrendous year.

And the spaces that a lot of queer, radical, and anarchist Jews…. there’s a space called Pink Peacock and in Glasgow – this Trans and Queer Yiddish thing. Yiddish anarchist, Jewish anarchist, and they’ve been doing on online Havdalah. It’s very intimate and small. And we have these lovely conversations. I started doing that in a moment when I was unbelievably depressed and didn’t even know if I wanted to live. Just waking up every morning and going “why am I still on this earth” and was at one of the lowest points. And I started going, and the first time I got on the phone, they said “it’s okay to be wherever you’re at,” and I just almost started crying on the phone. And no one, you know… it was in held in a ritual Havdalah, which is another Shabbat and I’ve been going to that for months. I’m like, “okay, they created that space, the ritual to grieve and to find joy again, and to process what was going on”. And anarchists have not been as good at doing that.

Muslim anarchists that I talked to have also profound rituals, and Black anarchists and indigenous anarchists. And I guess I want to ramble on about lots of topics. Part of the pandemic is I like “how do we keep our minds on… I feel so scattered!” What about the pandemic side effects? There’s also a resurgence of Black anarchism and indigenous anarchism. And what I like to think of all in a way is all diasporic anarchism might be a next Anthology. Anarchists that have been people that have been displaced repeatedly and disenfranchised, seen as disposable, are understanding that their own… they’re reclaiming. They’re saying, “Hey, we’re not going to let you take away things from us. And in fact, we’re going to bring those things back in and use them as our power and as our resilience and our as our playbooks and as our way of being this for life.” But it’s making anarchism so much more beautifully complex and sustainable.

I’m more an anarchist each passing year the older. I’m like “Why are anarchists always in their early 20s?” The vast majority of them! Where do all the other anarchist go? It is hard, because there are not the things that keep you in it. But when you’re a Black anarchist, or an indigenous anarchist, or Jewish or Black Jewish anarchist, all the overlapping [identities] where you can go and you can say “Hey, we have traditions! We have rituals!” More and more people bringing those into the spaces of resistance. And we’re bringing our multiple prayers into those spaces of resistance, or multiple grieving rituals.

I’ve been at things where people want to do several of those from different traditions. They all are so similar in a certain way. I’ve used this example before, a lot of diasporic peoples have used different things to make noise because you have to gather people. Jews use Shofar – a ram’s horn. Things you can find in the ecosystems where people were. In Mexico or that part of the world, I just learned, people use big snail shells to call people together. There’s the conch shell! A friend of mine yesterday said… I think it’s in the Gulf region, some indigenous folks and other peoples. Black and indigenous communities use drums…. Indigenous peoples, we’re all in different places. We’re all experienced our own displacements and pains, but we have these rituals and we have these things we do. And when we get together, we’re like, “Oh, that’s cool! We all have these different ways of gathering each other!” We can return to those things together.

But especially I think the sense of what’s sacred at this time on earth is so imperiled. In a way, I think that’s why, weirdly, I think it isn’t just me coming back to the sense of spiritual. Not in a hierarchical way. But a sense of if we don’t understand the beauty and the mystery of the earth and that we’re part of it, and that we actually can’t even explain that. It’s just beautiful. Why do we have to explain it? You know, you’re sitting in a forest with some friends and you’re like “why do you have to explain why this feels powerful?” I’ve done some Jewish anarchist grief rituals in the woods and it’s absurdly beautiful and moving and healing. Why? Because I feel so connected to the ground and we’ve done things, the burning, and rocks, and blah, blah. We need that right now because humanity is destroying the earth and we have to remember our connections. And part of that is remembering this mystery.

The little anecdote about that Shabbat I was telling when we were under the stars? It was almost transcendent where you start singing… If you have ever done that? Just acapella. Your voices start… It’s like so anarchistic… you all kind of know what song you’re gonna do next and which words. Your voices rise and fall, when to start and when to stop. Like how is this organization without hierarchy? Whoo! Your bodies are just feeling really good! All of a sudden I was looking at the stars and was just in this beautiful “I just feel so good! And I haven’t so much of the time!” And then I see this line of lights across the sky and they’re moving and I almost scream and broke the beautiful space we created. Everyone looked up and someone’s like, “Elon Musk, that’s Elon Musk’s satellites!” We all stood for five minutes watching him destroy the sky. I thought, “Oh my god. Jewish ritual asks you to look for three stars at the end of Shabbat to end the sacred 24 hours of a non capitalist time” Time and community time, and here’s Elon Musk that’s taking away the sky.

It’s good to do rituals to remember that we have things to fight for. Things that are beyond us to even understand that we shouldn’t be doing that to, right? Rituals have meaning. They’re not just like woo woo looking at stars, they’re like those are ours to destroy and they aren’t Elon Musk’s to desecrate in capitalism in the name of money and all this other shitty stuff. It makes you want to be radical and resist even more and not have it be that. So they’re interconnected, not an instrumental way.

TFSR: I love how you’re talking about that. One way I think about anarchism… or like, the way I want to talk to people about it who maybe aren’t anarchists yet is to think about all the ways in our lives that the state doesn’t touch us and doesn’t reach us. And really what the history of the state and the capital is like, kind of tearing people away from their life ways from the land and making them dependent on the state (or seemingly dependent on it). But really, there’s all these moments that we don’t have the state in our lives. The way that you’re describing the rituals for all the kinds of cultures, not just Jewish culture is creating a different time in space that isn’t the state that isn’t capitalism. It changes that and that, and the more we do that, we would be making our lives more outside of the state. Doing something else than what we’re expected to do or asked to do. So I think that’s a really powerful way that you describe that.

CM: I watched someone during the “Chinese New Year” this year, they did this really beautiful series of posts about how this is actually not the Chinese New Year. It’s the Lunar New Year. It’s actually not one day, it’s… I don’t remember… I’m going to not say how many days it is because I don’t remember, but it’s multiple days. They said each day has a very specific thing and it’s not, you know… you think about New Year’s. New Year’s has become this ridiculous go get fucking drunk and just have a horrible time. But you’re supposed to pretend you’re happy! That’s not a ritual. That’s like an unthinking, commodified… like Christmas or whatever, all these things!!!

But these rituals that you make your own. The Jewish New Year is also extends over multiple days, and you’re supposed to spend a lot of time reflecting on harm you’ve done to others and harm. You’re supposed to actually gather with the community, if you’re part of one. Jewish anarchists could stand to do this, and other anarchists, once a year, to get together and think about harms that have happened in the community and whether it’s possible… how we dealt with them, how better could we have dealt with them? Should some things be forgiven or not be forgiven? There’s all these moments that are structured into ritual to help us do things that we want to be doing in our anarchist world. What does an abolitionist future look like? Well, we practice it through rituals. We’re going to get better at doing that! Cleaning our space.

These there’s all these rituals that people do there outside of the hegemonic ones. Christmas makes me so agitated and angry, because, you know, what? It’s three months long and it’s nothing but buying things. It’s so dominant. Everybody assumes everyone’s Christian. There’s so many reasons, but it’s even beyond that. It’s like this deadening. It’s not even a holiday or ritual. And when you come back to all these other traditions you realize people did them around harvest times to celebrate the harvest. Around moments to celebrate! There’s a day, the highest day of sorrow, where Jews spend the day thinking about mourning, and then there’s highest days of joy.

A few years ago, before the pandemic, I spent a lot of time in Montreal and some friends and I went to the day when you’re supposed to unroll the Torah scrolls and start again, and I’d never done that before! You take them and dance with them. People were dancing it was really fun. And then when someone said “Oh, let’s go outside and dance!” And my queer Jewish anarchists friends and I were like “Hey! Let’s dance in the street!” Because not everyone was a radical. And then people were all moving in the street and then we’re kind of creating a little blockade. But we were also just dancing, right? It was really fun, you know? And so you were kind of teaching people “Hey, you could actually take over streets.” We weren’t intentionally doing that. It wasn’t like a lesson, but it was just like… “Hey, we’re anarchists, we’re gonna we’re gonna go in the streets.”

There’s a joy in remembering these moments. We can do this on this day. I think this year has been really hard for a lot of us because our little teeny rituals… I realize how beautiful and precious they are and how flimsy they are, you know? Anarchist bookfairs are our sort of like dancing together. I don’t know, we’ve lost those. And I think we need to come back into this time and think more about it. I really want to encourage Muslim anarchist, Jewish anarchists and other Black anarchists, indigenous, brown, all the anarchists that are coming to try to say, “No, I want to be the whole of who I am with this!” And not have to keep those in separate spaces.

Of course, there’s some beautiful about just being with indigenous anarchists to do your thing, or just be with Jewish anarchists. I get the value the power of that too. But if we can all start saying, “Hey!” If we all start reclaiming all the beautiful rituals and holidays and practices and playbooks and trading them, I just think it’s gonna look so different. It’s gonna make our resistance better and our anarchism better too. Our anarchism needs probably more refreshing. It’s actually a much younger tradition than most of those other things I’m pointing to, which have actually had to go through…. much, much longer they have had to be rebellious and exist outside the states. Yeah, much, much longer.

TFSR: Yeah, we’ve been talking for a while. But one question. My questions is in a light hearted spirit, but maybe I don’t know where we’ll go with the answer. One thing that struck me reading this book talking to my people – my queer trans Jewish anarchists, the way that all those things being queer, being Jewish are being anarchists individually often we are like “am I queer enough? I’m not queer enough, I’m not Jewish enough, I don’t know enough about Torah. Am I anarchist enough? Am I committed enough to the struggle? And I just wondered if you hadn’t any thoughts about how these three things? I mean, the book gives us a different image of that for sure. But why do we internalize… or how do we internalize these like… this impossible measurement of like what we should be to really be that?

CM: Yeah, it was funny when you said that. I was like “That’s so true!” Like, almost. I don’t know, almost everybody, especially Jews. There’s something about Jews always going around, “I’m not a good enough Jew!” I don’t know, I feel it. Maybe all of them. Maybe less so with anarchism. I think there’s something nice about that. I don’t know. It’s like, to flip it around. There’s something nice about being humble. We have to always be striving to be good enough to be these things. You know? It’s an honor to be all of them to me. Will I ever be a good enough anarchist? Probably not. But I should aspire to be a better and better one all the time. Especially all three of those, in their own way, have really profoundly beautiful (this is not a universal, because some people say “they are not always welcoming”).

But I think in general, they’re very generous and welcoming and mutualistic and reciprocal. You know, if you say you’re interested in anarchism, people start handing you zines or whatever it is. People really do want to share and borrow. Maybe to flip it around, maybe it’s comes out of humility. It also maybe comes out of… it is really hard to feel enough. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just gonna flip it around. Because I think it’s nice think about humility, which I think maybe we need, and just be like “let’s aspire to be better and better at all of them” you know, maybe more… the “not good enough” comes from: it’s hard enough to be all these things in a world that says those things aren’t. Especially like radical versions of Judaism, and anarchism, queerness, that they’re all seen as is not enough. They’re outside of the… so it’s too bad that we have to take on that sort of self doubt about ourselves.

It does become hard to sustain them sometimes. I really hope with this Anthology, and almost everything I do to really emphasize, like, all we really have is each other in the solidarity more than anything to me is… if we don’t stick by each other, we don’t have anything else with each other. Maybe we’ll feel more of enough if we try harder to be there for each other in ways in the fullness of who we are. I don’t know. For me, I want to hear other people point out antisemitism, so it isn’t just Jews. I want to hear people that are not queer. I want everyone to not have to be their own advocate, as it were. So maybe that’s another way we don’t feel enough because we all just feel sort of invisibilized by each other, which I think is sad, you know?

If we were more acknowledged, like, celebratory of each other. But I think it’s really going in that direction. I really do. I feel like the last few years there’s been so much collective trauma, so quickly, targeting so many people. Like every day now almost. The past few years if you think how many white supremacist murders, assaults on people. They pretty much have killed now every category of humanity except themselves.. I think we’re all starting to go into spaces, each time, unfortunately. I don’t want that to happen, for us to see that. Then I start realizing we’re like, “Oh, we are enough because we start seeing each other. We are enough because we’re there for each other.” So, yeah, maybe we’ll start getting past that. When we all try to be more of ourselves to each other too.

TFSR: Well, I’m grateful for you giving me your time to talk for the Final Straw and also it was really exciting to be in an actual space with you, physically together. But also for putting this book together because it did, for me, made me see that I’m not alone and that there’s other people struggling with the same questions and having answers that I would never have thought of. That confirm things that I feel. So the book creates this community too. I think is really important work, so I’m really grateful to you for that. I really like the idea: may we be queerer and more Jewish and more anarchist!

CM: I know! I want to be! May we be more. We have to be more of all of them. Again, what I said I wanted this anthology to be liberatory. Queer liberation. Jewish liberation sounds weird. But I do want like a liberatory-ness within our Judaism and our Jewishness as radicals and anarchists and queers, you know? I wanted it to be bold and beautiful, and assertive in a way of beauty. But not just for Jews, I really, I hope. I’ve been really happy. Because one thing I was trying to do with this was to not just have this be something for Jews, to have the anthology really show interconnections of struggles and identities. Jews are all colors, all languages, all places, there are no borders within Judaism. If we don’t see that enough, we push ourselves harder. I’m not saying that it’s perfect at all. But there is no homogeneous Jew. And that points to this beauty of “we are all things across all borders.” And including beyond just Judaism. So I hope… I feel like it touches people on this other level outside of being a Jewish anarchist.

But I’m also really, really appreciative. I feel the same way. I really want to acknowledge and thank all the 40 or more people that contributed to it. I’ve been really touched by how many people are reading it and saying “Oh wow. I feel. I feel seen for what I’ve been struggling with as a queer, feminist, non binary Jewish anarchists.” Who is trying to be part of this resurgent, beautiful, bold new thing that’s been coming out and creating this of anarchism with other anarchists that are coming to their senses of who they are together. And it’s just really touching to see people. That’s what I want. I want us all to see ourselves. The fullness of ourselves more. That’s the title. There’s Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart. We’re all so brokenhearted by this world because we should be. But I want us to be whole in that too. So I’m loving that you and other people are responding to it that way.

TFSR: Well, thank you so much.

CM: Thank you so much for having me on this.

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keepingupwitht · 5 months

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"Counting the Cost" by Jill Duggar Dillard

Last night, I read all of Counting the Cost in one sitting because apparently my fundie fascination is still going strong over a year after we closed down KUWF. I've got a lot of takeaways I want to talk about so I'm going to put a cut and get into it all after the jump.

In the beginning of the book, it struck me how generally correct we were about Jill and growing up as a Duggar. She was a people pleaser and playing the role of “Sweet Jilly Muffin” was so important to her. She loved her childhood and her parents. It’s interesting both from Jinger & Jill that as kids, the Duggar childhood of their memories is an idyllic one. There was a lot of emphasis on their values - no rock music, dancing, movies, etc. but it was a lot of time spent together and fun and games.

We also saw the shift in the way they grew up - they were always IBLP inspired conservative Christains, but were attending a regular baptist church up until they attended a different church one week that had dancing in the service. Suddenly, they started attending an IBLP only church and getting deeper in. Jill recounts the first time she went to an IBLP conference and realized there were other families like theirs. It was interesting to see their early progression deeper into the cult (which Jill even calls it by the end of the book).

Jim Bob getting into politics was interesting - Josh’s early interest in it, while Jill preferred to get treats from the other legislators, made a lot of sense. When Josh is sent away, Jill glosses over some of the details (fair enough) but it’s interesting to me to see how she lays out the three things happening around the same time: (1) going deeper into IBLP, (2) her dad getting involved in politics and (3) Josh getting sent away. It lays the groundwork for what TLC is about to walk into and change everything.

Jim Bob also saying he knew God wanted him to run for Senate, then losing and immediately being noticed by the press and ultimately Discovery - and opening the “window of opportunity” for their family to be on TV was a little wild. The fact that all this happened ultimately because this man flipped a coin three times and got heads all three times - something that has a ⅛ probability of happening - is sorta wild.

Jill not enjoying filming was something I did not expect - honestly I always thought that she was one of the kids who enjoyed it more. But it makes sense now that she was one of the few who refused to have her honeymoon filmed and refused TLC cameras at her birth, which Jana and Michelle filmed. Those were one of the things that I noticed at the time but didn’t realize what it meant. Good for Jill for standing her ground on both those things - although she wanted to refuse to have her birth filmed at all.

It was interesting to me that the Duggars were not an IBLP model family UNTIL the show. The show put them in that position - Jill didn’t think they’d be one without it. And the line about Jana being invited to visit headquarters as the only blond to be one of “Gothard’s Girls” just hurts to think about in hindsight.

It’s interesting how long they propped Josh up as the golden boy while he was in trouble behind the scenes.

In hindsight, the fact that Jim Bob really set up Jill and Derick is really something, since they would ultimately be the first to really break away.

Everytime Jill advocates for herself, I am so proud. She pushed for two weeks in Nepal to meet Derick even when they only wanted to film part of the trip, and got the time. They filmed a fake goodbye and then spent another week getting to know each other.

I didn’t expect to have my lawyer hat on, but the fact that Jim Bob had Jill sign a contract the day of her rehearsal dinner with everything going on with her MILs health without letting her read it, and her not even realizing what was happening was just atrocious. Just pure and straight abuse.

The fact that Jill was not paid for any filming and thought she was volunteering at her family ministry for the majority of the time she was filming is just awful. I know she did get perks - her Nepal trip, various other trips, her wedding, groceries, etc. But the fact that she and Derick only had a five day honeymoon because that’s all they could afford when Jim Bob almost certainly made more than $100,000 for their wedding is gross.

This also doesn’t make TLC look very good, since this kind of abuse was allowed to occur basically under their watch. I get that they likely had a great deal on the Duggars because they were only negotiating with questionable businessman Jim Bob but it does suck to see how little they care about the human cost of their show.

#jill duggar dillard #counting the cost

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licncourt · 1 year

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some thoughts on incest in iwtv

I already had this partially written for later, but I've received a few asks on various topics surrounding this issue so I guess I'll talk about it now.

In short, I think the incestuous themes in IWTV had a lot of wasted potential for psychological horror. I don't think it was necessarily a terrible choice if it had been utilized to its full potential, but that never occurred the way it needed to in order to feel like it made sense in the narrative. If I had to boil it down to a tl;dr, I'd say that the incest feels unnecessary and gratuitous in some cases because the deeper themes and story elements that are virtually always the point of Gothic incest are inadequately thought out and never feel like a complete exploration of the topic. Something like incest is so sensitive and so easy to use for cheap shock value that it requires a thoughtful approach and capable touch to work.

The psychosexual fixation Claudia develops on Louis in IWTV is the first and most fleshed out example of incest in VC and the most interesting, in my opinion.

As an exploration of isolation and familial trauma, I think Claudia's feelings for Louis could've been very impactful in the narrative. Maybe controversial, but I think incest themes work really well in horror and can be done in a way that creates something really compelling, and the groundwork for that existed in IWTV. Without follow-through though, it felt like an unnecessary disruption of the father-daughter dynamic which already held a great deal of tragedy in itself.

Before Claudia's feelings for Louis shift, I would've liked to see a deeper exploration of not only her growing alienation from her physical body, but also of her physical isolation. From the age of five, Claudia has been completely cut off from the world, only Louis and Lestat, her parents, as her companions. They've been filling every role in her life from early childhood and I think that's often overlooked as a contributing factor in Claudia's deterioration.

If that had been explored more deeply, that caged-animal aspect of her existence, I think her final escalation to incestuous feelings would have felt less jarring. Maybe there could have been attempts on her part to turn children her age or a fixation on another adult in their social circle, something to indicate to the reader where her mind is at outside of wanting an adult body for the sake of it and being angry at her unimaginably small world. I think the scene with the her murder of the Creole woman in the movie was a great way to express that actually, maybe even better than the mother and daughter in the book.

With that established more clearly, I think the turn of her fixation on Louis would have been more impactful, pushing the horror and desperation of her situation as she approaches her breaking point versus this sudden switch from familial affection to something sexual and romantic.

This dynamic is really interesting and heartbreaking for Louis as well. I think it's pretty clear that her romantic feelings are not returned by him (thank God) and he only sees her as a daughter, his little girl, but there are still a couple of reasons why he seems to allow this to continue. Firstly, he's isolated in his own way. He has Claudia and Lestat, but that's all, and as the years pass and his relationship with Lestat continues to deteriorate, he's left alone with all the emotional needs that are going unmet. He doesn't have any friends or other family or community and that's combined with an incredibly painful and stressful environment.

I think what's incestuous in the traditional sense for Claudia becomes emotional incest on Louis' part, the idea of a parent looking to a child to fill the role of confidante and support system to an unhealthy level. He's emotionally reliant on Claudia in a way that makes him desperate to keep her happy and close, but also is enough reciprocity of that peer relationship to feed into Claudia's fantasies. She wants to play house and Louis wants to give her whatever it is that will give her some modicum of happiness for his own sake as much as hers.

I actually think this was pretty well developed on Louis' end which makes sense because this kind of emotional incest is far less difficult to deal with in a literary and thematic sphere. It's a common phenomenon and doesn't violate taboo in the same way. You see where he's coming from, caught between his desire for true companionship and his incredible need to cling to his paternal role Neither approach is healthy, but at long last Claudia's reliance on her parents for all of her emotional needs are mutual. It's an equalizer just like their trauma bond was, but this also makes their relationship even more untenable.

In true Gothic tradition, the horror of incest in IWTV doesn't necessarily come from the act itself, but what it represents in the narrative. It's a mouse in a trap gnawing its own leg off to escape, it's repeating cycles of trauma the characters don't even know about, it's the total corruption of what's supposed to be incorruptible and the denial of the comfort that unchanging stability brings, it's being so alienated from the world that you only have your own reflection left to turn to unless you want to spend eternity on the outside looking in.

(For anyone interested, Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews is a book @sofipitch mentioned to me when we were discussing this topic as a better example of incest in Gothic fiction published around the same time where all these themes and elements are explored. I read the book after she brought it up and I absolutely agree with her. It tackles a lot of the horror themes I just mentioned but in a more deliberate way.)

#there will be no discussion of blackwood farm mainly because i think the book was boring and weird and idc #i might talk about lestat and gabrielle in the future though #vc #the vampire chronicles #interview with the vampire #tvc #iwtv #meta

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banavalope · 1 year

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Calling it an ARG isn’t just ‘technically’ incorrect its 100% incorrect. It wasn’t even a fandom thing the creator made it as an art project and it blew up overwhelmingly and now they don’t even want to do it anymore

Look bud, you’ve kind of got me between a rock and a hard place here. The artist has asked people not use his words as artillery against each other, and quoting him directly is the only way I can accurately respond to you, so we've come to an impasse.

Anyway I wanna talk about ARG semantics instead, which is an interesting conversation we can both have together.

It involves analyzing analog horror as a whole to understand how we've arrived at having both a modern, and a traditional, definition of ARG.

To make a long story short, just in the event you're not here in good faith or perhaps don't like reading long essays - also to like. Do everyone a favor rq - the word people are looking for to properly define Welcome Home is ergodic analog horror. This is the umbrella term you're all looking for. Ergodic. We're moving on now.

Might I also recommend two video essays I love if you find this topic interesting: Ergodic Literature: The Weirdest Book Genre by CloudCuckooCountry and History of Analog Horror by Alex Hera

So lets ask: What makes something (not Welcome Home, we're not talking about that anymore, I do literally mean Something in General) "technically" an ARG?

Our modern day definition of an ARG has quite honestly become interchangeable with the term ergodic literature, most likely due to "ergodic literature" being an obscure term; however, the evolution of the analog horror genre subverting what it means to be "a game" is a much more likely cause that I think is important to appreciate.

By traditional definition - perhaps having been lost to time, this was the early 00s after all - an ARG is only a proper ARG when there is a game master orchestrating a game, and the story does not, will not, and can not progress without player participation. There are quite a few famous ARGs our there that went on for years before being finished because the participants got stuck. It's entirely on you to finish the narrative. Think of them like global LARP sessions, a lot of visiting physical locations to get your next clue is involved.

There are lots of traditional ARGs, some famous ones include projects like I Love Bees, Blair Witch Project, and the very infamous "Hey Peabrain, you teleport?" that happened right here on tumblr dot com. These games are my experience with defining what is or isn't an ARG.

Of course, time moves on with or without us, and I've come to accept that ARG is a broader term than it was before.

It's important to note that ARGs are the direct birth parent of modern analog horror. In fact, while analog horror has always existed as a sort of artistic backdrop, it wasn't a named genre until Local58 offhandedly defined itself with the term "analog horror". Many well known analog horror projects such as Mandela Catelogue, Gemini Home Entertainment, or Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, take much of their inspiration from the groundwork Local58 laid, and took to calling themselves analog horror as well, as one might expect.

Now, these influential supergiants are in, what you might call, "read only" format. Audience participation is not needed for the story to progress, which is a necessary component of an ARG.

Until it isn't!

Looking at art projects like This House Has People In It, Liminal Land, Doki Doki Liturature Club, or House of Leaves - just to name a few - they are all alternate reality "games" (one of them is literally a game). AR"G"'s, if you will.

The narrative presents itself as being contained, but very much is asking you to engage with it, if you so choose. They lay out clues to be found that take you to the next Easter Egg, and a deeper story can be ascertained, but only if you want. This is, technically, an ARG.

You can also just choose to play Doki Doki without digging into the sound files and extracting the meta data to get the secret art, or just watch This House Has People In It without finding the related secret website explaining Links Disease, either option is a "correct" way to read the media. You only stand to gain a different perspective by looking into more.

Which again, that's ergodic literature.

But these projects are famously considered ARGs.

These projects were huge, some of them mainstream, and were a lot of people's first time introduction to analog horror and ergodic literature. Some of these self define as an ARG when that's technically incorrect.

Altruistically, what these projects are accomplishing, is creating accessibility to the game space of the ARG genre. Cherrypicking all the self contained, gamelike elements, without committing to orchestrating a game. Traditional ARGs are typically extremely time sensitive, and one might "miss out" for arriving late to an event, or having limited access to necessary tools. Perhaps some people feel unsafe at the prospect of going to an unknown physical location, on the hope it's part of the game. Traditional ARGs were once incredibly niche for that reason. Modern AR"G"s keep this to a minimum, if not outright omit it in favor of telling a good story.

I'm not sure if there's a recent example out there of a traditional ARG, other than Hey Peabrain? Certainly there are some, to be honest with you I've moved on from traditional ARGs in favor of modern ones and other analog horror media subgenres, but my point being that they're becoming less common as they're increasingly replaced by Hunt-A-Killer style story ""games"". Shortly, we'll see some of the same evolutions begin to happen as digital horror outpaces analog horror as the shiny new popular horror genre. With digital horror's inclusion of formats like tiktok, I would expect to see us circle around again to traditional games being explored within the alternate reality space, as it lends itself well to that kind of thing.

In general, people are going to be familiar with this form of ARG, where "game" means "a story asking you to engage with it", and will default to using ARG in that way. In the broader experience of others, ergodic literature is an ARG, even though ARGs are not ergodic literature, technically. Most ARGs calling themself an ARG are not ARGs, mntechnically.

With any luck, this essay was compelling. It's just a thinker, really, I'd be interested to hear what you - or anyone - might think.

I'll reiterate, here, in closing, that by no means is this analysis meant to be seen as being in defence of, or opposition against, how anyone chooses to use the term ARG. I'm making no statements about Welcome Home or the people who took to it as if it were a traditional ARG. Neither am I expressing my opinion on the way fans engage with art projects, or even actual ARGs. That's a whole other conversation we aren't having here.

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centrally-unplanned · 8 months

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Gonna cap off the Japan book haul posts with some odds and ends picked up at random bookstores throughout Tokyo, as opposed to one big stash of Jimbocho or Comiket goods . First off - behold, the complete collection of officially published books about FLCL:

I already owned several of these - of course the FLCLickNoise (bottom-right) interview book was the start of this mini-project. Bottom-center is the FLCL Archives - which was actually printed in English *extremely* briefly, but it goes for way too much, so I imported the Japanese version. That book is the "supplemental 101", with settei/character design sheets, concept art, production documents, and even those original scripts and project proposals which I have blogged about in the past. Top-center is FLCLism, which is more like a conceptual art book - a grab-bag of promotional art, production art, random photographs, and interviews with some of the team. I will do write-ups of those interviews someday!

And rounding out the collection from Mandarake Akihabara, we have in the top-right the Groundwork of FLCL. This is much more of "live" production book - lots and lots of genga/key frames, sketches with timing sheets, e-conte/storyboards, etc. These books are always a little funny, because its not like the median person will study these or anything, and they don't work as an artbook, at least not cleanly. But as a preservation of the process they have a beauty no artbook can have - something you own for the total package as opposed to any specific page.

The bonus book on the left is The Art of Tadashi Hiramatsu, a longtime GAINAX animator, and Animation Director for episodes 1, 3, & 6 of FLCL. So not technically part of the collection but certainly deserving of some extra credit. He was a pretty core part of the team for the show - Tsurumaki names him frequently in FLClickNoise when discussing an approach to a scene (Though I rank him below people like Yoji Enokido or Imaishi). He also loves Mamimi like me and this book has some great Mamimi art - as well as a ton of Kare Kano art, where he was the character designer and Chief Animation Director.

As always, if anyone wants any deeper dives into some of the books let me know, but that is probably long enough for now. Lets see what else I can gather up...

#flcl #Ash Japan Adventures

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universitypenguin · 1 year

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Has Lloyd ever opened up about his past with princess? Does she know about his childhood? I’m sure she’s able to get some details about his time in prison as well solely from files but has Lloyd ever talked to her about that part of his life as well?

Lloyd has never opened up about his childhood with Princess.

The only occasion where he’s discussed it was with his psychiatrist Dr. Blair. He struggled even with that, because articulating the events of his past is very hard for him.

Lloyd finds emotions challenging. Three or four years ago he wasn’t as able to process them like he can during the timeline of the story. His past is a stressful topic for him. While some of the work has been done, there’s a deeper layer of trauma remaining. He copes better with the unpleasant emotions thinking about his childhood brings now that he’s gone to therapy. However, he doesn’t talk about it with anyone, unless there’s a very good reason to do so.

In anger management therapy he learned his childhood memories are a trigger, and decided to avoid situations that brought them to mind. It usually works well. For Lloyd, out of sight does in fact equal out of mind.

Lloyd appreciates that Princess is a fresh start for him. She doesn’t have memories of what he was like before, she just sees him as her friend. Other people are baffled by his transformation. They don’t trust him, and Lloyd considers that evidence of their good judgment. He believed for a long time that a leopard couldn’t change its spots. It doesn’t surprise him to find that attitude directed at him.

Instead, he used his growth to build a new relationship with someone new. Then he found himself in the healthiest friendship he’s ever had. The kind he used to think were make-believe, crafted by Hollywood writers and marketing executives. But he put in the work to earn her trust and respect. He did things for her without any ulterior motives, and through close observation, learned to understand her feelings. Without realizing it, he fell in love with her.

The last thing he wants to do is unravel in front of her. Unfortunately, Lloyd still has that masculine pride that refuses to acknowledge his weakness, especially in a romantic relationship. There are painful memories that make him feel helpless and afraid. Those emotions trigger an intense rage and he doesn’t want to live like that anymore. So, he only talks about “before” in snippets. His justification is that he’s trying to leave the old Lloyd behind and improve himself. The truth is he’s afraid of reigniting the anger that used to control him.

Is this something Lloyd needs to work on? Yes. Absolutely, yes.

Which is why that’s the next character arc we’re going to take on, starting in Part Ten. I’m not going to take a deep dive yet, but I’m laying the groundwork. Lloyd has done a lot of work. The last thing needs to address that remaining layer of unprocessed trauma, so he can be the partner Princess deserves.

And for evidence from the main plot that Lloyd is still very damaged… when he realized he loved Princess during dinner, he didn’t tell her. He didn’t even consider telling her.

#penguin replies #the princess and the lawyer: ask #Lloyd Hansen #lloyd hansen imagine #lloyd hansen x princess #lloyd hansen x female reader #chris evans characters #lloyd hansen au

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linklethehistorian · 2 years

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Cherish Development Notes — Part 1: Origin

Since two people have already asked me to make this a thing, and 7 others also liked the post, I’ll just go ahead and put this first one out there. Along with my usual tags, I’m going to be tagging these posts “#Just Cherish Things”, so feel free to block, follow, or do absolutely nothing about the tag as desired. lol

I guess the first thing I really want to talk about — which I was actually asked about yesterday — was what the general process of writing the chapters for this fic is like, as a whole, and actually that’s a really interesting question because…my process for Cherish — given it’s my only non-oneshot fic — is actually way different from any other fic I write.

But, before I can talk about that, I first need to talk about something else — namely, its very different origins from all of the rest.

(Although it’s not super long, the rest is nevertheless under the cut for some basic Fifteen/Storm Bringer spoilers. Also, I guess since I’m putting one of these here, I’ll mention I talk about the ships VerRim/Rimlaine and ChuuArt here briefly, too, because…obviously. lol but really, the tags and the fact this is about a fic revolving around them should tell you that anyway)

You see, unlike all the other fics I’ve created — which, from their very conceptions, were all stories intended to someday be shared with the world — the tale that you all know today as Cherish had much more humble beginnings; that is to say, it did not start out with the intention to ever be a written fic at all.

In fact, tracing it all the way back to its true roots of like, January 2020 iirc, it was really nothing more than this extremely wild, elaborate…well, I guess you would call it a headcanon, originally.

I believe I mentioned in a much earlier ask about BSD Paul that it was somewhere between August of 2019 and the release of Storm Bringer that I began to openly dabble in front of friends with the idea of a regretful, even redeemable, Verlaine; this, in a sense, was a much more secretive extension of the groundwork I had already set there and in years prior (that groundwork being a long-standing scenario in which Chuuya had found a way in a future time to revive BSD!Arthur Rimbaud and the two fell in love, thus leaving Verlaine alone to suffer and dwell on the mistakes that led to him losing his partner and would-have-been lover many times over).

The primary distinction between it and its foundation material, however, was that, unlike with the said other headcanons and ships that set the stage for it to even happen, I had kept everything regarding poet!Arthur and Paul, and the pairing comprised of them, entirely to myself — at least, for a very long time. Why? Well, the reasons were actually quite simple, really; first and foremost, I didn’t think anyone could ever give even half a shit about it even if I’d tried, and secondly, I greatly feared being judged over it, even by some of my closest friends. I knew very well that there were at least a fair number of people out there on the internet in general who had a huge problem with “real person fiction”, as it’s called, and although I knew that technically BSD itself was a form of that in a weird way and thus most of the fandom would probably be a lot more understanding (not to mention that the real person involved was a long-dead historical figure, anyway), I honestly just couldn’t justify it to myself to go through the risk of harassment and confrontation just to share something that, in my mind, no one but me would ever have any interest in to begin with.

At that time, I had made up my mind that it would never see the light of day even among my friends as a headcanon, much less ever become a written fic.

However, as the months went by, and it kept growing and growing into something deeper and more interesting, it became a lot harder for me to hold to that self-made rule, and eventually I ended up giving in and rambling to just one of my friends about it in private — that person being my friend and ever-kind supporter, Jailrose, whom I felt safe with (and whom, it seems, no longer has a blog on here).

In the end, it is only her I have to thank for Cherish’s existence in its current form, as it was purely her constant enthusiasm, support, and insistence that despite my uncertainties, she thought it would make for a great fic she would love to read, that helped me to finally gain the courage well over a year later to publish it on AO3 as the fully-fledged, multi-chapter story in progress that you all know it for being today.

[Read the fic!]

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dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram · 1 year

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Hi! So I just want to ask for your thoughts on Harry's ambiguous image. He very publicly expresses his sexuality, so much that he is accused of queerbaiting. He presents as a gay man. Some things stood out to me last year. His really camp Coachella performance. BHG interview mentioning that his friends know how he identifies. His HH moodboard had some really camp pics which still haven't been released yet. Howard Stern asking about closeting in the industry but it was cut from youtube uploaded clips. Him kissing Nick at Venice. Olivia making comments about the lgbtq+ community and wearing pride stuff to his shows. The LNT vid being about public image vs private. His personal trainer being a Xander 2.0 (with encouragement from HSHQ). Him being really camp on his Europe tour. MP. Lots of things that went unnoticed but the fact he chose to do them interests me. He did reign it in after the RS backlash but then this year he kissed Lewis at The Brits and there were several vids of him flirting with different men. Looking at the whole picture it feels like a lot of progress. Harry's sexuality is now a hot topic and yes there are many who still automatically view him as straight but there is more speculation than before and it feels intentional, that he wanted this. He wouldn't have done MP otherwise. Having said all that, his womanizer image is still prevalent in the media and that is what people pay attention to because it's always there. Every few days there are articles about him dating a new woman. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are. Why did he choose this ambiguous image rather than hiding his sexuality? Is it because he had plans to CO but changed his mind and just stuck with the ambiguity for marketing purposes? Is it laying the groundwork for a CO in the future? Or does he have no intention in CO and is just a gay man living his life while in the closet? Is this image sustainable for him if he doesn't plan on CO anytime soon? A lot of the queerbaiting discourse is being pushed by the media so will he have to face this every time he gets a new beard? He's not going to be able to play another gay role again in a movie, the backlash was bad enough the first time. Will the backlash push him deeper into the closet, does he even care? By adding to a huge list of beards, will it make it harder to CO in the future?

So I have to start with saying I strongly disagree with your starting point. I think 'progress' is a really insidious way of understanding what's going on. Progress suggests a desired end goal and evaluates everything towards it. I don't think it's a good way of talking about someone who is closeted.

As well as that principled disagreement - I also disagree on points of fact. I don't think that what has been happening for Harry has been steps towards being out or being more queer in his performance. I definitely don't agree that the things you list are him presenting himself as a gay man.

First off I don't think a lot of these are about presenting himself as a gay man. So for example kissing men who are understood as being straight is not presenting himself as a gay man. I disagree with your interpretation of Late Night Talking. I have no time for the idea that the fan reaction to either Xander or Brad was something planned for by Harry's team, rather than just fans doing their thing.

Secondly, being out is not the only way of engagin with queer culture. By being a very camp, closeted performer, Harry is part of a long tradition - it's not evidence of some path to being out.

Finally, I think seeing what Harry said when interviewed by Better Home and Gardens as in any way steps towards coming out - completely misunderstands the dynamic. The whole point is that he's stonewalling and trying to avoid talking about things he doesn't want to talk about. The fact that people are pushing and asking him more and more and he's fending that off - isn't a sign of the direction he's stepping in, but a sign of how he's defending himself from taking steps he doesn't want to take.

*******

To answer your question - I think Harry wants to play stadiums and also engage in queer culture in his performances. I think he knows the contradictions in doing this - and there are reason that the character of Tom resonated with him.

We can't know the future. We can't know what he plans for the future now. And we can't know what will get in the way of that. All we can know is what's happening now. And right now Harry is playing stadiums and engaging with queer culture in his performances.

#I've got another anon #suggesting the same thing #that Harry is taking steps out of the closet #I wasn't aware that people thought that #and it's something I definitelyd isagree with

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chihirolovebot · 2 years

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1 5 & 10 for sleep awake!!!! i must know especially the first one

OKAY LETS GO. i talk a bit abt mental health and depression in the first one btw so if u dont want to hear abt that i beg u scroll.

one — what inspired you to write the fic this way?

god. i mean. the actual answer is that i am severely mentally ill. and like kind of in a funny haha way but kind of actually also and im not medicated for adhd or depression at the moment either. it was basically a combination of not being able to get danganronpa out of my actual head, like, seriously this is the longest hyperfixation i have ever had to the point where im considering it just a special interest instead. like, reader insert and escapism has always been my way of interacting with media i was a fan of, since i was like SIX i was imagining myself into winx club and scooby doo and it literally has just never changed. PLUS i thought it would be a good way to explore a lot of the characters i wasn't familiar with, like kirumi, tenko, and kokichi himself. and then another big part of it was i just. wanted a story where someone like me got to go on the journey i wanted to go on, the one i am currently going on. like, the main theme of wanting to live and realising your life has value didn't come from nowhere, it's stuff that i need to hear and learn for myself. and honestly it has helped, a lot, so yk sometimes therapy can be writing a 300k danganronpa reader insert fanfic. sorry this was probably a bit of a deeper answer than u were expecting but it is the simple truth.

five — what part was the hardest to write?

it shouldn't come as a surprise, but definitely chapter three. all of that had me pulling my actual hair out trying to make everything connect and make sense and even as i was writing the trial i was like god. i've forgotten something. this is paced awfully. i've created a plot hole. everyone's going to hate it. the first trial and making the reader look super guilty for rantaro's murder was also super difficult, probably just because it was the first time i did it and didn't really know how to lay all the groundwork yet; i vividly remember having to write the trial chapter and the investigation chapters alongside each other so i could keep the truth bullets and the testimoniest concurrent and consistent. like, i would figure out something that had to be brought up during the trial and immediately go and write it in the investigation, and keep going. it was pretty exhausting.

ten — why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

it's kinda interesting actually. the story didn't start out with the vision of, i want to do a kokichi/reader. actually right up until i published it was like, okay. i want there to be a romantic interest, but i also do want people to like. read it. so i should do one of the more popular characters, which left me with kaito, shuichi and kokichi. i eliminated kaito kinda early on because i wanted the love interest to coincide with reader's journey on learning to want to live, and i thought the storyline would be too repetetive of what kaito did for shuichi and maki. so i was flipping between shuichi and kokichi right up until i published the first chapter. weirdly, i think shuichi might have been a more conventionally suited love interest to the reader's journey, as he goes on a pretty similar one himself. in the end, though, that's exactly why i went with kokichi, for the contrast and the unconventionality of it. i thought it would be more of a challenge. it would definitely be nice to read about shuichi and reader growing and healing together but, like, i saw the potential for a much more complex story and themes with kokichi, ones that i was more interested in exploring.

#these were very fun to muse on!!! love my baby fic so much #🌙; ask games #🏚.sleep awake #<3.kodzus #tw mental health #tw depression #tw depression mention #depression mention

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themilophant · 2 years

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Last week's episode of the BS-Free Witchcraft podcast (follow @traegorn if you don’t yet!) came to the unavoidable conclusion that Tiktok is hostile to human life, which, unavoidable, yeah. But it got me thinking about social media and witchcraft slightly more carefully than my usual thought about social media and witchcraft, which is “don't.” And – I still pretty much think, “don't” – but we can dig a little deeper, I feel!

The obvious problem with social media, which I am not breaking any new ground by saying, is that it thrives on Engagement, which means that the reach of something that engages the limbic system is disproportionate to the reach of something that might be insightful or truthful or even useful, but feels dry. The more all-powerful the algorithm, the more this takes on a life of its own (literally, for all I know...), but the rules of Engagement are in effect all over the internet, with generally unpositive outcomes for Discourse in every field. (To clarify: I think the internet itself has a number of positive qualities and benefits for human flourishing, but all of that has to be weighed against the fact that the internet also operates as basically a 24/7/365 Propaganda Engine that pushes people to be ever more inflammatory and/or pandering in order to break through the background noise.)

In that sense, then, witchcraft isn't anything unusual – it's just another area of human activity that's undergoing the same stresses online as all the other areas of human activity. But I actually think there's a sense where witchcraft does suffer particularly acutely from this dynamic. To explain how I get to this conclusion, I kind of have to slam my hand down on the third rail, so here we go: What Is Witchcraft, Actually?

Look, long story short: I'm not going to come to your house and slap the mortar and pestle out of your hand, so if you think I'm full of shit on this, so be it, just keep on keeping on. I'm not the sheriff of the Craft and I wouldn't want the power to enforce this definition even if that were possible, but I am a guy who prefers to have some kind of sense of what a word means before I run around using it, so I've given the question a lot of thought for myself, and I have (quite cleverly! I'm clever!) distilled three elements that I feel like are sort of load-bearing pillars of the Craft that show up more or less throughout the various versions and generally distinguish them from other paths either of occultism or spirituality. I like to think of them as Eros, Gnosis, and Heresy (well, Hairesis if we wanted to keep the Greek conceit going, but I just say Heresy in my mind). There's no reason to go into all three at length here; I'm saying this just to lay the groundwork that I believe witchcraft isn't just incidentally heretical as defined by certain outside institutional forces, but that in fact practicing Heresy is foundational and required.

By “practicing heresy,” I don't mean that you have to do the opposite of whatever your parents do, or that I think Christians get to set the standard by which everything else is judged deviant. I think those are both mental traps that people fall into, but I mean something much simpler than that. I'm using etymology to root the English word “heresy” in the Greek word hairesis, meaning “a thing that's chosen” or “one's (essentially) free choice.” To be a heretic, merging the modern and root definition, is to be someone who has insisted on making a choice for themselves. I think the reason witches are notoriously so fractious and disorganized and so disinclined to cob together and do the same thing in either the short or the long term is that our very nature is to treat every single piece of received wisdom or authoritative pronouncement as a big maybe. If we choose it. If we agree. If it works for us.

I mock that phrase a lot, honestly, maybe more than I should. Ask any witch why they do things the way they do, and you have like an 80% chance of hearing “well, it works for me.” Which I love, in theory! I love the idea of us as a group of mad experimenters, putting everything to the test and accepting it only once it's proven to work for us. In practice, though, there's one major problem, which is: it works to do what for you? What kind of results are you getting? Hell, what kind of result do you want or expect from practicing witchcraft? The concrete markers of mundane flourishing: financial security, rewarding relationships, good health, good reputation? Creative inspiration? The power to know and to enact your True Will? Self-development – moral, psychological, spiritual? Psychic powers, insight into the nature of reality, mystic secrets? A sense of belonging to a cosmos that's enchanted, wondrous, meaningful? Surprisingly few of us can answer that question, and if we don't know what we're aiming at, of course we can't know if the things we do are getting us closer or further away – if those things are working for us at all.

I think that makes witches particularly susceptible to all the flaws of the social media attention economy. We want all the options, we are choosers of things, so we're hungry for input, information, ideas. But most of us are unable to practice the core skill of being good at heresy, which is discernment. We don't know which of our myriad of options are better or worse than the others, because we're mostly not consciously navigating toward anything in particular, except an unarticulated feeling of desire to be somehow more than we are, other than we are. And that's a deeply human desire! It's also one that most schools of philosophy or religions or spiritual practices will at least attempt to provide some form for. You feel an inarticulate longing for Not This? Great, here's what you really want, what will satisfy the deep restlessness of your soul, and here's how a person gets from here to there. Some of those roadmaps are more structured than others, but they tend to have some language around what the Not This is all about, where this road is taking you. And then you have some combination of texts and live mentorship and co-learning community and Tradition and your own discernment that all collaborate to help you figure out what's going to Work for you as you do the Work.

Those things aren't exactly absent from witchcraft – you can still read books and find teachers and join communities and learn from history and practice discernment. You can do all those things, and hopefully you hit on the particular combination of factors that, well, works for you to help you learn and advance. But witches, being a whole community full of people who are deeply, fundamentally inclined toward Heresy, do tend to not do that first part, the part where they tell you where you're going. You can go wherever you want! It's your path! Hell, I did it a few paragraphs ago: I reassured you that I wasn't trying to tell you what witchcraft means, because it's not my place to do that for you, only for me.

I don't think you can make witchcraft non-heretical in that sense, or make witches not a bunch of heretics ready to throw hands in defense of their right to choose their own path. I wouldn't want to! It's not a flaw, it's part of (in my humble opinion) our identity and our magic. But you take that and throw it in a vat of the internet's constant content, constant Hot Takes, constant ever-increasing competition for the limited resource of Attention and Engagement, and it's just fucking overwhelming. It's being lost in the wilderness with no map and no compass and told it's your privilege to build your own map and compass. Grateful as you may theoretically be for your freedom, the reality is you're going to walk in a lot of circles. And you're probably going to fall in with the first other person you run into who really seems to know where they're going.

My unpopular solution to this is – silence. It's time. It's spaciousness. It's asking a lot of questions. It's taking in a lot of ideas without attaching yourself too tightly to the first ones that feel good – it's giving yourself room to wonder why an idea feels good to you, if it's nourishing a real hunger for you, or if it's stroking your ego by echoing your biases back to you. It's spending a significant amount of time in a space of humility. It's loving questions at least as much as you love answers, or at the very least defeating your fear of doubt and uncertainty to some degree. None of these are things that social media will ever give you, and honestly the internet is going to get in the way of most of that for you. And when you are ready to make a Choice about your path, or at least the next leg of your path, the solution is to find guides who seem to be going somewhere that you would actually want to end up – in a real way, not just the ones who are good at curating an image that appeals to you. Which is a talent, yes, but once you learn everything there is to know about curating an image, my guess is you're going to feel like there should be more. And you'll be right.

#things said #learning witchcraft #witchcraft community

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