Thing Ive Been Mulling Over For A While: Some Really Good YA Fantasy Novels Of My Childhood (Young Wizards-

Thing I’ve been mulling over for a while: some really good YA fantasy novels of my childhood (Young Wizards - no one who knows me is surprised by this) really emphatically gave me tools to understand and dismantle my own “white supremacist delusion,” as Sonya Renee Taylor puts it. The construction of the cosmos in these books formed my worldview at a really early age. They have helped me, decades later, to believe deeply and truly in both my own ability to support and uphold Evil in all of its guises, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘nice’ I may inherently see myself to be - and my own power to dismantle Evil in all its guises, within myself, as well as in the world beyond myself.

I was watching this IG live video where Taylor powerfully explains how important it is to shift from seeing whiteness as something intrinsically ours to possess rather than as the result of a dehumanizing system that we can - and in fact are ethically called upon to - uproot. I understand Taylor to be saying that I, as a person assigned power by whiteness, have a duty to continually identify and reject the delusions of whiteness starting with myself. 

There’s an image Taylor uses, in this video, of searching inside of yourself for the spaces where this toxic ideology of whiteness has taken hold - and to find and uproot it. And immediately I saw a climactic moment from High Wizardry, one where Dairine has a realization about how intimately entropy has its hold upon her:

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly…

I’m a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It’s in me too…

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning light-sabre, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable any more. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered […]

I’d hazard a guess that many of us have a primary conditioning to see evil precisely as “something outside to battle and cast down.” I say this about evil in general; I think it’s probably extra true for the ways that white people approach the evil of white supremacist delusion. I see it a lot with the teenagers that I now teach: the actively anti-racist white kids who really want to march, to have hard conversations with other people, to change laws, to show up at city hall meetings…and who don’t understand that, while those are all good and important things to be doing, if they are all you are doing, they will not be enough. They are all ways of seeing the problem as “something outside to battle and cast down” instead of as something that is LITERALLY “wearing [your] clothes, and [your] heart.”

The good news - also from High Wizardry - is the possibility of full and complete liberation on the other side of the recognition, and the reckoning that follows. The snatches of it glimpsed within this life, the work of widening the ground… The belief (which Duane’s world offered me, and which my Christianity never did) that even the one who dreamed Evil into being can be liberated and redeemed from it…and that that, and no less, is the scope of the work. 

(YW also taught me, perhaps most importantly of all, that this work is collective and done best when part of an ever-widening family / network / team.)

original textpost credits to @your-royal-momoness !!!

@rippledragon linked this to me and a good time is being had.

Recently finished Unhallowed by @jordanlhawk, and it was wonderful to be back in the eerie town of Widdershins again! Btw Nocturn Rune is my new fictional child, protect this muffin.^^^

千と千尋の神隠し

Hey um what. What goddamn business did Omashu have having a King?? Like I never really questioned it since it came from such an early Book One still-world-building episode but. Omashu is a city, for starters, and it’s a city in the Earth Kingdom. Which. You know. HAS a king. 

You know I bet, honestly, Omashu doesn’t have a king. And NEVER had a king. Omashu had a succession of Governors or some shit and on the day that Bumi took the mantle he said “Fuck this ‘Governor Bumi’ stuff that’s lame. Call me King.” and when his advisors said they can’t legally do that Bumi passed a law changing his title from Governor to King, stuck a crown on his head, and called it macaroni.

And the citizens of Omashu were probably just like “alright” cuz like. Bumi strikes me as the kind of Local Town Eccentric who has a working personal relationship with pretty much everyone so all 100,000 people of Omashu heard this decree of Kingship and went “yeah that tracks” and got on with their day.

Outside of Omashu though? Good god. That’s gotta be a fucking look. At this point 112-year-old Bumi has been ‘King’ for a lifetime longer than the actual Earth King. What a look. How much sleep do you think Long Feng loses about this??? How many assassination attempts do you think he tried to carry out, only to have the Dai Lee come crawling home with the imprint of Bumi’s face smashed into their armor and some rock candy stuffed into their socks?

Ba Sing Se adores its appearance of order and structure and hierarchy and I cannot even begin to imagine their Daily Hell of dealing with Omashu’s centenarian feast-loving candy-munching batshit unhinged and utterly unkillable pseudo-King. 

The Fire Nation taking over Omashu was probably the happiest goddamn day of Long Feng’s life.