It’s An Ursula K Le Guin Free Your Mind From The Idea Of Deserving Kind Of Day

There is no such thing as a real fox... :(

Within 100 feet of a fox, anywhere on Earth

ok im going to #seriouspost for a second here. I don't think Harry Potter is a manifesto. I think it was a flawed passion project that millennials latched onto because of the fantasy of sticking it to their mean teachers and arbitrarily categorizing themselves (hogwarts houses; it's the thinking millennial's astrology). I think the fact that the series got popular when and how it did was very much a product of its time.

I don't think Harry Potter is the biggest symbol of JKR's bigotry. I think the most flagrant sign of that was how she responded to critics. I watched her become radicalized in real time. I watched how she doubled down on her racism when she was called out for the ways she promoted her tragically mid fantastic beasts movies. I watched her chase marginalized teenagers with a double digit follower count off of twitter for daring to criticize her thought process, and no one with any kind of power standing against her because she was the one who was paying them. This isn't to say Harry Potter is without flaws. This is to say she really didn't give a shit about that. Getting rich and powerful is a hell of a drug, and she had enough sycophants that she had no reason to care about what her critics were saying.

She was convinced that she was a martyr; a voice for the unheard; a leader for the ages, so of course her detractors were the bad guys. And I think we should take this to heart. We should see this as an example of how easy it is to get radicalized; if you think of yourself as a paragon of virtue, you are going to think that whatever you see as good and right is an objective fact. Most people don't know this, but the majority of terfs start out as trans allies. You are not immune to propaganda! You are not immune to falling into dangerous ideologies!!!

This is why the most important thing you can do as an activist is to listen. Do NOT think you're above being wrong; do NOT develop a god complex; do NOT form an identity out of being right all the time. Involve yourselves in the groups you claim to speak for. Listen to trans women; share resources that help trans women; familiarize yourself with the diversity of experiences that trans people have and the struggles they face.

No, none of you are as bad as JKR because you don't have her money or her power. You will likely never have the capacity for harm she does. But check yourselves. Do not affirm yourselves into thinking you always have the moral high ground. Watch yourselves; humble yourselves; check yourselves for signs of cult behavior and internalized prejudice. You are always learning. You will always be learning. Do not allow yourselves to get a power trip from brushing off marginalized voices.

Feanor was the first, who predicted the end of Infinity War.

I don't think I understand dwarves. I get that Khazad-dûm is their main, greatest and most beautiful city, a cultural treasure, but some pretty terrible things did happened there. And yet all they want is to reclaim it again and actually live there. It's like if elves were trying to restore the ruins of Gondolin (were it possible). "Sure, it was our most beautiful stronghold once, but on the other hand thousands of our people died here horribly... which doesn't give me nightmares at all..." I mean, the dwarves deserve our respect.

i genuinely feel like The Whole Point of Jin Guangyao’s demise is that it was not justice. in-universe, it did not actually come about because of any of his deeds that we the modern audience would consider the most heinous. Nie Huaisang plotted against him because he killed Nie Mingjue specifically, and… like, Mingjue explicitly and with pre-meditation tried to kill Jin Guangyao three separate times, with the novel (my preferred text source) heavily implying he only started playing the evil music after that third time. this could very reasonably be argued to be self-defense.

i’m not necessarily interested in re-litigating which of JGY’s worst acts were, which ones were justified, which ones he maybe didn’t do, which ones were okay because they were sexy, how unforgivable any of them are, etc, but i think we can all agree that if he simply avoided killing NMJ, his other deeds would not instantly become fine. so NMJ is not the golden snitch of fucked-upness in his repertoire. it is far from The Worst Thing He’s Done.

but it is the reason that NHS hunted him.

JGY’s punishment was not about justice on a moral scale, but on a personal scale. (this is a narratively valid reason to destroy someone, btw. JGY clearly did not kill his own father because his dad was a graceless abusive imperialist sex offender and war profiteerer who ordered the slaughter of dozens of innocents and ruined countless lives. he killed JGS because JGS insulted his mother. so while i sincerely believe that NHS wanted personal vengeance, with moral justice being relatively unimportant to him, that’s not at all meant to be a criticism of him.)

to further cement it, the final blow dealt against JGY was explicitly for a deed he did not do. narratively, it would have been SO EASY to write him making a last desperate attempt to run and getting caught on a sword, or lunging for some final hostage and missing. this would be completely in line with his behaviour leading up to that point: the author created COUNTLESS opportunities for some hero or another to run him through when he was actively scheming and manipulating. but she deliberately didn’t.

she deliberately made JGY, a person who had committed so many vile deeds that anyone in the jianghu could accept his execution as just, die an unjust death, slaughtered for something he didn’t do.

(do you think the characters cared that JGY had killed some nameless working women, btw? even LXC was more concerned about his scumbag father. that time he slaughtered an entire family of civilians as enrichment for Xue Yang? to the best of my recollection, that wasn’t even brought up in the main book. that was just for us.)

i’m making this post because a lot of people have told me point blank that JGY “earned” his miserable ending by doing bad shit, that Jiang Cheng/JGY/LXC/whoever the person thinks is an antagonist because they were mean to wangxian were “punished” with horrible fates, and this is how MXTX is codifying who the villains and who the heroes are, and the story is actually explicitly about moral uprightness prevailing over repugnance. and i just think that’s kind of a lackluster reading for a text that’s so blatantly explained that in this universe, good or bad things will simply happen to people completely regardless of whether or not it’s fair.

friend izzy points out that in the world of MDZS, “justice only happens on a personal scale”. there is no societal change. there is no large-scale justice. guilt is basically determined whenever some powerful people get in a room together and agree on it. and neither of the protagonists actually bother to change this. WWX’s big heroic stand was to save a village of a few dozen family members and retreat from larger society completely. LWJ’s heroic deeds account to literally just vigilantism. and this is good. the Wen ghosts coming out of the blood pool said: that was enough. sizhui’s whole existence says: protecting a handful of “unimportant” people for a year was worthwhile.

(XXC, SL, Mianmian etc also just kind of peaced out and wandered around helping people on an individual basis. and since I’m being petty anyway, I’ll once again throw out the fact that the person who affected the largest-scale positive societal change was in fact JGY, whose watchtowers were repeatedly praised for saving countless civilian lives, by the narration and by WWX himself.)

NHS committed himself to vengeance, neglecting his duties to his sect, killing animals, catching Qin Su in it as collateral, endangering children, desecrating the grave of an innocent woman, traumatising Jin Ling and thrusting him into a massive power vacuum at age 14, and destablising the politics of the entire Jianghu because there was no other way to get the piece of justice he personally needed.

any family member of any of the 3,000 people that Wei Wuxian killed at Nevernight have exactly as much right to do to Wei Wuxian exactly what Huaisang did to Jin Guangyao.

but nobody in this story “got what they deserved”. they just got it.

The Rise and Fall of the Sun

1. Sunrise over Karavankas, Slovenia, summer 2018 (view from Stol).

2. Sunset in Färnebofjärden National Park, Sweden, summer 2018 (peninsula Östa)

You know, for all that the elves are beautifully described by Tolkien to have a deep cultural connection to the stars, the only character in Middle Earth that I would really label an astronomer is a mortal man: Tar-Meneldur, the fifth king of Numenor.

Tar-Meneldur was actually born “Irimon”,...

me: ( I’ve failed to blow a soap-bubble in a shower ) “That’s so sad… Alexa, play ,,Thanos likes bubbles"