Would Love To Read A Fic From An Outside Perspective In 3rd Life Being Concerned For Grian And Thinking

aaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaaa

Itchy veins.

choose your (secret) fighter

@tvvigjuice you mentioned wanting this list.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Lets talk about the not so pleasant parts of Autism

This post is not to say that aren't good things about being autistic or that every autistic will have my experience. Let's just not forget that this is a disability that needs to be taken seriously no matter the person. Any autistic person is welcome to add on the the list.

I'll start with my struggles:

Violent meltdowns

Public meltdowns

VERY poor hygiene the the point of needing teeth removed and hair loss

Constant loneliness and felling depressed from it

Co-occuring conditions like personality disorders, ptsd, depression, psychosis, etc

Mourning the childhood and friends you never had

Blatant bullying

Feeling like you will never make your family proud

Rejected by family, society, medical system, literally everyone

Being taken advantage of (including SA)

Constantly putting yourself in danger

EDs and malnourishment from dietary habits

Knowing that others are purposely leaving you out

Being called homeless and other names for stimming and wearing comfy attire

Sensory issues make you feel like your skin wants to remove itself

Sensory issues making you miss important or fun events

Knowing that you may never be independent

Being belittled

Self injurious stims and low self esteem from it

Embarrassment 101

No privacy

Constant painful state of confusion

Being mocked for how you communicate

Fear of being judged for alternative forms of communication

Needing assistance to just maintain a healthy shower schedule

Having to follow very specific routines to the point of possibly putting yourself in danger if you don't follow them

...and these are just some things. This is the not so pleasant part of what I go through on a daily basis as an autistic. This list can go on forever because autism comes in many "shapes and sizes". Any autistics of any level, if you want, please add on to this list to show that autistic isn't a quirk and can have some seriously hard to live with sides.

We Need to Talk About The Giver

In the past couple of years, I’ve seen a resurgence of discussion about The Hunger Games online, but I rarely, if ever, see anything about Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, you’ve very likely read it. For a little while it was a popular school assignment, until “concerns” about a scene describing a very chaste dream indicating the protagonist was developing sexual feelings for a girl in his class made it equally popular to ban from school reading lists. The stage play adaptation was good. The movie, despite its star-studded cast, was awful. (That might be why nobody talks about it.)

Lois Lowry published The Giver in 1993, when the popular thought was that avoiding ever talking about race, disability, gender, or sexuality was the way to mark progress. Discussions of these things were (and are) uncomfortable, and isn’t discomfort the same thing as pain? Isn’t making someone uncomfortable the same as hurting them? Isn’t hurting someone the same as doing something wrong?

In this way, “leveling the playing field” for marginalized people began to look like pretending everyone was the same. “Colorblind” ideologies, as well as euphemistic terms like “differently-abled”, grew in popularity as people found ways to avoid acknowledging the ways in which other people’s lives were different from, and sometimes more difficult than, their own. At best, it was an effort at politeness. At worst, it was intentional suppression. Often, it ended up being condescending and muddled either way. Afaik Lowry didn't really talk about the philosophy of the book in interviews, wanting it to stand on its own, but the book totally skewers that whole ideology in a way that's still relevant today.

The book's society, the Community, emphasizes "precision of language", which ends up meaning the total opposite. The society constantly uses euphemisms ("Release" for euthanasia and death, for example) and through "precision" has eradicated big concepts like love that are simple, but become complicated when intellectualized.

The Community insists on ritualized constant apologies with ritualized mandatory acceptance. These are, of course, meaningless apologies that result in equation of big/intentional harm with small mistakes. Consequences for infractions are frequently too great, from constant, ritualistic public apologies for lateness and other small mistakes to Release – death – for a pilot who flies too low.

The Community has no fictional stories, only dictionaries and books of facts directly related to everyday life in the Community. There are no arts or history classes in schools, and there is no Storyteller (possibly not in living memory). In fact, there's little or no education not directly relating to a person’s vocation after age 12. All these things make it easier for the Community to deny the reality of Release and make it very, very difficult to feel true empathy, if not impossible.

The Community has literal colorblindness – nobody except the Giver and the Receiver can see color in anything or anyone. All skin tones and hair colors look the same to most people, and most people look the same thanks to genetic engineering. The only physical variation Lowry ever describes is the “pale eyes” of the characters with “the Capacity to See Beyond”: the Giver, Jonas, Gabriel, and a child named Katharine who the Giver mentions as a potential replacement Receiver for after Jonas runs away.

Sexual feelings are intentionally medically suppressed. It is illegal to be naked in front of another person (unless the naked person is an infant or an elderly person who needs assistance with bathing) because nudity is believed to be inherently sexual. Marriage is exclusively man/woman, and purely for raising children, not sexual or romantic at all. Adults apply for spouses who are chosen for them, apply for children supplied by Birthmothers, raise 1 or 2 children to adulthood, then split up and live among the Childless Adults until they are too old to take care of themselves. While the gender binary doesn’t determine vocation (unless you’re a Birthmother), it’s still strictly enforced in the ways that coming-of-age ceremonies happen and the ways that family units are built. One man, one woman, one boy, one girl.

Birthmothers have “no honor” in their vocational assignment, even though they create other humans that allow the Community to continue to function. They are highly valued during their three childbearing years (it’s implied that these years come very early, possibly while the Birthmothers are still teenagers), but they are put into difficult manual labor jobs after a maximum of three births. Other members of the Community look down on both Birthmothers and Laborers as “unskilled”, unintelligent workers, even though their labor is essential.

And then we come to the eugenics. Birthmothers are chosen for their strong bodies. All human embryos are genetically engineered to eliminate all possible differences in skin tone, hair color, and ability. Old people are killed shortly after they are no longer able to work. Babies are killed for not meeting development milestones at the established times, or in cases of identical twins, because they have the lower birth weight. The Giver is not an anti-abortion novel, as it's frequently interpreted, but an excellent case for the idea that when we eliminate disability in chasing a “perfectly healthy” species, we eliminate disabled people.

The world of The Giver looks like adulthood looked in the bleakest stress dreams of my childhood. A vocational track is chosen for you, you’re not allowed to deviate from it, and you’re expected not to have outside interests or time for fun. Marriage is only for the purposes of having children. Sexual feelings are a natural phenomenon of adulthood, but one to be treated with medicine, like period cramps. However, marriage is still considered the only way to have an “exciting” life – a woman in the House of the Old complains that a Ceremony of Release (read: pre-funeral) she went to was boring because the dying person “never even had a family unit”. It makes sense. In a world where there is no fictional content to consume, no creative education, and no travel, life without marriage and kids is just… work. After a short childhood, mostly for the purposes of analyzing what kind of job you’ll be best at, you work until you become old and die.

The Community is not a capitalist society – nobody owns wealth, and Sameness has eliminated class as well as race. However, The Giver’s greatest horrors are pretty damn capitalist. Early on, Jonas’s mother warns him that his life will change dramatically after the Ceremony of Twelve: his friends and his play time will become less important to him as his vocational training ramps up. Adults are expected to work and make families (so that they can raise other adults who will be expected to work). Everybody is measured in terms of whether and how they’ll be useful workers. This is not to create wealth for an oligarchic few, but to create riskless, joyless stability for themselves and everyone else in the Community. The Community, and other Communities, were established after some great event in the past – while we don’t get into specifics, it’s implied that hunger and poverty were part of it. Sameness and the shallow, emotionless placidity that come with it are a reaction to a scarcity of resources from a long-ago catastrophe. It’s heavily implied in The Giver, and outright stated in later books, that other Communities have moved on from that reactionary thinking.

The Giver asserts that depth of feeling and empathy come from three places: ability to feel pain, experiencing real choice and the proportional consequences of those choices, and from stories (memories) of others’ experiences. The Community eliminates pain, choice, and story, totally eliminating depth of feeling from life in the name of exaggerated safety and comfort.

That said, The Giver doesn't shy away from the reality that living with traumatic memories is hard. The narrative insists that Rosemary, who applied for medical assisted suicide during her Receiver training, was not a coward. The Giver and the Community didn’t adequately prepare her for what she would experience as the Receiver of Memory. Jonas and the Giver only find their memories bearable through being able to relate to one another – once they know they’ve each experienced a memory of something similar, they’re able to discuss it on the same level with one another.

This is a story about purity culture. This is a story about eugenics. This is a story about what happens when we take avoidance of pain too far - and like all science fiction, it's a story of where our real society was then and where it is now.

Hello! Here’s what I did!

And Tvvigjuice tagged the only other person I know, so this is open invite! If you see this, I invite you to respond.

I feel like making one of those uquiz and picrew chains with these random ones I found sooo

Take this quiz and find out what instrument you are and thennnn

Picrew

cool lil dudes!

Make a cool lil dude! :D Check out my other picrew, silly lil guys!

make a lil guy with this picrew :))))

(As a viola player I’m VERY offended. So offended, offended beyond belief. But hey kitty :)) )

@ilivebyshipping @glassesgirlies @lusxnei6

let's recap what we've learned about the United States in the last few days.

things that are terrorism:

allegedly shooting a healthcare CEO whose company generated more pure profit (not revenue, profit) in a year than the GDP of 94 countries, exclusively by denying coverage to people who pay for it

a 42-year-old mother of 2 using the wrong combination of 7 words during a heated conversation with a call center employee at a health insurance company who was in the process of denying her health coverage.

things that are not terrorism:

mass shooting in a Black church to incite a race war

going to a BLM protest specifically to kill protestors

a neo-nazi running over a crowd of people, killing a woman

targeting and killing 23 latinos in an el paso, texas walmart

killing 12 people in a theatre, shooting 58 others, rigging your apartment with explosives

a QAnon groyper killing 7 and shooting ~50 at a 4th of July parade

killing 3 people and shooting several others at a Planned Parenthood in defense of the unborn

stalking someone relentlessly and then killing them and their child despite months of the victim making police reports

any one of the 1,200 murders committed by US police yearly, the vast majority being minorities

tightening your border while ~100 immigrants (including children) drown every year in the Rio Grande

United Healthcare killing an unnknowable number of elderly people by using faulty AI to deny medically necessary coverage

Aetna killing a woman by refusing to cover her cancer care

Blue Cross killing a 6-year-old by denying her appendicitis surgery

Cigna killing a 17-year-old child by denying her liver transplant

the pharmaceutical industry killing half a million people with opioids in the name of producing revenues in 2023 that rivaled the GDPs of countries like Spain, Mexico, and Australia.

the United States killing 45,000 people a year because they can't access health coverage

make sure you keep this guide handy the next time you find yourself interacting with your insurance company or any other millionaire, billionaire, or an individual who is part of a protected class such as a CEO or president of a corporation.

is this anything

Literally how Lizzie and Joel meet in my au

Lizzie is walking to school. She almost trips over a kid on a scooter, nearly walks into Cleo on rollerskates, and barely dodges Mumbo's bike just to have Scar catch her ankle with his wheelchair. Joel is watching all of this happen while on his skateboard, drifts off sideways watching her and ends up nearly crashing into her.

Later that evening, they meet each other in the emergency room.

Joel: (jokingly) What'd you get hit by this time, a car?

Lizzie: (fully serious, deadpan) No, I got hit by a truck.

(there is a reason why Joel is there, it's not important rn)