in which murderbot is a very normal terracotta soldier and ART the dragon spirit of a chinese junk who dwells in the ship's keel. they meet in the ming dynasty perhaps, when ppl are sailing places extra willy-nilly.
*NĂŒwa is the mother goddess in chinese mythology, known for creating humanity from yellow clay and repairing the sky.
thank you @mutualrapport for hosting the event! original prompt below.
[drawn for the prompt: an AU of ART and MB's first meeting and conversation - e.g. another look at their first meeting from a fantasy, historical, or (non-canon) sci-fi lens! Any perspective is fine. The only constraint is that it cannot be set in the canon universe. Any visibly non-canon AU- fantasy, human, historical, etc. - anything goes!]
ok coming back to this (as one does) i didn't realize you can click the newsreel dates/codes and it'll pull up the source for the descriptions/captions . so 'bogey is there to protect bacall from hepburn, a notorious woman lover' was written by someone in the hearst metrotone news library in 1951..? â ïžâïž i have a dozen more questions
Not every scene deserves the same amount of page time. Sometimes you need to summarize three weeks in a sentence. Sometimes five minutes takes three chapters. Pacing is about emphasis. Slow down when emotions are high, when decisions matter, when everything could fall apart. Speed up through the boring necessary stuff. Your reader doesn't need to experience every meal and every conversation, just the ones that change something.
Iâm not trying to play devilâs advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youâre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnât, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think itâs important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heâs a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesnât make the text less racist but itâs an important thing to consider. Thatâs all, I agree with your other points.Â
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so Iâm snowed under atm â ïž
So thereâs a lot of talk about Tolkien being âof his time and classâ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. âOf his timeâ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnât applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ânorms of his timeâ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to âwhat Tolkien saidâ rather than âwhat was actually happening thenâ.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the âthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeâ line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moodyâs League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think whatâs more likely than âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnât know any such antiracist thought existedâ is that âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedâ.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharkyâs minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleâs cats
Anyway, Iâm so tired of how âof his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.Â
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really donât think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as âunconscious biasâ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job đ
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ânormal people not kings of menâ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of NĂșmenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramirâs entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the âchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesâ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a âbirthright citizenshipâ as a consequence of a personâs actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day âmigrant criminalityâ discourse, how can you say he didnât anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration đ
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the FĂ«anorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donât jump up my ass đ)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Menâąïž being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. Itâs not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!Â
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean âhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normâ??? đThe legendarium isnât a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that âhis timeâ kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnât.Â
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didnât have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does â ïž
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on âunconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when heâs hit. Which is to say, the insistence on âTolkien was of his time and his time was badâ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about âthe timeâ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.Â
On a vaguely related note, I also think âthis fandom gives grace to the authorâ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket youâre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itâs doubly baffling considering that he isnât exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.Â
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of âgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldâ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going âwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?âÂ
as a certified woman-lover I understand the instinct to say there's no such thing as a woman who isn't beautiful or all women are amazing etc. and i take a lot of comfort in loving women. and beauty is in the eye of the beholder etc. we can't say anyone is objectively attractive or not and "ugly" is a loaded worded riddled with a history of fatphobia, racism, and ableism. that all being said, all women don't have to be beautiful to deserve respect. women are allowed to be "ugly". if we hinge our respect for women solely on how much we love them then what happens when there are women we don't find attractive or nice or pleasant or who actually have no desire to be seen as attractive either. what about grandma? idgaf if you find old women hot, what about their unpaid labour? their rights??
but they're not. sometimes women are bigots. or blonde. there is no one on this god forsaken earth that thinks all women are beautiful, but even if there was, that is entirely, fully, completely separate from the personhood of women and the respect they deserve as human beings, and the rights they deserve as people, and the work that needs to be put into combating misogyny. we will literally never be free until beauty is not a factor in how we treat people
I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up
i am terminally A Sucker for characters who have a towering and generally earned ego about their own ability and absolutely no self-worth about themselves as a person at all. intoxicating combo.
The only difference between a chud religion and a woke religion is whether or not said religion has the weight of the government or other powerful institutions behind it. No matter how beautiful and egalitarian and morally aspirational the original texts of a religion are, there is absolutely nothing stopping institutional actors from twisting those words to defend the powerful and demonize the powerless. Bitches in the U.S. will be like "Buddhism is such a peaceful religion, you never hear about Buddhist extremists" yeah of course YOU haven't heard of Buddhist extremists you couldn't find Myanmar on a map if your life depended on ir
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of yearsâfar longer than settlers have been in Canadaâand made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotÄn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racismâlike Kashechewanâbecause it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
ah doing ma thing just like god int- (remembers im atheist) just like the universe intend- (remembers i don't believe in determinism) just like noone and nothing intended ever. doin ma thang fucking unpredictable style
adjuncting in the US is truly so insane. Please tell me how I just saw a job ad which listed the lower range of its salary as $1100 for a 3 credit course. master's degree is a MINIMUM REQUIREMENT
for context my university considers one 3 credit course to be 168 hours of labour. 1100 for 168 hours is SIX FIFTY AN HOUR. for a master's degree minimum requirement job. that is below federal minimum wage what the hellllll
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