Just wanted to point out. That’s how an appology should be done. An acknowledgment that you hurt someone, what you’re going to do better next time. An explanation of your reasoning of your actions without attempting to make an excuse.
Some of the Viking reenactors I know are giving it up because of the unfortunate association with far-right groups. I do not blame them for doing this, as I am sure it’s quite upsetting to be mistaken for a neo-Nazi. I support people doing whatever they have to to avoid this.
However, I am really bothered by the idea that there’s something *morally correct* about ceding your passions to supremacist groups. I am deeply uncomfortable with the praise such people have gotten for “doing the right thing”. You know what that’s saying? It’s saying that racists can point to whatever they please and go “it’s ours now”, and *by your own standards* you have to give it to them! Not only did you build the most exploitable loophole ever, you’ve practically drawn them a map!
I do not wish to acquiesce to neo-Nazis in any other context, and I’m not starting now. Hate groups do not get to set the standards for my communities. I’m genetically disabled and engaged to a Jew, and I *delight* in the middle finger my presence in Viking reenactment holds up to Nazi ideology. Like hell I’m going to go “oops, my bad, this actually *does* belong to you!”
It doesn’t. It doesn’t get to. History belongs to goddamn everyone, and in fact *making people think it doesn’t* is one of the great tragedies of racism. I sincerely believe that connecting to shared human heritage is one of this world’s foremost delights, and supremacist groups do not get a say in how I express that.
This is literally something /pol/ knows and exploits.
Maybe the pendulum swings and white people wave to stay in their lane and can *only* play vikings. Stranger things have happened.
In what other ways does /pol/ exploit this? I can think of a couple.
Think the ‘It’s Okay to be White’ thing from a while back. Clearly a /pol/ op and everyone knows it’s a /pol/ op, but knowing it’s a /pol/ op gets people to overextend and say that everyone saying it’s okay to be white is a far-right white nationalist.
Or Pepe memes, for that matter.
Honestly, I’m not expecting the left to die on this hill, or on any of the others, but I would like to see them fucking fight on one for once, instead of immediately retreating to the next one the moment some asshole starts to climb it. Make a goddamn stand for once and say ‘no, you can’t have this, this belongs to us/everyone’ instead of immediately ceding ground and then claiming anyone who didn’t run away with them fast enough is just another enemy pursuing them.
Make a goddamn stand for once and say ‘no, you can’t have this, this belongs to us/everyone’ instead of immediately ceding ground and then claiming anyone who didn’t run away with them fast enough is just another enemy pursuing them.
I know it’s poor forum etiquette to quote something only to shout “FUCKING THIS”, but…FUCKING THIS
I saw this thing once from a guy who was looking for white supremacist reggae groups because he likes reggae. I suppose, by tumblr logic, that means reggae is now an alt-right thing and we should be abandoning it and rejecting it as basically racist and white supremacist, because one dude somewhere said a stupid thing that one time.
jewish trans dude here, definitely specifically decided today at an SCA armoring event to go with viking costuming instead of norman because you know what? fuck nazis.
I think it’s really important to talk about how different people have different power fantasies.
For example:
For some people, the idea of someone redeeming a villain is a power fantasy.
For other people, the idea of a villain being defeated is a power fantasy.
And for other people, the idea of a character owning their villainy is a power fantasy.
I would argue a lot of fandom conflicts re: villains come from people being unable to see that their fantasies, which put them in control of a narrative (and all three of these are designed to give the author or reader control of the narrative in different ways) are someone else’s horror stories.
v for vendetta is a film with a female protagonist that criticises capitalism, condemns pedophilia, encourages the viewers to question their governments, has a central plot about how LGBT people are condemned in right wing societies (more than three LGBT characters are in it) and was directed by a trans woman and her brother.
why has this become a fuckboy classic
because they mistake V for the protagonist and Evey as simply the viewpoint character, wilfully ignore the part of the plot about LGBT discrimination, and concentrate on how cool V is with his mask and his government-rebelling plots.
What I find interesting is that – V is actually, imo, coded as trans, especially in the original graphic novel. Alan Moore claims that clues to identity of V ‘are all there’, which implies it might be a named character. If it was one, the only person matching would be Valerie, the woman whose journals V gives to Evey. Everything would match – Valerie was an actress, which would fit with both costume and tastes of V, and also why said letter was so important – and really, how the hell an occupant of a high-security concentration camp under constant observation had ability to write a letter, and also how a letter written on toiler paper would survive all these years, and burning down of Larkhill camp. (answer – by being written AFTER all these events).
Except, V appears to be male. Everyone is using male pronouns for him, in the movie he speaks in a masculine voice, and in the novel we do see a panel of his silhouette naked in Larkhill, and he definitely has a masculine physique.
But, if Valerie becoming V was metaphor for transition, that’d make sense.
That’s in addition to well, the fact that a lot of trans men begin their self-discovery as butch lesbians? It’d sure fit.
Why do I believe that theory? In addition to whole LGBT themes thing, and the letter thing, there’s one more reason. Well, I think this was skimmed by in the movie, but in the novel, we get a pretty solid clue. See, in the movie, exact nature of experiments performed on Larkhill inmates is kept rather dubious if I recall – we know they gave V abilities slightly above normal humans, but that’s it.
But in the novel, it’s more specific. So, what is the field of experiments that are being performed Larkhill concentration camp that they needed human specimen?
Hormone research.
V got strength to throw off chains of opression and fight back and yadda yadda, became a character who ticks off literally every single checkbox on definition of a superhero, including superpowers…
By literal fucking hormone therapy.
Administered to him, ironically, by the very oppressors.
From what I’ve read of Alan Moore’s stories, he doesn’t leave details up to a chance. Everything has a reason, and everything is interconnected with each other. And this, this doesn’t look like a bit of dark irony Alan Moore would pass up, since he loves that shit.
So, those are my reasons for this particular interpretation.
both the wachowskis are openly trans women now but yes
Still reading “You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Crazy or Stupid?” – a book for and about adults with add. And this is all me, especially that last bit.
It’s sad there seems to be so many of us.
The things you see:
She is a mess of papers. Trailing things, losing things, can’t find the homework she swears she did. Or turns in homework with ink stains, water stains, creases. Chew marks? Her shirt is on backwards or inside out.
Her eyes drift, go glassy, she loses the thread of something she was saying in the middle of the sentence. She’s gone the moment you take your eyes off her.
She writes and draws slowly, painfully. She can’t keep up with notes in class. Her hand cramps, so she massages it absently. Sports may be great or average, but these fine motor skills are still hard after years of practice.
She wants to do better. She wants to. She always seems sincere. Sometimes she seems desperate. Always there’s a look in her eyes that says she knows she’ll fail but she’s going to try anyway.
She has that thing somewhere. In her bag? Her locker? Where was it?
You ask a simple question. She gives you a convoluted answer that is not what you were asking for at all but turns out, after a bit of a tangent, to be more accurate than you would ever expect from someone her age. It seems like an accident, but it happens just often enough to raise doubts.
She always seems to be working on the task you were doing 5 minutes ago, not the task you’re doing now. She has no idea what task you’re doing now.
Whenever she works on group projects, she has the biggest, grandest ideas and contributes the least amount of work to the finished product. Or she does the whole project herself and turns it in 3 days late. Or she has no idea what’s going on with the project and does her pieces incorrectly because she doesn’t know what the big picture is supposed to be.
She can’t remember the multiplication tables. She can’t, no matter what you do to try to help her. The information won’t go in. (She has the presidents memorized in order, with their years and vice presidents.)
She walks into the room, blinks at you, and says “I have no idea why I’m here.”
She forgot the homework. It’s midnight, and her friend called 2 hours ago to kindly remind her that the big project is due tomorrow and she’s been working on it for 2 hours (it was supposed to be 2 weeks) and she’s crying and trying and her parent finally puts her to bed. She will get up in half an hour and start again, stay up until 4am trying to finish, not even sure what the requirements are because she can’t find the sheet but refusing to stop until she falls asleep on her desk.
You ask her what she’s learned, and she can’t tell you. But in her head, her spaceship’s design is far more accurate now that she understands friction and propulsion and other things you weren’t actually trying to teach her. Or, you ask her what she’s learned and she can’t shut up about it, going on long after you’re very much Done with this conversation.
She mastered this task last month, but now she has no idea where to start. Again. You go over it with her. Again. She gets through the first two steps and can’t remember what comes next. Again.
She’s late. Again.
Things you don’t see:
The world is a fascinating, beautiful, bustling, overwhelming place, and she will always be Not. Good. Enough. for it. She knows failure more than success. It’s no wonder she wants to be somewhere else.
She often has insomnia because she can’t turn her brain off to sleep at night.
The tiniest accommodations make it so she can breathe again.
There is a place where she shines. It’s the athletic field, the music
room, debates, her kindness when she takes care of others, painting, her
fashion sense, hiking, telling stories. Somewhere, she shines. She
doesn’t think that means anything, though, because everywhere else she
is staggering through double gravity and wondering how everyone makes it
look easy.
She has no idea that she could shine everywhere – that it’s the rigid structure failing her, not her failing it.
She is on another planet during 3rd period, literally, inventing a fictional language and a syllabary to go with it, and no one has noticed because they’re droning on about test prep.
Sometimes she feels like an alien.
When she’s fully here, in the classroom, she sees who else is struggling, like a kind of visible kinship. She could tell you who and why, but she won’t because you won’t ask.
The day she finds out the bell curve was a eugenicist’s lie, she wants to burn the world down.
It’s not an “active imagination” or “escapism” or a “fantasy life” – it’s self-care to fight depression and anxiety caused by being unable to meet the rigid expectations of an inflexible school system and society at large.
She finally gets diagnosed in her 20s or 30s, after bringing her son in to the doctor to address his obvious ADHD. Going over the checklist in the waiting room, one hand absently snagged in the back of her son’s shirt to keep him from climbing the potted tree in the corner, she has a moment of stunning clarity: this is me.
* Note: There are boys and AMAB non-binary folks with non-hyperactive ADD as well, and we should not overlook them. Really, the only substantive reason to divide us into hyperactive and non-hyperactive is the structure of our school system and childcare, which mark hyperactivity as a behavioral issue to be addressed and everything else as just personality. Neither is accurate.
** This list is a conglomeration of experiences relayed to me anecdotally from several ladies of various ages and one dude. It’s not exhaustive or accurate for everyone.
Wow. Thank you. This, all of this is so true and I’m tearing up because it’s always a relief to know that you aren’t alone.
PSA: the main reason that Britain never had a European-style mass fascist movement in the 1930s is because socialists, Jews, trade unionists, black folk and queer people physically dismantled the Blackshirt movement in its infancy by disrupting meetings, toppling stages and assaulting prominent fascists. This meant it never reached critical mass as a street gang capable of controlling public space and providing a pole of attraction for white, working-class youth – a fundamental precondition for the exercise of political power independent of the state by fascist Parties.
my maternal grandfather grew up in a south london working class jewish community and has told me so many stories about this! ❤
DIRECT ACTION WORKS
ATTACKING NAZIS WORKS
All the pathetic fools who say that “Punching Nazis isn’t the answer”…history says otherwise
Violence is ABSOLUTELY the answer to the problem of Nazi terrorists infesting a country
Beating the living shit out of every single Nazi or gathering of Nazis that dares to slither out from beneath its rock IS the answer
MAKE NAZIS AFRAID AGAIN
A lot of Nazi rallies in the US were cancelled last year because those cowards feared for their safety, so beating the shit out of these assholes actually works
It is absolutely an effective tactic at destroying the efforts of these nazi scum to spread their filth
it would be cool if fat dudes without big beards were considered hot sometimes too.
I realized today that the main reason for the “hot fat dude must also include beard” thing is part of the whole “fat people are required to perform a higher and more perfect expression of gender”.
like usually this sort of thing is more easily identifiable in fat women, who have to be hyper feminine to be considered “attractive” by the mainstream. but I sort of blinked today and realized, oh. fat men must have beards to be attractive for the same reason fat men must wear suits and look dapper to be attractive, just like fat women have to have perfect eyeliner and wear cute pinup clothing. higher, more intense expression of gender, executed perfectly and without flaw is required for fat people to be seen as attractive.
ohhhh. that would be why “neckbeards” ie dudes who look like they’ve grown the beard by not shaving as opposed to for an aesthetic decision are exempt from the trend then, i guess.
😮 WHUUUT? BUT I THOUGHT NECKBEARD DIDN’T HAVE ANY CONNECTION TO BEING FAT
WELL HOWSABOUT THAT
It is also a form of racism that excludes people from ethnicities that generally have less body/facial hair.
It really is a hard idea to stick to, Nonny, I totally get it.
Here are the things that help me keep the hope alive (settle in, folks, I’m about to go on a tangent):
First, S1 & S2 (and I’d argue at least some of S3) were so well done, crafted with such care by everyone involved. Gatiss and Moffat are such fanboys it is ridiculous, and I don’t think we should forget that we fell in love with this show and these characters in the first place thanks to them.
Second, I personally think it’s par for the course for show runners to keep fans in the dark. I know Mofftiss are sometimes arseholes in how they go about it, but they obviously need to keep the element of surprise (especially if they’re doing something that is truly groundbreaking and never-before-seen-on-tv like they claimed they were ::cough:: Johnlock ::cough::). They can’t tell us what they have planned, and this is not unique to these writers, this show, or the BBC.
Third, I think that the show is following a five-act structure. We’ve witnessed the good times, and now this is the crisis/conflict stage, after this comes resolution/happy ending. Read more about how this is a 5 act show here in @toxicsemicolon‘s most recent meta.
Fourth, there are too many coincidental loose ends that can’t possibly be accidents, like in HLV – Molly tells Sherlock after he is shot: “It’s not like it is in the movies. There’s not a great big spurt of blood and you go flying backwards.” Yet that is literallyexactly what happens to Mary when she is shot in T6T (the very next episode). Why would they do that unless they want to raise red flags for the viewers. It was almost comical how overblown Mary’s bullet wound was, and that was on purpose. So… why?
Same thing with the skull painting. The same painting has been a prominent mainstay of the flat at 221b for 3 seasons/series and suddenly in S4, it glows and changes colors and sometimes is completely black. Why? Mofftiss claims that it’s budget constraints with the original painting’s artist, but in the same exact series they were able to afford to film two helicopter scenes and rent an Aston Martin? I don’t buy it. There’s a reason.
Ever since I discovered meta I’ve been sure that there is something more meaningful coming.
If nothing else, there are too many coincidences to be accidental. Just a few examples (I could go on for days… don’t tempt me)
In TLD, Culverton Smith says (of getting away with murder) “You don’t build a beach if you want to hide a pebble; you just find a beach!” and then in the very next episode, Mycroft tells Sherlock about Eurus while flashing back to a beach covered in pebbles (which they shipped in for that scene) and then holding a pebble, which he drops onto the beach. Read more in @finalproblem‘s amazing meta here.
In TFP, the patience grenade explosion in 221b was powerful enough to blow John and Sherlock out a window (and according to Mark Gatiss, “boop they’re fine” cuz they bounced off the thin awning of Speedy’s cafe, which must also heal burns and scrapes and bruises but whatever), but it didn’t burn paper or half the things in the flat. It DID, however, destroy John’s chair. The chair that they replaced it with? John’s chair from TAB. From Sherlock’s 1800s mind palace. Arwel Wynn Jones has confirmed this.
Here’s a solid list of questions that @snycock came up with for Sherlocked UK that either prove that the whole cast and crew went through some sort of collective insanity for TFP, or there’s something more coming and things don’t make sense for a reason (which is what I think)
“The Lost Special”
“Mirrors” (where one character stands in for another in a scene, like Molly for John, or Culverton for John, etc.)
Imagery of both burning/fire and drowning/water
Check out my tags for more meta, it’s incredible what this fandom discovers. Most of my meta is tagged under #hope for s5 #what fresh fuckery is this #I believe in mofftiss
Ok, I’m starting to get incoherent and my browser just crashed all my tabs so I’ll leave it at that. The meta rabbit hole is deep and wide and curvy and I could probably fill a book filled with just links to other people’s brilliant findings.
I guess the main takeaway I want to leave you with is this:
I don’t think two men who cared so much about this show for so long would chuck it into the toilet for no reason. The same brilliant minds that gave us villains like Moriarty, Culverton Smith, and Magnussen suddenly giving us an improbable two-dimensional psychopath in Eurus makes no sense. TFP itself makes no sense in about 100 different ways. And I don’t think any of that was an accident.
More is coming. When the Garridebs story is finally free of copyright, we’ll get our resolution. I don’t know which theory I believe but there are so many… that Eurus shot John and TFP is his dying hallucination, that Sherlock is still in his mind palace (possibly since HLV, or even earlier), that the whole thing is us seeing events through John’s blog (which was commissioned by the BBC yet often conflicts with canon), alibi theory… who knows. I’m happy to point you toward more meta, but I think the blogs I mentioned above and some of the links should start you on your way. Once the evidence starts to stack up, it’s clear… we don’t have the whole picture yet.
all of that, plus when was it moffat said, “if you aren’t reading the subtext, hell mend you”, was that in the run up to TAB? Or at SDCC the summer before s4? Possibly @skulls-and-tea has the receipt in “creator quotes”. Even as i endured my one time watching s4, i could tell that it was awash in subtext, even if i didn’t know what it meant yet. Sure enough, the stalwarts here are teasing it out. Let go of the surface reading, look under the hood, pull it apart, that’s where the juice is.
Also, the 5 act structure is not only increasingly clear from the overall arc of the show so far, but is hinted at consistently in every set of five anythings in the individual episodes. Look at any set of five*, and compare them to the series. This story is structured up the wazoo, there is not a wasted or a random second anywhere in it, not one “throwaway” line or scene, it’s like a fractal, even small fragments contain the pattern of the whole. the more “sample size” we have, the more consistent that is, even including bizarro mirror world s4. we’re at the “grandpa, why did you read me this” stage of the princess bride. (go watch that if it’s been a while, and also the tjlce video on tpb!) Or Han Solo about to be frozen in carbonite, but just before “i love you; i know”. The dementors are loose and nobody has conjured a patronus yet. But we’ll get there, or it will be their failure, not ours.
*IE, the five suicide/murders in ASIP, the five pips in TGG (a double set, the hostages and the cases), the five tasks in TFP, etc.
There are also a lot of threes, lines or situations that recur three times, etc. Again, consistent to the point where if there are two of something, we can be watching out for the third one. @callie-ariane ’s transcripts are a great resource for “l clueing for looks”.
Thanks for this very comprehensive stack of evidence @88thparallel – compiling all this is a really great work and very useful!
In addition to all this, there are two details in S4 that I would go so far as holding for proof, not just evidence:
These things didn’t ‘just sort of happen’ – that’s impossible. Which means they’re there for a reason. Casual viewers won’t pick up on them, though; their appearance are way too subtle for that. Which means they’re there only for the obsessive fans to discover, the ones who go through this show picture by picture (us 😊).
So, a heart monitor and an MRI scanner. And where do these two clues lead us? They lead us directly to a hospital, the only kind of place in the world where these items exist on a regular basis. Which is one of this show’s many recurring themes. Not a coincidence, then.
So, the question here was: Do these writers really know what they’re doing? Yes – I think they very definitely do. In detail, they absolutely do. And that leaves us with only two remaining options: either they’re the epitome of cynics, who willingly spend millions of pounds and years of their working lives just to mock their own audience – especially the most passionate part of their fans. OR there’s more to be expected, most probably at least a fulfilling of the five act structure (if not more).
And @sarahthecoat, I love the fractal imagery! And since we’ve already had The Sign of Three, I think it must be time for “The Set of Five”. 😉
yep. And of all the medical equipment they could have referenced, they chose a HEART monitor and a BRAIN scan. You can pretty much go through the show episode by episode at this point, and sort characters, props, colors, whatever, into either the brain column or the heart column. Consistent patterns, over and over. The opposite of random. YES s4 was crazy and ugly and hard to watch, but if you take a close look at s3, it’s crazy and painful too, just dressed up prettier. And we’ve been teasing out the subtext for years, so much of what was utter nonsense on first viewing, has fallen into place subtextually. S4 builds on what we learned so far, and takes it that much farther. That much crazier and harder to look at, but still part of the pattern. S3 gave us drinks code, firmed up phone=heart, stairs code, started us looking at vehicle subtext, water & fire, dogs & cats, theatricality, all of which have been vastly developed in s4. Just about any stone you turn over has subtext under it. Every place there’s a line that “doesn’t make sense” on the surface, there’s a thread to pull out more subtext. No wonder it takes years to write these, they are not just formulaic procedurals. its mind boggling.
so this just occurred to me, if phone=heart across the series, is there another object that =brain? We have mycroft=brain in a lot of places, and john or a john mirror=heart. But is there anything that corresponds with phone?
Could the symbol for the brain be the skull painting in 221b? The one that was just fine and dandy and iconic until it was inexplicably* all fucked up and glowing and black and obviously NOT RIGHT and NOT THE SAME?
the British developed a taste for sherry after they sacked Cadiz and took thousands of barrels back home with them, so Spain ended up exporting a lot of sherry to Britain.
they didn’t want the empty casks back, and it wasn’t profitable to ship them there anyway, so the wily Scots took them and used them to mature whisky and get added color and flavour from the oak and the sherry.
but there’s a shortage of oak sherry casks now because they use stainless steel for export, and whisky keeps going up in price, so it’s actually cost effective for the distilleries to buy their own casks, lease them to the Spanish vineyards to mature sherry in for a couple of years, then take them back to use for whisky.
like so many human culinary tricks what started out as a lazy hack ends up being pursued as a goal in its own right.
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 