Do you have a name?” asked Gerta.
“I do,” said the raven.
Gerta waited.
The raven fluffed its beard. “I am the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.”
Gerta blinked a few times. “That’s…quite a name.”
“I made it myself,” said the raven, preening. “I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having. ‘Sound’ and ‘God’ were particularly well-guarded. ‘Crunching’ I found in a squirrel nest, though.

The Raven & The Reindeer, T. Kingfisher

My new book is out today! It’s called “The Raven and the Reindeer” and it’s a retelling of the Snow Queen. It’s available on Amazon, Smashwords, and check this page for links to other formats like Kobo, Nook, and iBooks, as they become available.

(via tkingfisher)

ultralaser:

tessionare:

ultralaser:

forever done with clever writers saying ‘hey, let’s have the black guy be racist’

mack on agents of shield, pike on the 100, it’s allegorical racism in a world where normal racism doesn’t really apply somehow, so the only visible racism is performed by black men

and the white guys look super enlightened by comparison bc they’re not allegorical racists

anyways why do ppl like this show bc one of the showrunners? last week tweeted that the canon bi girl is going to end up, not with her tragic dead lesbian gf, but the angry white boy who has murdered hundreds of people IN THE LAST FIVE EPISODES

I don’t think Mack was portrayed as racist, or even short sighted or irrational. He was scared and wanted Daisy contained. He didn’t advocate killing her. Further, he is now one of the inhumans greatest supporters.

By your measure, you could call Joyce Summers racist for not immediately accepting Buffy as the slayer, Elena for not accepting Damon and Stefan…Showing characters reacting badly to things they don’t understand is realistic and a sign of a well rounded character.

Now, Pike has taken a very Trump like stance on the grounders and is playing on people’s fears. I can see the frustration here.

mack had a preexisting prejudice against aliens – which he claimed as a rational response to aliens like loki, but when it turned from ‘the worst behaved aliens’ to ‘all aliens by proxy’ that stops being true – and daisy got caught up in it, but he eventually overcame it.

but if you swap hunter for mack and asians for aliens, it’s clearly just racism. mack //was racist against aliens// but then he met a nice one and got over his prejudice. it’s not even subtle.

for comparison, joyce was being allegorically homophobic, like bobby’s mom in x2, all ‘have you tried …not being a mutant?’ the difference between joyce and mack is that mack hated what daisy was, where joyce hated what buffy did.

pike hates grounders, mack hates aliens. mack doesn’t have to want to kill aliens to be racist against them. though jemma did want to! aaaaaall of macks arc could have been on jemma, except they needed to give those traits to someone who can embody them without making the white audience feel bad, so her xenophobia arc was like two episodes where macks was a season and a half.

(Note that Bob Morley, the actor who plays Bellamy, is half Filipino, so as to not derail this convo.)

But yes! This is so annoying. I was putting it down as xenophobia, but allegorical racism, that’s it. It’s like that one weird ass book a while back that tried to portray some white girl as the victim in a “flipped” society, where apparently to make a commentary on race, the persecuted people had to be white and the bad guys Black. I assume they’re trying to make racists see what it’s like by taking away typical dynamics, but they just end up with extremely unsympathetic Black characters, so…? How would that be convincing racists? That’s how they see the world anyway. And it’s usually with white characters there to call them out, too, so it’s just bad all around.

ultralaser:

tessionare:

ultralaser:

forever done with clever writers saying ‘hey, let’s have the black guy be racist’

mack on agents of shield, pike on the 100, it’s allegorical racism in a world where normal racism doesn’t really apply somehow, so the only visible racism is performed by black men

and the white guys look super enlightened by comparison bc they’re not allegorical racists

anyways why do ppl like this show bc one of the showrunners? last week tweeted that the canon bi girl is going to end up, not with her tragic dead lesbian gf, but the angry white boy who has murdered hundreds of people IN THE LAST FIVE EPISODES

I don’t think Mack was portrayed as racist, or even short sighted or irrational. He was scared and wanted Daisy contained. He didn’t advocate killing her. Further, he is now one of the inhumans greatest supporters.

By your measure, you could call Joyce Summers racist for not immediately accepting Buffy as the slayer, Elena for not accepting Damon and Stefan…Showing characters reacting badly to things they don’t understand is realistic and a sign of a well rounded character.

Now, Pike has taken a very Trump like stance on the grounders and is playing on people’s fears. I can see the frustration here.

mack had a preexisting prejudice against aliens – which he claimed as a rational response to aliens like loki, but when it turned from ‘the worst behaved aliens’ to ‘all aliens by proxy’ that stops being true – and daisy got caught up in it, but he eventually overcame it.

but if you swap hunter for mack and asians for aliens, it’s clearly just racism. mack //was racist against aliens// but then he met a nice one and got over his prejudice. it’s not even subtle.

for comparison, joyce was being allegorically homophobic, like bobby’s mom in x2, all ‘have you tried …not being a mutant?’ the difference between joyce and mack is that mack hated what daisy was, where joyce hated what buffy did.

pike hates grounders, mack hates aliens. mack doesn’t have to want to kill aliens to be racist against them. though jemma did want to! aaaaaall of macks arc could have been on jemma, except they needed to give those traits to someone who can embody them without making the white audience feel bad, so her xenophobia arc was like two episodes where macks was a season and a half.

(Note that Bob Morley, the actor who plays Bellamy, is half Filipino, so as to not derail this convo.)

But yes! This is so annoying. I was putting it down as xenophobia, but allegorical racism, that’s it. It’s like that one weird ass book a while back that tried to portray some white girl as the victim in a “flipped” society, where apparently to make a commentary on race, the persecuted people had to be white and the bad guys Black. I assume they’re trying to make racists see what it’s like by taking away typical dynamics, but they just end up with extremely unsympathetic Black characters, so…? How would that be convincing racists? That’s how they see the world anyway. And it’s usually with white characters there to call them out, too, so it’s just bad all around.

hagar-972:

kokoona:

The Cross Lake First Nation reservation in Manitoba has declared a state of emergency after 6 suicides in the last two months, and 140 attempts in the last two weeks. With a population of 8,000 this means that nearly 2% of their entire population has attempted suicide in the last two weeks alone. They are begging for mental health staff and an actual hospital, at this point. We must end the ignorance regarding the plight of native people. 

*checks because I always do with news-things* This update current as of 09 March, 2016.

hagar-972:

kokoona:

The Cross Lake First Nation reservation in Manitoba has declared a state of emergency after 6 suicides in the last two months, and 140 attempts in the last two weeks. With a population of 8,000 this means that nearly 2% of their entire population has attempted suicide in the last two weeks alone. They are begging for mental health staff and an actual hospital, at this point. We must end the ignorance regarding the plight of native people. 

*checks because I always do with news-things* This update current as of 09 March, 2016.

pizzaback:

jhenne-bean:

africanaquarian:

africanaquarian:

So all of Detroit public schools are going to close after April 8th if there’s no funding and there’s definitely no money so I guess the school to prison pipeline is now completely removing schools from the equation here.

I just wanted to clarify that by close, what’s actually happening is after April 8th, the district will literally not have the money to pay any of the teachers. At all. None. Unless lawmakers grant them 50 mil in aid, but so far they can’t agree on a plan. And there are already teachers on the news saying they will not be going to work if they’re not being paid. Given the current conditions DPS teachers deal with every day (lack of funding, overcrowded classrooms, limited resources) no one can really blame them or say anything. No one knows exactly what will happen since the district is already about 515 mil in debt but it’s not looking good.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/03/detroit_public_schools_could_r.html

this is the most fucked up thing

pizzaback:

jhenne-bean:

africanaquarian:

africanaquarian:

So all of Detroit public schools are going to close after April 8th if there’s no funding and there’s definitely no money so I guess the school to prison pipeline is now completely removing schools from the equation here.

I just wanted to clarify that by close, what’s actually happening is after April 8th, the district will literally not have the money to pay any of the teachers. At all. None. Unless lawmakers grant them 50 mil in aid, but so far they can’t agree on a plan. And there are already teachers on the news saying they will not be going to work if they’re not being paid. Given the current conditions DPS teachers deal with every day (lack of funding, overcrowded classrooms, limited resources) no one can really blame them or say anything. No one knows exactly what will happen since the district is already about 515 mil in debt but it’s not looking good.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/03/detroit_public_schools_could_r.html

this is the most fucked up thing

youcareabouthim:

Can people stop saying that Clarke will make Bellamy “good” again and that she’ll bring him to the “right” side and that’s why they hugged?? It’s really gross?? Because believe it or not, but Clarke isn’t always right and despite how this narrative tries to spin her as this all knowing white savior (“what would Clarke do?”) in season two, her way isn’t always the right or best way in the end, aka her trusting in the grounders alliance in s2 to rescue the kids and Bellamy even said all they needed was an insider man and guess what?? in the end he was right??

Going into season three this is literally the dilemma again because both of them have different ideas of how to best protect their people, except this time their methods don’t align and they find themselves on opposite sides with different methods. Despite how I disagree with Bellamy’s methods and in fact I’m cringing at the thought of how much more shit Jason’s gonna make Bellamy go through before he finally makes an active stand against Pike, it’s super gross to me that the BC fandom likes to romanticize the idea of Clarke “saving” Bellamy in any way, shape, or form by showing him how wrong he is (and by default showing how right she is, and having him acknowledge it!!) and that she somehow represents this all knowing truth and Bellamy needs to follow her “light”. Like Clarke isn’t perfect and she fucked up a lot too because she thought she was doing the right thing, just like how Bellamy thinks he’s doing the right thing now, and that was literally the whole point of the last BC scene where Bellamy was angry at her because yes, some of it was personal resentment for her deserting them and him, but some of it was also him questioning her leading style and prior actions and guess what folks, Clarke needs to have her actions questioned and held accountable, just like how Bellamy is gonna be held accountable for his fuck ups in this season.

Why are people pretending like Bellamy is in the total wrong here, as if Clarke’s plan to hold the coalition together isn’t gonna blow up on her face (it will, trust me) and it’s gonna be like MW betrayal 2.0 because she once again thought the answer to everything is making an alliance with grounders, but in the end, it’s only a short term solution?? The coalition isn’t gonna hold and what then? The only difference is that this time Bellamy isn’t gonna sit around twiddling his thumb waiting for shit to hit the fan and have the alliance fall apart AGAIN and he’s taking the offense instead of playing defense again, and yeah his methods are fucking questionable, but don’t pretend that Clarke’s methods are beyond criticism either and shame Bellamy for being wrong while Clarke herself is gonna be proven wrong very quickly once the Ice Nation gets the civil war they want so badly.

Despite liking Clexa, I’ve never minded reading things from the Bellarke side because they call out the racism, and lord knows there’s a lot of racism on The 100. But reading this kind of sickened me. Yes, it’s gross for your ship if people have Clarke “fixing” Bellamy or if Bellamy needs Clarke’s guidance to not do gross things, which is on the show too, but the major problem is the writers, most of whom seem to have very little idea with how to write for disenfranchised groups, writing a colonialist narrative spearheaded by PoC characters and then eventually glossing over it and always valuing Clarke above everyone else. Equating what you think are Clarke’s poor strategic choices with Bellamy’s poor moral choices is pretty awful? The Arkers are playing out the colonialist narrative very clearly and it really does sicken me to think that somebody murdering what we’ve clearly seen is an innocent group of native people because of xenophobic fear of what they might do is seen as positive action, going on the offense and not twiddling his thumbs. You value Bob Morley’s Asian background, how can you ignore how this very thing historically ravaged huge parts of Asia?