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I am skeptical that the thing holding back political action nowadays is “hopelessness.” It’s true that people can lack a sense of the possibility of improvement to such a degree that it limits their ability to act because “what’s the point.” people can also, as OP is pointing to, use hope as a means of delaying their willingness to think creatively, to take risks that might pay off, to cultivate the actual skills and capabilities that are far more directly useful to achieving desired outcomes than possessing hope. if I lack the skill, tools, or capacity to achieve a goal, hoping that the goal will still be achieved probably won’t change the outcome (although random chance is still a possibility but I wouldn’t want to rely on it). and if I throw up my hands and say “well there’s no hope” because I lack those things, that is, counterintuitively, still an assertion of hope’s supposed value as an affect and also a way of denying my own ability to act.

"Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures." David Graeber

"I want to explore how optimism and hope participate in this turning. I do not want to argue that optimism and hope are always good things or necessary tools for revolutionaries. To be turned is not always about being turned into action but can be about how one is turned by the actions of others.

To become revolutionary would seem to require a belief in the possibility of revolution. To become revolutionary would also seem to require a belief that a revolution is necessary. In other words, you would agree that what exists is something against which we should revolt. The revolutionary might have pessimism about the present but optimism about the future. This does not mean that revolutionary action depends upon subjects acquiring the right kind of orientations toward the present or the future.

I want to turn to the question of hope as a way of reconsidering the temporality of feeling, how feelings are directed toward objects in the present; how they keep the past alive; and how they involve forms of expectancy or anticipation of what follows (the future is always “the what” that follows, never arriving, always or only tomorrow, even when we have past futures behind us).

(...)

Whenever I see someone disregard or disparage ideas of rehabilitation for people who have done (or in this movie's case, almost did) unforgivable things, I want to grab them and ask "what should be done, then?" Because, people like that do exist, in spades, and short of executing or imprisoning or Black Mirror White Bearing every person who's done or thought of doing something immoral, rehabilitation is probably the best bet for minimizing harm, right? (And if your answer to immorality IS execution or isolation... i do not think youre really the more moral one here...) But even taking out any potential empathy for the humans who do or think of doing immoral acts, sometimes, giving them the tools to lead a happy and fulfilling life are the exact thing that leads them AWAY from the potential acts of like, shooting up a school, regardless of how undeserving you think they are of that.

I mean, it's original fiction in the end, so it's imo totally not fair to judge it as fanfiction. Scott isn't Steve. Kip isn't Bucky. Or vice versa or whatever. I don't think it's fair to judge the story at all on how the characters function as adaptations of Steve or Bucky, or Stucky altogether.

Nevertheless, I now can't help thinking about how I don't think the story works for me personally as an adaptation of Stucky, especially in a Hockey AU, right down to the bones of it. I know that the story presumably went through many edits before final publishing, I don't know what it looked like in its fanfiction form, but the basic premise of Kip not being another hockey player or Scott's childhood friend is a dealbreaker for me if you're seeking to emulate the MCU Stucky dynamic.

Like, I can actually pretty easily see MCU Steve Rogers in Scott Hunter. (If he's supposed to be Bucky instead, I'm not really seeing it.) Captain of his team. Professional duty and severe scrutiny as a public figure (a "role model") interfering with his personal life. Experienced. Wry. Tired. Lonely. Good at shouldering it.

But Kip??? If this WAS a Stucky AU, I'd personally (privately) be like #NotMyBucky about it. For me, I really need Bucky to be both or either 1) Steve's childhood friend tragically parted from him, 2) a formidable Winter Soldier equivalent.

If I was writing a Hockey AU for MCU Stucky, I'd probably go one of two routes: 1) Steve and Bucky are one of those soulmate-level, rising-stars juniors pairs, with the Howling Commandos functioning as their teammates, until Bucky gets a severe career-ending injury as a teenager (arm loss) before his major pros career can really start. Stucky lose touch and reunite as adults.

Shane's canonically kind of a selfish guy! Not in a terrible way, he just doesn't really care about stuff outside of his direct sphere. He only gets into philanthropy when there's a direct benefit to him (laundering his relationship). He loves his friends but he's not super caring of them or all that invested in their lives (forgetting Hayden's baby's name is peak). Some of that is he's too wrapped up in his own shit and his secrets but I think a lot of it is just his personality. Shane's not selfish to the degree of it being a personality flaw (see: Shane giving up a day with Ilya to babysit Hayden's kids. I wouldn't have) but he's more selfish than selfless.

We don't hear about him sending signed pucks to sick kids or doing charity with the Voyageurs or that sort of thing. Maybe he's doing it in the background idk. Most likely he's got some assistant in charge of it. But that's not something he spends a lot of mental energy on.

He's not rude or cruel to people, but internally he's a bit judgemental. He sells himself pretty ruthlessly. He’s wealthier than anyone on this website can even comprehend. He’s a landlord.

To get to three cups in a decade Shane’s also got to be very locked in as captain. Like Theriault is this fandom villain (fair) but it just doesn’t make sense to have Shane constantly clashing with him and the Voyageurs and still winning over and over. We see Shane let homophobic comments slide in the locker room and I have to assume that’s his general approach to dealing with things in Montreal. Winning comes first.

Hudson imbued Shane with a lot of gentleness, and the series centring the romance means we see a lot less of Shane when he isn't Ilyamaxxing but book!Shane is incredibly cutthroat. He's impatient, he might not ~showboat~ as much as Ilya does (and he judges him for it constantly) but he's just as much of an attention whore. He isn't just admired because he's Shane Motherfucking Hollander; he's genuinely a bro, he's inaccessible because of his routine and his diet (which gives him major 'you can't sit with us' vibes that he does precious little to counteract, both because he's too wrapped up in his Everything to notice, and he wouldn't care enough if he did).

He's the ice queen, not Ilya. As far as the league, and even his team, is concerned, all routes to Shane Hollander are through excellence, proximity, or work. Ilya and Scott Hunter get the time of day because they're good. Hayden is his friend and Assistant Captain. JJ is a teammate and is sort of the glue of the Voyagers. Rookies get Captain Hollander because he's responsible for them. That's all.

Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.

Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.

Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.

Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.

The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.

Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.

A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!

And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)

however, everyone should care about accessibility because disabled people are fellow human beings living in the same society as you who deserve the same rights as you

This is one of the few times when I’m actually going to weigh in with my expertise, I did my PhD dissertation on North Korean propaganda. North Korea is, contrary to popular belief, a right wing authoritarian ethnostate, and there are a lot of reasons why that is that I’m not going to get into in this video. 

But as someone who thought a lot about propaganda, I have some things that I want to share. The main thing is exactly this point, that it’s a bad idea to pay attention to every little thing that you see. A lot of people think of propaganda as something that’s trying to teach you something that you end up believing, so it’s like “profits are great now, profits are great now, profits are great now!” and then all of a sudden the audience is like “oh yeah, profits are great now,” but that’s actually not the case most of the time. 

One of the articles that really broke my brain about this is, again, this is a very academic article in 20th century music, called “Stalin and the Art of Boredom” by Marina Frolova-Walker who specializes in soviet propaganda of sort of the mid 20th century. And she argues that the point of a lot of propaganda is not actually to convince you of anything, but to bore you into submission by basically filling up your brain to the point where nothing else can take up that space. So like, if you see a statue of Stalin in the courtyard, it doesn’t actually inspire any feelings about Stalin, but what it does do is fill up that “statue” position with something of Stalin so you cannot image something else being there. 

Hope isn't just some flighty butterfly, something fragile and wispy. Hope is the woman praying daily at her husband's side in the hospital, waiting for him to wake and wondering if he'll remember her after his head injury.

Hope is the sailor clinging to the helm in the teeth of a gale, riding it out because he hopes and knows that the storm cannot last forever.

Hope is Samwise storming the tower of Cirith Ungol, not knowing whether he can truly overcome the orcs in the tower, but hoping that he can help his Master Frodo in some way at least.

Hope is the last stand of Húrin the Steadfast: holding the gap against the forces of Morgoth in Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, swinging his axe as he and his kinsmen fight to the death to protect the retreat of Turgon and the elves of Gondolin, shouting with each swing, "Aurë entuluva! Day shall come again!"

but from a writing and storytelling perspective it's delicious. it's the narrative literally punishing shane for letting himself indulge. for letting himself figuratively (and in this scene literally) get distracted for once. he's paying so much attention to ilya and their relationship off of the ice and it's a reminder to us and to him that they are in a HOSTILE environment and that they aren't in a safe space. that shane has dedicated his entire life and all of his time and energy to hockey and ONLY hockey. and he’s always made sure every decision he makes (from the books he reads to the insane fucking diet he maintains to the personal and professional image he’s worked so hard to cultivate) is the right one to benefit his hockey career. to keep him at the top of his game and the top of the league and to never give anyone any reason to question whether or not he belongs there. and the one time he lets his personal life bleed into his hockey and distract him FOR ONE SECOND it wrecks him. literally. and not only that, ilya had to WATCH IT HAPPEN and reckon with having real life, very serious consequences of their actions. he is forced to face the fact that whatever it is they are to each other is bleeding through to hockey - to their lives outside of hotel rooms and each others houses - and that he cares about shane A LOT. that seeing some guy he’s been hooking up with get hurt like that shouldn’t ABSOLUTELY TERRIFY HIM the way that it does if all they’re doing is sleeping together.

idk I could probably write a whole essay about this but I don't want to go off like that on something where I'm in the COMPLETE MINORITY.