Non/Disney Editor. Feminist. Mixed Black & Latina. She/Her (?). 25 This started out as a place to post my image edits but now it's one obession after the other. Currently losing my mind over punkflower and prowlerbyte, black queer love stay winning
Happy Black History Month everyone! I want to make a few things celebrating inspirational and trailblazing people this month. So first and foremost we have bell hooks! bell hooks was a feminist author and activist who was an early voice in the movement speaking about the intersectionality of identity and oppression. She spoke to how black women are treated and failed by both the general feminist movement as well as the black power movement. Allot of her most powerful and influential work is about our struggles with love, both accepting love for ourselves and sharing it with each other. I personally want to read more from her and explore her writings on how society purposefully isolates young boys in order to keep all of us down. We sadly lost bell hooks a few years ago but her work will always be necessary in the conversations of blackness, womanhood and how we can all work to emphasize with each other’s struggles.
Some of her books if anyone wants to look into her work are, All About Love, Ain’t I A Woman and The Will To Change
Finally posting a snippet for my Prelson fic! Still working slowly but surely on it, Part 1 is almost fully written, and is currently being edited.
Btw, let me know in the comments if you want to be tagged when I offically start posting the fic!
wip under the cut, I might change it some more in the final version.
Title: Love Always Mends The Heart
Some context: the events of Heartfixer don’t happen in this AU, because I planned so many plot points while forgetting that Adrien knows the trio were actively messing with him and Marinette 😅 maybe I’ll figure out a way to incorporate that, who knows.
—
The next day, Prem is seated in the common room, watching the ticker on his computer screen go down, using every fiber of his being to remain still. Tickets for Hadestown at the Théâtre de Paris will be available in less than 5 minutes, and he can’t even afford to be distracted for even a second. He's been anticipating this for months; he even avoided watching any bootlegs or listening to the soundtrack so that he could experience the entire story live for the first time. Plus, it’s been a while since he’s seen a live show, and, if he makes it to the next stage of the competition, he could use some inspiration for staging.
He was originally supposed to see it with his mom, from whom he inherited his love for musicals and performance. Ever since he was 7 years old, they’ve had a tradition of seeing a musical live onstage once a year. Unfortunately, just a couple days ago, she learned from her agent that she would have the opportunity to audition for a dance company in London, the exact week they had planned to go see the show. She encouraged him to go see it anyway, and to bring a friend with him. Prem had considered inviting Rose, but his mother only had offered enough for two tickets total, and he didn’t want to risk causing trouble between her and Juleka again... Maybe Zoé could be interested? Either way, he needs to be able to actually buy the tickets first.
2 minutes left.
He taps his heel against the ground. Hopefully he’ll get good seats. Ideally, he would get the front row in the upper circle, so that he can get a nice view of the stage and won’t have to worry about someone tall sitting right in front of him. Maybe one day his father’s tall genes will kick in, and if they do, he’ll sit in the back row out of consideration for everyone else. His phone dings and he takes it out to silence it. Whatever it is, it can wait. He places the device next to his computer.
Just over a minute left.
A loud crash resonates in the distance. Everyone in the room freezes. Some people are already beginning to stand up, eyeing the nearest exit. Please please please, not right now. Prem glances at his screen again; less than a minute remaining. If he’s quick, he’ll be able to snag something, even if it isn’t the perfect seat. The counter hits zero and he refreshes the page. The ticket shop is now accessible. He clicks on the room layout.
Another crash, much louder this time, followed by an ominous crrrrrrrrk as cracks snake their way up the wall facing him. They branch rapidly, reaching towards the ceiling. This isn’t good. Prem’s survival instincts kick in, and he launches himself backwards, knocking over his chair, in an attempt to put as much distance as possible between the expanding damage and himself.
Wait.
He eyes his phone, still sitting on his desk, next to his computer. Should he risk it? What if he needs to call for help? As if answering his question yet another crash resounds, making the room shake and a piece of the ceiling come crashing down right where was sitting half a minute earlier.
Never mind.
Prem joins the rest of the students in swarming towards the exit, struggling to get around knocked over chairs and tables. A loud distorted voice echoes from beyond the wall, but he can’t quite catch what it’s saying. All he can decipher is the anger within it, rattling the walls. Even as he runs for his life, Prem can’t help but feel compassion. He hopes that whoever it is, the heroes will manage to soothe the source of their distress.
+++
About a dozen or so students, as well as a couple of teachers, are huddled in one of the school's bunkers. By now, everyone knows the drill. Find shelter, remain silent, wait for the all-clear. The emergency electricity isn’t working for some reason, leaving the only sources of light the pale blue glow emanating from phone screens, as people watch footage of the battle raging outside. Despite the familiarity of the situation, there’s a quiet tension in the air. The heroes have never failed before, but there’s always that possibility that this might be the one that takes them down.
Most have split into groups, offering each other comfort. Algae has curled herself into a ball as Aurore and Mireille hover over her. Another group has gathered around Diane who, by chance, had been carrying a board game with her when the attack started.
Nelson remains in his own corner, alone. No one has invited him to join. Not that he cares. He wonders if Loïc and Ray managed to find shelter. He was on his way to join them when the attack started. If they were their meetup spot, they should have managed to get off the school grounds quickly.
He overhears the news broadcast that the group nearest to him is watching. Apparently, the entire school building has collapsed. This akuma is seriously powerful. He wonders how it feels, to suddenly gain the ability to cause so much chaos. To make the people who’ve wronged you tremble. To make them listen.
Though, if it were him, he wouldn’t go for something so flashy and obvious. You turn into a giant monster; everyone knows who to go after. He’d prefer something more discreet... Ideally no one would even know he was akumatized at all, that’s the real power. Maybe something like shapeshifting... Yes, that has a lot of potential. Nelson threads his fingers in his scarf absentmindedly as works out this idea. Once he’s done with Prem, that could be their new plan. It shouldn’t be difficult to talk the others into it.
Just then a wave of glittering ladybugs flies through the room, and the lights come back on. After a moment of silence, a symphony of notifications begins to resonate in the room. Nelson’s own phone dings and he finds a notification from his mom.
Are you okay?? They said the school collapsed?
Text me when you get this!
Nelson texts back
I’m fine. I’m in a bunker.
The response is immediate.
We’re coming to get you
So, they’re both coming. Nelson puts his phone away. It was to be expected. They always get extra attentive after an attack. The bunker doors are opened and sunlight comes flooding, blinding everyone inside.
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
Thanks for the correction! I was like 8-10 years old when this all went down (2014-2016) so I only know vaguely about it. I’m still learning about this.
Gamergate never ended as a movement, is in a state of active resurgence and is globally implicated in the rise of the hard right. Steve Bannon, guy who works directly with Trump and ran the hard right website Breitbart, was CEO of a WoW MMO gold farming operation, actively looked towards radicalizing the sexist young men, and are targeting gamers to replace federal employees over there (also in that article link). Now they use LLM generated gamer memes to recruit for ICE.
In terms of what to do about this:
Begging folks to:
1: Start taking memes seriously, look at where the New Lingo you're getting is coming from online because the answer is almost always either:
Appropriated AAVE, which also serves the far-right agenda in multiple ways. Participating in Digital Blackface and the active destruction of different facets of Black cultural tradition (queer spaces do this SO MUCH. SO MUCH of "gay people talk" is bastardized AAVE and that causes serious harm and erasure of history which is inexplicably linked with histories of resilience and joy and culture making in the face of oppression and enslavement. We owe much of our ability to track what gamergaters are doing At All to the work of Black feminists who paid attention to how the far right started to mimic and impersonate Black women online to seed controversies designed to discredit feminist movements, but I digress (barely))
or
Far right memes designed to push the overton window on acceptable behaviour and things to say more firmly into their wheelhouse. This is something far right governments are both aware of and actively engaging with.
All those Virgin v Chad comics; the incredibly ableist lobotomy reaction images; the resurgence of the R slur; the push of tradwife content and Girl Math and such all either originates back in those cesspits or has been firmly weaponized.
2: Continue to educate yourselves on game development and call for systemic change at shareholder levels. Get loud and write in proper complaints about racist and sexist and ableist design choices. Call for crediting and fair pay for everyone who worked on games, including contracted staff on the other side of the world who provided art assets or quality assurance.
Video games are increasingly recognized world over as one of the most profitable and effective modern shapers of culture. A truly obscene amount of money is constantly changing hands, and where development studios are allowed to form at all impacts what stories are told.
A lot of gamedevs want better than this, but we need audience support and participation. There's huge efforts to unionize the industry - but the same underlying problems are at play in organizing too. Devs, not just white devs in the global north, all over the world need support. Unionization won't fix underlying culture issues, and there's also a lot of people who have no interest in even starting to address those. Please support the Game Devs of Colour expo, look at indie titles, check out independent games journalism efforts who are able to call out the links between the mainstream industry and the numerous active war machines.
Sorry for the huge add-on but as a developer myself I have followed along with this from the start and kept abreast of how the situation has continued to metastasize and develop. It's genuinely so important to talk to kids and young people about this history that's still in motion and provide education on what to look out for, especially if you know any who come from conservative homes. Many of the kids are NOT alright, and they're getting swept up across the world into states of profound alienation and taught to view anyone different than them as less than human.
The industry could be better than this, we could see a world where the medium flourishes into a beautiful international art scene and is used as a vehicle for active cultural exchange instead of increasingly being encircled and weaponized for propaganda purposes. But it won't happen unless a lot more people become aware of what is happening and actively push back against it.
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