Yes. A true sympathetic villain, which is very hard to do by Hollywood writers. In the episode where she is talking to Mama and Pete made it clear she is a victim of environment. And the fact that Mama knew she was being raped by her own brother, and did nothing to help.
She is evil yes. What she said and meant about Tilda were horrific but understandable. And Tilda being the one to kill Mariah AMAZING. Anyway, I can see why many won’t like her, hell I don’t, but I see her evilness as deep seeded pain more so than Bushmaster. There is something about a girl being raised in a whorehouse being raped by the only one who said she was pretty is something I am sympathetic to.
I could write a whole thesis on why Mariah is one of the most sympathetic villains to date & why the audience will cape for everybody above her. I already see the slanted twist woobifying Shades. Why? When he was at the scene of the crime every damn time! And I love that twisted dynamic! Equals to the End! Mariah is just too much for a lot of people. They want to lay the crimes of her family at her feet since they’re all dead – and when she doesn’t behave like a shrinking victim they then feel justified to brow beat her into submission and defeat. Isn’t it just another off shoot of the ways women pay for not being ‘the perfect victim’. She’s a villain and a victim. The 2 things can coexist and Alfre does it beautifully!
THIS. This season, the characters blamed everything on Mariah, acting like she’s this ancient evil that’s been destroying Harlem for hundreds of years, when she’s actually only just come into power. Aside from Bushmaster laying the entire family’s sins at her feet, the most most egregious instances of #BlameMariah were:
– Luke blaming her for his punching a hole in Claire’s wall. Misty actually co-signed this shit.
– She reveals this tragic history of abuse/neglect to her daughter, the product of said abuse, and this daffy bish Tilda responds by calling her a monster. How could your heart not break for Mariah after that? Of course she could and should have made better choices, but she literally never had a chance at a happy, functional life
I know certain people find themselves incapable of sympathizing with black people, but it really fucks me up that people can’t see how broken she was.
Yes! @ghostridetheship it was really excessive and overboard. Like they felt we didn’t get she was a villain last season. Or they felt she wasn’t a compelling enuff villain as is and had to really lay on the point that on a chessboard of villains Mariah’s the worst of the worst. Crazy or not – when Mariah says Shades made her there’s a lot of truth in that. After killing Cornell she was in such a state she was done for. Maybe an attorney could have gotten her by with a self defense charge. But Shades intervened with his own agenda. And everytime she tried to grieve and move on he popped up and threw her to the sharks and waited to see if she came out alive. That kind of intense continued trauma would unravel the strongest mind. Then he says she lost her heart – but thats how Mariah has always coped with trauma. She turns off a part of herself just like she dealt with her rape, the child of that rape and her guilt over killing Cornell. But we can’t find a smidge of sympathy that would be lavished on her if she were male? Remember how people were capping for that lunatic Cornell cause Mabel didn’t let him pursue his music. And now Shades (god love him) led astray by his love for an ungrateful Mariah (hahaha). Yes I sympathize with both – it just irks me too see the crumbs of empathy thrown Mariah’s way from the seeming unending buffet laid out for the other villains of this show and others. As long as they’re male of course.
3/12/17, 10:30 PM CET Updated 3/15/17, 2:21 PM CET
KIEV, Ukraine — When “little green men” invaded Crimea in the spring of 2014, Russian media went into overdrive, smearing Ukraine’s Euro-revolution as a “fascist coup d’état.”
A group of professors and students struck back and unwittingly made history that spring when they launched StopFake.org, the first site to directly tackle and refute Russian propaganda. Now that the rest of the world has woken up to the Kremlin’s disinformation tactics, the journalism school crew behind StopFake have emerged as the “grand wizards” of the fake-news-busting world.
“There was a growing avalanche of propaganda from Russia seeking to reframe the narrative in the Kremlin’s favor, and we urgently needed to counterbalance that,” says Yevhen Fedchenko, the dean of Kiev Mohyla University’s journalism faculty and one of the founders of StopFake.
The site quickly gained a cult following by exposing false facts in anti-Ukraine Russian news reports. An aggrieved mother whose child was reportedly “crucified” by Ukrainian troops was “outed” as a popular Russian television actress in an article that was shared 11,000 times and later referenced in a press conference with Putin.
As a journalist covering Ukraine during the post-2014 barrage of Russian propaganda, I remember how the Kremlin’s fake news stories infected our most private moments and reframed the narrative.
But it was only after last year’s presidential election in the U.S. — when Russian fake news and cyberattacks were blamed for swaying the election in Donald Trump’s favor — that the site burst on to the global stage.
Almost overnight, the founders of StopFake went from provincial do-gooders to international media stars. Fedchenko and his colleagues were lauded at conferences and plied with offers of consulting work by nervous European governments. They now organize media workshops across the Continent, offering guidelines on recognizing and debunking Russian propaganda.
[…]
As the West scrambles to get a handle on the Kremlin’s propaganda tactics, Ukraine for once finds itself in a privileged position. Ukrainians lived through the Soviet Union, speak fluent Russian and can sift through Russian-language sites for clues about the inner workings of the Kremlin’s fakes news operations. They know the sites pumping out Kremlin disinformation and might even have met some of their editors in the past.
The site Ukraina.ru, for example — a Russian-language site from Moscow that peddles false anti-Ukraine stories — recently offered one of StopFake’s freelancers a full-time position.
“He turned down the job of course, even though the salary was very high,” says Fedchenko, who knows the editor-in-chief, a man who spent a few years in Kiev before the Maidan revolution. “We traced their offices to a building in Moscow that also houses other Kremlin-friendly sites like Sputnik and RIA Novosti.”
New urgency
As a journalist covering Ukraine during the post-2014 barrage of Russian propaganda, I remember how the Kremlin’s fake news stories infected our most private moments and reframed the narrative.
I recall an incredulous taxi driver telling me that a recent client from Moscow had insisted that the MH17 flight, which was downed over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, had been “stuffed with dead bodies.” He refused to pay the fare until the driver agreed with his version of events.
Fake reports alleged that the Ukrainian air force had targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plane, which flew over the same region as MH17 one hour earlier. A journalist friend who was briefly detained in eastern Ukraine said the separatist soldiers had been incredulous the West could so openly support Kiev’s “fascist junta.”
Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s repeated assertions that there are no Russian troops or weapons involved in the conflict has created a convenient narrative for those who prefer to label it a “civil war” and not an act of Russian aggression.
Ukrainians are also intimately aware of the dangers of Russian propaganda, and the way it can infect the body politic with its dark messages.
Chopping the air feverishly with his hands, Fedchenko emphasizes that contemporary Russian propaganda had no inherent ideology and appealed to people’s basest instincts.
“Their messages are very fluid and seek to divide societies against themselves,” he says. “The Kremlin is against all international organizations like the NATO or the EU, and prefers that each country is forced to fend for itself.”
StopFake’s dire warnings about Russian propaganda and its nefarious designs have taken on new urgency in the context of upcoming presidential elections in both Germany and France, where there has been much talk about Kremlin disinformation campaigns against anti-Russian candidates.
Fedchenko explains that the case of the German-Russian teenager, Lisa — whose supposed rape by Muslim immigrants sparked mass protests by Germany’s millions-strong Russian community last year — was a classic example of Russian propaganda.
“They fabricated a rape to inflame passions among Russian speakers in Germany and discredit Merkel,” he says.
During a recent presidential campaign in Moldova, Russians also spread fake reports labeling the pro-European candidate a lesbian and accusing her of supporting “mass Muslim immigration.”
The pro-Kremlin candidate won the election.
Ukraine can’t turn back time. But for the rest of the Western world, it might not yet be too late. The government in Kiev has many Russian media outlets to counter fake news. And indeed, Fedchenko’s biggest regret is that “Ukraine hadn’t switched off Russian television 20 years ago.”
His eyes briefly become misty as he imagines a country completely free from the taint of Russian propaganda. If that had been the case, he says with renewed conviction, “we’d never have had the war in the Donbass to begin with.”
Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately gathered national attention there. Ehlers had never forgotten a rape victim telling her forlornly, “If only I had teeth down there.”
Some time afterward, a man came into the hospital where Ehlers works in excruciating pain because his penis was stuck in his pants zipper.
Ehlers merged those images and came up with a product she called Rapex. It resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.
When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers replied tersely, “A medieval device for a medieval deed.”
– Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof
REBLOGGING THIS. x1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
A medieval device for a medieval deed – yes.
This is perfect
BLESS THIS PERSON
I BOW TO THIS INTENTION
Can we talk about how beautifully this turns rape culture on its head? Instead of “If they weren’t dressed like that they wouldn’t have been raped” THIS IS LITERALLY “IF THEY HADN’T TRIED TO RAPE SOMEONE THEY WOULDN’T HAVE SPIKES IN THEIR DICK”*
That bold bit~
reblogging for the rape culture comment omFG AMEN TO YOU
Exactly.
First time I heard of this, a guy friend said, “What if just a mean girl were to put it in when she was mad at her boyfriend” and immediately a dozen other guys were cringing and agreeing.
Here’s the uncomfortable thing, guys: That’s fucking stupid. If you’re with someone who wants to cause you bodily harm when you sleep together, this isn’t going to make that more likely, or even easier. She could already do that. She could offer a blowjob and tear that shit apart.
Fortunately, another guy pointed that out, and the majority of the guys immediately agreed, said it was horrible that this thing exists, but only because it’s necessary. And I appreciated that they came to that realization, I appreciated that they, as a group, were able to recognize the need and take ownership of the idea that whether or not they fear it being ‘used against them’, that’s not the reality, and that’s not what’s going to happen.
And at the same time…I was pretty fucking uncomfortable to realize that their first reaction was to assume it was some malicious thing that could be used against them, instead of latching on to the idea that rape in some places and cultures is so common, women have to resort to shit like this for their own safety
Yeah…kinda fucks me up in the head thinking about alllllll aspects of that discussion
@sciencescribbler also the guys needed another guy to say something before agreeing with it
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