Omgg Tag Me When It's Out✨

here's a list of things that are ACTUALLY a result of capitalism but people feel like they're not:

•racism

•global warming

•homelesness

•poverty

•war

•class war

•education inequality

•pollution

•sexism

•imperialism

•colonialism

•slavery

•ableism

•immigration

•health insurance

•nature as a commodity

•concept of failure and success

•actual food lines

•destruction of the world

i can trace EVERY problem in the world back to capitalism. and now capitalism is very clearly failing in the middle of a pandemic & folks arent communist, socialist, or anarchist yet??? how y'all living?

dragging myself thru a fic with Ron Bashing bc it's not too bad otherwise, but the entire Extremely Warped Personality to the Point of OOC, ordeal . . . is making me feel like a war veteran reliving my comrade being butchered to death right in front of me

people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.

i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money. 

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”

every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.

team voltron and aspects of alienation

I've seen aspects of "not-belonging" in analyses of Lance and Keith's characters and I'd like to shed light on how it's a sentiment that's very well nestled in every member of Voltron.

Starting off with the alienation (ha, get it) that is most flesh out in canon, we have Keith. From the very beginning the show, Voltron is divided into three factions: the Alteans, the Garrison trio, and Keith and Shiro. Keith has trouble mingling with the trio due to Lance's harsh front towards him, and has slight trouble mingling with the alteans due to cultural divisions and difference in views. Then he finds out he's half-Galran and Shiro is removed from the equation, which removes him further from the team. He gains a sense of disconnect from the team due to his heritage, his lack of bonds, and his belief that he's a failure of a leader.

Lance's disassociation from the team is more subtle. It comes from his views of inferiority and the idea that he doesn't contribute to Voltron. Unlike Keith, his sense of alienation comes more from what he does rather than who he is. He doesn't believe himself to be skilled enough, and when he throws himself into gaining skill, he finds that he's not achieving enough. He finds himself becoming more and more irrelevant as time passes, as if he is blending into the background.

The divide between Allura and the team is a storyline that we were robbed of. It's so plainly laid out for the writers to pursue- the cultural differences between Alteans and humans, the unity the humans feel towards each other that they extend to her in friendship to no avail, as she doesn't understand it. The other paladins will not know the part of the war that she knows. They will not know the loss she knows.

Perhaps she finds comfort in Coran. But even the split between her and Coran may grow as she becomes a paladin and he remains support for Voltron. They're still close and they still care for each other, but the way you fight in a war, the things you see, they can define and shape you. War looks different from different angles. Coran has never been in a pilots seat. Hes never been in the mind meld. And he doesn't need to do these things to have a bond with the people he cares about, but he still may feel the distance in his mind.

Hunk's sense of isolation from the team was also something we were robbed of, but were were also robbed of everything when it comes to Hunk. There is a huge difference in drive and fight when it comes to Hunk versus the rest of the paladins. He is unable to throw himself so deeply into the fight it just- it scares him! And I'm sure it scares everyone else too, but can Hunk see that? He sees the way everyone else stands tall and fights and goes into battle and training every single day, and he doesn't feel made for that. He doesn't want to do that. And it makes him feel guilty for not having the "passion" everyone else does even though his heart is in his actions, but at the same time he constantly feels sick.

Shiro is someone who has been both physically and emotionally distanced from Voltron. His kidnappings have shaped and transformed him- but it's not only that he's changed, Voltron has changed while he's gone too. Shiro has left and come back to an entirely different team filled with people who have changed so much because that's what war does, it changes you. There are months of Pidge, Hunk, Lance, Allura, and Coran that he's missed and years of Keith that he's missed. And they'll welcome him with open arms, but it doesn't change the fact that he doesn't feel like he knows them as well as they know each other.

Lastly, there's Pidge. Pidge is a fundamental anchor of Voltron as she produces so much technology to aid the war effort. She throws herself into her work so much that it consumes her, and this ends up eating away at her connections a little bit. There's also the fact that the technological battle she's fighting to combat Galran interfaces and invention rates is a fight that the rest of the team aren't exactly a part of. They can support her, but ultimately it is only she that can do the work she does. This puts a lot of pressure on her and compels her to do even more. She spends so much time working that she misses so much with the others.

The point I'm trying to make is not that Voltron isn't close or that they aren't a family, but that they themselves might not feel close to the team they love. And it's not a sense of isolation felt by one or two members, but instead by all of them equally. I think that dreamworks could've really worked with this dynamic to show the fact that war can make people grow apart (opposite to how a lot of media shows war bringing people together; both are themes that can be explored). Dreamworks could've also taken this opportunity to let the characters grow as individuals and then come together as an even stronger team.

"why the fuck am i into this freak"

"i need to know what's wrong with him. not in a weird way. in . . a scientific way; a purely academic need"

enemies-to-psychosexually obsessed with each other. more of that

“sorry haha, i was just seeking attention.”

asenora i will listen to anything you have to say about these characters ever. please tell us what the tea is with dron

as i rummage through the backlog of messages in my inbox the thing that i have discovered is that you girlies [gender neutral] are absolutely clamouring for citizenship of dron nation.

[thank you to @spectral-kitty, @thesilverstarling, and two mystery anons!]

to which i say, the borders are open, baby. you just have to read the following manifesto:

why fandom needs to stop sleeping on dron

something i am continually banging on about, as regular readers know, is the harry potter series' fondness for assigning [male] characters to narrative mirror pairings.

exploring these pairings is interesting in and of itself without a romantic dimension being involved - i could talk for hours about the mirrored approach to guilt and grief in snape and sirius' characterisation - but it's also true that several of the most interesting ships which can be drawn [however non-canonically] from the text are between the two halves of each mirror pairing.

tomarrymort is the obvious one, snack [or starprince or snirius or whatever we're calling it] is starting to get the attention it deserves, but people are still sleeping on draco malfoy/ron weasley [and also, may i say, on lucius malfoy/arthur weasley and narcissa malfoy/molly weasley], largely - i fear - due to the sheer popularity of drarry and dramione.

i'll be honest that i really don't like dramione, and i'm generally ambivalent towards drarry, but i do love dron. and the narrative mirror aspect is entirely the reason why.

ron and draco begin the series as mirror archetypes within the genre conventions of a children's boarding school romp. ron is the loyal, humble sidekick of the everyman protagonist, draco is the everyman protagonist's posh, stuck-up rival. both are insiders to the world of the story - whereas harry, the reader surrogate, is not - who introduce harry to the positive and negative aspects of the wizarding world respectively.

as a result, ron and draco are mirrors in terms of personality, and are much more similar to each other than either is to harry or hermione. this doesn't, of course, preclude ronarry [a ship i adore] or romione [which i've defended here] or drarry or dramione [if ya nasty], but it introduces a specific - and very interesting - tension into the pairing which is absent from these other ships.

both ron and draco have shared positive traits - they're both loyal [and their loyalty is very practical and pragmatic - ron is not hagrid, whose faith in e.g. dumbledore is totally unwavering; draco is not bellatrix, whose faith in voldemort is the same], they're both highly observant, they're both quick-witted, they're both capable of doing the right thing - if not always immediately [which is, in fact, more admirable than being preternaturally willing to suffer and sacrifice], and so on.

they also have shared negative traits. they're both attention-seeking [ron fucking loves nearly being knifed by sirius and you just know draco was seething], self-aggrandising, insecure, sulky, and predisposed to jealousy.

and this is a gift for authors, because it means that dron butt heads in a relationship in ways which allow for real character growth... or otherwise.

one issue that i have with drarry is that it often feels like the change either one goes through within a fic is kind of out of character. for example, you have a harry who feels insecure and haunted by his ill-treatment of draco [this is a man whose response to committing attempted murder is to be raging that it reduces the time he has free to hit on ginny], or a harry who is chasing after a cool and sophisticated draco who eventually learns to open up [whereas if there's two things draco isn't, it's someone who keeps his thoughts to himself and someone who isn't a distinctly unsophisticated flop].

dron, however, react to conflict in the same way - which means that the two of them finding themselves in conflict with each other absolutely slaps. they also have similar levels of emotional intelligence, and are likely - if they're inclined to - to be able to communicate with each other and work through issues surprisingly effectively. they can be a mess, or they can be a happy-ever-after, and i like that in a ship.

but, while ron and draco are mirror archetypes, they are specifically children's literature mirror archetypes. ron's role as harry's guide to the world diminishes in the later books, as the series' horizons move beyond hogwarts to think about wizarding society and voldemort's impact upon it more widely [he is replaced by characters such as dumbledore]; while harry becomes considerably less bothered by the pettiness of draco's rivalry with him [concerned as it is with things like being good at quidditch and getting away with misbehaviour at school] as the enemies he's focused on shift to being the resurrected voldemort and his death eaters.

which is to say that dron makes considerably more sense within a hogwarts setting than drarry.

as i've said elsewhere, an issue i have with drarry is that it's frequently written in a way which suggests that harry and draco have a mutual obsession with each other - while the actual evidence of canon is that, while draco is [as his archetype demands] preoccupied with what harry's doing, harry rarely gives the impression of caring what his rival is up to unless directly compelled to by draco's own attention-seeking.

ron, in contrast, spends a lot of time noticing things about draco unprompted - he can, for instance, recall overhearing him boasting offhand about what broom he owns in philosopher's stone - and retaining this information in order to deploy it at the opportune time to get a rise out of him. he delights constantly in his misfortune [him being hyped for days because draco's annoyed harry gets a firebolt is beautiful]. he's ready to throw hands with him at any given opportunity, often giving those of us who thrive on cheap innuendo plenty of material in the process [draco finds himself, for example 'on all fours, banging the ground with his fist' after having ron's wand pointed in his face... same, girl.] and he tends to consider draco much more integral to the various shenanigans which take place in the castle than harry does [ron is the main proponent of the 'draco malfoy is the heir of slytherin' theory in chamber of secrets - and he is shook when draco reveals that he's wrong].

and draco does the same. he comes into the trio's compartment on the train in goblet of fire and immediately starts telling ron how unfashionable his dress robes are. he obsesses over ron's position as gryffindor keeper for months - and, of course, makes up a song about it, which isn't exactly helping him pull off 'i don't think about you at all', is it? - and ron is profoundly affected by the taunts in way that harry, who doesn't really care what draco thinks of him, isn't. and he constantly goes out of his way to provoke ron into trying to punch him [him shoulder-barging ron in half-blood prince just after harry's essentially outed him as a death eater in madam malkins... exquisite pettiness].

all of which is to say, their interactions feel very teenage and petty and silly all the way through to the end of half-blood prince in a way that draco's interactions with harry and hermione don't, and - therefore - i sincerely think that dron can be made to work much more plausibly as a pairing in fics set while the characters are at school.

my final point in favour of dron is that they mirror each other in their approach to their other relationships, and the tension this causes is really interesting to explore.

both ron and draco have mirrored attitudes towards their place within their own families - something neither harry nor hermione can have with draco for obvious reasons. ron is one of many siblings and feels overlooked in the crowd; draco is an only child and feels overburdened by the visibility, especially once his father is sent to azkaban. they both conform to behaviours expected of them by family [they are both in the same hogwarts house as generations of their family, they share their families' political views etc.]. they are of the same social class and their families both have a reasonably similar level of political influence [despite what we're told about his insignificance, arthur weasley is known to everyone in the ministry and he's able to throw his weight around to influence policy even before the promotion he receives in half-blood prince], but their material circumstances are divergent. they both heavily resemble their fathers - to the extent that they are immediately recognisable as each man's son - and spend their schooldays defending family honour by playing out lucius and arthur's own petty feud [lucius and arthur - and, indeed, narcissa and molly - are also narrative mirrors, and we deserve many more enemies-to-lovers fics featuring them]. and the course their lives take during the war is dictated as much by their role within their families as it is by their relationship with harry - the scrambling post-dumbledore order operating out of the burrow is a mirror image of the ascendant voldemort operating out of malfoy manor.

they are also obviously defined by their mirrored relationship with harry - most interestingly by a major similarity in their attitude towards him: that both struggle with how jealous they are of harry.

this leads to lots of excellent tension which just isn't possible in drarry or dramione. how do both sets of parents react to the news their sons are in love? how do ron and draco's relationships with harry change as they find each other? how does draco cope with the hustle and bustle of life at the burrow? how does ron deal with having to have dinner at the manor [particularly interesting because the world in which draco lives is one that's familiar to him - he's not going to be shocked by any of the weird stuff in that house, he knows how it all works, so he can ruin christmas by deciding to have his dad arrest lucius for fun instead]?

it's messy, and fun, and it sustains me.

and some recs for the lads?

collateral damage by @danpuff-ao3, which starts out with both of the lads working out their... issues with harry and ends with declarations of going to lunch with each other's mothers.

dance the night away (aka it's true love, you bastards) by evandar, which has as its premise ron and draco ending up, largely by accident, going to the yule ball together.

this great stage of fools by @nanneramma, which correctly demonstrates how ron is charming enough that him being supremely annoying is actually loveable.

i knew this conceptually, but like you dont really KNOW that public school is designed to set you up to be a good worker bee until you're cracking out a report, after hours, at 7 pm on a monday night and it hits you; oh, i'm doing homework, this is why they made me do homework, and suddenly i'm feeling it in my chest. i cant believe i was raised by the state to be an automaton, and worse, i am one of the lucky robots who isn't doing manual labor.