thesallowbeldam asked: If you're still doing prompts? Cry-lo Ren travels to Korriban (for whatever reason) and takes shelter in a Sith tomb. The spirits of the dead take this fantastic opportunity to rip this pathetic immitator a new. I'm talking Com. Plete. Savage. Bollocking. (that means a lecture btw)
My buddy, my pal, it’s safe to assume that I’m ALWAYS taking
prompts. (I might get to the point where
I’m busy enough that it might take me a while to fill them, but I’m always
taking prompts.) Now, I’ll admit that I’m
not super well versed in Sith history, and the Sith Lord I’m most familiar with
is…well, Vader, who failed to die a Sith Lord and didn’t get entombed on
Korriban. I’ve always kind of liked the
mental image of Darth Sidious being disappointed in Kylo, though, so yeah. Also, I don’t know what happened to Palpatine’s
ghost and it appears that neither does anyone else, so we’re going to handwave
some stuff because Force.
Personal
shuttle crashes are, generally speaking, remarkably easy to survive. Battlestars or cruisers are bulky and built
to survive damage in the black, but a planet-side crash turns them into an
avalanche of wreckage. Fighters, small
and quick and light, shatter like glass more often than not, and even when they
don’t, their mostly-engine structure doesn’t play well with the heat of a
crash. A personal shuttle, though, is
small and sturdy and designed to survive an emergency landing, even if the
emergency in question is ‘falling out of the sky.’
“Engines
do not just kriffing fail,” Kylo Ren
hissed as he pulled himself out of his shuttle and trying to adjust to the
heavier gravity. He snarled a string of
curses in a handful of languages, giving a sharp kick to the hull and
repressing a grimace of pain. Snoke
would be furious if he missed his ordered arrival time, no matter how good his
explanation was, and Kylo felt a shudder down his spine. He refused to admit that it might be fear. “There isn’t even anything wrong with this piece of bantha shit,”
he shouted, thumping it with a fist. He
raked a gloved hand through his hair—the helmet was still inside the shuttle
somewhere—and stared around him at the valley he’d wrecked in.
-our sacred texts include more than just the 5 books of the “old testament”
-we don’t call it the old testament and please don’t call it that unless you’re referring to the christian use of it, when talking about the jewish torah use the term “hebrew scriptures”
-torah = the 5 first books (genesis exodus leviticus deuteronomy numbers) + the prophets and the writings (song of songs, psalms, etc)
-there is also Talmud (mishnah and gemara) which is where conversations by rabbis about how Jewish law should work were recorded (mishna) and further commented / debated on (gemara), and the law codes that later simplified and revised the talmud for better practical use (the shulchan aruch and mishne torah), sages’ commentaries on these law texts, and centuries of responsa to them. these texts are where you will find a lot of the rituals, observances, and rules that Jews follow (so for example the kosher laws, when we say what blessings, how we celebrate holidays, etc). so no, we do not participate in “old” testament ritual sacrifice and looking directly in there for how Jews live is a rather fruitless attempt.
-sometimes the word “torah” can refer to talmud as well, it can refer to any study of holy texts.
-responses and interpretations of Jewish law and scriptures goes on to this day
-Midrash is another type of important jewish texts which are basically poetic or interperative writings about the things in the torah/talmud/etc, comparable to parables, written by various jewish scholars to think through Jewish thought, history, religion, etc. not seen as binding legal texts but rather ways of thinking through torah/judaism. there are ancient published midrashim as well as modern ones.
-Basically understand that Jewish textual tradition goes far beyond what you know of the Hebrew scriptures and “Jewish practice is just Christianity without the New Testament” is terribly inaccurate.
-The idea that “Jews just do ancient barbaric Old Testament rituals” is ages old antisemitic slander.
non Jewish people are ok to reblog this because it is so often misunderstood
The same Hebrew word that is used in Genesis 2:24 to describe how Adam felt about Eve (and how spouses are supposed to feel toward each other) is used in Ruth 1:14 to describe how Ruth felt about Naomi. Her feelings are celebrated, not condemned.
And throughout Christian history, Ruth’s vow to Naomi has been used to illustrate the nature of the marriage covenant. These words are often read at Christian wedding ceremonies and used in sermons to illustrate the ideal love that spouses should have for one another. The fact that these words were originally spoken by one woman to another tells us a lot about how God feels about same-gender relationships.
Just a few of the stories my great aunt told me about women in the 60s:
1) A woman she worked with at the hospital who had a baby with one of the ambulance drivers. When work found out they fired her (he kept his job). She tried to self-abort with a knitting needle.
2) The sister of one of her neighbours who wasn’t able to rent a room because she was a ‘fallen woman’.
3) A girl who got sent to a convent house and scrubbed floors until the day she gave birth. Her baby was given up for adoption without her consent.
4) Girls who had babies with priests.
5) Women who were on their fifth, sixth, seventh child, who had been pregnant for the best part of a decade, begging for sterilisation because their husbands wouldn’t wear a condom.
Banning abortion has never ever stopped it from happening. It’s just meant more stigma, more prejudice, more risks and more deaths.
In 1962, my mother was going thru a divorce, got pregnant and knew this fact would be used to deny her divorce (they used to do that, in case you didn’t know).
My mother was given a “shot”; she lived 3 blocks from the doctor. He never told her what it was, likely an “overdose” of progesterone, which is how they used to “induce menstruation” in a hurry (i.e. abortion off the books). She was about 7-8 weeks by her estimation. He said, GO STRAIGHT HOME, go to bed and stay there. She walked fast, but nearly collapsed at the curb and my grandmother went out to guide her into the house. She went to bed, stayed there and bled steadily and heavily for 3-4 days. She said it was like being very very sick, headaches, nausea, vomiting… and then, gone.
She never let me forget this and took me to my first NARAL meeting when I was 15 yrs old. And here I am today, in my 50s–and I still remember my grandmother’s scary account; my mother swaying, literally, at the curb, and nearly falling, under the strength of that one shot.
How did she get the doctor to do it? She told him, “If you don’t, I will do it myself”–and if you knew my mother, you knew she meant it. She would have. After all, lots of women she knew had.
This is what they want to take us all back to, the fucking middle ages. Please remember.
The cost of denying women abortions is women’s lives. Nothing “Pro life” about it.
[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]
Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.
This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!
Except.
Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.
Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.
You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.
And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.
Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.
But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.
Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.
But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.
But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?
I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.
So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.
I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.
I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.
I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”
If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.
I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:
And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.
How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.
Preserve their habitat, so your grandkids can see Dory-fish too.
Please please PLEASE don’t buy any blue tangs, clown fish, or any other fish/invertebrates in these movies. If you really want to see these pretty fish, there are many established aquariums which house some local and tropical fishes in well kept homes.
Also saying this because there is apparently a sea otter in the movie, but DO NOT APPROACH SEA OTTERS. They might look cute, but they are CRITICALLY ENDANGERED, and disturbing it can potentially cause it to waste precious energy fleeing from you; energy it needs to grow, maintain body heat, forage, and what not. It is also ILLEGAL in the United States to harass a marine mammal.
If you really love the animals in this movie, protect them and their homes.
I am proposing that we make 1 June 2016 a DAY OF JEWISH COMICS. Jewish people created this industry and the beloved, nigh-immortal characters still so popular to this day. Let’s fight the antisemitism of the current moneyed creators and give back to the community that has given us so much by putting out fanart and fanfic that returns Jewish characters and influence to the (positive) spotlight.
DC fans are welcome too! Y’all want to put out some Superman celebrating Purim or Batman protecting a synagogue or Harley Quinn taking a giant hammer to the current Cap writers, GO FOR IT. We are here to show that Jewish people have, and have always had, a place in these comics and this giant unwieldy mega-fandom, whether their home of choice is Avengers Tower or the city of Gotham. (Massively Multiplayer Marvel/DC Jewish crossover? FRICK YEAH.)
Folks who may not have fanworks to contribute, but want to take part: as with any celebration of Judaism, we can expect the tag to garner jackasses who have nothing better to do with their time than hate on people they’ve never met. You can be a superhero in your own right by patrolling the celebration tag and doing a block/report on any usernames you see trying to spread antisemitism or make the tag unsafe for Jewish users.
To add fanworks, use the tag #jewishcomicsday. Please REBLOG and spread the word, and let’s take comics back from people who want to make them a bastion of hate!
Signal BOOOOST!
Signal boost! I’d love to see y'all go right straight off. ❤️
There’s something about the way Finn said “That’s the only name they ever gave me” that breaks my heart. He sounded so resigned, so nonplussed, so matter of fact–as if Poe had asked the time, Finn had given it, and Poe seemed confused, to which Finn just shrugged and replied “that’s what the clock says.” He didn’t sound sad or particularly broken up about it and I realized it’s probably because he didn’t know what was stolen from him.
Of course Finn knew what families were and that some people got to grow up with them. He understood what parents and siblings were. He knew enough of the concept of friendship to want it. But these were all things he’d never had and knew he’d never have. So, Finn pushed them from his mind.
Since birth, Finn was told that he could never change his circumstances. So, what was the point of complaining, he reasoned. Why wallow? His hand had been dealt and so he worked to play his cards to the best of his ability.
Because Finn isn’t self-involved. Finn doesn’t pity himself. Finn is selfless, almost to a fault.
That is why it was never anything the First Order did to him that made Finn decide to leave. It was what the FO did to others: the teammates they told him to leave behind, the innocents they ordered him to kill, the teammates they led to slaughter.
That is why every new experience and person is so precious to Finn. He’s discovering the life he never had–the person he wasn’t allowed to be. And he greets each new discovery, not with an understandable sadness borne of deprivation, but with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of exploration.
A nickname? He’s always wanted one. Tries it on. Finds he likes it.
A pilot. A friend? Gone too soon. Finn clings to the only remaining piece of him.
A scavenger. A look. One he’s never seen before but is immediately determined not to lose.
A reunion. He runs to it. Embraces it.
A righteous battle. Innocents to defend. He dares Death to come get it.
When Finn awakens, he’ll find Rey, friendship, love, family, a future. All the things he thought he’d lost. Finn will embrace each new revelation the way Finn always does: not with the sadness of “this is what I missed,” but with the joy of “look at what I’ve found.”
