Glyphs and Cycles

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

How many can you get?

Accidentally fallen in a natural body of water

Visited the second-largest city on your country

Taken ibuprofen on an empty stomach

Gotten a tattoo in only purple ink

Tried to dye your hair only to find the dye wouldn't take

Drank a spider

Broken your left femur in exactly two places simultaneously

Nearly ran out of petrol on the highway but not quite

Had an allergic reaction during an exam, because of the exam materials

Been prescribed antihistamines

Blocked someone on tumblr

Submitted a CV with a typo in the first line

Drank coffee without sugar

Been in an airplane only for the flight to be cancelled before takeoff

Abandoned a hobby exactly three days after you picked it up

Gotten the wrong prescription glasses because you were too shy to tell the student optometrist they were blocking your view of the eye chart so you just made up some answers at random

Been told "jokes about [trauma you had] are never funny" right after you made a joke about said trauma

Gotten lost at a new school

Been to a birthday party

Told someone you don't speak a certain language, in that language (give yourself a bonus point if you were lying to avoid a having a conversation (give yourself another bonus point if it was your native language (give yourself another bonus point if you clearly doing something - eg reading a book or watching a movie - that indicated that you did in fact speak said language)))

Left kudos on AO3

Read a book longer than 300 pages

Accidentally declined a call you wanted to take

Found a coin on the footpath that was the largest denomination minted in the country you were in at the time

Watched a TV series in an order determined by a random number generator

Gone out of your way to spit on someone's grave

Rolled a 12 on a pair of D6s

Received a scholarship that did not pay nearly enough to cover the course fees

Visited Geraldine, Aotearoa

Been mistaken for a sibling of a different gender

Accidentally shoplifted

Coloured your nails with a highlighter

Thanked your aunt for the lovely handkerchiefs

Been adopted by a calico cat with six toes on each paw

Looked someone up in an actual old-fashioned phonebook

Been given a nickname you initially hated but grew to like

Cut your own hair without looking in a mirror

Lived somewhere everyone says is haunted but you've never noticed anything abnormal

Driven a car older than yourself

So: repurposed vaguely Kinseyesque scale describing your aromantic and/or asexual protagonist's awareness of and relationship to their own aromanticism/asexuality:

Unaware That This Is A Thing People Can Be. Type specimen: Carl from Dungeon Crawler Carl. Has never once considered that "not wanting romance or sex" is a thing people could feel, let alone identify as. He is normal, which means straight. It's just a coincidence that his relationship with his girlfriend was a disaster and now he's just way too busy in this new nightmare dystopia world for any of that! Anyway!

Aware They Have These Feelings, Assumes Everyone Else Also Does. Type specimen: Doug Eiffel from Wolf 359. Firmly believes that his aro-allo experiences are universal and everybody else is just better at acting like a functional human being than he is. Being a huge movie nerd also leads him to believe that "romance" as we understand it is massively exaggerated for drama in movies and people in real life don't actually do and feel that stuff any more than they mind-meld or can use the Force. He's just a fuckup at everything; why wouldn't relationships be included in that? For most of the show if you told him about aromanticism he would NOT be comforted about it, he'd probably take it as a diagnosis that his fuckup-ness regarding relationships was innate and incurable. (This doesn't have to be negative; this is also where Andy Wheyface from Arden falls and he is having a GRAND old time.)

Aware They Have These Feelings, Realizes That It Sets Them Apart From Others, Doesn't Conceptualize It As Part Of An Identity. Type specimen: Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary. His reaction to other people having sex is mostly "why would you do that." His single attempt at a serious romantic relationship didn't work out and he has a nagging sense that there is something in him that can't maintain serious relationships; attributes it to cowardice and fear of commitment. Ironically he does know what asexuality is. He's a middle school teacher in 2020s California, he has absolutely gotten LGBTQ+ Sensitivity Education at least in "pamphlet listing queer identities" form, he for sure has students with pride flag pins on their backpacks and pride stickers on their notebooks, and he is also not immune from the Culture War Bullshit around gender in schools. Knowing that asexuality exists did not even slightly lead him to apply this to himself.

Aware They Have These Feelings, Considers Them Significant, Attributes Them To Some Existential Feature Of Their Existence Rather Than A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot is very confident it does not want anything to do with romance or sex, and it attributes this to Being A SecUnit, and romance and sex are Human Things SecUnits Don't Do. Has not yet realized that this is an itself thing and not a SecUnit thing. Probably willfully at this point.

Considers These Feelings A Significant Aspect Of Their Selfhood, But Doesn't Name It. Type specimen: Sister Carpenter from The Silt Verses. Clearly confident in who she is and what she wants in her personal relationships, recognizes that as something that makes her different from others and out of step with what others expect from her, and is basically like, that's their problem. She knows who she is. Sometimes other people try to make it her problem but she has so many other problems that societal amatonormativity keeps getting pushed lower and lower on her list of Problems.

Recognizes Themself As Aromantic/Asexual As A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Nova NoStar from InCo. Clearly considers this part of her identity, but is allergic to talking about her feelings even at her therapy android's insistence and besides that's not anybody else's business is it?

Publicly Identifies As Asexual And Describes It With Period-Correct Sexual Orientation Language. Type specimen: Sally Grissom from ars PARADOXICA. The only character I've ever heard come out as asexual and lay out the definition in terms of sexual orientation and attraction to another character on-air that made me go "yeah she would do this, this is in character for Sally." Strongly feel like she would be an active commenter on the 2010s ace blogosphere. Would get in an argument about the correct definition of asexuality on AVEN.

This is a really interesting aspect that I was definitely thinking about when I put this list together, because it began as an expansion of this post and I was freely mixing characters that are canonically and intentionally written as aro and ace, and characters who were not at all intended to come off that way but really do to me and/or a lot of people. But it's true, and I think that speaks to something about how different genre narratives prioritize things that lead to these readings!

A lot more thoughts about this under the cut:

Me: yes, in various forms, but you have to understand that the primary reason I and others in our species participate in this particular ritual is to ritually invoke erotic mating behaviors by using a phallic symbol to communicate our readiness to copulate and our laxness with traditional contending ritual doctrines discouraging mating.

Alien: Ah, so this goes back to that Freud guy you talked about before.

Me: on some level. He had some less advanced analytical technologies but they were typical of his era.

Alien: I see. And this is a “heterosexual” behavior?

Me: actually the ritual itself is sexuality agnostic. By invoking primary images of sexuality, we’re able to utilize these symbols outside of their conventional contexts, by making symbolic references to them.

Alien: are these references like the references you mentioned in rust programming of memory pointers?

Me: yeah, you got it! and therein lies the eroticism of programming the machine. It’s why the machine is related to sexually by many humans.

Alien: fascinating.

Me: humans also use this ritual to find willing mates by prompting other humans to ask us if they can participate in the ritual with us. But this isn’t always the case, and that ambiguity —

Alien: creates tension in the uncertainty. It’s all play again, I see.

Me: precisely.

Alien: can I bum a smoke off you?

Me: ;)

btw, idk if this will be seen by any of the countless people who already have seen and reblogged this post, but heres the original guide posted on how to make the chibi-rocky! the OP also has a separate guide for a more accurate rocky, though obviously less simple of a guide than the little thingy shown off