hi everyone. does anybody else miss something they can never return to. anyone else being swallowed whole by grief. anyone else clinging to love as a life preserver
as a ukrainian currently living through a full-scale war, i was slapped by this post. but it’s also accurate
volunteers in bucha offering shelter to refugees from kherson makes me feel some kinda way
like this is not a “bad thing happens and then we recover” kind of story, there is never any time to wait for the bad thing to finish happening because it never does, so whatever you can do to recover you must do right now and keep doing it, and keep doing it, and keep doing it
so, russians destroyed the dam in the occupied nova kakhovka in ukraine, on june, 6.
we knew they mightdo it since they’ve occupied the region, since they’ve started shelling our infrastructure (it’s easy to translate this text), and they did it, and now situation is pretty bad. for people, for animals, for ecosystem, for nuclear safety, etc.
the city was occupied by russians, liberated, and shelled regularly since, and now it’s this, in kherson and regions around it. almost 1,5k houses were flooded yesterday on the right bank of kherson oblast (liberated). who knows how more are flooded in the occupied regions of the district on the left bank (there, russians do not allow people to evacuate.)
what can you do? donate.
here is a carrd for foreigners with organizations helping on the ground, too (it’s right on top)
here is a google doc with other grassroots helping kherson region
i’m begging you not to donate to UN/international red cross/etc. they’re useless, and yesterday, instead of addressing the disaster, they decided to celebrate day of russian language. just don’t even bother. this money will be spent on drinking latte in kyiv and photographs with a disaster as a backdrop three weeks later what it’s too late. please, give money to the volonteers on the ground.
what else you can do?
read ukrainian sources on the subject (kyiv independent is pretty good. yeah it’s not leftist, but it’s created by ukrainians and it’s not another english source that bothsides this story.)
snyder wrote a good thread about international media coverage of this event. it’s on point.
listen to ukrainians. when musk and twitter shadowbans ukrainian activists while boosting russian propaganda and tucker carlson (or whatever he’s called), it’s increasingly important to listen to ukrainians.
-
to all the people who feel the urge to start bothsiding in my replies: don’t.
wrote a little thing about genshin asogi talking to klimt and barok, pre-horrors.
(it’s all polyamory (without barok; barok may suffer in gay and silence) because i can’t care for adultery.)
(headcanoning genshin arriving at britain and being like *waves hand at all the repression* bitch? you live like this? mikotoba has it so much better, honestly)
(listen, i know things with male-male desire in japan got bad after meji restoration kicked off, but not *that* bad.)
(Barok, ten years later, reading some sort of Eastern World magazine about “Tokyo students’ perversive attitudes”: Of Course They Are. Of Course.)
(Barok, after 2-5: Well, Shit. Well, Fuck.) (nothing hits quite like the narrative of a character who has all their prejudice laid bare and hates himself for it.)
like many in the fandom (as far as i see) i do think there’s a high probability barok sends kazuma the letter that changes his life (the only other option is strongheart, but i don’t think strongheart knows he can use kazuma until kazuma comes to jigoku with a letter, so, kazuma is not a worry of him; all other members of the judiciary have genshin judged with a mask on, and i don’t believe his defence - however flimsy it might be - was a relative of the professor’s victims).
five years after the attacks on the “reaper” exhaust him, perhaps after he gets his face scars, he is like - that’s it. i’ll draw myself one last case for retribution, a final case, a finish line. and that’s it. he writes to kazuma, and collects newspaper clippings, and says, “okay, son of a man that killed the light in my life, come to london and let me see and destroy my brother’s murderer’s legacy.” he sends the letter and goes into retirement for five years, until he receives the message that his summons worked. perhaps, during these five years, he would ponder on professor’s case and think of all the inconsistencies and stew in hate and self-hatred and dream of vindication, of closure, of something that would make bearing it easier.
i wonder what it feels like, to receive the news of kazuma’s death and then to see another japanese student with genshin’s sword, sworn to fulfill asogi’s will. i don’t remember if ryuunoske shares this sentiment with him or perhaps strongheart lets it slip, but, i imagine, barok has a pretty good theory on what this “kazuma’s will” is. something something a dream of final showdown/confrontation/vengeance that was taken away from you by a stupid accident in the middle of the ocean. there’s nothing else.
and then, of course, kazuma comes, contradictory, “i didn’t come to london to murder anyone” but relentless and tunnel-visioned and scared and enraged with the desire to see barok answer for the murder of his father, - and the truth is revealed and doesn’t make anything easier. perhaps he thinks about how his letter made kazuma drawn in hatred as well, perhaps he thinks on how that was what he wanted. he thinks that the letter led asougi to jigoku and right into strongheart’s clutches, and there they were, both of them, clutched.
perhaps it was a drunk, impulsive decision, perhaps not - but in the end, after ryuunoske walks both of them into the light, i think, barok cannot help but blame himself for that, too.
[Screenshot from Queering the Map, the mark in Zhytomyr region I Ukraine, saying “If I knew bombs would have rained down on us the following morning, I would have never stopped kissing your fragile skin the night before”.]
massive r*ssian missile strike on my city. at least six explosions, some close enough to shake windows in my apartment. hands are shaking for the first time since summer, i think.
saw the video of r*ssians from the district that borders mine excitedly watching the outgoing rockets.
i watched the entirety of m9 in spring of last year during sirens and russ*an bombs and news of russ*an torture and occupation of my country (again). when a large part of my city was destroyed, and i was sitting with my mother in a small flat in central Ukraine (it was bombed, too. nothing is truly safe here). mighty nein got me through the worst of it (yet). helped me adjust my psyche to new, twisted reality. now i’m back in my city, there are less bombs, and i hope i will be alive when animated series shows up. hope my spouse and my friends will be alive, to see me babbling about my hyperfixation. i am so happy they’ve managed to find collaborators for it. i am so happy & hopeful for the future of cr multiverse. i hope i live to see it. hope i’ll survive
living A Life in war is freaking surreal. after 2014 and the way i was displaced i thought war was something like a shadow - walking in your steps, something in a corner of your eye; although i lost my home, the war was still far away from me. i wish i’d done better by those who were closer to it; i understand them now.
last year – this year – it will be almost a year since the full-scale invasion, which is insane for me – it stopped being a shadow. not something that disappears in midday. (i do realize that it has never been a shadow for those from the east of the country; it has never been a shadow for those in occupation; i was privileged in this perception – a privilege to withdraw; paint the war as a far-away horror; so close – when i’ve volunteered in a hospital in ‘15, it was so close, – and yet, not this close.)
it’s visceral now. it’s fear that i walk with along the streets. i see the war everywhere when i look at the world with my eyes open and when they’re shut. the war is in broken buildings. in evening darkness – we mostly have no streetlights, especially here, 20km from r*ssia. in closed shops. in air raid alarms, constant. in sounds of the automobiles outside that make everything tense. in reports of our dead. constant funerals. constant grief. there’s no going out of it.
any moment, you can die. you can take precautions not to die but that doesn’t guarantee you won’t die. there is this funny two-wall rule for missile strikes – to save yourself from a missile attack if you don’t have a proper bomb shelter near your house – hide somewhere where there will be two walls between you and the window. two wall rule won’t save you from the russ*an missile created to sink fucking warships. this is just the reality. you can hide in a bomb shelter and die from hypothermia while emergency services clean up the rubble from the destroyed houses.
but this was a post about surreality, and that isn’t the war that makes life surreal. what makes life surreal is that it keeps going.
20 km from the border, air raid alarms every day, electricity issues, threats to my close and precious people, those in occupation, those volunteering; the district nearby was de-occupied at the end of summer. there’s so much desolation to the north of my city, villages destroyed – which people still live in. volunteers are helping them get through the winter, but they do live, hoping to rebuild. all this death and darkness and – god, i wish more people knew r*ssian to see the genocidal shit i’m reading sometimes on the internet – and, you know. all this.
and in the middle of this, i am still worrying about rent, my job, my salary. i was (am) lucky to keep it, even though i hate it deeply. i bring pie to a friend who has been sad lately. i watch shows. i watch critical role. i read. i try to start exercising a little. i donate. i think about what plants im going to grow in the spring. i stop eating meat. i try to sort plastic even though there’s literally no place where i could bring it in the city, all facilities that i know about are closed. i post on tumblr ffs.
my friend tries to get a job in a major it company and they refuse him because “it’s clear that he wants the job for money.” a new beer shop opened near my flat, and it occurs that their previous location was in the town that was de-occupied recently but their entire accounting papers are still lost.
people that are not in Ukraine often react in two ways: they either think there’s total destruction everywhere in the country (“how can you write on the internet if everything is that bad?”) or say things like “well, why can’t you fly here, what do you mean it took you two days to get to Name European City.” well because we don’t have planes here, Miranda. russ*ans may shoot missiles at them. they already did, actually, a few years ago, and god how many death could have been prevented if the international community™ reacted back then.
it’s much more complex than these two things. you can die at any moment, and yet you live – for now. someplace, it’s destruction and wasteland – and someplace, it’s matcha lattes and other shit. and you gotta do something with that life while you have it. it’s being fought for so hard.
Now that season 2 of TLoVM is coming let me tell you that it took me 8 episodes to realise that in the intro (kinda spoilers for the show and campaign 1) that it starts with a raven and golden threads that spread between the VM members and that each one looks up when their thred is around except for Vax.
And each time I’m not okay
same…
(and scanlan stretching his hand towards his thread because of the wish spell?)
ALT
