jewishvoiceforpeace: This is what genocide looks like. These are the 2913 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military this month, as of Thursday, October 26. As the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza intensify, we recognize with horror and grief that this death toll is already inaccurate.
We demand a ceasefire now to save lives. To stop a genocide. The Israeli military has already erased 47 entire Palestinian families from Gaza’s population registry; all members of the family, from all generations, are dead. This is loss beyond measure.
The U.S. is also responsible for this horror. 80% of the bombs that the Israeli military drops on Gaza, that are used to kill these children, are American-made. We are called to do everything we can to stop this genocide.
As we continue to demand a ceasefire and fight for a future where everyone is free and equal and safe, we refuse to forget these lives. We will always affirm that every life is precious.
Every single one of these deaths was preventable. When we say Never Again-for anyone, this is who we mean. Never Again is right now.
some people are taking “doomed” to mean “dead”. this is actually a misconception! you can be doomed even if you don’t die! it’s sometimes worse if you don’t die!
Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take up the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.
—a sailor’s diary entry, on losing a shipmate, ca. 1834 (from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr.)
as much as i love corruption arcs, there’s just something so sexy about a character that can’t be corrupted, to the point that he un-corrupts you instead
it’s always so fascinating and heartbreaking when a character in a story is simultaneously idolized and abused. a chosen prophet destined for martyrdom. a child prodigy forced to grow up too fast. a powerful warrior raised as nothing but a weapon. there’s just something so uniquely messed up about singing someone’s praises whilst destroying them.
It’s giving Romeo and Juliet and it is making me DERANGED
AS PROMISED here’s the mini essay that’s been brewing in my brain since I saw this post (it all came together with these last two episodes):
Most people (understandably, given how the play is taught in high school) are in two camps when it comes to Romeo and Juliet: 1.) it’s one of the greatest love stories of all time, or 2.) it’s a story about how two idiot teenagers kill themselves over hormones
Both of these readings are short-sighted.
People often forget that Romeo and Juliet doesn’t end with a double suicide, it ends when all of the surviving characters come back on stage and the prince is like “well, I guess we have to face the fact that our toxic community is fucking killing our kids.”
It doesn’t matter if Romeo and Juliet found true love, what matters is that their community is adamant that blind hatred is more important than their children’s happiness. And because of this, when Romeo and Juliet want to be together, there’s a deep panic in both of them. It causes them to rush–the whole play starts to rush, really, once Romeo kills Tybalt. From that moment on, it’s this mad dash to figure out how to be together, because clearly they just don’t have time. They can’t possibly have time when their families are saying “we’d rather see you dead than love who you want.” Their relationship would be drastically different if they felt like they had the safety to slow down and develop things normally.
Anyone else hear the word “whim” flitting about?
Ed and Stede live in a world that would rather see them dead than be the men they want to be, particularly the men they want to be with each other. And I’m not just talking about romantic-gay here, I mean pirating, existing on the fringes, being soft, “a lot of what we’re taught about being a man is wrong.” The British at their backs saying “renounce your life and come to war, don’t die for love, die for hate.”
So both Ed and Stede get the instinct to rush (albeit in different ways). We get where we are in the story because neither of these men feel like they have time to stop and think. I don’t believe either of them are inherently prone to whims. They were both taught in different ways that they always have to be running to stay ahead of the monsters society has set on them.
But the big difference that sets Ed and Stede apart from Romeo and Juliet is that they’re not kids. This may be their first real romance and makes them feel like teenagers (and in many ways both have a lot of growing up to do) but they’re not actual, literal teenagers. They’re grown men who have learned (even if flawed) ways to take care of themselves. It’s too late for their parents to learn their mistakes and try to start fixing what they broke. Now Ed and Stede, and the community they’re building, need to fix it themselves.
Ed briefly slipped back into feeding the hatred the world wants him to feel, and it was destructive for his whole community. But he came back, and so did Stede. They didn’t die. Not just because of true love, but because they’re the adults in the story that need to find a way to rebuild what the world keeps trying to force them to break.
Ok, I was joking with this post the other day, but it turns out I actually do want to talk about whether fucking would have fixed them.
I’ve seen the take a few times that what makes Silverflint work so well is that it lives in the subtext*, all tension and denial and repression, and if they fucked it would ruin the dynamic because it would be resolved.
And not to make this about me (I’m gonna) but as someone solidly at the intersection of old, slutty and queer, every time I hear this I think about my personal experiences adding fucking to intense, ambiguous relationships in stressful situations where communication about feelings was already not great.
Zero times did it fix anybody.
See: Vane and Eleanor. Also Max and Anne. Incompatibilities in goals, values and worldviews are not resolved by fucking. The work of relationships is different than the work of sex, and in some ways much much harder.
*disclaimer that shouldn’t be necessary: subtextual queer relationships in media are great and valid, that is very much not what I am taking issue with.
ALT
