Nightingale's Calling

A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:

2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.

2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.

November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.

December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)

Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.

1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)

Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.

The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.

ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.

It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.

Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.

And from today.

They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.

And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.

So that's a brief history.

Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.

It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.

I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.

Innktober Day 5: Romance brought out the love from fans and characters alike

Here is some of that from Humbleduck, Carbon, Brack, and Needle!

What is your favorite display of love in The Wandering Inn?

:')

Interesting phenomenon I’ve picked up recently (although this has always been an issue) is readers treating characters and fictional worlds as real and using that as an argument against someone who critiques the writers of the series behind those characters/worlds.

What does that mean?

Specifically, the reason it’s bothering me enough now to write this out is because I saw it a day ago when I saw a tweet criticizing Frieren (is that how you spell it?) as coming across as fascist because the bad guys in it are a demon horde completely incapable of empathy or goodness whatsoever. The OP specifically asked, “Why did the author write it like that? Doesn’t that sound like fascist messaging?”

Which okay, perhaps the way they worded it was obnoxious, because “fascist” is a word that gets thrown around sometimes to the point it can lose its meaning and people forget how bad it really is…

But fans of Frieren were defending it by saying, “Well, the bad guys aren’t capable of goodness ever so that’s why they have to be completely wiped out in the series!” One artist even qrt-ed it with a comic showing that someone trying to be nice to a demon will be killed, captioning it as “this literally happens in the series” and they got a shit-ton of likes—even though it completely misses the point of OP’s argument??

OP didn’t say Frieren the character is a fascist or that she as a character should try to extend sympathy to fictional demons that we know in her world are incapable of being better.

The question lies in why the author chose to write the world like this. In truth, you can’t easily glean an author’s morality from the fiction they write (Neil Gaiman is perhaps, most recently, a horrific and unfortunate example of this), because humans are too complex for that…

But when it comes to prejudice, it can seep into one’s work in uncomfortable ways.

For example, when people accused the Attack on Titan writer of including things in their work that felt supportive of Imperial Japan, or when Asian writers are criticized for the preference for pale skin in their work, or when Han Chinese danmei authors stereotype non-Han ethnicities in works set in ancient times.

So when OP asks why the Frieren author was comfortable with writing the antagonist as an entire species of evil beings, that’s fair to ask from a writing standpoint. It doesn’t matter that diegetically within the lore, the demons will never ever be good and that you wanting a demon to be good could get you killed—because those demons aren’t real. They are a product of the writer’s imagination…so why did the writer imagine them as an evil mass horde that deserves to be slaughtered?

And no, most people don’t have a problem with a villain who is genuinely evil. The reason Frieren gets special attention here is because it’s about an entire species—the main question is simply why, how come, and what the significance of that is, along with how it may demonstrate or even perpetuate a certain ideology, which in this case, can be seen as dangerous.

Now with that being said, I’m not a fan of Frieren or even someone who has tried it for myself, so I can’t properly critique it, nor would I make actual assumptions on the writer’s views. I’m simply saying that OP asked a question from a writing perspective, but rather than consider the nuances behind the writing choice OP was questioning, Frieren defenders defended it as if the demons were a real thing you needed to worry about where “you can’t question it because if you do and try to be nice to them, they’ll kill you!”

Again, OP did not ask why Frieren as a character doesn’t look for more good demons. OP asked why the author of Frieren the series wrote the theme this way.

Now for another example, The Legend of Korra, which has recently seen an uptick in discourse due to a new Avatar series that says being the Avatar is now a bad thing, which many Korra haters blame on Korra the character.

What I noticed is someone pointing out that the writers behind The Legend of Korra as a show constantly put her in punishing situations where she was violated and thrown around like a ragdoll much more than Aang was, and they said they felt like it was internalized misogyny by the writers.

People responded that Korra was always meant to be a darker show and, most frustrating of all—just as they did with Frieren—they spoke about the character as if she was real, because “well she was just way more headstrong than Aang so she got herself in all kinds of fucked up situations!”

Which, okay, yes, we can glean that an obvious flaw of Korra’s is her temper and stubbornness, but again, that wasn’t OP’s point. OP specifically wondered why the writers made Korra like this.

Like why make the female character so impetuous that she seems deserving of punishment through violation?

It doesn’t matter that Aang and Korra have fundamentally different personalities and approaches to battle in this particular discussion because the main point OP brought up comes back to writing choices. This invites us to consider the series critically from a writing perspective.

No matter how mad Korra makes you as a character, she’s still just a character—she’s just words on a page.

Her “choices” aren’t her choices at all because they were choices made by the writing staff, and it’s fair for some people to wonder why a writing staff would write her the way they did. Especially since they could still write her as headstrong and stubborn without making it so that everything always somehow seems like her fault to viewers, to the point no one is satisfied (because ATLA fans think she was too full of herself and thus ruined everything even as they think she deserves the punishment the series gives her, while Korra fans dislike that the writers put her through so much hell).

So with all that being said, I basically wish sometimes people would treat stories as actual stories. I know it’s easy to get emotionally attached to a fictional story or to emotionally respond to a character, whether they’re super amazing or super annoying, but at the end of the day fiction is still fiction and characters are still characters. Even if “normies” can’t look at things from a writing perspective, I wish they could look at a series as just that—a fictional series.

I’m not a fan of or even someone particularly well-versed in The Legend of Korra or anything, but I can still tell how silly it is when someone questions the writers and writing choices of a show and fans of the series as a whole respond that “actually it’s fine because it’s meant to be darker and Korra is flawed so she’s the one who makes a mess of things.” That doesn’t engage with anything in any critical or thoughtful manner.

Like yeah, we get it—the character of Korra is super stubborn so she messed up a lot in the plot and it backfired on her, or the character of the demons in Frieren are indeed irredeemable and it’s pointless to discuss otherwise. But who’s the one making them so flawed in the first place? They don’t actually exist; their traits and what happens to them are all details assigned by the writer(s). So it isn’t pointless to question why a writer chose to write these things the way they did.

Of course, you should not speculate either, and calling Frieren the series “fascist,” even in terms of its messaging, may be going too far, but thinking more critically about the different series you consume is usually a good thing.

If nothing else, it exercises your brain, which I’m starting to get worried that people refuse to use.

Remember, friends: when you think critically about a series, you’re also thinking about why such writing choices are made and what they convey, because again, none of these characters are real. We know what the lore is, but it doesn’t hurt to wonder why the lore is what it is.

Also I will emphasize again that you can’t assume the writer is far-right solely based off what they create, but if the series’ messaging and themes are appealing to the far right who end up flocking to it, that demonstrates why it’s important to think more critically about the works we consume.