"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, being spent on species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
the hellfire murder mystery was the first x-men comic i've liked in months. (excluding the solo titles, at least)
it wasn't perfect, and if the solution to your mystery is "mystique did it" you probably want to work a little harder than just not telling people she's in the issue, but it was fun to read and that's more than enough to cover a lot of failures.
i'm aware there's some measure of criticism being levied by the fandom over the issue being "too horny," but it's the x-men and that's just who they are. the soap drama is the backbone of the setting. what are you reading their comics for if you don't want a bunch of ill-advised hookups during their downtime? and the teased pairings were all pretty good, in the sense that they're all incredibly ill-advised and would cause lots of drama if developed
i am surprised though at some of the characters who were not included.
no doug ramsey? if he's going to be the new apocalypse for the foreseeable future, you'd expect him to be one of the big-movers-and-shakers that Shaw would want to court, and he'd make a very good secondary suspect to the crime. more importantly a costume ball is an excellent opportunity to stealthily give him a better redesign than what he's been saddled with.
no kurt wagner either, just shocking. obviously no one is going to suspect kurt of being the killer, but you'd just expect a man of his flamboyance to be a priority for the art team. (i must admit there is a possibility that he actually was there, and the costume was just not exciting enough to remember, but if so my point is unchanged)
ultimately it doesnt really matter since got as a show got its indecent end, but rereading acok it really is insidious how the showrunners decided to not include any sign of the lannisters ravaging the riverlands (indiscriminate pillage, rape, torture, murder) in favour of positively framed tywin scenes where he insulates arya from the aforementioned & appreciates her for what are ultimately signs of higher class breeding (literacy) & also in general how a lot of tywin scenes had that level of 'go diva, cool clapback!'. it does contextualise a lot of d&d disgust with dany & her forced turn towards the authoritarian as primarily resting in her existing as othered & orientalised vs our homegrown western feudal war atrocities
Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to knowā¦
What is your AO3 user ID?
Iām an OG user 5 digits or less
Six figures baby!
Iām in the millionsā¦
Remaining time: 3 days 46 minutes
Iām so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!
And Kitty is just as unhinged about Illyana's safety. The Beyonder takes Illyana from her, and her response is to advance a revenge scheme that will destroy the universe if successful
I feel like this is an almost universal experience for people of our generation. We always knew more or less that the super-rich were corrupt assholes ruthlessly exploiting the rest of us for their own gains. But still, on some level, we held out to the belief that when things were really dire, when we really had to work together or risk catastrophe, even those rich assholes would begrudgingly do their part. We knew the game was rigged, but we though there were some rules keeping the powerful in check. And then we had that moment of finding out that no, there really were no rules if you had enough money, that you could really just fuck over all of society and get off scot free. For some of us that moment was the 2008 financial crisis. For others it was later, but I feel like we all had that sinking realization at one point, that feeling of sheer powerlessness in the face of the most brazen injustice.
And for John that moment must have hit so much worse, as he was screwed over personally as well as politically. That was his project, he was supposed to save humanity - except they wouldn't even let him. They took away his life's work and the future of humanity in one fell swoop. Imagine the entire world crashing down on you like that. Would you ever be able to recover? I don't think I would.
After that moment, I don't think there's anything John could have done that could have made me lose all sympathy for him. He did so much wrong but man they really had to break him to get him to that point.
At the end of the day, love him or hate him, he is the voice of a generation - our generation.
Even after all he's been through, even after he saw the trillionaires steal his life's work laughing all the way to the bank, he STILL clings to the idea of some ultimate justice. He's still assuming they're playing by the same rules as everyone else. He still can't accept that the whole system he's been carefully working his way through to make a difference in the world was always designed to serve these people.
It's so hard letting that belief go when you've invested so much into it. And when that belief finally, truly snaps, it might take a lot of your conscience along with it. And suddenly, you watch yourself start playing around with nuclear blackmail...
Really, John's rage makes so much more sense when you remember he's the guy who believed in the System to the bitter end, who gave it every chance to restore his faith in it. More cynical people like P- or M- would never have felt that level of betrayal, which is why they were able to keep their cool. But John? John had been slapped in the face one too many times.
Like I was saying in a post the other day, if John had been more of an asshole from the start, if he hadn't been trying so hard to do things in a fair and moral and just way whenever he thought they could afford toāwhen it wasn't an immediate matter of life-and-death, and even after multiple instances where it had beenāif he'd been willing to throw zombies and skeletons at the problem and solve his problems with violence and murder sooner, we never would have made it to Barbenheimer.
But he didn't want violence and murder. He did want actual justice. He didn't even want the trillionaires to die until they were actively on their way out the door leaving everyone to die, and even then... With the parallels between John's story and Nona's, the way they had very much dragged him out from behind the table to shoot him and then he just doesn't mention them again and the narration sort of jumps, it is entirely possible not only that they shot him and he got back up, but that he got back up Having A Tantrum, Nona-style. Some really interesting points in that moment, too...
First, I became a demigod. I nearly fell out of my body. I put my hand around half the worldās throats. Some of them I managed to snap before they were melted away by nuclear fire. I did them clean. Everyone died, but I helped a hell of a lot of them go before they knew anything had happened. I drank them in, and it wasnāt enough. I needed those ships. I needed to extend my hand. I got it around the throat of the other half. I made them go away too. Then I had control of everything on the surface, but not the shipsĀ ā¦ birds flying above the fireĀ ā¦ kids playing keep-away.
There's a fascinating juxtaposition in how John was the one who launched the nukes, but then he rushed to give half the world cleaner painless deaths before they knew to be afraid; it sort of aligns with his moment of hesitation when he catches the last ship, too, that one instant where he could feel them but then it was too late. (Something something parallels with John and Coronabeth where she doesn't know whether to be relieved or distraught that Ianthe isn't dead something something duality.)
"I made them go away" is such a pathetic attempt to frame it as any less horrific, and at the same time it speaks to a mentality of make it stop, the overwhelmed mentality that reaches to violence not for the sake of violence but for escape. "Kids playing keep-away" and just how often John and all his friends are so frequently compared to children. His blocky child's letters in the sand, his idea of Perfect being 7 years old again playing with his mum's old Barbie. Mercy and Augustine in the candlelight looking simultaneously appallingly old and no older than Ianthe, holding each other after the murder like children waking from a nightmare. The way Cytherea looked like she could have been seventeen or thirty-seven. Pyrrha's "Itās better to die. Thereās a power to dying cleanĀ ā¦ dying free. Itās not love, what youāre about to do. Itās not beautiful and itās not powerful. Itās a mistake. We didnāt even do it rightĀ ā¦ we were childrenāplaying with the reflections of stars in a pool of waterĀ ā¦ thinking it was space." And of course, how Alecto sees everyone, too, even Crux, the poor baby of a mere hundred years...
Usually when people call him a man-child it's an insult but like. No, honestly. This is the autistic kid who latched on really hard to The Rules and always had a tendency to frame everything through the lens of Stories, who pushed himself through academic hell so fast and so hard to make a difference and had that work out overall despite so much working against him (and as an adult object personified so hard he thought of corpses as friends before magic ever existed but you know). He was told if you work hard enough and play fair, you can climb your way to the top, or at least high enough that people above you might listen, and then that just stopped working. And he kept going, what? No, that's not FAIR? That's not how it WORKS?
And right up until those last few minutes, that really was all he'd wanted. For them to stop, for them to play by the rules, for them to sit back down and take accountability and help fix their own mess, as was only fair. But it was never fair, and they were never playing by the same rules.
Honestly, at this point, considering how little he's done to Blood of Eden as they are and Prince Ianthe's order to cease activity and have others not accept anything from them but no demand to? kill them or even turn them in? I'm left to wonder if he even still wants to kill the trillionaires when he finds the rest (lost in time) or if he just wants to gather them and take them back and force them to fix shit jaowejaoaw. Like it wouldn't surprise me if he's like "no those fuckers had too many chances already", but it does feel like hunting them all down to take in alive would be significantly harder than launching some kind of attack he could be reasonably confident would kill them even without knowing exactly when or where they are. But yeah...
And then we turn around and these days he doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else, either, at least in any way that matters... but he takes his fair turns cooking like everyone else. He still trips over himself to apologize sometimes. Gradually compromises and accommodates, like giving Harrow first water instead of tea, and then crackers instead of biscuits. Still dives in to both physically and spiritually grab Harrow and pull her through the last stretch of the River during the trip to the Mithraem at genuine serious risk to himself. None of it is worth enough to matter next to all the horrors he's perpetuating and all the ways he puts himself above everyone else, but man it's almost worse that there's still that part of him that cares about trying.
GOD... Sorry to reblog this again but looking for something else and just saw again, in John 8:1, after the cow wall incident...
I didnāt care what they thought, I wanted the attention. I wanted to break my NDAs. I wanted to let them know about the cryo plans and how we got shut down.
This motherfucker was Playing By The Rules so hard he still hadn't broken his NDAs yet. Sir... Sir you are living in your old workplace with the power shut off and you just turned 80 cows and a bunch of sheep into a wall because you didn't trust them not to kill you. Why are you still... sir... please...
"Whether someone understands it or not, these are the consequences of the political views they're espousing" is a pretty important analysis tool for online movements because quite honestly, over half of everyone engaging in politics online have no foundations for the stuff they're saying and are just saying whatever makes them feel like a member of an in-group.
If your in-group is "the left" you're very much not immune to this. In fact, trying to do left-wing politics without even trying to build a foundational political understanding is a great way to end up as a neo-nazi with a tumblr accent rather than an effective left-wing advocate.
scenes in harrow the ninth that always make me get choked up:
harrow reaching for alecto and begging to be able to touch her
palamedes being so excited to see harrow he PICKS HER UP IN A SPIN AND KISSES THE TOP OF HER HEAD when she canāt even recognize one of her only friends
augustine telling mercy āmy bones will rest easy next to your bones.ā
cam painstakingly gathering the fragments of palamedesā skull for the smallest chance he might still be in there
gideon gaining consciousness in harrowās body and the only thing she even wanted was for her to be there.
harrow realizing the theater of her mind and feeling the absolute gut punch of losing the love of her life all over again
feel free to add your misery to this post šš
the scene where john tells harrow that she would have made "a hell of a daughter" (WHOLE other can of worms coming from him) and her instinctive response to that is to kneel in broken glass and confess the sin that killed her actual parents and he DOESN'T EVEN BELIEVE HER.
wake smiling at pyrrha like there's no one else in the world she'd rather see
harrow's dream-hallucination roleswap au holding firm to the idea that crux loves her and would stick by her even if she weren't the reverend daughter
her desperately contrite apology to ortus and his simply wrapping her in a hug which feels good and safe in a way touch usually doesn't for her
mercymorn tearfully demanding that john tell her he loved cristabel
gideon remembering the fight that prompted harrow to open the tomb, the angry desperation and genuine desire to hurt each other that two children should never have felt ("how much more will it take before you and i achieve omniscience?")
augustine telling mercy that he could stub her out like a cigarette and john would forgive him, and then later john does exactly that and augustine refuses to forgive him
"but when i am in heaven i will remember your mouth and when you roast down in hell i think you will remember mine"
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
society went downhill when u stopped being able to go on youtube and look up "[show] season 1 episode 1" and getting the full episode broken up into parts but otherwise completely intact and it had every single episode
I'll always be fascinated by how Spock in "The Conscience of the King" is completely right about everythingāsomething far from inevitable in TOS episodesābut in particular, he is the only character who wasn't on Tarsus IV who seems to emotionally get the full weight of the starvation and genocide.
He doesn't try to minimize or displace what Kirk, Riley, Leighton, and others endured as Kirk's real driving motive. He doesn't close his eyes to the evidence that an almost unimaginably horrific sequence of horrors shaped his best friend even though it's painful and uncomfortable to think about. Spock is his usual paranoid jealous self wrt Lenore for about 5 seconds before using his brain, realizing it's fake, and concluding Kirk's real target is likely her father (this is why he discovers the genocide at all). He tries to convince McCoy, does the hard research when that fails, and drums the reality into his head to get him briefly onboard. Spock isn't cowed by Kirk lashing out at him repeatedly, but he also understands that Kirk can't and shouldn't just let it go without his safety and justice assured.
It's obviously much more of a Kirk episode than a Spock-centric one, but Spock is an absolute champ in it.
...That said, I also think having Kirk be the major character whose backstory specifically involves mass starvation and genocideāand in other episodes, shown to very persistently react to hunger/starvation in a visceral way no one else does, and treated as more of an expert on surviving starvation than biologists and doctorsāwhile Spock is the one character who wasn't there and gets it is a truly wild choice when both characters are played by 2nd-gen Ukrainian diaspora actors.
Leonard Nimoy's parents fled Soviet Ukraine separately and had to track each other down in the USA while unable to speak English, and William Shatner's father (the parent who died during the filming of "The Devil in the Dark" btw) had been a teenaged Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary to Canada who brought over the rest of his family. Nimoy and Shatner themselves were born in Boston and Montreal (respectively) just before the Holodomor and ~10 years before the Holocaust in Ukraine (CW for pretty much everything); their parents' emigrations spared them from having to survive two genocides to reach adulthood.
North America was no walk in the park for the members of the Ukrainian and/or Jewish diasporas during much of the 20th century, of course (when DeForest Kelley was born, Canada was still actively operating some of the internment camps holding Ukrainian Canadiansāincl ones born in Canadaāas enemy aliens, and had kept many, many other Ukrainian Canadians under surveillance and more; meanwhile, just listing the USA's and Canada's antisemitic practices in the 40s-60s alone would probably take years). But still, millions of people like them starved and/or were slaughtered where both their fathers had lived: in real life, in their lifetimes.
(Kodos "only" managing to butcher ~4000 starving people before the competence and good will of the Federation's institutions stopped him getting presented as the most successfully brutal expression of eugenics in recent history speaks more volumes about the better world the fictional characters live in vs the realities of the mid-20th century than "we've evolved past hunger and cruelty :)" ever could. Unfortunately.)
I'm not even sure what my full opinion is on that particular story choice in context, just... huh, sure was a choice.
What do you think is the significance of Dany forgetting Hazzeaās name?
For reference:
Her name had been Hazzea. She was four years old. Unless her father lied. He might have lied. No one had seen the dragon but him. His proof was burned bones, but burned bones proved nothing. He might have killed the little girl himself, and burned her afterward. He would not have been the first father to dispose of an unwanted girl child, the Shavepate claimed. The Sons of the Harpy might have done it, and made it look like dragon's work to make the city hate me. Dany wanted to believe that ā¦ but if that was so, why had Hazzea's father waited until the audience hall was almost empty to come forward?
Daenerys II, ADWD
And then:
"Drogon killed a little girl. Her name was... her nameā¦" Dany could not recall the child's name. That made her so sad that she would have cried if all her tears had not been burned away.
Daenerys X, ADWD
I don't think she's actually forgotten. Her internal narration mentions Hazzea in Dany VIII and IX both. I think it's as the text says: Dany cannot recall. The name's there but not in her grasp. The passage in Dany X takes place when Dany is exhausted, ill, dehydrated, hungry, and as she appears to be right in the middle of a miscarriage.
But as the miscarriage is symbolic, so too is Dany's (probably temporary) inability to dredge up this information.
Cut for length. This gets a bit involved.
I think this is a key passage in understanding Dany's symbolic lack of recall.
No queen has clean hands, Dany told herself. She thought of Doreah, of Quaro, of Eroeh... of a little girl she had never met, whose name had been Hazzea. Better a few should die in the pit than thousands at the gates. This is the price of peace, I pay it willingly. If I look back, I am lost.
Dany VIII, ADWD
Hazzea's death, and the cover-up, are part of Dany's suppression of her own desires, identity, and own better judgment in trying to keep the peace in Meereen. What follows Dany's failure to recall Hazzea is this:
"I will never have a little girl. I was the Mother of Dragons."
Aye, the grass said, but you turned against your children.
Dany literally locked them up, in fact. And what we also find out in Dany X, with Drogon:
When she laid the whip across Drogon's right side he veered right, for a dragon's first instinct is always to attack. Sometimes it did not seem to matter where she struck him, though; sometimes he went where he would and took her with him. Neither whip nor words could turn Drogon if he did not wish to be turned.
By contrast, towards the end of the chapter, Dany can direct Drogon when she uses hands and knees.
In other words, dragons need guidance. Parents. Not a master. And for most of ADWD, Dany rejected her role as mother, instead acting as a master and gaoler.
There is no metric on which Dany did not fuck up bad here. She didn't think hard enough about how to raise large scaly predators or take precautions. Then, when that went wrong, she covered up the death and imprisoned her dragons, guilty of nothing but being dragons. She failed. She was weak on this point. And if she looks back on that failure...
This is not the end of Dany's character development, after all. This is part of it. A process. It looks to me like we're heading into one of the roughest parts of that process. After being too timid, I think she's going to overcorrect. Not being able to recall Hazzea's name allows for that overcorrection as she loses sight of the consequences.
If you think about it as an extended metaphor for freedom, it makes sense. Freedom is dangerous and difficult. There are consequences for poor decisions and lack of foresight, like a dragon killing a four-year-old. As with other issues, GRRM's honest about that. Sometimes freedom sucks and sometimes it involves truly difficult balancing acts. The solution isn't to take away freedom entirely, but to guide people into it.
To do it well, you need strength and courage and the ability to face up to your inevitable mistakes. Dany's not short on strength or courage - I think she'll face up to her mistakes in the end. I think she'll find that balance so that the people (and hopefully the dragons) she cares about can be free.
both Cassās introduction in Batman (1940) #567 and Batgirl 2000 really hammered in the Cass-dog parallels (in the form of symbolizing how David Cain violently stripped Cass of her personhood) but looking back itās such an insane way to tell your audience that the protagonistās abusive father from hell will always love her unconditionally
still caring about internet friends you lost touch with years ago is so embarrassing. yeah i had a deam we met up irl recently. the last time we spoke was maybe 7-8 years ago. i still wear the laces we randomly decided was a sign of our friendship. i dont know what any of your socials are or if youre even active on any. sometimes i see someones art resemble yours and i wonder for hours. do you still go by that name you chose? whenever i see it i wonder if its you. we couldve passed each other in this vastness a thousand times and not have a clue.
I've always thought that "the baron is taking over" thing was... not actually real. You can't really square it away with the way she is depicted in the first two novels, and also (more importantly) the baron's memories are not actually the baron's memories, they are Alia's memories. There is no possession. That is, within universe, an unfounded superstition. This is all happening purely in Alia's head.
So I've had the view that it's all her own stress/anxiety getting the best of her, the uniquely hateful bene gesserit ideology telling her that she's doomed since before she was even born, her isolation, and her resentment over being left to hold everything together for the family that abandoned her. "The Baron" is ultimately just Alia's internal argument with herself. All of that in a book that was very of it's time, that despite sympathizing with her position, cannot fathom any ending beyond "sad girl too far gone kill her for her own good."
I mean I think the concept of genetic memories within Dune are pretty firmly established as ārealā, itās one of the things the text tries to pretend is ambiguous but itās simply not IMHO. Like, the gholas that are created from a few cells extracted from under someoneās fingernails after scratching them are able to be āawakenedā and regain all the memories of their past lives, even as children. I donāt think that can be written off as a stress-delusion. Alia isnāt the only abomination, after allāLeto and Ghanima are also almost possessed (I guess Leto is sort of omni-possessedā¦), and are only able to resist it because they have Paul in their ancestry to stand guard. Plus thereās the Reverend Mothers ritually sharing memories with their successors, which is the only thing that made Alia preborn in the first place.
I do think thereās an argument for the inaccuracy of Other Memory personas and I think the fact that Alia succumbed specifically to the Baron is more about her psychological state and anxieties than like, the psychic superiority of his force ghost over fucking Agamemnon* lol.
To clarify I don't meant to suggest that Alia's preborn memories are a delusion or a fabrication, rather that they are an intrinsic part of Alia's own consciousness, not a collection of external actors at constant war with her.
There's not a tiny Jessica living inside of Alia, for example, driving her around. Jessica's experiences and memories to the point she took the water of life are held by two different people, and then diverge as Alia and Jessica experience new things. The Baron's memories as they exist in Alia exist colored by everything else that is also in there. If you take the Baron from book one, and put him over Alia's shoulder I book 3, he's not going to be saying the same things as what Alia is telling herself in his voice. Even if we take as true that there is no core set of memories unique only to Alia herself, the mass of everything put together still makes an individual. She's in the books. We hear her internal monolog
I've always thought that "the baron is taking over" thing was... not actually real. You can't really square it away with the way she is depicted in the first two novels, and also (more importantly) the baron's memories are not actually the baron's memories, they are Alia's memories. There is no possession. That is, within universe, an unfounded superstition. This is all happening purely in Alia's head.
So I've had the view that it's all her own stress/anxiety getting the best of her, the uniquely hateful bene gesserit ideology telling her that she's doomed since before she was even born, her isolation, and her resentment over being left to hold everything together for the family that abandoned her. "The Baron" is ultimately just Alia's internal argument with herself. All of that in a book that was very of it's time, that despite sympathizing with her position, cannot fathom any ending beyond "sad girl too far gone kill her for her own good."
Keyleth (Critical Role) vs. Iris West-Allen (The Flash)
Keyleth
Iris West-Allen
Voting ended onJul 18
Propaganda below the cut:
Keyleth:
The DnD fandom at the time was very heavily male and very misogynistic. Marisha Ray, Keyleth's player, was the youngest person at the table and was, like, CONSTANTLY dogpiled for Keyleth's actions, leading a LOT of people to be mad about Keyleth in general. She was a naive, insecure character who grew and changed, and a lot of the writing changes in The Legend of Vox Machina have made this arc clearer. I've seen some people still be mad about Keyleth in TLoVM, but nowhere NEAR as bad as it was in 2015-16. All her decisions made sense for the character, but since Marisha wasn't, like, minmaxing or metagaming, a lot of people were like "why would Keyleth do this, is she stupid??"
She's finding her way in the world!! She's doing her best!!! She's incredibly powerful and really comes into her own as the story goes on. There's only a couple episodes of TLoVM Season 4 out right now but the sheer difference in her confidence versus insecurity from Season 1 to 4 is incredible.
When Critical Role first aired, a lot of fans said she was annoying or criticized the choices she made. People also brought up small mistakes she made more often than they would for male characters .If she made a mistake it was the worst thing ever but if a male character made the same mistake it wasn't even mentioned
I think she's really cool! She actually had an arc about overcoming insecurities and criticism, which is ironic given fan behavior but did result in arguably the most thematically interesting dragon fight we got to see
It's totally okay if you don't want to include her because a lot of the hate towards her also goes directly towards the person playing her being "too new to dnd" or "not nerdy enough". That being said: A lot of people think Keyleth is childish or annoying, when really that's the point of the character. She's been thrown into a position of leadership way sooner than she should've been. Her people live for hundreds of years, she's still an awkward teen within her society.
Druids are awesome. Nature magic is awesome. She's a wholesome little bean until she gets truly pissed off. Is a cinnamon roll that could kill you. And everyone in critical role is the epitome of poly panic. (Maybe not in canon but in our hearts)
Iris West:
Fandom calls her a bitch and annoying for daring to challenge Barry and to be his love interest while being a black woman.
She is sweet but doesn't take shit from her father or love interest and she is a great journalist and a terrible cook (iconic).
