The elderly woman, identified as Becky, was traveling on a metro bus to a nearby supermarket to go shopping for her granddaughter, this according to the woman’s son, Pete. According to the community newspaper The Eastsider, another bus passenger, described as a Black woman between 25 to 30, began yelling anti-Asian racial slurs at her. The woman then assaulted Becky. She broke her nose and gave her a concussion. At one point in the assault, she dragged the elderly woman from the back of the bus to the front.
As a Mexican American I am disgusted. Yasmin Beasley attacked one of my people but with the intent of hurting an Asian American. For what? I never see anyone talk about the hate us Mexicans get. For example Antonio Valenzuela.
“RIO RANCHO, N.M. — Forty-year-old Antonio Valenzuela’s death didn’t spark widespread protests like George Floyd’s. In fact, the police killing of Valenzuela drew little attention outside the American Southwestern city just north of the U.S.-Mexico border.”
“As with the killings of Black men and women, officers rarely face punishment in the death of Latinos. However, Latino cases seldom garner national attention, even when caught on video.”
I am not saying black lives don’t matter. But we need to pay attention to latino lives too. They are the second most targeted. “Latinos are killed at the second-highest rate, 23 per million residents, according to the newspaper’s analysis.”
Alaska has the highest amount of Latino murders. New Mexico a close second.
When I went into a local supermarket I was racially profiled. This woman followed me around the store and asked me to empty my purse. When I asked why she ignored me. She reached for my purse and tried emptying it. I pulled it away from her and she called the cops claiming I was a Mexican drug dealer and that I had assaulted her. I was detained until a bystander told them what really happened. The woman was told not to do it again but I was lectured about coming off as suspicious.
Canon and Fanfic: A Short(ish), ST:VOY-Flavoured Essay
I used to be obsessed with slavish adherence to series canon in my fanfiction, unless of course the fic was clearly and intentionally an AU. But I’ve redefined my parameters over the years and I now work within several fanfiction boundaries I’ve mentally established, which may be utterly pointless to anybody else. Here they are, under the cut because I hate having to scroll past long posts so I assume others do too, and I’m polite like that.
1. Canon-Compliant
If we didn’t see it on screen, it didn’t happen. Stories in this vein are careful not to contradict anything TPTB showed us (which is challenging in itself since TPTB weren’t the greatest at maintaining their own continuity). Canon-compliant fics might hint at things we didn’t see confirmed, or that were only referred to in the show, but the intent of these stories is not to contradict the intent of canon.
To put it bluntly, if J/C was never seen to actually happen on screen and Chakotay’s apparently one-sided attraction for Janeway had disappeared by Season 7 in favour of C/7, a canon-compliant fic won’t suggest anything different.
2. Canon-Consistent
There’s a lot more wiggle-room in these fics. No, nothing will outright contradict on-screen canon, but there’s a world of interpretation to be explored in the gaps. Canon-consistent fics may or may not accept other sources as canon (books, comics, even widely-accepted fanon) but they’re primarily concerned with working within the parameters (there’s that word again) of what we see on screen.
Note: though it may be widely-accepted fanon that Chakotay says ‘Spirits!’ and is referred to as ‘Chak’, ‘Old Man’ and ‘Big Guy’ by various crew members, particularly Tom and ‘B’E’ (urgh), I will never accept this. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!
3. Beta-Canon
Ah, the books. The wonderful, magical Star Trek bookverse. Blessings be upon Our Lady of J/C, Kirsten Beyer, forever and ever amen, not least because the woman can actually write. The rest of the Trek authors can pretty much go eat a dick, particularly Peter David (YOU DARE TO KILL THE QUEEN? OFF WITH HIS HEAD). I give Christie Golden a just-scraped-in pass for doing her best with Homecoming, while Jeri Taylor gets a B- for taking Mosaic as far as she was probably allowed to go with it and a big fat F for that abomination, Pathways. But whatever your opinion of the many and varied and utterly contradictory novels in the bookverse, there’s no denying they’re a rich source of fanfic material. And they have certainly assisted me in creating many a ...
4. Headcanon
How many Baskin-Robbins flavours are there now? (Does Baskin-Robbins still exist?) That’s probably how many headcanons I can juggle concurrently. There’s the one where Janeway is the geeky, fresh-faced, bouncy Science Nerd (so basically, Season 1 canon Janeway) who gets excited over coffee nebulae and can barely control her right eyebrow. There’s the one where Chakotay is the poster boy for still waters running deep and has the most complicated and complex backstory and motivations the Voyager writers could never imagine for him. (Ever noticed how there are as many versions of Chakotay in fanfiction as there are ice cream flavours? Wonder why that is? Because those fuckers had NO IDEA what to do with him, that’s why.) There’s the one where Janeway was brutally mistreated during her capture by Cardassians and has been dealing with that trauma ever since. There’s the one where she has unapologetically overcome it and allowed it to shape, but not break, the person she is. There’s the one where she and Chakotay fuck like bunnies and get up to all manner of depravity. There’s the one where... You get the picture.
There’s a story or three for every headcanon out there. Go forth and write more.
5. Alternate Universe (AU)
Also known as ‘Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence’, this is the category most fanfic probably inhabits. It could range from tweaking one little scene in an episode to the author’s preferred outcome (what really happened after the hand-holding scene in Resolutions, or ‘dessert’ in Timeless? Or if J/C isn’t your bag, what is salamander sex actually like? My guess is slimy) all the way to splitting off from the series canon at a certain point (what if Janeway never hit the reset button in Year of Hell?)
These are still the characters we know in the setting we know, despite it not matching canon in many ways. They just probably get to have a lot more fun. Or angst, if that’s your bag. It’s mine. Maybe you’ve noticed.
6. Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
‘Modern’ is a relative term, okay. Basically, you take the characters out of their canon setting/time/place and whack them behind the counter of a coffee shop (ugh, sorry, I really dislike high school and coffee shop AUs) or in 1940s San Francisco or meeting by chance on a train or in a nineteenth-century drawing room. They key - and this is super difficult to do well - is to maintain the integrity of the characters despite their environment being completely different. How much of Janeway’s personality is shaped by her Starfleet brat upbringing? Would Chakotay be an entirely different person if he were a New York ER doctor in 2018?
7. Parallel Universe (PU)
This is where things can get really freaky. We’re not just talking canon-divergence here, or taking the characters and slotting them into a different setting. Parallel universe stories are set in the Star Trek world we know, but with tweaks. Maybe Chakotay mutinied and took over Voyager. Maybe Janeway was the Maquis captain. Maybe Caretaker never happened, or Justin Tighe survived, or Janeway and Owen Paris never escaped Cardassian capture. There are endless possibilities and I want to explore every last one of them.
Note: “AU” seems to cover this category as well as the two above, so it can be a little confusing to figure out what kind of world you’re about to enter when you start reading an AU fic. But that’s part of the fun...
Hi guys! This is a reminder that my requests are closed. I love that you guys enjoy my writing but I have over 50 requests that I'm sorting through! Most of the 200 follower thing is going to be drabbles which I'll explain in the next paragraph.
Also I apologize for the shortness of my posts, I'm in the hospital currently so I'm writing what I can! I don't want to overwork myself when I need to be resting so once again I'm so sorry for the shortness.
