whatevs

"Here for You"

Been a while since I did a sketchy comic.

But I'll probably clean this one up later

Cleaned up

Comic list

Dumbledore is literally the scum between my toes

LEAVES A 1YO CHILD ON A DOORSTEP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT LIKE ‘OH NVM THEYLL FIND HIM IN THE MORNING LOL’

knows good and well how the dursleys are abusing and neglecting harry and just LETS THE SITUATION CONTINUE even though we see in the fifth book that he has the power to stop it (the ‘remember my last letter’). he lets harry be LOCKED UP IN A CUPBOARD and abused for ten years both because of the ””protection”’ privet dr has for harry (don’t worry, it’s only at the cost of his emotional and mental wellbeing, it’s all good) and because he WANTS harry to fall in love with the wizarding world, like voldemort did, like snape did, because it will make him easier to manipulate

GROOMS HARRY TO BECOME A PERSON WHO WILL WILLINGLY DIE FOR ””’THE GREATER GOOD””

PURPOSEFULLY WITHOLDS INFORMATION FROM HARRY AND KEEPS HIM UNINFORMED SO HE’LL DO WHAT DUMBLEDORE WANTS WHEN DUMBLEDORE WANTS HIM TO DO IT

tells harry in ootp that he kept the truth from him because HE ACCIDENTALLY ENDED UP CARING ABOUT HARRY. LIKE OH HERE’S THE KID I’VE BEEN PLANNING TO KILL AND HAVE LET LIVE A MISERABLE LOVELESS LIFE IN ORDER TO RIGHT THE WRONG OF THE OTHER BOY I FEEL LIKE I LET DOWN AND I ACCIDENTALLY REALISED HE’S A HUMAN BEING WELL FUCK

told arabella figg she couldn’t be nice to harry when he went to her house? like what the FUCK?

after all his lectures and ”’wisdom”’ STILL GOES AFTER THE HALLOWS HIMSELF BECAUSE HE WANTS THE POWER

literally told harry the only reason he didn’t make him a prefect was because he didn’t want people to think he ””plays favourites”” like he didn’t last minute give gryffindor the house cup like four fuckin years in a row because of harry

KNEW HE WAS GOING TO DIE AND DIDN’T TELL/PREPARE HARRY FOR THE EMOTIONAL DEVASTATION OF LOSING ANOTHER/HIS LAST FATHER FIGURE AND EVEN MADE HARRY WATCH HIM DIE

locked sirius up AFTER HE HAD SPENT TWELVE YEARS IN PRISON in the house where he was ABUSED AS A CHILD AND MADE TO FEEL OUTCAST AND UNLOVED and pretty much exacerbated sirius’ arrested development and feeling of worthlessness because he’s dumbledore and dumbledore knows best

LET SNAPE TEACH AT HOGWARTS FOR 15+ YEARS DESPITE KNOWING FULL WELL HOW HE TREATED STUDENTS JUST BECAUSE HE WANTED TO KEEP HIM CLOSE

HE IS IN A POSITION OF POWER - ARGUABLY THE POSITION OF POWER - AND USES IT TO MANIPULATE AND EMOTIONALLY TRAUMATISE HARRY AND BATTER HIM INTO A WEAPON TO USE AGAINST VOLDEMORT AT THE COST OF HARRY’S FUCKING CHILDHOOD

Doesn’t know/care that his Defense teacher has Voldemort sticking out the back of his head and is teaching students

Does not figure out/care that a bloody fucking basilisk is attacking students, leaves that up to the twelve year-olds instead, nevermind that he’s supposed to be the greatest wizard of the age

Sends Ginny Weasley off for a cup of hot chocolate after she’s been posessed by Voldemort for a whole school year (I’m never over the disservice done to Ginny Weasley)

Lets a goddamn Squib clean the entire fucking castle and be in charge of discipline against students whom Filch clearly hates (Crying about being able to whip them in Y5? Wishing that he could hang them from the ceiling by their thumbs?) and also has absolutely no way of protecting himself against should a student decide to hex him

A shit headmaster, just really. One teacher per subject for hundreds of students? Lets people like Snape near children? Permits all sorts of horrible bullying, and does literally nothing against Umbridge except rescue Trelawney, who’s a crap teacher anyhow. And why is Binns teaching? How does a ghost keep up on recent history or even mark the stinking papers?

Sends Hagrid to take baby Harry from the house his parents just died in??? What the hell was happening that he didn’t do it himself?

Decides that he, a half-blood wizard who used to genuinely think Muggles were inferior and should be ruled for their own good and whose parents were both magical, is the best person to lead the resistance against pureblood bigotry, a host of pure- and half-blood witches and wizards to accompany him (like, allyship is all well and good but was there a single canonical Muggleborn who wasn’t Lily or Hermione?)

Lets a boy he knows to have a Dark Mark attend school and attempt to kill him all year, badly, and with a lot of collateral damage, instead of just doing him the solid of offering him some help

- Speaking of Hagrid; Dumbledore has a history of mismanaging and mistreating isolated young boys with dysfunctional traumatic pasts; Tom Riddle, Hagrid, Snape, Harry, Neville.

- And then when he’s feeling guilty about it, finds ways to keep them near him, as part of his machinations within the wizarding world. (Neville somewhat escapes because as guilty as Dumbledore feels, he just can’t be assed so he passes Neville off to herbology and there Neville gets an actual education).

- KNOWS the position of DADA is cursed, but STILL lets Remus become a teacher, knowing very well what’s likely to happen to fulfill the curse and how it’d further complicate his life.

- And then doesn’t speak up for him.

- Helps foster not just the house rivalry at Hogwarts, but the attitude that ALL Slytherins are EVIL (vile, corrupt, liars, cheats, etc). These are children under his care and he sets them up to be reviled, to end up fighting back and creating a culture of under-age vengeance and violence.

- Oh yeah, does not call for any sort of investigation, or heightened awareness etc when Harry ends up in the Triwizard Tournament, even though it’s all as suspicious as f*ck and could lead to death - AND at that point, he’s the only legally acknowledged guardian underage Harry has.

- Does NOT shut down the school when the Ministry declares freaking DEMENTORS are going to roam the outer grounds of a school for CHILDREN.

- Also does not immediately order every child on grounds to learn how to create a Patronus.

Description: Pride and Prejudice AU

you’re in the pocket of Big Ball, I see

there’s no pocket for me to BE in, there’s no LOBBYING involved, there’s no SUPPRESSION campaign because you don’t need one! traditional methods suppress themselves when you make modern pokéballs available. you might as well start accusing AT&T of deliberately suppressing the noble traditional art form of the goddamn semaphore.

not to mention OP demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the market realities of the pokéball industry- Silph and Devon are not monopolies, if they weren’t in constant competition their magic monster domination spheres wouldn’t cost two bucks a pop. the ball spec is a public standard, and Bill Masaki’s storage system based on that standard is an open-source project. they’re only the two largest players because they’re able to leverage economies of scale. you still get smaller operations like the Laverre City Poké Ball Factory, with better regional supply chains and local brand recognition, making room for themselves in the market. 

That notion was, and remains, a tool to limit general access to Pokémon in the interest of maintaining class disparities. I mean, have we already forgotten the Aether Foundation’s pseudo-conservationist nonsense? Their attempt to manipulate natural resources and establish a power base in Alola, while they were modernizing and taking their place on the world stage, was founded on this exact rhetoric of “rescuing” Pokémon from local disenfranchised populations, as if taking Pokémon away from places like Po Town would improve things instead of increasing competition between trainers and decreasing safety.

The release of the $2 pokeball meant that the balance of power shifted to the common citizens. If any child can wield the power of a god, the military and the government and the wealthiest businessmen have no power over them.

More than that, instead of power being determined by the wealth to acquire pokemon, power comes exclusively from the dedication, effort, and empathy required to train them to high levels and to maintain their loyalty. If a person simply buys their pokemon, then those pokemon will either stay at low levels forever, or refuse to obey the human because there is no respect between them; the most powerful people in the world are those who caught a critter at level 2-5 and then devoted their life to raising it into a world power.

Others bank hard on ‘animal rights’ issues, and end up creating facilities run by folks with little experience, overcrowded and ripe with disease.

“Did you eat it? You just tasted history.”

Let’s look at my grandfather as an example:

He was an Indian man born under colonial British rule who supported the Indian National Army, an armed force formed by Indian nationalists and Imperial Japan in 1942 in Southeast Asia during World War II. He was studying and working in the US during the war and wasn’t able to return to India in order to fight with them, but I know he wanted to. And on one hand, fighting to end British colonial rule in India was 100% a noble goal. I’m fully down with giving a hearty “fuck you” to British imperialism. 

But on the other hand… the Japanese were an Axis power with their own history of imperialism, and were endeavouring to establish even greater dominion over China and Korea (the latter of which had already been annexed by Japan in 1910). And on top of that, they were allied with, y’know, the Nazis, which… as a Jewish person, I have to just say: Not great, Bob! 

I mean, you had this Indian military force that was fighting against British colonialism, but they were doing it by aligning with another imperialist power, who in turn were aligned with the fucking Nazis, who the British were trying stop. In fact, Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the INA, actually lived in Berlin from 1941-1943 during the height of the final solution, and had even met with Hitler and other Nazi officials about forming alliances to defeat Britain, until he finally came to the conclusion that “the new nationalism of Germany is not only narrow and selfish but arrogant.” And yeah, it was definitely fucked up that Bose spent time working on an Indian alliance with Hitler to the point where he was living in Nazi Germany for two fucking years, but on the other hand, he was mostly there because the British threw him in jail for leading mass protests against their own imperialism, and the Germans strategically gave him asylum with the goal of turning British Indian POW against the Allied Powers (they totally would have invaded India later if given the chance but I digress). And meanwhile, Churchill, while fighting off the Nazis—which, again: good—was also enacting policies that contributed to (or at least exacerbated) a major famine in Bengal that killed 3 million people, which didn’t bother him at all because he was a massive anti-Indian racist who said doing anything to help was pointless because we (Indian people) “breed like rabbits.” 

So anyway, back to my grandfather. He was an Indian man who wanted to end the centuries-long occupation of his country by the British by any means necessary, to the point where he considered fighting for an anti-British army that was aligned with the Axis powers. And yet… he was also madly in love with his Jewish wife, and the proud father of a Jewish-Indian son, and he hated the Nazis, because, y’know, people tend not to like regimes who want to murder their family. 

So what do you take from all that? 

I feel like so many of you just want to see things in black and white, and decide if somebody is stanned or cancelled. But there are so many situations where you can’t do that—where things are grey or dualities exist at the same time. 

The whole thing with the INA and the Japanese and the Nazis and British - it’s like a snake eating itself. I can’t fault my grandfather’s desire to join the INA as a way of overthrowing the British, and I also can’t wholly support it. It’s not quite wrong and not quite right, and I’m saying that as somebody with 80 years of history in the rearview mirror, which means at that particular moment in time, it was probably even more unclear and confusing. 

And sure, there are plenty of things in history that are more clear cut. In If you look at the fight between the Brits and Nazis in microcosm, obviously the Brits are in the right, because fucking Nazis. And if you look at the fight between Brits and the people of India, obviously the Brits are the wankers, because fuck colonialism. But a lot of things are much greyer or amorphous than that, and sometimes we either need to accept that we’ve been presented with a Gordian knot or agree that there are situations where multiple things are true at once.

We can hold indentured labourers in the 1800s accountable for their role in colonialism and also empathise with the systemic powerlessness they sang about in work songs, and neither cancel nor absolve them, but instead learn about history and also look at parallels between then and now, where disenfranchised people in the West often benefit from sweat shop labour abuses abroad without necessarily being able to immediately do anything to stop it. 

We can be honest about the fact that American soldiers of all races in the Korean and Vietnam wars aided in unleashing extreme imperialist violence against the people of those nations, but also empathise with the fact that many of them, especially Black soldiers, were only there because of systemic racism at home—and we can also acknowledge that even in spite of all this, many Asians are still horribly anti-Black/contribute to the systemic oppression of Black people, instead of having useless fights over whether a fictional Black soldier in the Korean war should be the protagonist of a show or not.  

And we can acknowledge that sometime two disabled people will have competing needs that can’t necessarily be reconciled, instead of declaring that one of them is being ableist against the other.