Hieron Zine Comic: The Violence of Its Maintenance
[Read the left side as one storyline, the right side as another]
"For every inside, an outside." / "Every border implies the violence of its maintenance."
For me and @wellnoe's piece for the Hieron Zine, we were excited to tell a story about Hella’s semi-involuntary status as a mascot of Ordennan empire and borders as a literal technology of death that played with comic borders and formatting! The title is, of course, from the Ayesha A. Siddiqi quote.
Script for the comic below the cut, which also serves as a rough image description:
Layout note: Panels are small relative to the page and “float” in the gutter space. Adelaide swims freely between them and speaks to Hella inside the panels’ borders. The comic is laid out vertically, mostly in two columns. Panels on the left are labeled L, the center labeled M, and right labeled R. Panel numbers denote which row of the overall page they’re on.
Page 1: 3 Rows
Panel M.1.A: Adaire hunched over a map of Hieron in a dimming twilight room.
Panel M.1.B: Close up of the map having Nacre added to it near the shore, and an outline sketched of its border, the pencil in Adaire’s hand.
Panel M.1.C: Adaire’s hand in close-up, partially erasing the border around Nacre.
Panel L.2: Hella outside the Ordennan border, at a tall gate. A guard looks at her suspiciously from the other side.
Adelaide to Panel L.2: Adelaide looks at Hella condescendingly.
Adelaide: Do you imagine that walls will keep Nacre’s gift out?
Panel R.2: Hella and Hadrian ride in a halfling-driven cart through the refugee camp towards the Ordennan military camp. Hadrian watches Hella for her reaction to seeing the refugees.
Panel L.3: Hella displays the emblem of the Tristes to a crowd of cheering soldiers, brandishing her sword in a stabbing gesture.
Soldiers: Is that– From the cleansing of Nacre– She killed the queen!
Adelaide to panel L.3: For every inside…
Panel R.3: Stornras Glasseye shows Hella and Hadrian a map of Ordenna’s planned invasion of Velas.
Adelaide to panel R.3: …an outside.
Page 2: 4 Rows
Panel L.1: Hella reads the book about her family being a line of traitors, inside the undersea cave. She is hunched over awkwardly, wet from swimming in, and visibly perturbed.
Adelaide to Panel L.1: Adelaide reads over Hella’s shoulder. She’s draped over the panel like a cat, one hand dangling inside and the other holding an apple to her mouth.
Adelaide: Our dear father did like that ancestor of yours, only for her to betray Nacre and then Ordenna. Varals love to hang people out to dry.
Panel R.1: Hadrian and Hella interrogating Iduna Fel. Hella holds a torch up. Iduna, seated and hands bound, looks up at them and snarls at the torch, speaking of how Quintrona should burn Rosemerrow to stop the undead.
Iduna Fel: We should be burning every place–every person–the curse has touched.
Adelaide to Panel R.1: A family of traitors fits right in with the Tristes.
Panel L.2.A: Hella is on tour of Ordenna. She looks out distantly at the countryside. A clothesline with clothing hanging from them forming figures like people separates Hella in the panel from a mine like the ones her father worked.
Panel L.3.B: Hella on tour in an urban center, looking lost. Train tracks separate Hella from a guard station.
Ordennan soldiers: Queenkiller! It’s the Queenkiller!
Adelaide to panels L.2: Adelaide’s teeth are bared, her lazy demeanor dropping for one vicious moment.
Adelaide:At least I remember that you should be called Kingkiller as well.
Panel R.2: Hella and Hadrian walking back through the refugee camp. Refugees do laundry, multiple clotheslines crossing the panel, the clothes partially obscuring Hella and Hadrian.
Adelaide to panel R.2: Do you believe your people to be better than me? They decide who dies to expand the borders of Ordenna.
Panel L.3: Hella marching in front of a company of Anchor in a square formation, Ordennan soldiers crowding around them. Hella is smiling stiffly, uncomfortable. She is wearing a shiny new uniform.
Panel R.3: Hella standing equally stiffly in front of a line of Pala-din that guard the Ordennan camp from the refugees. She watches a circle of refugees cooking and crafting, going about the business of their survival. Some are visibly undead. Two of the refugees are a Nacreite young Black sibling pair with an older boy and younger girl, invoking Calhoun and Adelaide. Hadrian in the background examines a pala-din, his stance mirroring theirs.
Adelaide to panel R.3: Adelaide looks at the siblings in panel R.3 but speaks over her shoulder to Hella on the left.
Adelaide: Is it so monstrous that Nacre grows so that more may live after death?
Panel L.4: Hella alone in a lavish Ordennan bedroom, looking out of place and small. Maybe in plain underclothes and curled up on a chair, looking angry.
Hella: Yes!
Her dialogue fills up the panel, crowding her.
Panel R.4: The refugees notice Hella and Hadrian and look at them warily. The boy steps in front of his sister. Hella looks small in the crowd of people. She holds a hand out to the boy.
Page 3: 3 Rows
Panel L.1: Hella in a lavish Ordennan ceremonial chamber, on a stage. She is dressed in fine clothing given to her. A pearl-studded brooch with an Ordennan motif is being pinned on her by some military-uniformed functionary.
Military functionary: For you, the spoils of our first battle.
Gathered soldiers and civilians: Queenkiller! Queenkiller! Queenkiller!
Panel R.1: Hella makes an awkward ‘open your hand’ gesture to the boy, who warily opens his hand.
Refugees: Isn’t she….That’s the Queenkiller. The Queenkiller?
Panel L2: Hella, with her head bowed, has her arms and shoulders draped with garlands of gems and pearls looted from Nacre. The ends of the strands run down out of the bottom and side of the panel.
Military functionary: May you always bear the fruits of our holy empire.
Panel R.2: The boy has a handful of apple candies poured into his palm. He looks up, defiantly. A few candies fall down outside the panel.
Adelaide, to both panels L.2 and R.2: She holds the end of a pearl garland in one hand and an apple candy in another
Adelaide: Then tell me…What are you going to do about it, Hella Varal?
Panel M.3.A: Adaire’s hand drawing the refugee camp in Knoll Hollow into a map of Rosemerrow.
Panel M.3.B: The Ordennan military camp being drawn outside the refugee camp.
Panel M.3.C: The wall around Rosemerrow being drawn between the refugee and Ordennan camps as a border.
Title Text: The Violence of Its Maintenance
Subtitle: Story and words by Will Xia (boo-cool-robot)
gojo fans being aghast when you point out he has canonically made sexist and racist comments really has me in condescending reading comprehension questions mode. like "what might this say about the gojo clan and gojo satoru's position as clan head? how can we compare him to other clan figures? why might an author depict a likable character as having prejudices? how else does the text depict jujutsu society as a whole? can multiple things be true about gojo's relationship to the power structures of jujutsu?"
Me in the hospital ER reading a book on gender in the 1920s Chinese Communist Party and my brother reading a book about Black perspectives on Marxism-Leninism 👍
rewatched JJK 0 with a friend and wow, it is really striking how different yuji and yuta are. yuji is thrown into jujutsu and immediately starts agonizing over whether he's doing what's right and the meaning of death, and yuta is basically totally amoral and just like "uhhh I don't know if that geto guy threatening mass murder is good or bad; I'm just here for my friend maki!"
are we at the point now where we can admit that the like "spiritually israeli" and "hitlerite" jokes are kinda fucking gauche. I thought "don't make genocide jokes" was like pretty self explanatory.
at absolute best you're deeply obfuscating what you're actually attempting to say behind edgy jokes and at worst you just sound like a complete dickhead for deciding that your le epic edgy joke was necessary in an otherwise serious discussion
I had actually never seen S1 of the JJK anime and perhaps the biggest surprise on watching it with a friend is discovering that Sukuna uses loanwords from English
Oh, I don't really have original opinions here. It's mostly the usual: "I alone am the honored one," KFC divorce, being totally unhinged in the Shibuya fight, and the afterlife airport. The only scene I think is underrated is when he's unsealed, immediately tracks down Kenjaku, sucker punches Uraume through a wall, and makes fun of Sukuna for taking Kenjaku's orders like they're his mommy. He's fucking ON ONE in this scene.
all those posts that are like "why am i researching currency debasement in the 1860s for a fanfiction no one is going to care" are full of shit, i just DNFd a fic for being obviously incorrect about the history of plumbing
just got a double whammy of the most annoying comments i get on this post back to back in my notes (1. this is going to give authors anxiety!!! 2. but you CAN get tenure by 35!!!), so everyone say bye bye post for another several months
post unlocked because i just dnf'd the project hail mary book due to andy weir's 'rocky thinks in base six' inconsistencies.
if rocky thinks and estimates in base six round numbers and then converts to base ten for ryan gosling's sake (established early!! basically one of the first things ryan gosling works out!), then he would not suggest that they jump from 80 to 86 when rounding up for safety, because neither of those are base six round numbers. he would suggest jumping to a safety allowance of 84 (220 in base six) or 90 (230 in base six).
Can't believe my parents are hilariously lackadaisical Buddhists and raised me accordingly....didn't they know I would need to understand Buddhist theology because I would get into JJK as an adult???
it is frustrating to be in a fandom where an interesting and narrratively significant female character seems to be widely popular, only to realize that actually most people are just going "wow cool sword girlboss" and not um. thinking about her point of view or internal life at all
got a hot maybe lukewarm take here. for a minute i saw a lot of posts going around saying "calling you petty bourgeois is not an insult it's an objective evaluation of your class position!" which is true....but it's also true that people were mainly bringing it up in frustration over people parroting reactionary rhetoric, in this case over a.i.️ art debates.
if you are an artist who primarily makes your living through self-employed commissions, most marxists would characterize you as a member of the artisan class, which is a precarious position under capitalism. capitalism pushes all the classes of previous societies towards either bourgeois capitalists (owners) or proletarians (workers)--from nobility to farmers to musicians etc etc, everyone finds themselves being pushed into one of these positions. clear examples for artists can be walt disney, who could sketch and all but ultimately owned a massive media empire (bourgeois), versus the animators he employed at said company, who made their living working in his studios. they were (and are) proletarians, and as such organized in high-profile labor organizing like strikes in the 1940s, for example.
but what of the artist who makes money off commissions and print-on-demand services? especially in the latter case, you are not doing the screenprinting and packing yourself, yet you don't own redbubble. this is where the "petty" or "petit" part comes in. someone else is doing some labor for you, yet you still do a lot of legwork and dont enjoy the same security as a larger capitalist. (the moment you hire an employee, you become a capitalist, albeit a small one, because at least part of your income now relies on your employee helping you bring in more money than you pay them. ex. youtubers hiring editors) this can and should be an objective judgement of your economic position from a marxist/communist/whatever perspective. it doesnt make you suddenly an irredeemably evil person. after all, engels was a capitalist and look what he did for workers! but many capitalists do indeed do horrible things in the name of profit, living lavishly at the expense of everyone else, so we can't pretend like there's not a wealth of deserved hatred for capitalists generally.
so what happens in the case of AI art debates is that people are understandably upset that the very thing they used to promote their work and get clients (public-facing internet) has been used to make a machine that appears poised to take away a lot of their income sources, maybe even forcing them out of artisanry altogether and into fully alienated wage labor (proletarianization). im not going to get into the weeds of the many arguments here because what i want to emphasize is that capitalists are also afraid that image generators will infringe on their profits, control of their image (ex. deepfakes), and many other reasons....AND that one route they have chosen to try and wrestle back control is that of intellectual property and copyright law.
so the frustration communists have here is that intellectual property, like any form of private property, ultimately serves to funnel wealth to the largest capitalists who own things at the expense of and to the detriment of everyone else, the majority of whom are workers. petty bourgeois artisans like independent artists and musicians can utilize copyright law to their advantage in some contexts, but can also be victims of lawsuit trolling or bigger capitalists just generally pushing them out of the market (monopolies are an inbuilt consequence of capitalism once it develops enough). being petty bourgeois means you do have a foot in either camp (to varying degrees), and it's frustrating to see someone who could ally with communists & workers instead side with capitalists who will ultimately screw them over anyway. it's that whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" thing all over again.
im not claiming to know the answers about the future of art re: AI, nor do i want to discuss it. rather what im trying to say is that being an artist, artisan, or other middle class that's not uniformly proletarian or bourgeois doesn't mean that you have a uniquely spiritual calling that exists outside the economy (...and a lot of MLs on here are way too unsympathetic about these economic anxities. saying "lol get proletarianized idiot!" doesnt really help anybody here). you are likely either petty bourgeois, or (what i suspect to be more common) a proletarian aspiring to become petty bourgeois. and it's not inherently a moral indictment to point this out, but it is something you have to wrestle with if you're serious about left-wing politics or even just want a sensible explanation of things (lbr liberal economists mostly spin fairy tales). if you really are in a petty bourgeois position, then siding with workers in different parts of class struggle can and will go against your economic interests at times, either personally or for your class as a whole. i used the example of artisans here but i think a lot of us in the global north are in similar positions with mixed interests. eventually the tensions boil over, the scales tip, and we're all pushed one way or another. and the question is, with whom will you align?
I think Megumi has both the temperament and skills to entirely manage her HRT regimen herself--she's a planner, meticulous, and cynical--and Shoko is happy to basically toss the prescription pad at her and let her do whatever she wants. She's got her HRT optimized within an inch of its life.
This does eventually lead to Yu gradually leaving decisions about her HRT to Megumi because "she seems like she really knows what she's doing :)" and Yu loves to defer emotionally fraught parts of her life to other people. Both of them feel very uhhhhh normal about this arrangement!
Maki claims she takes testosterone by feel...she can just sense what it'll do and how much she needs. Megumi thinks she's bullshitting but can't prove it
one of the best parts of making up increasingly wild and specific aus with a friend is sending them posts like "this is sooo blorbo in torture chamber au number 15" and they reply back like "YESSS btw have i told you about my latest idea for how to torture them even more" and you get to enjoy a little snack and kick your feet with glee
