More symphony au!! Chapter 2 is up on ao3 for the fic of my amazing collab partner, the lovely @verdantdaises ! (I adore you)

Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!” 

Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.

Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpean fabrication and it’s been proven time and time again to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)

You know what’s older than racism?

You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?

fucking rabies

You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.

Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.

Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.

Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.

Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.

Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.

After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?

I’m not going to be a hypocrite by pointing out racism being excused as a stemmed human behavior without claiming that the deep seated primal fear of disease doesn’t make a good excuse for ableism as well. I mean we use othering to discern friend from foe, and then at some point decided that was a good enough excuse for racism. Theres legitimate proof that ancient homonids could and would be hospitible to the disabled out of compassion. The point of having these initial fears is to guage saftey measures first, but once someone or something is proven to be harmless that normally should be the end of it. I mean if an adult wild silverback gorrilla can look at a spycam and decide it’s chill after a moment of inspection then there’s really no excuse for any of us.

Healthy othering =/= newly invented racism.

healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.

I think this is the right petition though but I can’t find the links for anything else:

If my information is wrong PLEASE CORRECT!

Here’s the amnesty.org link

Here’s the second change.org link

Oh you are playing to my strengths. I love Snart and John together. Unfortunately I’ve never finished anything with them in it. BUT. I’m very willing to share bits of the WIPs I’ve done for them with you.

Here’s one where Leo and John hook up after everything that goes down with Sara. I think halfway through I wanted to make it more about Len and John so I never really finished it. I wanted them to bond over their shared attraction to Sara, but nothing really came out of this.

“Thought you said you were spoken for, handsome,” John says around the cigarette between his lips. His voice sounds muffled, smoke leaking from behind his teeth. 

He’s leaned against the wall in some seedy alley next to where The Waverider is parked for the time being. Everyone is knackered after everything that happened with Nora and Sara won’t let him smoke on the ship. 

“I am,” Leo replies, approaching John and caging him in against the wall. “But I figured, when in Rome.”

John tilts his head to the side, taking another long drag of his cigarette. The spent ash at the end breaks loose and falls down onto his white shirt. 

Leo reaches out and plucks the cigarette from his lips, tossing it over his shoulder and onto the ground. 

John doesn’t protest. He watches the cigarette go, following its trajectory all the way down to the ground before turning his gaze on Leo. 

Smoke leaks from his mouth and into the air around them, rising between their faces. In the dark it looks so sinister. 

“Well go on then.” John encourages, expelling the rest of the smoke from his lungs. “Take what you came for.”

And here’s one from a story I’m writing where John joins the team in season 1, but not as a magician. He’s a metahuman in this. Here’s a conversation he has with Mick post-Snart’s death.

"He loved you, y'know," Mick says, taking a long gulp of beer.

John stares down at the table, trying desperately to keep the tears in his eyes from spilling over and down his cheeks. He's cried enough, he thinks. It's time to move on. Not like Len is the first person he's lost. Probably won't be the last either.

"I know," John says, his voice shaky and broken.

"Did you love him?" Mick asks pointedly.

John closes his eyes, losing the battle against his tears. He takes a shaky breath. "I'm not that kind of man," he says. "I always thought love was nowt but a story or a lie people told to make life feel a bit less unbearable."

He wraps his hand around the bottle of whiskey in front of him, raising it to his lips and gulping down as much of it as he can. The taste is bitter and it burns in his chest as it goes down, but he doesn't stop. Anything to erase what he's feeling. So he can stuff all of this down and move on.

Later when he's alone, John knows he'll need something a little stronger to take the edge off, but he won't do that in front of Mick or anyone else on this ship. He's always been good at keeping the darker parts of him secret. It's better that way. Easier if they don't know.

"You didn't answer my question," Mick remarks.

"Aye," John says, lowering the bottle of whiskey. "Cos I don't think you'll like the answer."

Mick grunts in reply, downing the rest of his beer and pulling a handle of hooch out of his jacket pocket.

I don’t usually answer asks and I don’t really take prompts. I’ve been struggling to finish anything this past month. I haven’t even been updating my regular fics. But you were so nice and you picked a ship I genuinely adore and wish thee was more work for.