If you see me liking a bunch of your posts, it might be for my specialty blog: blackfemmecharacterdependency, so hopefully you won't block me. Black women, girls, and MaGes = ❤️ Nonblacks, if we not friends, do not tag me. I don't know you motherfucker. Born in 1982
Pick 9 webtoons. Share your taste. by @neshatriumphs
This breakdown is SO funny. The truth is, I pull up to where a Black lady is on the front cover and if she's important, I read it and it's in my favorites.
[reading the foreward of the delectable negro] hey isn't it so interesting how white ppl have started using cannibalism as a metaphor for lust broken free from society's constraints
it's just insane to realize that, for a specific example, white queer sinners fans who believe remmick/sammy is gay are recreating white cannibalism of Black bodies from scratch without actually knowing any of the real history
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
First thing, and according to the witch, who said that she went by the name “Kerrigan Thornheart,” in the kingdom. “Diamond Kerrigan” in the castle. “Mother Diamond” in the Coven. “But you may call me Witch Mother, if Mother seems too cozy. I am… your new mother, a mother in magic, if you will.” She bowed to her and looked up to see her face.
“Why can’t I call you one of those other names?” Punzie asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, “You could, but names have a lot of power in them, even fake names. In the kingdom, I am a dashing outlaw who they come to for jobs that nobody else can quite do. In the castle, I am a worker who does the work that nobody else dares to do. In the coven, I do as my sisters do, taking in princesses who have been offered up to curses and quests, and training witches. But, a Witch Mother is more than just keeping you locked away. Plenty of princesses have not one magical bone in their bodies and so long as you put ‘em to sleep, keep ‘em fed, or freeze their body’s functions - they just exist until a prince comes to rescue them. Or, if they’re lucky, another witch.”
“Why would that be lucky?” Punzie asked, a bit horrified.
Witch Mother grinned, for the first time looking as evil as Rapunzel suspected witches of being. “Because a prince is wealthy in riches, but witches are wealthy in power.” Rapunzel took a step back, suspiciously eyeing Witch Mother. The woman smirked, sat on the foot of the bed and asked, “What do you know of your mother’s confinement during her capture?”
“She was taken by a witch of the Ebon Shadowlands, and held in an underground cavern, lit by the eyes of nocturnal creatures keeping watch of her…”
“Did the prince slaughter them during his rescue?”
Rapunzel furrowed her eyebrows, “I don’t know.”
“If they were keeping watch, that means the Witch of that cavern would have known the moment he stepped foot inside. Did they attack him? What type of nocturnal creatures were they, anyway?” She asked with a childlike wonder that Punzie could tell was fake. “Bats? Possums? Racoons? Were they some type of magical creations, or animals given employment by the witch?”
“ I don’t know. Do you want to hear what I do know, or do you want to interrupt?”
Witch Mother smiled, made a zipping gesture over her lips, which surprisingly literally zipped her lips together, startling the girl. “He… he went into the cavern. Wait. He was given the quest by his father…” Witch Mother tilted her head, like she had more questions, but Rapunzel waved her hands, as though shooing them away before they could be spoken. “I don’t know how his father came up with the quest or found out about it. I just know that he told my father that it was time that he went on a quest. He told him where it would be, and gathered him for an announcement and a seeing off. He was given provisions, a weapon, and a horse. He set off on Diamond Stallion, to find the princess and rescue her from the evil witch…”
Now, the witch unzipped her mouth, licked her lips to clear it away. “Oh. I know who your father is now. Right. I know who your mother is too.”
“Of course you know. She is the Queen.”
“A Queen, for certain, as she did marry a Prince, and shortly after this quest, a perfectly healthy king and queen, within mere months of each other, and so young, at that… passed away. He became king far too young, a lot of people said (when they knew nobody was listening, that is), and he had a daughter, some years later. He wanted sons, all of the kings do. But, unfortunately for him… He… was married to a witch. She never would have given him a son,” she waved a hand.
“What makes you think that my mother is a witch?”
“What makes you think that a woman who can use familiars to spy on you, manifest desires out of thin air and keep you safely contained and alive without human interaction nor social dependence, is not a witch?”
“Because witches are outlawed in the kingdom!”
“In the kingdom you were born in, and that is only for witches who are unaffiliated. Your father’s kingdom employed witches. Where do you think the prince got his stellar horse, his weapon that could defeat a witch, his quest?”
“From his father.”
“I love you. You’re so innocent.” She stopped smiling and looked serious, and mean. “Kings and Princes are always finding witches to try to get us to do their bidding. Sometimes, we’ll get a wicked queen, but usually, it's Kings and Princes. They want a quest for their son. They want a healing for their wife. They want to be rid of a daughter that they wished would have been a son… They cry out to us all the time…” She imitated a lamenting cry, “Someone! Someone please behold our plight and give us a way out of this!” A scoff later, she was calm again. “Sometimes, it is a war. They need a victory, or they need supplies. And the payment is often greater than what they can afford. Because they are wealthy with things that we do not need nor desire. But, sometimes, they might have something that we want.”
“What is it that a witch might want, if not riches? Or… fame? What are you getting, by being here?”
“I will answer the first question. The second is my business.What might a witch want, if not riches? Perhaps the power of a vast ritual. War Witches, for example, can give a boon, or even an army of spirits, if they’re powerful enough, and in return for their help, they are perhaps granted souls, or the blood of the fallen. Either of those is a really good haul for a War Witch. Sometimes it is freedom. As you said, witchcraft is supposed to be illegal in your father’s kingdom, but if you were able and willing to offer something to a human of great status, your witch crimes would be pardoned and overlooked in the future. Sometimes, it is to find an assistant or a successor, if you intend to move on to bigger and better things. Sometimes… And this doesn’t happen very often, in fact your mother is the first to do it in my long lifetime, and I am told it has been at least 300 years since we’ve been able to claim this… Sometimes, it is a kingdom.”
Rapunzel gasped, felt lightheaded, then sat on the foot of the bed, next to Witch Mother. “For what it's worth, Punzie - I do think that your mother loved your father. If she killed him on purpose, I think she probably had a very good reason to do so.”
Rapunzel turned to her, glaring, and ready to argue about it. But, Witch Mother snatched into the air and was suddenly holding in the palm of her hand, Rapunzel's lips. “There is no question as to whether or not she killed him. This, I know for a fact. I wouldn’t have been able to take you if she hadn’t killed him. In my opinion, being the Widow Queen of a kingdom wasn’t a very fair trade, even for her firstborn daughter. But, now that I see you and I’ve seen the spirit that embraces you, I definitely came out on top.” She lifted the lips on two fingers, blew them once and they fluttered their way back onto Rapunzel’s face, making her mouth operable again.
She frowned. She didn’t know why, but she believed it. Even in wanting to protest and scream about it not being true. “It had to have been an accident, if she did that. She really loved him, and me. Whatever she’s done, I just can’t believe that killing Daddy would’ve been something she ever chose.”
“I don’t care one way or another,” Witch Mother told her with a shrug. “I currently have a circuit of thirteen princesses, and you’re the only witchborn one. The others I have to try to convince, if I’m ever gonna get my power’s worth out of them.” She turned and collected two handfuls of the hair, “But to find you, in this humble tower, with this homely princess… I could give the others away and still be ahead of everyone in the Coven, maybe even in the network!”
“The spirit in my hair… where did it come from?”
The woman quickly looked at her, “ Well, when we are witchborn, spirits know of our arrival to this plane. Some of us are marked. Whether or not we want it, we belong to a certain spirit, or a certain group of spirits. They are sometimes called familiars, and despite what you might hear, they select the witch. They always select the witch, be it at birth, or later on in life, when they discover each other. The two are connected, witch and familiar. If there are more familiars, there are multiple connections. But then there are spirits that are much more powerful than a familiar. We call what they do embracing the witchborn. It always occurs at birth , or shortly afterwards. Rarely do they embrace a witch later of their own accord, but sometimes, a which may find and coerce it to embrace her. Embracing is deeper than the connection of a familiar. The spirit who embraces a witchborn lives inside of them. An embraced witch’s power is dynamic, and often uncontrollable, if they don’t know what is inside of them. If nurtured, the embraced witch could become immeasurably great and powerful.”
“That’s… that’s why Mama sent me away..”
Witch Mother neither confirmed nor denied this, but Punzie cried anyway. After a moment, Witch Mother hissed, jumped to her feet and summoned her staff to herself. This shocked Rapunzel, as she hadn’t seen, heard, or experienced anything to merit that type of behavior.
One tap on the floor, and everything she took off came rushing to her, another tap and it all began moving to their various places, and with the third tap her staff hovered sideways, and she leapt onto it and flew right out of the window! Punzie sat, still in shock and quite confused. She didn’t see the woman again for quite some time, but in that time, she spent time writing down everything that she could remember about that night, in her texts. She drew a portrait of the woman, in various positions, making various faces she had watched her make. She even wrote down all of her accusations.
Months went by before she once again heard 3 taps and “Rapunzel, let your hair down.” She rushed to the window. She had started to wonder if she had been having an elaborate dream that night, but there she was, hooded, staff in hand, weapons on her person, awaiting the hair.
“I’ve seen you fly. Why don’t you just fly up here into the window?”
“Let down your hair, or you’ll miss out on a present!” Witch Mother sang.
“Ugh,” Rapunzel grunted as she tried to find the end of her afro. Putting it into a bubble ponytail had gotten old. Instead, she just dragged it, sometimes stepping on it and then apologizing profusely, sometimes tripping over it and feeling fortunate that it always moved beneath her to catch her in it’s fluffy softness. She found the end and threw it outside. Moments later, there she was again. The huntress looking witch with a small armory on her person. She tossed the staff and the cloak, which had been merely draped around her shoulders and pulled something out of the satchel. It was what appeared to be a baby teacup pig.
Rapunzel gasped and jumped up and down, “Is it a pet???”
Witch Mother extended it in one hand and said, “It’s a familiar!”
Punzie’s excitement died down. “I thought you said that the familiar chooses the witch.”
“Oh, they do. We haven’t summoned the spirit yet. This is just a vessel.” She handed the pig to Rapnuzel, who rubbed noses with it and snuggled it.
“I like it like this.”
“Sure, you do now, but when it's whining for food and pissing and shitting all over this tower, you won’t.”
“Can we teach it to use a box, like a kitty cat..”
Witch Mother slammed a knife down on the nightstand and turned to her, with wrath in her eyes. “YOU have yet to even say “Thank you, Mother, for this gift that I already adore!” The pig squealed and began trying to run up Rapunzel’s chest to her shoulder. It managed to kick itself free, trying to get away from Witch Mother, and seemed to be swallowed in her hair. She could feel him moving around in it, probably trapped, she presumed.
“I’m sorry, Witch Mother. Thank you for my gift…” The woman sighed and forced a smile. “Are you okay? You left so suddenly last time.”
“Yes, well, like I told you. I have several wards. One of them came very close to escaping with a prince!” She reached into the hair, withdrew her hand, and had the piglet by the throat. “But, he couldn’t defeat me,” she said, smiling wickedly at the little pig.
“Wait… That’s… that’s a prince?”
“Not anymore it’s not. It is a pig. A greedy little pig. Can you believe, that even with a court of wives and a harem of concubines, for prestige, he dared to try to take away one of MINE?” Her grip tightened and the pig squealed.
“You’re hurting him!” Punzie cried out and reached for him, to get him safely back into her arms.
“Punzie… if we do not kill it, it cannot be replaced by a familiar spirit!”
“I don’t want a familiar, if that’s what it takes! Why can’t I just cry out to a spirit and the spirit comes?”
“Because, if you are trying to get the attention of a familiar that you want to choose you, you will need to prove that you want them. Blood always makes a clear statement.”
“I’m just fine without a statement.” She pat the pig on the back. “My apologies for Witch Mother.”
“You don’t speak for me,” Witch Mother said, grabbing the pig and stabbing through him with her dagger.
Punzie screamed and covered her mouth. The pig also screamed, and it wasn’t the pig voice it had been squealing in, but a young man’s pained scream that echoed through the tower. “How could you? How could you?” Punzie asked, unable to see past her tears, a blurry image of nothing but blood crowded her eyes.
“Who is it that summoned? Is it the Witch Mother, or the daughter?” Someone asked. She pulled up her top to wipe her eyes and cleared her vision to see a man with a pink mini afro and vitiligo standing with Witch Mother and dressed in dandy fashion. “Oh. Oh, she’s lovely! And she has a very nice embrace!” He cheered, transformed into the teacup pig and scurried over to her barefeet. He tapped on her toenails with his little hooves, crawled up her leg and rested on her shoulder.
“You’re welcome, Daughter,” Witch Mother said.
Rapunzel simply glared at her, but she also reached over to pet her new familiar. “You’re a prince killer,” she spat.
The Witch Mother smiled, “I hate to tell you this, but most witches are.” She shrugged her shoulders, “Sort of comes with the job. They’re always breaking into our properties trying to play heroes. You’ll understand someday.”
“No! I don’t want to be like you! And I don’t want to be like my mother, either!”
With fury in her eyes, Witch Mother collected her things and once she reached the window, she said, “Well, let’s see how you fare without boons from either of us.”
The next few years, things went as they had… She was the only person who lived in the tower. Whenever she needed more supplies, she pressed the letter from her mother to her heart and expressed her needs, a bird called from downstairs, and she went down to find that her supplies were waiting.
One time, she tried to do this at the door, to see if the magic would happen in front of her, but instead, she heard a bird call from upstairs. She rushed up there, hoping that perhaps this meant that her supplies would be up there and make for easier unpacking. Instead, she got all the way up there, only to hear the bird’s call from downstairs and waiting with her supplies was the Queen’s bird, settled on top of the stack of crates.
“Heyyy…” She said, with an awkwardness in her forced smile. She felt something burn her fingers and she yelped and dropped the letter. When she looked down at it, it appeared to be burning from the corner. “No, no, no!” She called, forgetting the heat to put the fire out with a few pats of her hand.
At the bottom, she watched new words being written in the same handwriting as before. “If you should attempt trickery with this arrangement, or tampering with the process, this boon will be stripped away!” She looked at the bird, and she could have sworn that in that moment, it looked like the Queen, with an expression of disdain she had not seen in the time that she had been apart from her, but the memory came back with sharp ferocity. The bird then left, using the window upstairs, of course.
Her fingernails didn’t grow as fast as her hair did, but they did get pretty long, and she did need to maintain them, and she didn’t particularly know how to. But, she eventually learned, making notes in a large collection of texts that she would eventually bind together (likely using her hair, because she used it for a lot).
She had taken up woodwork, often taking the crates sent with supplies apart and making other things out of them. She had made a rack to put the large wall mirror up. She had made herself a hair cart, which she used to rest the bulk of her hair in when she moved around, in order to prevent it from dragging across the floors. She made seating for a book nook, an altar for her most sacred belongings, and her favorite thing to work on - a ladder that would become long enough to climb out of the tower. She knew it wouldn’t lead to freedom, but maybe she could at least explore this island. At the very least, she wanted to go to the lagoon, maybe put her toes into the sand like they did in the books.
Currently, it was too long to hold in her room, so she rested it beside the stairwell, and knew that by the time it got long enough to reach her room, it would also be long enough to reach the ground outside from her room.
She had been 9 when she first had the idea. The Queen’s bird had shown up, studied her actions, then left, signifying to her that this obviously did not constitute as her attempting trickery or tampering. She was unsure if that was because there was no chance for her getting free from the island, or if there was no worry that she would get out of the tower, but she knew that she had to at least try. It wasn’t like she had a terrible amount of things to do in this place.
By the time she was 12, she knew everything that she had needed to know in order to survive and be content in this tower by herself. Then, things changed. See.. her hair had been growing without regard for all of these years, and she was used to finding ways to travel with it with minimal dirt and the least possible tangles and hazards. But, when she was 12, it did something that she thought it had been doing a few times, but never really confirmed it… it moved on its own.
She had been in the bathtub, her hair in its crate, a bubble ponytail longer than her body by at least two times, arranged in a coil like a bubble bodied snake. Suddenly, she saw blood in the bathtub. “What is…” She narrowed her eyes, reached around to see if she was somehow injured, but she couldn’t detect any pain or broken skin. So, she got up to get out of the bath for further inspection and… her hair pressed her back down.
One time could have been her imagination, and twice could have been a misunderstanding during a panic, but when she took deep breaths to collect herself and once calm stood to get out and the hair, which had never been very heavy, even for its length, pushed her back down in the tub for a third time, she knew.
She remembered that it had screamed when she was younger. She always knew that there seemed to be a level of awareness to it that she had felt. She even ever so often thought about the time when her mother had stopped doing her hair, because something there frightened her. Something was in her hair. “Hello?” she whispered and bit her lip. No answer. Maybe being here alone for 6 years had taken some type of toll on her mind.
She finished washing up. She dried off. She investigated her body further, finding that the blood was coming from inside of her and thought, “I suppose this is how I die.” When she moved to leave the bathroom, there was a crate blocking the door. How had it gotten there? She had not asked for anything… She opened it and found padded underwear, sanitary napkins, sanitary plugs and cups, and wipes… She reached through the box and found another letter. This one was written in a dark reddish brown color that smelled in a way that ink did not, but the handwriting was the same.
“You are experiencing a change. Now, you are to be considered a young woman, and the curse upon you will try to lead you to some place. Figuring out your destiny will not be easy, but it is up to you to do so. You will have to make some tough decisions. You will have to choose who you intend to become with those decisions.”
“What?” She tossed the letter aside and studied the products. At the bottom of the crate was a book. “The Little Princess Becomes a Big Girl” it read, and when she opened it, there was a fairytale princess, modeled after her, showing without words her “story.” thus far. It began with her unruly hair, though it was drawn as though it were a monster, complete with arms and hands made of hair and accented by talons, and ferocious fangs. “Propaganda,” she muttered, flipping to the last page, where she was staring at the book’s likeness of this crate in the bathroom on the left side and photorealistic drawings of each product beside instructions on how to use them.
“Congratulations! You’re a big girl now, Princess!”
“This… is normal???” Or was it the curse the letter spoke of? There was no explanation for that! She simply decided to at least try to start using the products in her Boon Box, as she had begun calling them by this point. There was already hair everywhere. No need for blood to be added to the ambience of her lifelong prison.
.
One night, she was no longer alone. She had been asleep, having dreams about being in the kingdom, on a throne at her mother’s side, though in her dreams, her mother’s face had faded, as she no longer could picture what she looked like. She had descriptions she memorized, but placing those characteristics onto an actual memorized face had eluded her for years, now. She was dreaming of the now faceless Queen when… Tap. Tap. Tap.
In the dream, a bird had landed next to her and was tapping with its beak. Tap. Tap. Tap. She looked over at the bird and discovered, with the shrieks of the entire throne room and her own horror, her hand had been pecked open without her knowledge, and the bird was tapping on her very bones! TAP! TAP! TAP! She awoke with a scream! It was the first nightmare that she could ever recall having. Usually, her dreams were an escape from her lonely, locked up life. That night, it had been better to scare herself awake than to see what the dream would next show her. TAP. TAP. TAP. she heard, at the bottom of the tower. But.
It wasn’t the usual tap. It was instead… outside. She scrambled out of bed and looked out there to see if she could see anything. And by the light of the moon, she could. Someone was down there, cloaked in a dark robe, holding a staff of some sort, with a satchel over their torso. “Rapunzel,” they stated, in a voice much too low for her to be able to hear from up here, but somehow she could. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the magic of this place or if this mysterious stranger had magic of their own.
“Who is there?” She hissed into the darkness, then quickly added, “Nobody’s supposed to be here!”
“Who told you that?” The voice asked and in the moonlight, Rapunzel could just make out a little trace of a smile on their mostly covered face. She clutched the windowsill and tried to catch her breath. The tapping on the tower and her dreams had shaken her.
“It has always been that way,” she tried to explain, realizing only now that nobody had actually said that nobody was supposed to be here. In fact, she had been expecting someone to come for a while now. She had been expecting to someday meet… “The witch!” she whispered to herself and gasped, covering her mouth immediately after. Now, a full smile was revealed and it glinted in the moonlight. “We always recognize each other,” the witch said. “Throw down your hair, and let me up.” The request seemed to sound both from the stranger on the ground and in Rapunzel’s own mind. And her hair seemed to be moving of its own accord, as it was known to do. Rapunzel started gathering the hair and she took a deep breath, her full lips trembled in indecision. “Please, Punzi… The island is dangerous outside for people like us.” She heard.
People like us? She had not felt like she was a part of “people” for a long time. Much less, that there were people who were “like her..” She threw the bubble ponytail down and the witch latched on to it and glided up, with ease. It was as though the hair had the strength and ability to pull her up on its own.
Whenever she reached the place, she strummed Rapunzel’s hair lovingly and Rapunzel watched as the dirt it had just accrued, simply fell off. The hooded figure gave it a little kick and it collected itself into a little cloud, floated outside of the window, then turned into dirt that just fell back to the earth.
“Wow!” Rapunzel whispered.
Again, she could only see a smile, but now she heard the woman’s voice clearer and she sounded confident and young, not how Rapunzel imagined witches to sound. “You’re easy to impress! I like that in my pet princess witches.”
Rapunzel furrowed her eyebrows as the witch removed her satchel, tossed it effortlessly to hang up on a nail that Rapunzel had never noticed, and in one motion, removed the hooded cloak to follow, revealing a form that looked more like a Prince on a Quest than a witch.
The woman wore a huntsman-like outfit, had armed weapon holders on her waist, thighs, knees, ankles, and Rapunzel could sense some hidden ones as well. She had a long blond braided ponytail that hung to her waist and glistened with magic, much like her own mother’s had seemed to. But, where The Queen had floral scented black sparkles, this woman had white sparkles and smelled of… metal, copper or something… (It was blood. Poor Rapunzel just didn’t know it yet). And her surprise at seeing this person had made her forget how insulted she was at being called a pet, and worse than that, a witch!
“You are quite a find,” the witch said, now, circling and appraising the girl. “She couldn’t have known how valuable you are, because surely, she would have kept you to herself.” She folded her arms. “Well, one witch’s trash is another one’s treasure!” She cheered, kicked off her boots, flicked her wrist to start making things move (candles being lit, tea being prepared, other things that were confusing Rapunzel), and removing her weapons, placing them on the nightstand, carefully. Another insult went unspoken in calling her “trash” and was she suggesting that The Queen was A WITCH???
After she had, she turned to Rapunzel, who gasped, having only just realized that the woman’s eyes were not a pale, icy blue, she had presumed at first glance of her face. They were white, with a jet black pupil and flecks of icy light blue in the irises. Another distraction from Rapunzel’s insulted mind. “Don’t just stand there and stare, Punzie. Tell me about yourself.” She leapt into the bed and put her hands beneath her head.
Rapunzel took a deep breath, buried her hands into her hair, grabbing fistfuls of it for support and cleared her throat, “What do you want to know?”
The witch studied her for a moment, and Rapunzel felt deeply scrutinized, like she was learning things about her without her saying anything… like she was being scanned for the information that she had not given when asked for it. “Ah,” The witch said. “You don’t understand what she’s done to you. You don’t understand what you are, how she’s handled it, or what to do next.” The witch sounded mocking, like it was sad what she was seeing, but not like she felt sad about it. “She is cruel,” she said, with a wide smile that revealed canines a little sharper than Rapunzel felt that teeth should be, but she was not going to stand for any more insults from this… this WITCH!
“My mother isn’t unkind!” She snapped and when she did, all of the witch’s moving magic in the tower stopped at once. This made the witch sit up suddenly and look around the room as Rapunzel’s hair started breaking free from the shackles of the ponypuff, at the roots first, and trailing down. “She was grieving! She didn’t know what to do!” She fussed. “She loved me and she has taken care of me, all this time!” Tears flooded her eyes and her completely free hair began to take the form of her shadow, hovering above her and the witch, seemingly ready to attack.
The witch got down on one knee, overlooking Rapunzel to address to hair form, “I meant you no disrespect, honorable spirit. I intend to care for your chosen witch properly.” She lowered her face and lifted her hands, “Forgive my criticisms of the mother who forsook her responsibilities. She seems to be a worthy witch… simply not an appropriate mother… I am here to fill the void.”
Rapunzel’s confusion seemed to distract her enough that her hair fell behind her and she started, not having realized, in her fit of rage that it had been freed nor stood behind her. “Who are you talking to?” She asked the witch, glancing behind her, at nothing. She looked down at her hair and around the room, missing the witch lift her head to see the hair had obviously accepted her groveling. She made her way back to her feet.
“The spirit that embraces you. You know that you’re magical… she at least told you that much?”
“Magical? You mean I’m a witch? That’s what you’ve been saying since you were out there. Well, lady, if that were true, wouldn’t I be figuring out a way to get out of here?” She folded her arms and huffed. The nerve!
“I imagine you would try…” Her eyes darted around and she smiled as she realized something. “For example, the ladder? You think that it will get you out of the tower, and then what, Punzie? You swim back to the palace?”
“Stop calling me that. That’s what my family and family friends called me! You tricked me into me letting you up here by calling me that!”
The witch gave her a sympathetic smile, but it seemed to Rapunzel that this witch knew how to make feelings with her mouth, but the emotions never reached her eyes. “What would you like to be called?”
Rapunzel thought for a while, then huffed, because she knew that this witch somehow knew what she wanted to be called, for connection and normalcy… “I,..want to be called Punzie,” she admitted and dropped her arms to her sides. This was the only person, the only being, besides that snooty bird, that she had seen in years. There was no way out, and this witch at least was being nice to her. She sighed and clasped her hands together. “Tell me… Tell me what you think I should know about the way things are.”
the fact that the creator of the dcblackout was essentially bullied out of the boycott just because other people are getting books is disgusting. people said “i don’t care that black characters/writers aren’t getting books because there are gay people getting books” and we’re supposed to act like that’s not insanely racist
remember like 15 years ago when black bloggers were talking about this exact shit, 'digital blackface', white internet users appropriating images and clips of black people and using them as cartoonish exaggerated expressions of absurdity or high emotion. straight line from minstrelsy to your reaction gifs and nobody fucking cares any more. white people just decided not to acknowledge it and it went away, just like every other time black users have ever tried to criticise any aspect of online culture.
On the contemporary internet, things have been turned inside out. Exchanges that have historically taken place in the underground of black social spaces are now vulnerable to exposure, if not already exposed. The call-and-response creativity of Black Twitter is overheard and echoed by White Twitter, and viral dance phenomena like the whip are seized on by the likes of Hillary and Ellen. Together these objects — and the countless others in circulation, literally countless — create widespread visibility for blackness online. Blackness once again takes up its longstanding role as the engine of American popular culture, so that we find ourselves where we were in the 1920s with jazz, in the 1950s with rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’80s with both house and hip-hop — in a time loop wherein black people innovate only to see their forms snaked away, value siphoned off by white hands.
All the creative labor of the black collective being aside, there is a palpable blackness to much of this viral content — especially memes — that circulates independently from actual black people. This depersonalized blackness is shifty and hard to pin down — as is the blackness of any object or subject, really. It makes itself known through language, through an aggressive use of maneuvers associated with black vernacular speech, explicated in Manuel Arturo Abreu’s “Online Imagined Black English.” One finds captions littered with “bruh,” “fam,” “lit,” and, of course, “nigga.” This blackness is also signaled vaguely through the presence of black subjects. Athletes like Michael Jordan, rappers like Lil Mama and Birdman, and actresses like Skai Jackson have become vessels for affects extending beyond their own individual capabilities.
[...]
Memes move like blackness itself, and the meme’s tactical similarity to historical black cultural forms makes them — predictably — vulnerable to appropriation and capture. The meme is a form that allows for a sense of collective ownership among those who come into contact with it — black or nonblack. The meme seems open to appropriation and interpretation by whoever possesses it for a moment, echoing Fred Moten’s description of blackness as being only what we hold in our outstretched hands.
When we say that the internet extends and exacerbates the same old offline relations, we mean it. In keeping with historical precedent, the cultural and affective labor of black individuals online largely goes unrecognized and un(der)compensated. Compare the nonexistent returns seen by black teens for introducing the whip to the lifetime supply of Vans shoes gifted to the Damn Daniel kid or the nearly half–million dollars worth of swag that Chewbacca Mom received for her most abject display of consumerist bliss.
[...]
“Rather than capital ‘incorporating’ from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination,” Tiziana Terranova argues in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” “it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capitalism.” Likewise, memes — even when produced by black users — cannot be viewed as objects that once authentically circulated in black circles for the enjoyment of the black collective but instead are always already compromised by the looming presence of the corporate, the capitalist.
As such, the meme will probably never manifest blackness in a traceable form such that it might be fully claimed by the black cultural body. The internet, which was advertised as a way to free us from our bodies, has merely confused our limits and identifications, providing just enough flexibility to, in artist Keith Townsend Obadike’s words, “make the same old burnt cork blackface routine easier.”
I know it gets annoying to my Black followers who are just here to have a good time, but I feel the need to highlight this reminder: They run the Black people off. They outnumber, gang up on, harass, report, build campaigns to run the Black people off when they get told things that they don't like. The conversation seems to have gone away because the white people were insufferable to the point where a lot of those commentators abandoned certain spaces, like this one, and moved to other spaces, like Twitter, where they would still be harassed, but at least they could build something up for having to deal with white people's incessant disrespect.
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