semisphere (with a hat)

One of the things I can't stop thinking about is Neevee x Alistair

I am rooting for them. But the way their interpersonal lives are all tangled up in the legacy of colonialism is just, such a heavy weight. Alistair loving Neevee isn't enough. Her going through residential schooling, then a relationship with this much older man when she was 16. Which resulted in a daughter, a child that is that is yet another missing girl in a long line of missing and murdered women and girls. The legacy of colonialism is right there; it's not some abstract fading scar or distant generational trauma, it's a constant gaping wound

And then there's Alistair, who knows nothing about any of the above (except in the abstract) and who by all appearances did everything right. He doesn't stand apart as an expert; he tries to integrate and seems to immediately incorporate local knowledge into his research. He seems more in tune with the community as a visitor than Helen or the teacher, like, he talks to the community as a peer rather than someone sent to help them. He doesn't view Ice Cove as just a backdrop for soulless scientific research; he genuinely cares. And he made the incredibly correct decision of falling for Maika Harper. And then did the right thing by leaving when she told him to.

But he is still Canadian, still part of the system that does coldly extract scientific knowledge and resources, that does disappear women and girls. Even if he would never do that individually, the point is that the system would allow him to behave that way.

"First Lady", my first successful colored pencil portrait and now my first successful paint portrait

In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*

I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.

This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).

Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.

Lately I've been warming up in the morning with doodles of my girl Siaja. She deserves the world.