18+, she/her
Hellooo, a warm welcome to my blog :) I am obssessed w/ Stucky, Cap Quartet, & some other interests moon2mango on AO3
I try to tag all of my posts Black Lives Matter, Trans Lives Matter, Free Palestine
Major tags: Major Character Death, Grief/Mouring, Bittersweet, Terminal Illness
Steve Rogers Bingo Round 5, Square C5: Major Character Death ( @steverogersbingo )
Ships: Steve/Bucky
Summary:
Steve chuckles weakly back, his smile still there, but fading by the second.
Bucky's fades as well, as his brain supplies to himâ
It's time.
They share a look, and that in and of itself lets them know what they're both thinking.
Steve's hold gets weaker, and Bucky's eyes get wetter, but their gaze doesn't break, not once.
As Bucky starts holding him tighter, and brings Steve's hand to his mouth and kissing his knuckles, all while keeping his eyes on Steve's, Steve rubs his nose against Bucky's slightly, and Bucky knows.
This is their last minute together. Steve is ready. It's really happening.
âââ
An alternate ending to my upcoming fic about Steve getting sick, but in this one, he dies :D
Finally finished this !! My first fic for a fandom bingo <3
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I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while theyâre growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think theyâll get bulky as though bulking isnât a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density đ„
if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like youâre insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like âgirls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]â nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old
They go after the most vulnerable and marginalized. Trans people, kids on SNAP, single moms, old people. Theyâll work their way to the rest of us bit by bit if we donât stop them
The Spear in the Others heart is the Spear in your own, you are he. There is no other wisdom and no other hope but that we grow wise - Diane Duane
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um actually there's nothing wrong with letting cats be outdoor pets. your cat is depressed locked inside forever. it's animal abuse. let it outside. more cats should be let outside more often. especially overnight.
She worked with Hydra (knowingly or unknowingly) longer than she knew Steve.
I donât understand why people donât see it, but Peggy is a very dark grey character. She knows the rights and wrongs of the world, but she also gets that sometimes you have to do a little bad to do some good. And she did it no hesitation with it.
First of all, letâs talk more about Reinhard Gehlen. He was a German intelligence officer, he was the chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence. He surrendered to the CIC of the US Army and during questioning the Army recognized his usefulness for the future. Because even during World War II the USA already knew that after the defeat of Nazi-Germany the next enemy would be the soviets.Â
Gehlen founded the Gehlen Organisation that had close ties with the CIA. For years his organisation was the only one who provided Intel out of the Soviet block by questioning returning German prisoners of war. Later the organisation was the founding element of the the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).
Gehlen was not persecuted, no he even was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968.Â
The cold war had one simple rule: The enemy was the communist. And Nazis or fascist werenât communist so they stopped being the enemy. And they could be pretty useful after all, right?Â
Like Gehlen, or in the MCUâs case: Arnim Zola.Â
Steve told Peggy that he would not stop âuntil all of Hydra is dead or capturedâ. And she tells him âyou wont be aloneâ⊠and then goes off and offers Zola a job, the man that tortured and experimented on prisoners of war, which Peggy knows. But he was useful in their attempt to recreate the serum. Something Howard was obviously obsessed with. And Peggy let them.Â
Itâs one of the reasons why I always was low key disgusted with SHIELD, with Peggy and Howard. But thatâs because I thought about that, not because the movies show that to me. Only maybe when Frank Pym leaves SHIELD but even than no one ever talks about all the things Peggy must have done in all these years. itâs hinted at with Howard, but only barely.
Intelligence during the cold war was not a place for moral or ethics.
And the MCU and Disney always try to not be controversial or talk about anything highly divisive. They hide behind their âsuitable for childrenâ mantra, but in the end all they care about is money. And you wonât get money out of people you offend. And now we could talk about how fascism is deeply integrated in the US society, but I donât want to start that rantâŠÂ Â
So Peggy had to âdo some bad to do a little goodâ That sounds really familiar. Where have I heard that beforeâŠ
Alexander Pierce: Why do you think weâre talking? See, I took a seat on the Council not because I wanted to but because Nick asked me to, because we were both realists. We knew that despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, that to build a really better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down. And that makes enemies. Those people that call you dirty because you got the guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better. And the idea that those people could be happy today, makes me really, really angry.
So Peggy Carter has a similar worldview to Alexander Pierce. Ok then.
Please tell me the details of exactly what âgoodâ ends Peggy was trying to accomplish and how that justified her âbadâ means.
Actually now that Iâve typed that, Iâm serious about this question. What are her motivations? What is her aim? The MCU never addresses this, does it? As far as I can tell, weâre supposed to think that SHIELD exists for world protection and so we confer that intent onto Peggy, but are we ever given any reason to believe that this individual character has any interest in protecting anyone?
The biggest plot holes in that movie that bothers me so much is
Why does Tony never talk about Hydra's infiltration in the organazation his father created?
How did Howard Stark recreated that serum? And what was he going to do with it? Why was Maria in the car? Why did no one suspect the Starks were murdered? Did Peggy suspect anything? Tony?
All of HYDRA's files were leaked on the internet like 2 years earlier: so there is no reason why the Stark's murder did not become common knowledge.Unless... someone in the government was complicit and there was a wider coverup.
But let's be real: Howard Stark was an infamous arms dealer, war profiteer and Nazi collaborator. He had a *lot* of very vocal enemies: nobody would have been remotely shocked if he was murdered by one of his rivals or someone he got on the wrong side of. People would have been more surprised that he died in an apparent "accident".
Logically, its highly likely someone within SHIELD tipped off the Soviets about Howard's serum (because how many people would have known?). Peggy? Obadiah Stane? How about Tony himself? There's a long standing theory that Tony was a HYDRA operative the entire time- which just makes a lot of sense.
A also recently heard a theory that T*ny tried to kill Bucky not in revenge for his parents but because to silence him: because Tony himself was the one who tipped off the Soviets or gave the kill order. Now that would be very interesting.
How did Howard Stark recreated that serum? And what was he going to do with it?
There's only two real possibilities: Bucky's blood or Isaiah Bradley's were used to synthetize the serum. We know from "What If.....?" that Howard knew about Bucky from the early 1980s, so nothing to stop him getting a sample.
His intent? Creating more super-soldiers for the United States of course. Howard was basically obsessed with recreating the serum: so were others - notably Ross.
It's also important to remember that at the time CW was written the Isaiah stuff hadn't been incorporated into the MCU yet.
So at the time they put that WS serum in Howard's trunk, Bucky was quite literally the only person he could've got that serum from!
(There was even a big hooha in the AC show about how all of Steve's blood samples had been used up by 1946, but Howard had stashed one for himself to make money off replicating serum. So it's completely in-keeping with his canon that he'd have Bucky's-blood serum and be sneaking off with it, and lying about him, for his own monetary gain!
My pet theory -- given that the Soviets have got Bucky, and the Red Book, but no serum -- is that perhaps Bucky was sold to them by Hydra at the end of the Cold War, with the expectation that serum would be included in the deal,,, but when that didn't materialise, they realised Howard had double-crossed them, taking the serum for himself. So they sent the Soldier to retrieve what they were promised, after Howard had retrieved it from the Pentagon, and kill Howard and his wife in retribution. Maybe she was Hydra too!)
What If? season 2 showed that not only did both Howard and Peggy know about Bucky, (they were able to recognise him as the WS with the mask still on, and talked about him being Bucky)
but they were both fine with using him as TWS (as they do in the episode),
and continuing to do nothing to help him, after.
(NEC hit the nail right on the head with that one!)
And of course in CW there's the fact that Howard:
a) recognised TWS as Bucky immediately
(despite them never interacting before, despite Bucky supposedly being dead for 50+ years, despite him looking completely different / having long hair obscuring his face, despite Howard being on a dark street at the time, and having a disorientating head wound and blood in his eyes when he sees him.)
and
b) showed absolutely no sign of surprise to see him, either!
.
And the problem with 'they've had Hydra's files for 2 years' is that they really should have had Hydra's files for longer than 2 years.
Because Tony put that bug on the helicarrier waaay back in Avengers 1 (pre-CATWS!) to see what Fury was hiding.
Tony said that once he finished downloading he'd know everything SHIELD knew, and then Steve found the Hydra guns.
And in the intervening years between CATWS and CACW, Tony and Steve have been hunting down the remnants of Hydra in Europe, with the Avengers (AOU).
Meaning that they had decrypted whatever Hydra files weren't already easily legible.
...So where did all that knowledge and suspicion go??
.
Sidenote: whatever else he was, MCU Howard was not abusive to Tony.
IIRC we have three scenes of them together:
1) (IM2) the footage where he's yelling at kid-Tony to get out because he's making a noise/disturbance in his office, which is just normal dad stuff. (But that's followed by a recorded message where he praises Tony as his greatest achievement, or something similar. Tony doesn't scoff as if he's hearing sweet hollow words from an abuser; he's moved, and later on he praises Howard.)
(Hey...that recorded message... that's a weird thing to do, when you think about it. Unless Howard knew he was going to die. Did Howard expect to be bumped off? It's exactly like Tony recording a post-death message with an aside to Morgan in it! Why wouldn't he just tell Tony this info -- about the discovered element and Tony being his greatest achievement -- when he's alive?)
2) (CW) with teenage Tony, in which they're not spending Christmas together but do otherwise seem perfectly happy and fine together -- cracking jokes and riffing, etc -- and Howard's wife shows zero signs of worry about them. And then Tony talks about regretting/mourning them... which is an odd stance to take if one/more of them is abusive.
3) (EG) Where they converse as adults, and Tony shows zero signs of being in the presence of someone who abused him, but rather being moved to see him and even hugging and thanking him! Talking about the pearls of wisdom he learned from him! No signs of fear or resentment, even while they're walking around Howard's secret Nazi AI bunker. đ€Šââïž
Tony also once mentions having a nanny into his teens, and of course named his AI after Howard's Butler... That would be an odd thing to do if his father was abusive, wouldn't you say?
The idea of Howard being a bad father is just Tony's retrospective claims about him being cold and not telling Tony he loves him... which don't tally with what we actually saw.
It sounds to me like the MCU Starks were just your typical rich folks who had staff raise their kid for them, and Tony has decided this is the same thing as parental neglect, which isn't necessarily the case.
(Given his resentful inferiority complex regarding Steve, just because Howard rightly praised him, I have to wonder if there's any amount of love his parents could have shown a narcissist like Tony, that he would consider enough.
When he said Howard talked about Steve a lot... I bet that's not true. I bet Howard just happened to mention Steve once or twice, and Tony's jealous ego inflated that to 'never shut up about him.' To a narcissist, praise of someone else is an insult.)
Like theyâre the flag bearer and strategy think tank for the strongest examples of religious interference in the law even if you see evangelicals and catholics making moves theyâre using the LDS playbook
The LDS church is directly responsible for organizing a decent chunk of "religious freedom" coalitions over the years. The primary reason why they don't get more flak for it is that they're primarily seen as a regional power both by outsiders and those living within the mormon corridor. Pretty much everyone who looks at Utah for even a couple of seconds understands that it's Like That because the mormons have to sign off on any proposed legislation, but then they'll just assume that this phenomenon is limited to Utah and that the church doesn't have any meaningful impact on anything outside of that bubble.
Ensign Peak alone is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, and the church regularly pours massive sums of cash into PACs throughout the nation in support of conservative political campaigns. The most tangible impact the LDS church has is on the wider political landscape of the US via its spearheading of attempts to replace public education with charters or home schooling, and yet the biggest criticism most people have about it is that those poor bastards in Utah will never get to experience the joys of recreational THC. Like, girl, one of the wealthiest, least financially transparent nonprofit organizations on the continent is constantly pouring money into the Heritage Foundation.
I cannot emphasize enough that the Church quite literally has overthrown election results in Utah. Like you all know this, right? Utah voted for some of the best, healthiest marijuana laws in the country that would have made chronic pain for millions disappear overnight and it passed by a LARGE margin. People were ecstatic. The election results came out and people were beyond excited. And the state refused to honor the fact that it passed because the Church simply told them not to. My friend was in the Capitol building and watched the legislator she worked for see before his very eyes that the law did not apply to these men and watched the election be overturned quietly. Politely. The law shifted and adjusted just enough that people wouldn't riot, but not in any way what was actually passed. Utah is the testing ground for controlling the narrative. The goddamn NSA has one of its biggest offices there.
You all know this, right? You know that when you mock people in Western states like Utah you're talking about people who live under theocratic laws that they didn't vote for and can't vote out of and gerrymandering so severe that despite the majority of voters in Utah being registered Democrats, it's blood red because they built it that way... right? You know this? Please tell me you know this.
And then once you tell me you know this, promise me that you will actually internalize that the red states are not your enemy, they are being held hostage.
This isn't specific to the church fucking about with politics, more the republicans actively working against the people - my sister has been keeping us apprised of the gerrymandering debacle that's been ongoing in Utah:
The people of Utah voted on and passed a ruling to have a neutral 3rd party draw up new voting districts back in 2018 (basically democratic districts were carved up to be ineffective so people wanted them fixed)
The legislature decided they didn't like that and decided to ignore the votes and keep doing what they were doing (bad gerrymandering)
League of Women voters took them to court and in July of 2024 the judge said, uh, actually, yeah, you have to do what was voted on/approved by the people
The court decided that they would meet for a special session to pass an amendment to the state constitution saying that, actually, if they didn't agree with something the people voted on/passed they wouldn't have to uphold that decision
They got taken to court again (surprise surprise)
In September 2024 the lower courts ruled once again that no, you can't just fucking do that, you're actively trying to deceive voters with your convoluted phrasing
They don't meet again until January so god knows what hijinks they'll come up with to keep the state voting districts fucked up
This is only ONE example of how red states will stop at nothing to suppress votes and prevent loss of power. Please please PLEASE make sure you are registered to vote and fight things like this when they happen!!
iâm american, i would rather you americanise your fic
iâm not american, i donât care
iâm not american, i would rather you americanise your fic
i have a different opinion (pls explain in tags!)
Voting ended onApr 8
âtrying to gage this - i personally think itâs unnecessary, as ao3 is not an american territory that im publishing into, but ive had comments before that lead me to think it takes people out of the story. let me know your thoughts! :)
by âamericaniseâ i mean purely in terms of vocab/grammar, for example the use of em dashes is different (in the uk we use -, in the us you use â), or you guys would say âapologizeâ rather than âapologiseâ
i agree that if a story is set in america, i wouldnât be writing âbloody hellâ and using âpavementâ instead of âsidewalkâ. i do think there is some nuance there!
i think you should write what you are comfortable with! it's way more jarring imo when a writer is clearly trying really hard to write a dialect they don't use vs if they write naturally for them even if it doesn't suit the setting.
if you are comfortable using american english when writing from the pov of an american character, or even to spoof the style of a specific american writer, that can add an extra amount of verisimilitude to the prose, but that's a level of effort i wouldn't expect from a fic writer. if you feel comfortable doing it, go for it! if not, stick to what you know.
if it's not a case of an american english speaking pov character, and if you don't want to recreate canon style/canon is not a written medium in american english, imo there is literally no reason to do this unless for some reason you want to pretend to be american.
Yeah, I wish there was an option for 'If you're not writing about American characters I would prefer that you didn't Americanise your fic'. And it's not that I want people to Britishify it to cater to me instead. I don't mind reading someone else's dialect of English - I already do that with all the copious US media I consume. Most of the fandom spaces I'm in are already mostly Americans. We don't need to artificially add more. Variety is good!
However, I would draw a personal line at, for example, Steve Rogers saying 'mum' or 'bloody hell'. Write however you want, but I'm clicking off in this scenario.
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Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as âproblematicâ in class and our professor was like, âThatâs cool, but âproblematicâ doesnât really mean anything. It means that the thing youâre describing has a problem, and in and of itself thatâs not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else itâs not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like youâre trying to say that this is bad, but you donât want to say âbad.â Is that right?â
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the âbadâ thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, âIâm uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.â
Once we stopped calling things âproblematicâ and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, âthatâs racistâ or âthatâs misogynisticâ or âew capitalism grossâ out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, âUhhh... Iâm not sure whatâs so bad?â and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I canât help but think of this professor being like, âGood starting point, now letâs get specific.â I think when we have to commit to saying âthatâs ___â it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever weâre claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes itâs art, and it should be full of problems, because thatâs what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
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Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, butâgiven the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild foodâcould there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think thatâs only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602â608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.
Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.
Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.
We are a social species. In order to cooperate enough to hunt meat, to find enough food, we have to work TOGETHER. We have to make a together.
The Thin Veneer Theory--the Christian one, the one that says humans are inherently violent--falls completely the fuck apart when you realise that we would not have survived if we were that violent. We just would not have! If you kill someone in your very small group--because we lived in very small groups at first, under 10 people--then you've lost someone's knowledge, their hands, their legs, their eyes, their HELP. Help that you are going to need! Makes no sense. Not even chimps, our most violent cousins, are this violent to one another across their species. Because it's impractical for a social animal.
But the data says otherwise as well. Humans help. From birth. Other social animals also help--not just their immediately family or their group, but even other species of animal from them. Helping is inherent to being an intelligent animal that lives in groups, it seems.
But if you don't want to believe all those experiments and data, that's fine. Believe your own DNA then. Unless you are from Subsaharan African peoples, you have more than one species of human in your DNA. This means at some point, your grandmother and grandfather found someone of a whole other species attractive. That's a fact. And we keep finding more species hidden in our DNA even now--I think the most recent one was Denisovian! I don't know HOW you could interpret THAT information as "humans are violent and hate strangers" because it wouldn't be there if two people of two different species hadn't fucked enough to make a baby that survived long enough to make another and so on down the millions of years to now. That's incredible stuff. That means MILLIONS of humans had cross-species relationships! That means our species is SO friendly that we willing to reach across species and make babies with someone else! That is an incredibly high amount of friendliness!!!
We are a motley of many species of human being. That alone should be proof enough that we are inherently so full up with the desire to Make Friends that we will do it over and over to strangers and other animals unlike ourselves. We domesticated one of our main predators. We were so friendly and kind to cats they decided to bring us their babies and we were so friendly and kind we took care of those babies and now we make images of cats and put them everywhere and share them with one another. Even animals we eat, we are kind to and even decide that some of our gods are in their image, and make rules that say "it is Forbidden to kill this animal in a way that brings it suffering, it is Forbidden by the gods to make this animal suffer while it is alive" in MANY religions.
I do not fucking know what kind fo miserable attitude makes you say that you truly believe your species--your species, which has buildings and roads, maps and schools, books and movies, holidays and parades, sports and medicine and everything ELSE that requires lots of cooperation--is inherently NOT cooperative, altruistic, friendly in nature. We wouldn't HAVE society if we weren't a species that LIKES to cooperate with others! We wouldn't have agriculture! We wouldn't have ANYTHING! It ALL required cooperation!
there is no one first ape to become the first human. the first humans are the apes that gathered around a pile of sticks, lit them on fire, and cooked some fruit over that fire.
"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane
one has you making posts like "okay but if the author UNDERSTOOD the POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS of the story they were telling, and leaned into it, it would actually be a really interesting exploration of..."
the other has you pacing your bedroom at one in the morning going "why. why would you ever in a million years do it like that. genuinely what possible thought process was involved. was the writer possessed by a fucking ghost or something."
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