Me: yeah whatever. I don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: Our wars have ended and now the dead came back to rule over the living and those living are not only stripped of power and agency over their own lives, but also made to feel ashamed and are told again and again how their subjugation is actually rightful and benevolent and kind and how grateful they should actually be that their nation’s past came back to devour the present. this conquest is being painted as liberation and yet now there is absolutely no chance for escape or freedom or peace or dignity even in death because sooner or later you will be brought back or taken apart and every single part of you will be exploited and used for someone else’s purposes again and again until you have absolutely nothing left to give—

My buddy (???) Fann Arkhetarias from the darkness of the woods and beside the Long King: Why are you crying?

julien was beaten for being gay by other cops. danny has faced misogyny on the job by other cops. aceveda was sexually assaulted and then his wife (and cousin) react like everyone else would, like he's lost his masculinity and so he can't tell anyone else and actually get help (im not far enough in yet to say if he eventually does or not) and claudette is constantly undermined/loses out on her promotion and it's not quite as directly tied to her being a black woman within the text but it certainly happens more to her than to others and i think that's very intentional

but. buuuut they all still hold onto the privilege of being a cop. being a cop is a way of life. everything else doesn't matter because of the brotherhood of cops or some such culty verbiage. they repress all the parts of themselves with as much violence as is required to become a part of the "in-crowd" (except for claudette and aceveda to an extent, they do try to marry these ideas within themselves by representing the "good" black/latino communities, altho especially aceveda stumbles more often than not)

the precariousness of thinking that being a cop makes you immune from bigotry, because you're first and foremost a cop, right? and your fellow cops see you that way too... right? and it's possible to stamp down any similarities you see between yourself and the people you arrest/look down on/at best see as weak civilians, until whatever element of you that would also be targeted by systemic violence is wholly eradicated and this is definitely good for the soul and doesn't cause irreconcilable paradoxes within your sense of self......... right?

but they're cops, so they're in charge right? they're doing the right thing, because they're cops, which is a shorthand for Being A Good Guy. the reasons why things aren't working has nothing to do with the structures they're actively upholding, they couldn't possibly also be victims of it, because they have all the power....

“Come upon the town” means fall into prostitution. Now let’s forget for a second how horrible Meryton is being (Wouldn’t it be better for gossip if she was ruined forever?) Jane Austen just referenced her last book and teased her next one!

In Sense & Sensibility, Eliza Brandon, the divorced and disgraced love of Colonel Brandon, was found by him in a sponging house, probably dying of syphilis, after falling into a life of either prostitution or becoming several people’s mistress. “I could not trace her beyond her first seducer, and there was every reason to fear that she had removed from him only to sink deeper in a life of sin.”

Then, in Mansfield Park, Maria Rushworth, also disgraced and divorced, ends up in a distant farmhouse with Mrs. Norris, “It ended in Mrs. Norris’s resolving to quit Mansfield and devote herself to her unfortunate Maria, and in an establishment being formed for them in another country, remote and private, where, shut up together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other no judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment.”

All three women were failed by their guardians/parents and we see the three possibilities: prostitute/mistress, banishment, or married to an unworthy man.

THE HANDMAID'S TALE ⇢ 1x03 | LATE