some different looks for our dear archivist
Natasia Demetriou as Nadja in What We Do In The Shadows FX
One story element I’d like to see more of is the targeted bride-price
- Something like: the newly-widowed queen knows she and her daughter won’t be allowed to rule their country themselves, so she has to agree that her daughter be married. But she wants to ensure that her daughter gets a husband who will treat her well and that her land gets a ruler who will treat it well, so she rigs the game.
- Mercedes Lackey did a most excellent job of this in her 500 Kingdoms book The Sleeping Beauty, where the final challenge of the tournament to win the princess’ hand is to find a way to permanently protect their small but rich country from their many greedy neighbors (the winning concept is brilliant, btw, I grin every time)
- I’m thinking also of that neat comic with the witch who says she’ll marry whoever gets the key from around her cat’s neck–but she is also the cat, and the only way to get the key is to befriend her. that’s a really great example and also one of the few I can think of where the person is setting their own bride-price, double credit.
- any of those ‘the youngest/weakest wins by being clever’ or ‘the kind one wins by getting help from allies they helped along the way’ stories have potential to qualify, but I want specifically the ones where the person setting the bride-price did it that way on purpose to ensure a clever or kind winner
- same for any of those stories where the thing which must be retrieved is incredibly fragile and only a careful, gentle person could retrieve it
- or it’s worth a fortune and only an honest, selfless person could pass it up for the quest, y’all get the idea
- or, genre-swap: the mob boss has a handsome, powerful son, and all the other mob leaders keep trying to arrange for their beautiful eligible daughters to cross his path, and the mob boss says instead that the one who brings the most to the table will be allowed to marry their son
- this phrasing I like because it’s got two possible subversions!
- 1) all the mob-parents keep trying to show off their resources and the boss gets to say ‘no, none of these count unless you’re trying to marry my son. what do your kids have to offer him’ and then whoever’s the most badass all on their own gets to win
- or 2) mob-son is actually in love with a nice straight-arrow baker from down the road, who comes and brings a brace of pies literally to the table, and wins on a proper fairytale technicality
- I just super dig the idea of taking the big heavy traditional concept of a bride-price (and the ensuant actual selling of a bride) and turning it instead into the mechanism by which a clever and caring person makes sure that they/their kid/their country will be safe and happy in the future
I’ve seen more than one adaptation of The 12 Dancing Princesses where the mysterious old woman who gives the soldier the invisibility cloak an warning not to drink the wine the princesses offer was actually the oldest princess in disguise because she was tired of dancing and wanted to choose her own hero to beak the curse
The Fair Wants You To Die🎪🎟🤢
Ok I lost it at fried water 😫🤣
“Fry an acoustic guitar & put chocolate sauce on it”
oh my god im reeling
you might come up with several answers here.
- shit, i don’t know. we need prisons as prisons are to A) withhold certain people from harming their communities, B) punish certain people, C) kill certain people.
- uh, i guess i can kind of answer this. the criminal justice system still exists. why don’t we just leave those people in charge? they’re not cops! and we should definitely let people who have committed non-violent offenses go. drug charges are stupid.
- ok, i feel a little more confident answering this. we need to change the prison model for the better and follow the example of countries with restorative justice practices. incarcerated people need better access to healthcare and education, as well as access to opportunifies post-prison so that they are less likely to face reincarceration.
- wait. if we’re abolishing the police for upholding white supremacy and terrorizing marginalized communities, we need to abolish a lot of shit. restorative justice sounds cool, i agree with that guy above. but shouldn’t these efforts be run by the communities affected? wasn’t the problem a white supremacist state? wasn’t the goal community terrorism? wasn’t the power taken out of our hands, especially the hands of people being systematically criminalized? i think i have things to read about.
anyway, whatever your conclusion: here are some things to read about.
- darkness matters: on the surveillance of blackness by simone brown
- are prisons obsolete? by angela davis
- the law is a white dog by colin dayan
- gendering the carceral state: african american women, history, and the criminal justice system by kali n gross and cheryl d hicks
- “indigenous space and decolonizing prison abolition” from the final straw radio podcast (this is an episode of a podcast featuring ni frontiers ni prison, an indigenous prison abolitionist group)
- migra! a history of the us border control by kelly lyle hernandez
- disability incarcerated by liat ben-moshe and allison c carey
- queer (in)justice by joey l mogul, andrea j ritchie, and kay whitlock
- crazy in america: the hidden tragedy of our criminalized mentally ill by mary beth pfeiffer
- inventing the savage: the social construction of native american criminality by luana ross
- criminal justice facts posted by the sentencing project
- is prison necessary? an article featuring ruth wilson gilmore & explaining prison abolition to children who were very good at asking “but what about [x]?” questions
- and here’s an FAQ about prison abolition by people against prisons aotearoa
- and then another collection of links by the marshall project.
if you have trouble getting ahold of any reading materials i can usually find you a pdf if you DM me. if you need epub i can’t guarantee i can get one for you, but i can try.
this is getting a lot of questions that could be solved with a google search into any of these topics, so i just want to respond with my own that isn’t: if you advocate for abolishing the police force but don’t support prison abolition for [x] reason—what happens to prisons in a post-police society?
basically if youre in the place to educate yourself on these topics and you arent
- a prison abolitionist,
- a harm reductionist,
- for decriminilization,
- and giving the land back
i really do not think your assertions of “ACAB” or “be gay do crimes” or “revolution” hold much weight
beiny
A Geneticist’s Invocation to the Ancestors
I honour my Ancestors, whose struggles and successes are written in my genome. I honour Mitochondrial Eve, Y Chromosome Adam, and the haplotypes that walked out of the cradle of humanity to every corner of the world.
To each and every Ancestor – who struggled and fought and lived and died – but never too soon to pass on their phenotype – through the mists of time, I salute you!
To LUCA, the cenancestor, the root of the Tree of Life, three billion years old – through the mists of time, I salute you!
To the first of the cells, born from the cradle of the RNA World – I salute you!
I find it incredibly moving, and humbling, to remember that I am, and we all are, merely the latest link in a chain of unbroken inheritance that reaches back to the very beginning of life. All the challenges that have been faced by three billion years of ancestry, written in our genomes.
Some definitions below the cut for those who need a quick primer on some of the stuff I mention in that invocation.