Sarouslittleworlds - I Try My Best...

“Dobby and Draco are being released tomorrow!”

(Source)

I wanted to refrain from being overly-negative, and then spent some time trying to figure out what I wanted to say, but I need this out for my own sanity so  here goes.

Jodie Whittaker deserved better. She deserved better scripts, better characterisation, better stories. She deserved to be remembered not just for being the first female doctor, but for being the Doctor. She deserved better than such wishy-washy characterisation and for her incarnation to have been marked by conflicting and downright questionable morality. She deserved big iconic moments like Eccleston’s “Everybody lives”, Tennant’s “I’m the man who’s going to save your lives and all 6 billion planet on the people below”, Smith’s “Hello. I’m the Doctor.” and Capaldi’s “personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird”. She deserved actual relationships with her companions beyond the surface level “we’re friends now”. Relationships like the warm, bantering companionship of Ten and Donna, the blossoming, wound-healing friendship like Nine and Rose, the mentor/mentee relationship of Twelve and Bill, or the found family dynamic of Eleven and the Ponds. She deserved the darkness, depth, complexity and nuance that was afforded her predecessors, to go too far and have to be pulled back. She deserved to struggle, to not be right all the time, to fight and to almost give up, and after all that deserved to pull herself up and be brilliant, be mad, be the Doctor.

I will always love and appreciate Jodie for all she did. She gave everything to this role, and I just wish this role had given everything to her.

Alia Bhatt as Roop Chaudhry in KALANK (2019)

This is the best thing I've read today. Everyone wants a piece of Mobius, Loki is gonna be the jealous one next

Able-bodied leftists NEED to change the way they talk about service labor.

They'll talk over and over again about treating workers with respect and shit but then treat service work as inherently humiliating or exploitative, as if that inherently reduced those workers to feudal servants or some shit who need to be freed not of capitalist abuses, but of service itself.

"Who would want to service others?!" Well, bitches, if I had the physical capacity for it and the conditions under which service labor exists in a capitalist society weren't so deplorable, I would!

I already do a lot of things for my also physically disabled family that, if I wasn't related to them and they were paying me, would absolutely count as care and service work. I like it! I enjoy servicing others when I'm treated by them with respect and a minimum of reciprocity.

There will ALWAYS be people who'll need service labor from others, no matter how utopic of a communist society. Children, the sick and injured, elderly people, and disabled people will always exist. Even if you try to breed disabled people out, we will keep reappearing over and over again, no matter how many fetal genetic testings you develop and how many of us you sterilize and murder.

What are you gonna do about us in a communist society? Are we supposed to magically become able-bodied and not need accommodations once the revolution arrives? Are you going to kill us so we don't demand Awful labor that you deem too low for anybody to perform? Why do you see service as inherently humiliating and exploitative?

If you feel perfectly ok using devices made with child labor and wearing clothes made by sweatshop workers because "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism", why is that different when disabled people pay for service labor in a capitalist society?

Why are WE different? Why is your need to tweet on a device made with child labor and wear cute clothes made in sweatshops more ethically justifiable than, I don't know... A person who can't leave their house getting FOOD delivered to them? FUCKING FOOD. An actual vital necessity. Why is it that when able-bodied leftists can't escape the unethical nature of capitalism that's ok, but when disabled people can't escape it EVEN HARDER because we LITERALLY HAVE NO CHOICE then we're the enemies of the working class?

Get a fucking grip. Service labor and care labor aren't inherently exploitative, they turn exploitative under exploitative systems, and some people will always need that from others TO SURVIVE. Not to be whimsical lazy parasites, TO SURVIVE.

Service labor is just as noble and beautiful as producing needed material goods or working the land, it's NECESSARY for any and all societies, and just like disabled people have a right to complain when healthcare workers fail us, we have a right to complain when service workers fail us because it's not a fucking whim to us, IT'S JUST AS VITAL AS MEDICAL CARE.