Yall If Joel Goes To Exile We Get Jevin And Joel Interactions. Jevin’s Already Embracing The Insane

cleo :D

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.

I forgot to tell you guys that i finished my Stardew Valley designs 😋 im trying to use Tumblr more lets see how long it lasts

:D

WAAAAH I MADE AN ANIMATIC GO CHECK IT OUT

THXXXXX ❤️❤️❤️

Welcome to Double Life. A brand new 1.19 Minecraft series where the number of lives you have is indicated by your colour name. Green for three, two for yellow… ya-da-ya-ya-ya-da, you get it, you’ve heard the spiel before. The twist this series is that you are soulbound to another player. If one of you takes damage, both of you take damage. You share a health bar. And if one of you dies, you both die. But that’s not the only twist. The real twist is that the soulbound match-ups are far from random. No, each person has been sorted into pairs based on their compatibility to fit into two classifications: Caregiver and Little.

What if, instead of being inherently romantic, the soulbounds in Double Life were inherently familial, and were sorted into pairs of parent and child? How do the impromptu parents cope with the grave responsibility suddenly thrust upon them, and how do the children cope with their newfound lack of adulthood and autonomy in a death game?

A clickable link! ↓

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@tvvigjuice NO SHE IS NOT

enkay watches the imp and skizz podcast ep 125

"skizz has got a pet name for everybody" weird way to phrase that impulse

✨mirroring body languageeeee✨ the besties

"and then I met Joe (of the Hills variety)" spoken like a true close mate

"joe had to stage a coup to get me on hermitcraft"

live reaction to THAT statement:

another deed to add to the damn PILE of good deeds that Joe has done for the server: the man invited Mumbo

"etho pokes and prods scar into saying things" the mans is a great behavioralist

i love cleo's personality. They're just such a strong personality and i love them for it

"you don't match their energy, you come back tenfold, and I LIKE THAT" yeah of course you do skizz

best fwens :3

cleo loving hanging out with kids is so funny to me because they love observing some of the weirdest hermits (scar, joe, skizz)

of course skizz loves listening to accents

WAHHHHHHH I MISS STRESS

best fwens :3

cleo loving hanging out with kids is so funny to me because she loves observing some of the weirdest hermits (scar, joe, skizz)

of course skizz loves listening to accents

WAHHHHHHH I MISS STRESS

Cleo's GASP when skizz described tango's DnD table

this was skizz's face when cleo described DnD, GET THIS MAN A FUCKING CHARACTER SHEET

i love cleo's optimism about their career ten years down the line. I love them sm

"and then i started living next to ren and false" based and true. scar too. great creatures to observe

"get in there and mess me up" okay, freak

"i'll bully you!" "YES" i love these two

"can't wait to be bullied" i love them

imp and skizz learning the basics of D&D via a series of increasingly standoffish DMs would be so fucking funny. Start off with the beginner friendly tango/jev combo and then level up to the cleo/joe level where they're just fighting them from all angles

final frame weirdos /aff

HermitShift/EmpiresShift

Part 1

Jimmy (Grian's role)

(Demise + Regular skin)

Became a Watcher at the end of Evo after praying to them for help during the series.

Joined Hermitcraft in season 6 but mostly stayed on his own for the first part of the season because of an inferiority complex over the skill difference.

Needed diamonds and sold his services as a singing canary, even.had a whole cage.

Started Demise by accident, tired of everyone saying he died a lot he made it a personal challenge to not die at all, in the end everyone joined in and Demise was the result. Demise 2 was much more planned.

Started Third Life after some insistance from the Watchers... ended up winning the series, no one could believe it.

Rebelled against the mayor of the shopping district in season 7, created the grayscale resistance.

Created a literal rip in reality in season 9 that brought the hermits to another land...how? He doesn't have a good answer for that.

Grian (Bdubs' role)

(Crossover + Life series + Regular)

Joined for a short while Hermitcraft season 1 but had to go back to Japan to finish high school and after that some...complications arised.

Joined officially in season 6 where he became part of the NHO.

His eyes used to be smaller but a challenge resulted in him having much bigger eyes.

In the life series he ties his jumper around himself as It's much easier to move around, ends up getting grabbed a lot by it.

Also kinda became a god during the crossover with Empires, just your regular tuesday afternoon.

Bdubs (Scott's role)

(Life + Regular)

After a falling out with his brother he end up joining a lot of modded smp's.. From Crazycraft to Kindomcraft to eventually X-life and from there Empires.

Also ended up being MCC's mascot, begged for Hazel Horses to be added as a team.

Had to kill himself to stop his brother Pungence to save his anthropomorphic horse empire...and the rest of Empires too but it was mostly about the horses.

Won Last Life and came second in Double Life... And Third in Limited Life...and Fourth-

Sun theme.

Scott (Scar's role)

(Secret Life + Third Life + Regular)

All that Scar says by accident he says voluntarily, mostly to Jimmy.

His old server kinda fell apart after a zombie apocalypse, as soon as he escaped the zombie hordes he joined Hermitcraft in season 5 where he joined Convex.

Became the Jangler entirely to mess with Jimmy, they totally did not flirt the whole time.

Used his diplomacy skills to get elected mayor in season 7, made everything extremely colorful.

Sacrificed himself to Jimmy at the end of Third Life... He felt like he owed Jimmy for saving his life and he wanted to get even with him. Jimmy felt like he was cheated out of a chance to have a real win, Double Life ended up being akward.

Got sacrificed a lot to the Boatem Hole in season 8, what can he say? He has a thing for that.

Won Secret Life, everyone was waiting for it considering his general skill at the game, they were more surprised by how long it took.

Scar (Impulse's pov)

(Cyberpunk + Regular)

Have you ever wondered how Hermitcraft would be if Scar had learnt redstone instead of Terraforming? Chaos, the answer is chaos.

Has those shoes that light up with colours, It's certainly distracting.

Loves making minigames, especially shooting minigames.

Got backstabbed by Grian in Third Life, he wasn't very happy about it... At least they had Double Life to get better...by messing with everyone else there.

Really good at adapting to the chaos and go with the flow, the natural charisma definitely helps.

Five words: Cyberpunk motorized off-road wheelchair.

I am being terrorised by meat emojis