Sorry, I'm Not There Yet

So.

Such joy at avoiding the comparison...
Image from Tenor.com, used for commentary.

 

At the moment, I'm not amid any rewatches or rereads (other than the ongoing Hobb one), my daughter's watching YouTube life-hack videos, my wife's largely watching other things and reading for work, and my own media consumption is more or less in that same line. Consequently, I've been casting about for things about which to write. An online friend of mine--goes by Box--suggested that I might try to read Skeletor as an iteration of Æþelræd Unræd, and I looked into that possibility; while it could be argued that He-Man is a strange iteration of tropes regarding Danes, putting Skeletor in even such a position as Ironside's father would be a stretch even I am not willing to try.

Too, as I was doing some idle reading, I came across one of what I have found are many private projects positing what the United States might come to look like after an unspecified event resulted in the loss of modern technologies--a feudal America, as it is described. It piqued my interest initially, as could be expected; it'd certainly be a tale after Tolkien, and it's the kind of thing of which no few RPG settings are made (and, honestly, the concept's one that'd be interesting to play in). But as I reviewed the project and its author, I noted some...problems in it--not the relative age of the source, no, because I can work with things done in good faith that have simply been superseded by new information, but in some of the associations and assertions. I'm not linking it here for those reasons.

Honestly, there are enough problems with the medieval, broadly conceived, being deployed by hate groups to bolster execrable ideologies--and it is clear that there are more such groups doing more foul work that should be tolerated. How wrong such things are is amply and abundantly attested by far more intelligent and capable scholars than I--Mary Rambaran-Olm, Dorothy Kim, Adam Miyashiro, Jonathan Hsy, and others--whose work is well worth reading and investigating. I do what I can to address well-meaning errors in my groups; people make honest mistakes, working from information that has been superseded or that they accepted in good faith from people who did not act in the same. And, here, at least, I continue to call for the repudiation of hateful, wrong-headed ideologies that try to prop up systems of oppression and unwarranted violence; I may not be able to raise my hand against the evils of the world, but I can, at least, join others in raising my voice against them.