sashene

HI YES GLADLY !!!

so theres like. 60 issues max for everything khoa's been in... ghostbat even less.. but at least it's a quick read :,)

batman: the knight (2022) batman (2016) #100-111 batman annual 2021 batman 112-121 batman annual 2022 shadow war event batman incorporated (2022)

shadow war isnt necessary but hey, content is content. khoa also fights slade so thats fun.

(so if u want the full story its: shadow war: alpha #1, batman 122, deathstroke inc #8, robin (2021) #13*, batman #123, shadow war zone #1, deathstroke inc #9, robin #14, shadow war: omega)

*just a page in the final panel, bold is the ones he actually shows up in

hi ! do you like the Girl of all Time? dont know where to start? missing a few comics? well you're in luck. welcome to my complete (canon) reading guide (as someone who has read all of her appearances)

The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.

The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.

Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)

It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!

It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.

In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.

And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.

For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).

As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.

The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

having explained my reasoning, i still feel like a hypocrite. i have a lot of opinions about female characters and ships and the way they are so poorly treated, and i want better for female characters and female ships - but i rarely am the one to put my money where my mouth is and make stuff for them.

i don't know how to reconcile this. i'm sending this ask because i bet i'm not the only person struggling with this issue, and i wanted to support anyone else who feels the same way. loving female characters can be tough no matter how genuine.

look. no one is telling you not to write m/m fics if that's what you enjoy. this is fandom, it's for fun, and this blog is not about making people feel bad for things they like. with that said, i personally really don't agree with the argument that m/m is the only possible refuge from having to deal with misogyny.

writing about women doesn't have to be about misogyny if you don't want it to be. i mean you could make a similar argument that because m/m is about queer men, you necessarily have to deal with homophobia if you write yaoi. but a lot of people don't do that because it's fanfiction. you can write about whatever scenario you want and deal with whatever issues you're comfortable dealing with. you gave the pitt, as an example, right? write about mel and santos having crazy omegaverse sex after singing karaoke together; write an au where aliens exist and mohan and mckay go on a date in a spaceship (look we all have our crack ships, this one's mine, leave me be); write about dana missing collins so much that she moves to portland to be with her. get creative, go crazy. i just really dislike the idea that it's impossible to write women in a fun escapist way.

another issue i have with this idea is that often the male characters being shipped in popular m/m ships are themselves misogynistic. so, for example, the two most popular ships for the pitt, at least according to ao3 numbers, are robby/whitaker and robby/abbot. now robby is a character that i personally really like and enjoy, but i don't think there's any denying that he's sometimes casually misogynistic (and a little racist) in a condescending old liberal white guy way. so when you say writing m/m frees you from writing about misogyny, what do you do about robby or dean winchester or any other beloved male character who is pretty obviously misogynistic. do you only have to deal with misogyny if a character experiences it, but not if a character perpetuates it? i don't really get that logic.

also, i understand if you turn to fanfiction for escapism from real world issues, but speaking for myself, i sometimes like seeing characters deal with misogyny in fic. i think it can be pretty cathartic to see people actively confront the systemic ways they're mistreated. i totally understand that not everyone enjoys that sort of thing, but i must assume that at least some m/m shippers do actually enjoy it, because i know a lot of m/m fic does actually address how homophobia affects its characters. so if we can do that for homophobia, why can't we also do it for misogyny and racism and ableism and other kinds of bigotry?

Like, a census is treated as an objective, authoritative dataset that can be used to make ‘objective’ conclusions about populations, but the upstream question is why this census exist, what questions does it ask, and for what purposes. Racial categories are especially unstable in census data and change regularly, for example, because how race is constructed and reproduced via datasets changes a lot over time. I think it’s also easy to see this in the recent Canadian census (which I took, since it’s legally required), that asked people to both report their gender and their ‘birth sex’ as a way of measuring transgender populations. But why not have a question asking if you’re transgender? Why not go with self identification, and instead rely on pre-determined state assigned categories? It is possible for trans people to withhold their trans status from the state by answering no on a “are you transgender?” question, but you cannot lie about your birth sex, since the state already has that on file.