I’m Jewish, and my dad- a goy- was watching it with me.
one of the scenes that really got to me was
because you can see the way Erik’s face changes because Charles just doesn’t understand what he was doing when he said that.
Think back to the bar scene in the beginning. What does the Nazi say to excuse his actions?
So when Erik heard that? It just reminded him of what he knew and has been saying up until that very moment. Nothing’s changed.
I identified so much with Erik’s plight and I felt a physical ache in my chest when he spoke the next lines
Because growing up, all Jewish kids have heard or seen that in remembrance of the Shoah. Never Again.
My father made it clear that he didn’t understand; “So he’s gonna kill them all for following orders?”
“Dad, following orders blindly, without even questioning them set us up in some really dark times.”
“Whatever, the guy’s just blood thirsty and ready to blame anyone.”
And the thing is, Erik isn’t bloodthirsty, and never really has been. He’s logical and see’s the world based on his experiences of human actions. He’s seen the worst of them and refuses to be lulled into the false sense of security that working with the government had given some of them. Or the never-ending optimism Charles seems to have for the human race.
Because the fact is, Charles didn’t go through what Erik did and that’s one of the biggest causes of their thought differentiation.
It just showed me how much Erik’s backstory impacted me more than it did goyim. Sure we didn’t experience it like our grand and great-grandparents did. We weren’t actually in the Shoah; But it’s left such an intense impression and stain on our history that we are still triggered by it, threatened by it as ‘jokes’ and forced to see it used as a rhetorical device in arguments with no relation to it.
We didn’t experience it but it is part of us in ways others can’t understand. And I think Erik-an actual survivor- really truly realized that when Charles spoke that line.
I’ve had similar conversations with many goyim. They mostly just can’t grasp this dynamic…like, Charles couldn’t have said a WORSE thing if his goal was to calm Erik down.
“They were following orders” directly translates as “they commited genocide, but that’s okay, someone told them to do it.” Yeah, that’s not good enough. You’re responsible for your own actions and the harm you cause, and the people you murder.
And there’s no way that Never Again wasn’t deliberate.
Today I went to the bookstore to buy the Arden edition of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore because I need it for one of my term papers. But I looked at my punchcard and realized buying it would get me a free book, and because I’m standing right there in the drama section I start browsing around. Enter the Mansplainer. Now, I can only assume that this guy saw me flip through a few books and put them back and decided I didn’t know what I was doing. Mansplainer to the rescue. Up he swaggers. Now, this guy is average-looking but so am I, so at first when he says, “Oh, are you looking for some Shakespeare?” I’m willing to entertain the possibility that he might be worth flirting with or at least talking to, but he literally doesn’t give me enough time to even answer the question before he says, “You know–” And this is like, the most fatal phrase in a dude’s vocabulary, because as soon as he says it odds are 90 to one he’s about to start telling you what he thinks you don’t know. So I shut my mouth. I shut my mouth and I stand there and smile and nod like I’m in utter awe of all his manly wisdom while he proceeds to tell me every wrong “fact” he learned about Shakespeare in secondary school. For those of you who don’t know me, here’s what makes this hilarious: I’m getting a master’s degree in Shakespeare. I’ve been a Shakespearean actor for ten years. I’ve written a fucking book about Shakespeare. I know more about Shakespeare than this guy knows about breathing.
Anyway, for two, maybe three minutes I let him go on about how the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet is actually a sonnet and they were both like thirteen because that’s how young people got married in England in the 1700s and so on and so on. (All of this is wrong, by the way.) Towards the end he starts to flounder, because he was clearly expecting me to jump in and start cooing like a fucking pigeon about how romantic it all is or whatever the Great Mansplainer expects a woman to do when he dazzles her with his dizzying intellect. He finally finishes with a showstopping, “So, yeah.” And this is my cue. So I say, “Actually,” and then proceed to correct literally everything he said while I beam at him like the fucking sun because I want to watch his ego shrivel up like a fucking raisin. And it does. By the time I’m done (which only takes half the time because if women take up more than 25% of a conversation men think they’re dominating it and I’m 100% certain his little Mansplainbrain would just explode under the stress) he’s physically taken two steps away from me and is looking toward the door like he’s grappling with some intense fight-or-flight instinct. So I stop and smile again and because I just can’t resist I wave my staff pass and say, “Sorry, I need to go now, I have to be at the Globe in twenty minutes.”
And that is the story of the time a guy tried to mansplain Shakespeare to me and I will cherish the look on his face until the day I die.
What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect—what if she took him in?
Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).
Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes—she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.
Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.
They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.
Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.
Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.
But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.
There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.
(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not ‘Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.
Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’
A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).
Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.
Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.
His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.
