Oh Hey It's The 2nd Of August. It's International Romani Genocide Memorial Day. 79 Years And Still The

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you can always tell who has 0 critical reading skills/has never known or known anyone that’s experienced trauma when they complain that the ages for the characters in SOC are unbelievable. like, the entire point of them being so dark and so mature at such young ages is because all of them have gone through things that have forced them to mature. in some way or another the adults in their lives have failed them.

wylan’s dad abused him, jarl brum used matthias’ pre-existing trauma from having his family die against him, kaz was failed by both pekka rollins (scamming 2 lost kids in a city, what a piece of shit) and to an extent jordie due to his naivete & irresponsibility (kaz even admits this). in a sense zoya failed nina by being so harsh on her nina had little qualms about running off from her, colm forced jesper to hide an important part of himself for so long it basically irreversibly changed him for the worse, and inej was absolutely failed by tante heleen, who stole her innocence at a painfully young age. all these factors forced the main characters to grow up fast even when they didn’t want to.

and as someone who has experienced trauma at the hands of people who were never supposed to hurt them, who were supposed to do the opposite and be there for them let me tell you: that shit forces you to mature. because you realize then that the people who look after you aren’t doing that, so you need to look after yourself. you become your own parent, but something is always off with how you raise yourself because it was never supposed to be that way in the 1st place. you adapt to whatever circumstances you need to, its hardly even living. kaz became ruthless because he knew you had to be to survive, nina knew that her beauty and powers were considered her strongest assets in the barrel so she made them seem like they were who she was, etc etc.

(also, and this is small but still important imo: you can see the main characters really act their age once they all interact with colm fahey. nina giggling that jesper is in trouble, jesper tattling on nina to matthias, the kaz/jesper fight being broken up by colm, etc.)

TL;DR if you think the SOC kids are too young to be acting how they do you need to: gain some critical complex reading skills and also read further in the book to understand why these characters are the way they are, and see them act their age.

the next time you think you’re lonely, just remember you have about 25 billion white blood cells in your body protecting your sorry little ass with their life. you have 25 billion friends who would die for you. no need for tears.

I hate when Inst*gram inf*graphics or social justice posts say stuff like “this is NOT political, it’s a human rights issue!!!” Bestie, it IS political!! Human rights issues are almost always political! They have to do with politics. They have to do with politicians. The actions they require are political in nature. Something having a clear moral right and wrong does not equal it not being a political issue!

Following up on the promised Jewish history for @misguidedandperplexed. This will be a brief history of the origins of the Israelites and Judaism from a secular, historical viewpoint. Sources will be linked, although some of them are behind paywalls.

Around the year 1200 BCE, there was a mass destruction of empires around the Levant and Mediterranean, known as "The [Late] Bronze Age Collapse." (a) The period after the Bronze Age Collapse until the 6th century BCE (500s), is called the Iron Age. It is in this time period that the Israelites emerge in the Levant.

Ann Killebrew, whose work I'm citing, defines the term "ethnogenesis" as "a coming together of peoples from diverse backgrounds into a single tribal group which shares a belief in a common descent and ideology" (b). What we want to establish is how and when Israelite ethnogenesis took place.

There are a few theories about this. One is that early Israelites were “seminomadic” people who spent summers in the Judean Hills and gradually developed a sense of community with the few Canaanites already living there, eventually permanently settling in the hills. This is perhaps the closest of the newer models to the biblical narrative, in that a people originally moving across a desert over a long period of time arrived in modern Israel/Palestine and built their own settlements, sometimes clashing with the people there as they expanded their territory. (b)

The most likely theory, in my opinion, is that early Israelite society was made of both Canaanite peasants and farmers and “displaced peasants and pastoralists”, including the peoples from the deserts surrounding modern Israel/Palestine. It also allows for small groups of slaves running from Egypt to have joined the people of the hills, which would provide an excellent basis for the Exodus story, despite it not happening exactly as written in the Bible. (b)

Whatever theory we use, we have to account for the missing Patriarchs. It seems unlikely that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's sons ever existed in real life, but their names refer to real tribes of the early Iron Age. The Israelite tribes of the early Iron Age don't match with the ones we know today, exactly. (c) Early texts, notably the Song of Deborah, include references to the tribes of Gilead and Machir, and exclude several of the usual tribes. This is evidence of a degree of “fluidity” in the early Iron Age I, as the tribes were still in the process of becoming distinct entities; the list of tribes seems to have solidified by the time the tribes came together in the 10th-9th centuries BCE. (d)

Okay we're out of the Joshua/Judges period! Next up: Monarchies.

You may have seen the claim that the first Israelite monarchy arose in 1047 BCE and lasted until it split into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, somewhere in the middle of the 900s BCE. The 1047 number is almost definitely untrue, but it's harder to say whether or not the United Monarchy (as the theorized first monarchy is known) really existed (e). It certainly did not exist in the grandeur that is depicted in the Tanakh. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to skip to the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel in the northern region of Israel/Palestine (called Cana'an at the time), which did occur sometime in the 800s BCE (f), and was followed by the Kingdom of Judah to the south shortly thereafter. In 722 BCE, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrian Empire, and the remainder of the Israelite population of the Northern Kingdom was absorbed into the Southern Kingdom. In 587-586 BCE, the Southern Kingdom was conquered by the Babylonians and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, which began the Babylonian Exile, in which the Israelites were carted off to Babylon. (g)

And now that we're in the Exile, it's finally time to talk about Judaism!

Up until the Babylonian Exile, the Israelites were henotheistic -- that is, they believed there were multiple gods, but worshipped only one. There is debate over which god they worshipped where and when, but to simplify, the god that emerged in Cana'an during this time was known as yud-hey-vav-hey (YHWH, in English letters). YHWH had merged with another god, Ba'al, from the Cana'anite pantheon, and had then merged again with the Cana'anite god El; we aren't sure where YHWH came from. Suffice to say, by the time of the Exile, the Israelites were a sacrificial cult that worshipped the god of the Israelites, YHWH, by sacrificing to YHWH at the Temple in Jerusalem. This is called Yahwism or simply Israelite Religion by modern scholars. (h)

And then, the Temple was destroyed, and the Israelites found themselves in diaspora, away from their sacred site. This is the period in which Judaism, as distinct from Israelite Religion, arose. The Exilic community saw the emergence of prayer and the start of mass observance of Shabbat, as well as the massive rise in importance of Yom Kippur, and the process of codifying the Torah began in earnest. (i)

In 539 BCE, many Jews returned to Judah under the rule of the Persians. From that point until 70 CE, the religion practiced is known as Second Temple Judaism (j). It was during this time that sects of Judaism emerged, like the Essenes (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame), and the Pharisees (the precursors to the post-70 CE rabbis). (k). After the destruction of the Second Temple, most of the Jews living in Eretz Yisrael were forced out into what is now called the Diaspora. It is in the Diaspora that Rabbinic Judaism (the kind almost-universally practiced today) emerged.

As a last note, I will say that there is a definitive through-line from Israelite Religion to Second Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism. Obviously there are political ramifications for all of this, which I won't get into now, and there's much more history after the Diaspora began that I would be happy to talk about elsewhere. But hopefully this is a satisfying explanation of the rise of Judaism from a secular standpoint. :)

Sources:

a. Mark, Joshua J. "Bronze Age Collapse." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified September 20, 2019.

b. Killebrew, Ann E., 'Early Israel’s Origins, Settlement, and Ethnogenesis', in Brad E. Kelle, and Brent A. Strawn (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible (2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 10 Nov. 2020).

c. “The Twelve Tribes of Israel.” (2013) Jewish Virtual Library.

d. Weingart, Kristin (2019) "'All These Are the Twelve Tribes of Israel:' The Origins of Israel’s Kinship Identity." Near Eastern Archaeology 82.1: 29–30.

e. Kalimi, Isaac (29 November 2018). Writing and Rewriting the Story of Solomon in Ancient Israel. Cambridge University Press. p. 32.

f. Master, Daniel M. “Phases in the History of the Kingdom of Israel.” Chapter. In The Social Archaeology of the Levant: From Prehistory to the Present, edited by Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline, and Yorke Rowan, 354–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

g. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Babylonian Captivity." Encyclopedia Britannica, January 31, 2025.

h. Brown, William. "Ancient Israelite & Judean Religion." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified July 13, 2017.

i. Silberman, L.H., Cohen, G.D., Vajda, G., Feldman, L.H., Greenberg, M., Novak, D., Gaster, T.H., Hertzberg, A., Dimitrovsky, H.Z., Baron, S.W., Pines, S. "Judaism." Encyclopedia Britannica.

j. Reed, Annette Yoshiko "Second Temple Judaism". In obo in Biblical Studies. Oxford Bibliographies.

k. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Essene." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 11, 2025.

My roommate has been translating Gideon the Ninth into Biblical Hebrew (and including notes that people like me, who do not speak Biblical Hebrew, can also enjoy)! And if you happen to be a scholar of semitic linguistics, I can put you in touch 😊

Hadestown may have stolen my heart and crushed it, but at least I also had fun

eurydice: h

orpheus:

😔

Remus: How do you cope with your trauma?

Sirius: The trick is to play the music louder than your thoughts

Remus: I asked seriously, Sirius

Sirius: Did I stutter?

Can we talk for a second about how Hamlet is only sympathetic if he’s like, 19? That’s not to say you can’t make a good Hamlet with a 32 year old actor, but the main character Will Not be sympathetic if you do that. Which is fine, you can make an interesting movie with that, just don’t expect people to like Hamlet in it.