Stories That Resist and Transform SCRIPT (Patreon)

Hey everyone, and welcome to December! I can’t believe we’re already at the end of 2025—dear heavens! Thank you, as always, for your incredible support as we move into the new year.

I’m planning to release an official update video later this week, but I wanted to share this script with you now, because, honestly, it feels urgent. Over the past few weeks, the brilliant Aranock and I have been agonizing over this script—a project that began as a response to FD Signifier's recent video about how so many of our stories are stuck in a reactive cycle. His words really struck me, not just about movies and TV, but also about how we as a society respond to oppression and hate. Too often, we let our adversaries dictate the terms of engagement, which shapes how we understand ourselves.

This isn’t just about storytelling—it’s about survival. As attacks on trans rights and other marginalized communities escalate, especially under Trump, we need to reexamine the stories we tell about ourselves. We need to stop merely reacting and start envisioning something greater—a vision that isn’t defined by the terms of our oppressors. When FD kindly shouted me out as a creator exploring these ideas, I knew I had to tackle this head-on.

Writing this script has been a tough but rewarding journey. Aranock and I had a few passionate, loving debates about its structure, but I think we’ve found where it needs to be. I’m hoping to film it this week and release it by the end of the month or early next, but I wanted to share it with you all now for two reasons:

• I’d love your thoughts.

• I hope it provides some guidance and inspiration as we step into a challenging new year.

Take care of yourselves—now more than ever. I adore you all, and I’m so grateful for this community.
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INTRODUCTION

[JESSIE STANDS IN DARKNESS WITH RED LIGHT, CANDLES AROUND HER A WALL OF UNFINISHED STORIES BEHIND HER]

Stories shape how we think about reality, defining not only who we are but how we perceive the world and its possibilities. They actively construct frameworks for meaning, shaping our values, actions, and sense of hope. Stories are not what causes change, the politic that move it - but they are what inspires how we think about it. But when stories are trapped in cycles of despair, anger, or the myth of the lone savior, they limit our imagination. They become tales of endless struggle, where power changes hands but oppression remains, locking us into a belief that this is all there can be. Without stories that envision new possibilities—stories that break cycles rather than reinforce them—the world becomes less a space for dreaming up pathways of what could be and more a prison built from the weight of what has always been. Ideas that offer change must be vilified - fit into the dominant story as enemies of what must always be. 

The 2024 election exemplified this. Donald Trump's victory wasn’t about his policies, his vague concepts of plans, but about his embodiment of a mythic figure—a symbol of unyielding strength for those unsettled by a rapidly changing world. His appeal lay not in governance but in storytelling, offering a vision of steadfast power and identity. Trump’s myth resonated with many who felt disillusioned by a world of progress and inequality. His victory was driven by white voters who embraced the story he represented: a return to clear roles, celebrated strength, and grievances validated. But this narrative wasn’t confined to white people—it also captured those who bought into the myth that they too could become heroes, even within a system explicitly built to keep them out. These voters weren’t just choosing Trump—they were embracing a narrative, casting themselves as defiant anti-heroes in his image. Like Trump, they saw themselves as hated yet necessary, fighting against a world they believed had turned against them, seeking to restore it to its “rightful” place within the cycle of an inevitable status quo. This status quo—framed as tradition, as common sense—only feels inevitable because it has been reinforced through centuries of the same story, retold and reshaped by systems like colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and white supremacy. It’s the story that progress is dangerous, that hierarchy is natural, that order requires dominance. It’s the story of “civilization,” where the intelligent, the right-shaped skull, the civilized, the right skin color, hard-workers pulling up their bootstraps, the best genes are destined to lead, and where the so-called unworthy must either be uplifted by their betters or crushed beneath the wheel of history. It’s the same myth constantly dressed in new clothes—the same “heroes” with thousands of new faces, wielded to justify power, subjugation, and exclusion, while pretending it’s just the way things have always been—and always must be.

Figures like The Daily Wire and the modern Republican movement thrive on stories scapegoating immigrants, trans people, and feminists, deflecting attention from real issues like stagnant wages and rising rents. By framing progress as a threat to tradition, these narratives fuel anger and division, embedding fear and control into the culture. Reactionary creators weaponize shallow representation, portraying diversity as a cultural threat. And in some ways, it is—but only because it reflects our attempt to find ourselves in stories that were never made for us - because our true stories were stolen from us or hidden from view.

The stories we are told to shallowly see ourselves in teach us to distrust change, to see others as enemies, and to view ourselves as either victims or enforcers of a system we’re told is greater than us. They demand that we kill our hearts, that all we can be as oppressed is just to become one day oppressors. We are left to enact rules enforced for so long they are mistaken for truths, serving the supposed betterment of a larger, unfeeling machine. In this darkness, imagination falters, and we become trapped in cycles of fear and resistance, unable to envision a world built on hope, connection, and possibility. But that is their story. 

But the deeper problem isn’t just that these stories dominate—they’ve left us with a void. What stories do we offer in their place? Most of the time, we tend to critique rather than create. We expose the flaws of harmful stories but rarely move beyond them. Much of left-wing YouTube, for instance, revolves around reacting to right-wing content. This reactionary pattern extends into media, art, and activism, where progressive narratives define themselves in opposition rather than forging bold, imaginative visions. Political campaigns, think pieces, and blockbuster films often critique the status quo without crafting frameworks for hope or change

For too long, our culture has been stuck in this reactive cycle. FD Signifier’s Edgelord Movies Broke Me exposes this with devastating clarity. Stories like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Joker aim to critique systems of power but often end up reinforcing the very myths they seek to dismantle. Those who identify with anti-heroes like the Joker or Tyler Durden see themselves as hated by society, turning to nihiistic destruction as a way to make others feel their pain. Even explicitly critical works like The Boys or Attack on Titan deconstruct toxic systems and savior figures so thoroughly that they dominate the conversation, offering no alternatives beyond pointing out that “this is bad” while still showcasing the allure of power. Aggrieved viewers who identify with characters like Homelander or Eren Yeager often feel that the very narratives that inspired them—of heroes they can become changing things from the top of a system—are vilified - thus they feel villified. This disconnect, rooted in a failure to see how the system perpetuates their pain, feeds cycles of antagonism: us versus them, hero versus villain, with little room for genuine transformation or imagining something better.

Yet, even when we try to inspire, we fall into the same traps: cycles of dominance, power, and opposition. Narratives often vilify the corrupt in power just as much as those resisting it, ultimately reinforcing the status quo as something that can be fixed. The message becomes binary: perpetuate the system or destroy it - and destroying it is filled with uncertainty because everyone fears what will come next because we have not been allowed to imagine it. I have a companion video to this one on Nebula and Patreon about how even in stories sold as progressive, they still  tend to recycle the same tired structures - just putting in new diverse protagaonstists - while vilifying others who dare to imagine something new.

This video, however, is about how we need stories that reframe how we think about ourselves and humanity. Stories inspire emotions that shape reality, and to move forward, we must unlearn the myths that trap us in cycles of dominance, despair, and binary thinking. We need to recognize truly different stories instead of forcing them into the same molds of our biases and assumptions. 

We need stories that ignite our ability to dream, to open our hearts, and to build a shared hope for something greater. What would these stories reveal? How could they reshape us? And how do we bring them from the margins to the center, making them the lens through which we see ourselves and the world? This video is a step on that journey—out of the spiral of decay, away from the shadows of stories that bind us, and toward the light of stories that can lead us forward. I begin with the types of stories that helped me find my own light, tracing how they connect to a larger flame—one that burns beyond just me, illuminating a path for all of us. 

Trans Narratives Are Subversive

[THE LIGHT IS STILL RED BUT THERE IS ACTUAL LIGHT] 

In I Saw The TV Glow, we follow Owen, caught between the oppressive expectations of suburban masculinity and the haunting allure of The Pink Opaque, a childhood TV show reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At first, The Pink Opaque appears to be mere escapist fantasy, but it reveals itself as the true world—a reflection of Owen’s authentic self, long buried. A queer childhood friend, who introduced Owen to The Pink Opaque before mysteriously disappearing, returns to tell Owen that they are not who they think they are—they are characters from the show. To embrace this truth means Owen needs to kill his current self and step into the identity of Isabel, one of The Pink Opaque’s protagonists - accepting the person they’ve always been but has been actively buried by the show’s true villain, the sinister Mr. Melancholy. 

The suburbia Owen inhabits is exposed as a hollow prison, a dark, shallow, sad construct. An all encompassing darkness - to which the glow of the Pink Opaque is a glowing candle light through which they can step into the vibrant, true world they were meant to inhabit. Yet Owen rejects it, retreating further into the hollow performance of his constructed self, denying Isabel and clinging to the safety of conformity to the capitalist world he has felt he must always inhabit. This tension—between the dazzling glow of possibility and the suffocating grip of suppression—mirrors the struggle of transgender self-realization in a world that punishes vulnerability and enforces conformity.

The trans metaphor at the heart of the film is central to its narrative power. Owen's story illustrates the internal struggle of understanding that the masculine Hero's Journey is not true and the pain caused by an external attempt to fit into it. Owen's journey is one of disintegration—a rejection of transformation and retreat into a destructive false self - the typical masculine role that most heroes' journeys articulate as an endpoint - a cisheteronomative family and a job, a useful and redeemed member of society who has helped uphold it - even as it slowly kills him on the outside, and makes him think his heart is dead inside. That there is nothing of him left.This denial mirrors the experiences of many trans people who, in the face of societal pressures, suppress their truths and resign themselves to the “safe” but hollow roles assigned to them. 

Schoenbrun describes Owen as “the least interesting character” in the Hero’s Journey framework, not because he lacks depth but because his story challenges the masculine and cisnormative assumptions of agency and narrative progression: “[Our ideas of agency] are woefully limited… maybe by definition, masculine and cis. [I’m] trying to rewrite or call into question… alternative ideas of narrative structure, to express something that feels emotionally truthful to my experience in the world.”  As my co-writer Aranock discusses in her deep dive of the film, Owen’s story is a dark mirror of Neo’s in the Matrix, a depiction of what would happen if Neo took the blue pill over and over, choosing denial over liberation - constantly refusing the call because he cannot see himself any other way because its the only identity that has been sold to him - the perfect tool for capitalism. A hollow shell of a person performing his function - destroying himself on an engine of meaningless meloncholy. Owen’s decaying body becomes a haunting metaphor for the cost of clinging to a identity doesn’t serves him, yet he’s too afraid to leave because he has been told to think his true self is something childish, silly. A kid’s TV show. How can he, a man who must do his patriarchal duty for the world he lives in - ever be that powerful woman he saw on the screen? What a silly thought. So now, when he tries to look at The Pink Opaque, the world that embodies his true self, he dismisses it as nothing more than a childhood fantasy, a fleeting illusion of comfort - even as his body wheezes under the strain of upholding his current existence. 

And yet, there is a bright heart within him—a flicker of hope he didn’t expect to find. The film screams that there is still time to choose, to follow that beautiful light of self, and to reclaim humanity from the shadow of the decay - the self that he continually is constructing to try to live up to a societies ideals. 

I Saw the TV Glow is a desperate plea to reject despair and isolation - to reach for your heart. The film implores its audience to step off this doomed path, to confront the truths that frighten them, and to embrace transformation over stagnation. That there is still time to choose different because as long as you are alive, your heart within still shines. However, the “still” of the films most crucial line - “there is still time” - implies that time is not infinite. The lights can go out if you wait too long. 

Note for visuals: SUDDENLY I am shrouded in again but now I am slightly less illuminated.

Many cis viewers misinterpret I Saw The TV Glow, reducing it to a simplistic critique of nostalgia and dismissing its trans subtext—a reflection of the lack of curiosity and empathy the film challenges. Some argue the film falls apart in its final act, claiming Owen never fully denies his nostalgic longing. For these viewers, nostalgia is seen as a comforting retreat to an imagined past, untainted by present complexities. They frame the film as nihilistic, a warning against getting lost in the “safe” past of a favorite TV show.

Schoenbrun critiques this dynamic by showing that Owen’s fixation on The Pink Opaque isn’t nostalgic longing but a haunting reflection of his suppressed true self. The Pink Opaque is not a childhood TV show—it’s Owen’s true world and possible future, the life he was denied. His refusal to embrace it mirrors the individual and societal refusal to accept transformation, clinging instead to a status quo demanding conformity. Nostalgia becomes a weapon, erasing truths about other cultures and narratives by dismissing them as childhood dreams that never existed. In doing so, it fosters fear and apathy, suppressing those who challenge the systems it upholds.

For cis viewers, this misreading reflects a broader refusal to confront the violence of a system that demands conformity at the expense of humanity. Owen’s story resonates deeply for trans viewers as a warning and a mirror of their struggles, but for many cis audiences, it becomes another story to dismiss—an act of denial as profound as Owen’s own. As Aranock writes, I Saw The TV Glow says that to survive, to be yourself, you must kill the part of you that is killing you. For trans people, this is not hypothetical—the closet doesn’t just take joy; it can swallow you whole.

The violent irony is that by forcing the film into a worldview they understand, cis viewers, particularly cis men, reveal themselves not just as passive participants in these systems but often active enforcers. Misinterpretation has crossed into deliberate harm, with some mocking the film’s trans-coded themes or even hurling slurs in theaters. By consuming the film through a colonial, patriarchal lens, they replicate the very systems of domination the film critiques. They become Owen, refusing to see the light inside their hearts—and in doing so, they snuff out the light.

Note for visuals: BACK TO NORMAL

Like I Saw  the TV Glow, The Matrix was a story of internal awakening—a realization that one has been made a passive observer in their own life, trapped within a system of control. Unlike Owen, however, Neo chooses liberation. He takes the red pill, stepping into a movement of resistance against a world that tried to define who he was, choosing his own name and identity.

Capitalism, true to form, reclaimed and distorted the narrative of The Matrix. Endless copycats were made. The film’s technological wonders, once rich with deeper meaning, were stripped of substance and repurposed into shallow spectacles. The story of internal awakening and self-liberation was warped into a hypermasculine fantasy, reframing Neo as “The One,” an all-powerful savior who dominates and “wins” the Matrix. Figures like Andrew Tate amplify this distortion, using the imagery to peddle hypermasculine, money-grifting ideologies, while far-right groups co-opt the concept of the "red pill" as a symbol of their agenda. This perversion of the film’s message—a story rooted in liberation and identity—has been openly denounced by its creator, Lana Wachowski, highlighting the stark divergence between the original vision and its capitalist hijacking.

When Warner Bros. sought wring more profit from The Matrix  for more money by regurgitating nostalgia for profit, forcing a new installment into the franchise, Lana Wachowski stepped in to make The Matrix Resurrections so it wouldn’t be passed to someone else. Many have argued that due to that Resurrections is a film that hates itself—a cynical act of sabotage, designed by Lana to destroy the franchise and burn it to the ground. Nihilistic like how they argue I Saw the TV Glow’s ending is. But, like Owen does not hate his true self, Ressurections does not hates itself either - it simply hates the system that forced it’s existence and necessitated its message and doesn’t choose to hide from that fact.  

In the film, Neo was no longer able to be seen as the iconic, hyper-masculine savior archetype that many fans of the original film idolized. Instead, we find him depowered, trapped in a cycle of alienation, grinding away on a treadmill of creative futility as a video game designer trapped again back in the Matrix forced to remake the Matrix video games over and over again for the literal profit of Warner Bros. The meta-narrative here is very explicit: Neo, like Lana Wachowski, is forced to remake the Matrix within the film’s diegesis—a direct commentary on the pressure to commercialize legacy - they want the same story but different enough to sell again but nothing really new. The visual of Neo’s depletion as he takes blue pills over and over mirrors I Saw the TV Glow’s critique of the system’s vampiric use of labor: it runs you to death for its own sustenance. The matrix art has become a part of maintaining the matrix in text. This cooption culminates in Neil Patrick Harris’ Analyst character, Neo’s supposed therapist but in truth his Matrix middle-managing controller, even reveals how the system has weaponized Neo’s greatest power—bullet time. In the original film, bullet time symbolized reclaiming agency over time, a rejection of a culture that capitalizes and commodifies every second for efficiency. In may ways, it represents a queer perception of time -  Bullet time doesn’t just bend time; it creates space for a different, more liberating temporal experience—one that imagines a world beyond the rigid confines of capitalist hetreonormative, or the Matrix’s, rhythms. The same rehytms that control Owen’s speeding perception of time in I Saw the TV Glow that decays his life.

Over the years, bullet time devolved into a shallow stylistic trope ubiquitous in Hollywood action films. It’s metaphorical meaning was stripped in place of the aesthetic. Just the same, the Analyst takes this once-liberating visual and turns it into a tool of control, using it to imprison Neo within the Matrix. What was once freedom has been corrupted into an instrument of oppression, reflecting how even radical ideas can be co-opted by systems of power. This chilling repurposing mirrors how anti-capitalist and queer art - as well as art made by marginalized and colonized communities (images of jazz onscreen) - is often consumed, stripped of its radical intent, and sold back to white cis straight audiences who denied or were ignorant to the original message as hollow spectacle. 

In this sense, Resurrections is a deeply self-aware work, almost painfully so. It acknowledges that the original Matrix inspired millions with its message of liberation, only for that message to be twisted and commodified. By addressing this directly, Resurrections forces its audience to reckon with how even art that challenges the system can become complicit in perpetuating it when consumed without critical reflection.

However, like TV Glow, Resurrections is not resigned to nihilism. Its thesis simply rejects the very idea of the lone hero conquering the system. The film shows us that Neo cannot defeat the Matrix alone. The film underscores that Neo was never truly “The One.” Instead, it was his connection to Trinity that created that power, revealing the myth of the solitary savior as a lie. It was their love that created their power in the first movie, and its the same power the Matrix now harvests by keeping them close, but away from each other - isolated - like kids living in a suburban home - isolated from his own heart and each other - only seeing themselves in silly video games or TV shows that they imagine into. It also retroactively states that it was Neo and Trinity’s queer love that made them the one, recontextualizing the first 3 films to further how they are about collective action.

Symbolically, Trinity is both a representation of Neo’s transgender self, the representation of the woman he yearns to be, demonstrating that strength comes from embracing one’s heart and identity - as well as her own identity and person. Trinity, who can be read as a cis lesbian, is trapped in compulsory heterosexuality, but releases herself from that through her connection and love to Neo. It is queer love and connection which gives them both power, and which liberates them. These coexistent overlapping and seemingly contradictory readings critique mainstream narratives of power and invite a queer interpretation that celebrates connection over domination, asserting that truth is not singular but a symphony of possibilities, where liberation lies in embracing the full spectrum of the multiplicity and overlap of self, identity, love, and truth.This collaboration between Neo and Trinity literally remakes the world—she flies, not as a sidekick, but as an equal. Their connection transcends the Matrix.

Rejection of collective narratives is a large part of why edgelords never understood the first 2 Matrix sequels and especially the Zion sections. Resurrections extends its critique to contemporary culture’s obsession with nostalgia. The film isn’t merely a sequel—it’s a meta-textual deconstruction of what it means to revisit the past - how we can attack nostalgia and weaponized great man narratives from within.

It also demonstrates the potential for change, however small it may seem, that can grow into something bigger. For instance, machines and humans now work together in Io because Neo in the initial trilogy demonstrated the value of collective resistance—not by appealing to the machines' interests on their terms, but by embodying resistance through community-building - even if he failed to entirely bring the Matrix down. Others, like Bug, saw him fly - saw the real him, even when everyone else failed to understand what he was trying to say. People understood The Matrix for the radical metaphor it was, even if the system kept Lana stuck on a treadmill for profit. 

Both films confront the fear of embracing our true selves, but where one warns of the cost of denial, the other declares that our hearts are the key to not only liberation - but connection and eventually - resistance. Owen’s refusal to claim his truth in I Saw the TV Glow traps him in a hollow existence, a casualty of systems that demands suppression in exchange for survival. The Matrix Resurrections answers that trade with defiance.

I Saw The TV Glow and The Matrix use metaphor to show that while trans experiences are specific, the pain of living in a society that denies your humanity is universal. To be trans is to reject these systems, to choose yourself and your community, and to make visible the pain they inflict while reclaiming the vulnerability they teach us to fear. Yet, both Resurrections and I Saw The TV Glow declare this is not just trans pain—it is everyone’s pain. They remind us that the heart, though buried beneath the roles we are forced to perform, still beats. You just have to choose it. If you do, people WILL see the real you. People can see you fly. And in that recognition, we build communities of resistance.

This is why fascism MUST vilify transness—it cannot survive the truth of exposed hearts or the possibility of choosing a narrative beyond oppressor and oppressed. For a trans woman to claim her womanhood, a “lesser” identity in fascist eyes, destroys its entire worldview. Transness calls us to connect—not only to our own hearts but to each other. These works insist that the struggle to exist authentically in a dehumanizing world is one we all share. Through connection and reflection, we can resist together. Transness is not a “them”, its is a bright US SHINNING DEEP IN ALL OUR HEARTS. 

Note for visuals: SUDDENLY JESSIE IS IN DARKNESS AGAIN, THERE ARE LESS CANDLES LIT

When The Matrix Resurrections debuted, it was panned for lackluster CGI, weak fights, and a diminished Neo—precisely the point. Audiences craved the hyper-masculine savior the cool fight sequences from the original triology but the film rejected that illusion, presenting Neo as depleted, alienated, and trapped in a system that commodifies even resistance. Its “failures” were deliberate critiques, reframing how we get to liberation in a world that turns dreams of it into shallow products.

Yet critics dismissed this radical message, focusing on aesthetics while ignoring its call for collective action. This discomfort mirrored The Last Jedi, which dismantled the great man myth and enraged fans clinging to nostalgic hero worship. These embody what Owen in I Saw the TV Glow could have become: someone who channels their anger not at the system that exploits and commodifies their former dreams but at marginalized people who dare to appear in it.

While The Last Jedi sparked loud, often racist misoginstic backlash, Resurrections faced a quieter erasure. It wasn’t derided but ignored—a dismissal as insidious as the attacks on trans inclusion. Trans art, like these films, are sidelined, its contributions erased, its stories deemed meaningless. This isn’t just cruelty—it’s a weapon. It denies the message of art by minoirities by refusing to engage with it at all - say it cannot exist - instead villifying explicit minority representation stepping into stories that used to center them. 

They cannot see beyond the stories they’ve internalized, the myths that obscure their hearts. And as those lights remain buried, the world grows darker—not because the light is gone, but because we refuse to let it shine. Yet even in the darkness, there are those who resist, who have found each others lights in the darkness - and fight to let the largers lights through.

Note for visuals: BACK TO LIGHTS ON

Resistant Futures

Star Wars has long relied on the myth of singular heroes shaping history. The Last Jedi tried to challenge this with themes of failure and collective effort, but Episode IX rejected it, reaffirming the “great man” narrative. From Luke’s neoliberal democracy-saving arc to Anakin’s fascist descent and Rey’s preservation of a flawed status quo, the franchise clings to the idea that change comes from exceptional individuals, not shared struggle. Yet, Star Wars does offer a response to this problem…

The beauty of Star Wars Andor lies in how it navigates the internal struggles of its characters, particularly Cassian Andor, as a reflection of the systemic oppression surrounding them. At the start of the show, Cassian is a man closed off, driven by a singular, personal mission: finding his sister. This quest isn’t merely about family—it’s a desperate attempt to reclaim a connection to the culture and community stripped from him when the Republic, the predecessor to the Empire, exploited and destroyed his homeland for its resources - and one that showcases that the facism of the Empire is actually a direct extension of the colonial oppression of the neoliberal government that it was built out of. Cassian’s story begins with him resisting the vulnerability required to join a greater cause, even as he exists in Ferrix, a tight-knit working-class surviving under the Empire community rooted in solidarity and care. He lives among people who trust one another enough to hang their gloves on a communal wall each day, a symbolic act of shared humanity. He keeps himself apart, seeing his survival as an individual endeavor, disconnected from collective resistance.

Just like Owen or Neo taking the blue pill, Cassian repeatedly refuses the call to action throughout the show. When Rebel cell leader Luthen Rael offers him a chance to fight the empire, Cassian views it as a transactional opportunity helping with a heist not out of conviction but to earn his payout. He spends much of the series trying to escape—escape from responsibility, escape from a fight he doesn’t feel is his, and escape from a system that oppresses him while ignoring the ways it oppresses others. It’s only when he’s incidentally imprisoned by the Empire for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—ensnared in a system of forced labor designed to extract every last ounce of usefulness from its captives—that Cassian begins to wake up. In the prison, the dehumanization is suffocating. Men are reduced to numbers and shifts, cogs in a machine whose purpose they don’t even fully understand - forced to act in competition with the men around them as they tire away to make literal cogs for the Death Star - a machine of mass genocide. It’s here, amid despair, that Cassian learns the power of collective action, to organize, inspire, and fight—not just for himself, but for everyone crushed under the Empire’s boot. He helps lead a prison outbreak, one which only succeeds when he actively breaks down the way prisoners are forced into competition with each other, forming a strong collective. 

Andor doesn’t shy away from the cost of this resistance. The show lingers longer than most films or tv shows do on shots of nameless characters dying in moments of collective resistance- highlighting the pain, the loss, and the endless toll of fighting back. Many characters die—not in heroic, glamorous ways but in sudden, brutal moments that feel achingly real. Nemik, the young idealist with a manifesto, is crushed under the weight of the Empire’s greed, quite literally, his dreams living on only through his words. Kino Loy, the reluctant prison leader, finds his voice to inspire a revolt, only to admit he can’t swim to freedom with everyone else - meaning he knew the moment he instigated the revolt it meant his death, choosing to do so for everyone else anyway. The series confronts us with the reality that resistance is a continual struggle, one that requires sacrifice and often comes without guarantees of success. But it argues, passionately and powerfully, that it is still worth it—that the act of fighting, of standing together, is itself a form of victory. And that in doing so… over time, you win back not only your soul, but the soul of your future. This theme of humanity under fascism extends to characters like Syril Karn, who embodies the toxic masculinity fascism cultivates. A humiliated, entitled man, he sees himself as a hero but serves the system that dehumanizes him. Karn is a warning of what happens when anger and fear are weaponized, not met with compassion. 

Andor is what Star Wars originally aspired to be: a story of rebellion, of hope born from despair, and of people discovering their capacity to fight for something larger than themselves. It, unlike the original trilogy, succeeds because it rejects Campbell’s white supremacist patriarchal great man. It’s a reminder that the systems that oppress us can only be dismantled through collective action. While Andor may not wield the lightsabers and mysticism of its predecessors, it holds the heart of the galaxy far, far away: the belief that even in the face of overwhelming darkness, there is a spark worth igniting.

Note for visuals: SUDDENLY BACK TO DARK, LESS CANDLES LIT

Despite its richness, Andor faced misinterpretation and dismissal, particularly in online spaces dominated by shallow analysis and reactionary takes. Channels like Star Wars Theory derided it as boring or overly serious, refusing to engage with its thematic depth. These critiques reflect the same rejection of complexity that Andor challenges. The series rejects fan-service-heavy nostalgia, the hallmark of Disney-era Star Wars, instead asking viewers to sit with discomfort, confront complicity, and grapple with the cost of action and inaction. For some, this lack of spectacle - of seeing the nostalgic heroic Jedi winning the day - felt like a betrayal of what Star Wars "should" be. 

Yet, Andor wasn’t attacked as viciously as projects like The Acolyte or Obi-Wan or even the sequel trilogy, which faced heightened backlash often directed at their Black and female leads. The disproportionate outrage hints at the anti-Blackness, racism and sexism baked into much of Star Wars discourse. Like Resurrections, Andor is ignored in favor of more surface-level representation that provokes anger, exposing a deep discomfort with stories that ask us to think critically about power and complicity - yet inability to truly take it in - instead focusing more easily on the stories they can scapegoat into entitled narratives of aggreviment… 

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE

Note for visuals:  VISUALS STAY RED AND DARK, THERE ARE NO CANDLES LIT

Fascism is trauma. It thrives on pain—both the infliction and the suppression of it. It twists the human capacity for connection into cycles of violence and domination, insisting that the fault lies within us rather than in the systems that isolate and harm us. Fascism demands that we harden ourselves, it calls this hardness strength, but it is really a hollowing out, a stripping away of our capacity to feel, to care, to love. It weaponizes this emptiness, convincing men that their pain is proof of their failure to dominate, and then offers them scapegoats—trans people, immigrants, women, Jews—as false targets for their anguish. The result is not healing but further alienation, a system feeding on the very despair it creates. But there is a way out - a light in the darkness. 

On the surface, My Dinner with Andres is a simple film about a conversation—a dinner between a theater director and a playwright—but beneath the surface, it is a confrontation with the creeping hollowness of a capitalist world. How it numbs us, fragments us, and cuts us off from each other and ourselves. In this state of isolation, where connection is transactional and meaning is commodified, fascism finds fertile ground.

Andre talks about his travels around the world, his experiments in living, and his desperate attempts to feel alive. These attempts are radical and often strange, but fundamentally about reclaiming connection—whether to the Earth, to community, or to his own body. Wally, pragmatic and cynical, instead defends the comforts of routine and security, even as he admits they are dulling his senses. Their dialogue is a microcosm of our collective struggle: do we accept the alienation that capitalism demands in exchange for survival, or do we risk everything to find something real, something human?

Andre is a prophet of sorts, warning of what lies ahead if we choose the former path. He sees how capitalism prepares us for fascism by hollowing out our hearts. It replaces relationships with transactions, reducing every aspect of life—work, love, even art—to something that’s bought or sold. In doing so, it strips us of our ability to care, to resist, to imagine alternatives. It convinces us that our despair is personal and our loneliness unique. It then uses this isolation to pit us against each other.

Fascism, then, is not an aberration but an extension of capitalism’s logic. It is the promise of order in the chaos capitalism creates, offering community through exclusion and meaning through domination. Like both TV Glow and Ressurections exposed, capitalism primes us for fascism, isolating us, commodifying identity, and abusing vulnerability to enforce control. Fascism thrives on this trauma, on pain left unresolved and connections severed -It offers the illusion of solidarity while deepening the wounds it claims to heal.

Note for visuals:  suddenly, there are lit candles behind me. 

The way out, as Andre suggests, is through the darkness. This begins not with grand revolutions but with small acts of defiance: reclaiming dinner tables as spaces for connection, forming collectives that prioritize care over profit, and reimagining what it means to be alive together. These are radical acts in a world designed to keep us apart.

My Dinner with Andre is both a warning and an invitation. It tells us that the darkness is already here, that it is growing, but it also reminds us that we are not powerless. Our capacity for connection—our ability to love, to care, to build—remains intact, even if buried beneath layers of alienation. The way out is not to harden ourselves further but to soften, to open, to risk vulnerability in a world that punishes it. Only then can we reclaim our hearts and, with them, our humanity.

DEEP SPACE NINE

While these narratives of internal discomfort inspire solidarity and resistance, some stories go further, envisioning futures beyond resistance—futures where we can collectively build a world not unbound from the constraints of our present - but building off the scars that we carry from it. Star Trek is a shining example of such storytelling. It offers not only a vision of a brighter tomorrow but a roadmap for imagining a queer dream of the future. As José Esteban Muñoz writes, “Queerness is an ideality…a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”. In Star Trek, queerness emerges not only through individual characters or themes but through its broader ethos: the belief in humanity’s capacity to create a better world through mutual understanding, care, and connection.

Among all its iterations, Deep Space Nine delves most profoundly into this idea. It envisions a future that doesn’t ignore the traumas of colonialism but instead acknowledges them, integrating them into its foundation for growth. The show’s eponymous main location itself is emblematic: the station Deep Space Nine used to be the imperialist Cardassians as a mining station that forced an oppressed indigenous Bajoran people into labor and death for their resource extration - but now a site once used to exploit and oppress is transformed into a hub of solidarity, connection, and hope as the series builds. 

Like how Ressurrections and TV Glow look at how queer time has been commodified, Deep Space Nine’s constant discussion of time mirrors Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity, which suggests that queerness does not exist fully solely in the present but lives in the potential of what can be. It shows what happens when queer time begins to rebuild itself after it had been atomized. The show’s lead character Benjamin Sisko, a Starfleet officer, attempts to explain linear time to aliens seen as Prophets by the Bajoran people that experience time not as linear but happening all at once. To explain it, Sisko uses a metaphor of the game of baseball - a favoire past time Sisko uses to center his own identity - to explain time.  

[Emissary clip - “That may be the important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence, not just for answers to our questions but to new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge.  And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons or ideas. But to coexist and to learn.”]

This is how Sisko defines himself and humanity as a whole - through anticipation of the next moment, of the days to come. How we cherish the not knowing and the discovery. In the hope of exploration - a Star Trek ideal. The use of baseball, an everyday exercise, is laden with potential for the future because it is itself a present that requires knowledge of the past and hope for the future.  

That is what humanity is to Sisko - thus, perception of time beyond the present by glancing at the past to understand the future and being closer to humanity become linked and interchangeable within the performance of the hopeful Federation and humanity of Star Trek as an ideal future. However, the prophets point out to Sisko that exists he in one singular moment in time - his point of trauma - his thoughts and emotions constantly pulled back in time to the moment of his wife’s death - a death caused textually by the Borg but also the Federation’s best captain, Picard, who was Locutus of Borg at the time. Sisko is traumatized by the hero of Star Trek as a franchise - traumatized by the Federation that was supposed to protect him. 

And thus, by the grammar the episode has established with it’s linguistics of time, queerness is often found in existing within seeing the pain of our past, seeing how it affects our present and in striving for future that incorproates the two. Accepting that Sisko does exist tied to that trauma yes, but also striving for futurity as well. This trauma defines not only him but also the struggles he symbolizes throughout Deep Space Nine’s entire run. To find a sense of identity within the liminality of the pain systems enacts upon us and the scars it leaves behind on our souls.

His explanation to the prophets leads him to become the Emissary to the Bajoran people, a holy positon. The Bajoran people, who endured decades of colonial violence and cultural erasure, must now navigate the difficult process of reclaiming their identity while integrating into a broader galactic community that often misunderstands their pain. Their journey mirrors Sisko’s personal arc: a negotiation of past wounds with the hope of building a future that does not erase or ignore them. Bajor’s resistance and subsequent recovery echo the struggles of colonized nations to reclaim their sovereignty and cultural identity in the wake of imperial domination. Meanwhile, Cardassia’s continuation of colonialism and descent into and reckoning with fascism speaks to the ways societies built on systemic oppression must confront their pasts to avoid perpetuating cycles of violence.  Sisko’s Blackness adds another profound layer to this exploration. As a Black man leading a predominantly white organization like Starfleet, Sisko carries the weight of representing an idealized Federation while embodying a cultural history shaped by systemic oppression. In the best episode of the show(my opinion change if you want Jessie) Far Across The Stars, Sisko experiences the life of a black science fiction author in the 1950s who writes about Sisko’s future. The episode examines how Sisko relates to the history of violent anti black racism but also highlights how art that imagines futures beyond current struggles and oppression are valuable, how in imagining they assist in pushing towards making those futures real. Siskos' role as a father to Jake, for instance, highlights a form of Black fatherhood rarely seen in mainstream media—a tender, involved, and aspirational relationship that is not defined by struggle but by love and shared growth. Sisko teaches Jake not only how to navigate the challenges of their world but also how to find joy, passion, and purpose in it. Both Sisko and Jake maintain cultural ties through cooking especially, learning from Sisko’s father a creole chef. This contrasts with other Star Trek’s show’s before DS9 (and sometimes after it) tendency to strip its human characters of specific cultural identities in favor of a post-racial, universalist narrative. Sisko’s Creole heritage, his cooking, and his grounding in a specific cultural lineage make his character not just a leader but also a symbol of how cultural specificity can enrich the broader ideals of the Federation.

Deep Space Nine’s greatest strength lies in how it challenges Western expectations of nostalgia, story, and progress. It reimagines utopia not as a preordained outcome but as a continuous, collective process fraught with pain, conflict, and the necessity of self-reflection. In contrast to the polished optimism of The Next Generation, which often frames progress as an inevitable trajectory, DS9 insists that progress must be earned by grappling with the wounds of history and resisting systems of oppression—both external and internal.

DS9 stands as a reminder that it is the outcasts—the ones who have endured the sharp edges of systemic oppression yet still chose their hearts and each other - who best understand what it means to dream beyond it. These are the characters and stories that push back against fascism and colonialism, both from without and within - as teh story of DS9’s later seasons bear out in the fights against Cardassia, THe Dominion and even the turning of the Federation itself into something shaped by war and trauma. The dreams of are main characters are not shaped by nostalgia for a past they never benefited from, but by the radical imagination born of their survival from it. In this way, DS9 breaks free of Western storytelling’s fixation on cyclical nostalgia and inevitable progress, showing instead that transformation requires struggle, honesty, and the willingness to dream beyond the systems that have always failed us.

In today’s nostalgia-driven landscape, DS9’s insights are more crucial than ever. It reminds us that the future Star Trek envisions cannot be reached by clinging to echoes of the past, but by confronting our cultural and historical traumas, integrating them into our understanding, and using them as fuel for transformation. Only by embracing the uncomfortable truth of our struggles can we illuminate the path forward, turning the flicker of hope into a guiding light that grows brighter with every step.

Instead, modern Star Trek often retreats into the comforting sheen of TNG's utopia, exemplified by Picard Season 3. Nostalgia dominates, from reuniting the TNG cast to resurrecting the USS Enterprise-D, leaning on the aesthetics and simplicity of a bygone era. The season abandoned complex, morally ambiguous antagonists—characters grappling with the Federation’s war crimes and systemic failures—in favor of the Borg Queen, another traumatized figure flattened into a symbol of fascist control. This binary framing of good versus evil reflects a broader Western ideal: that the past holds all the answers and resolution lies in preserving what already exists, not in the messy, collective work of transformation. Even our forward thinking futures become echos of teh past. Its nostalgic glow resells an echo of utopia, a reselling of a childhood yearning to find oneself. Like Owen in I Saw the TV Glow, it mistakes looking back for moving forward, trading the challenge of growth for the hollow comfort of stasis. By doing so… it says our traumas must become a part of who we are, never to grow and never to heal - our hearts must always remain closed off to others for fear of pain. 

Imagining beyond franchise

I’ve talked about franchises over and over again—how mainstream stories have constantly been co-opted, their potential undermined by systems of power. It’s frustrating. These stories that try to offer visions of resistance, solidarity, and transformation are right here, but remain trapped, taken, resold and reshaped by corporate interests and cultural stagnation for reselling nostalgia.

But there are stories, like My Dinner With Andre, that have pushed beyond these limits outside of a mainstream, franchise obsessed framework. Ursula K. Le Guin’s works also stand as shining examples, daring us to see the world differently, to question our assumptions, and to dream of futures we might build. In The Dispossessed, Le Guin challenges us to envision a society not governed by the hierarchies we know today. The novel’s subtitle, “An Ambiguous Utopia,” signals the complexity of the anarchist world it depicts. This is no simplistic paradise but a world where freedom is intertwined with struggle and responsibility. Le Guin doesn’t shy away from showing the flaws of this society, nor does she dismiss the hope embedded within its attempts to create something better. In her hands, science fiction becomes a tool for imagining possibilities we haven’t yet considered.

In Earthsea, she interrogates the souls of oppression and death. Ged’s journey is one of understanding power and responsibility, of learning that mastery over others is not the same as mastery over oneself. The series weaves in themes of balance and interdependence, drawing from Taoist philosophy to suggest that true power comes from recognizing our place within the interconnected web of life. The first three books follow Ged as he grapples with the inevitability of death, the weight of change, and the importance of choosing one’s own path over following the expectations of others. Decades after the original trilogy, Le Guin returned to the series with Tehanu and The Other Wind, revisiting her male-dominated narratives to center women’s stories and confront the patriarchal structures within her world. These later books explore not just individual growth but how societies can move toward true equality by dismantling oppressive systems. The series as a whole rejects Western storytelling conventions of conquest and heroism, instead embracing a quieter, cyclical beauty that reflects the rhythms of life itself. The entire five-book series is one of my favorites of all time.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin critiques humanity’s inability to see past its own cultural contexts. The novel’s protagonist, Genly Ai, arrives on the planet Gethen, where the inhabitants are androgynous, shifting between male and female roles during their reproductive cycles. Ai, shaped by the rigid gender norms of his society, struggles to comprehend this fluidity, projecting his biases and assumptions onto the Gethenians. His journey forces him to confront the limits of his worldview, ultimately revealing how deeply our identities are shaped by the cultures we inherit. Le Guin uses this narrative to hold a mirror to our society, exposing the ways we fail to imagine alternatives to our constructed realities.

Le Guin understood that stories are not just escapism but tools for reshaping the ways we see the world and our place in it. Her worlds are not mirrors reflecting our reality but prisms refracting it, showing us the many possibilities that lie beyond our current limitations. By challenging the myths of domination and inevitability, she invites us to dream of futures that embrace difference and interdependence rather than fear them.

Her works also remind us that dreaming is not enough. As Le Guin herself wrote, “It is not the business of the novelist to predict the future. But it is the business of the novelist to examine the present, to explore what it means, and to imagine what it could become.” The question is whether we, as readers, will take up the challenge she lays before us: to see beyond the boundaries of our own time and culture, to imagine futures that are not yet here, and to build them together.

Octavia Butler stands alongside Le Guin as a visionary who challenges the myths of domination and inevitability, crafting narratives that force us to confront the systems shaping our lives while imagining possibilities beyond them. In Kindred, Butler explores the brutal realities of America’s legacy of slavery, drawing a visceral connection between the past and present. The novel’s protagonist, Dana, a Black woman from the 1970s, is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she must ensure the survival of her own ancestor—a white slave owner named Rufus. Dana realizes that her existence depends on his, even as she comes to terms with the horrifying truth that Rufus is her ancestor because he raped enslaved Black women under his control.

This chilling dynamic forces Dana into an agonizing moral struggle: she must save the life of a man whose power and violence sustain the very system that is destroying her. Pulled between two worlds, Dana repeatedly returns to the present day—attempting to live in her new suburban house with her husband—only to be wrenched back in time, where she is forced to endure, often for years, the brutal realities of slavery in order to ensure the survival of her slave-owning ancestor. Through Dana’s harrowing journey, Octavia Butler dismantles the illusion of separation between past and present, revealing how the traumas of slavery—its physical violence, its dehumanizing hierarchies, its entanglements of power and survival—continue to reverberate through history. This legacy remains alive, no matter how fervently we as a society try to deny it or insist we have moved beyond it. For those whose histories, bodies, lineages, and cultures are shaped by this violence, true healing is impossible without reckoning, acknowledgment, and fundamental transformation of the systems that sustain this legacy. Like Deep Space Nine, Kindred is not just a story of survival; it is a profound exploration of complicity, inheritance, and the binding force of systemic violence, demanding that we confront that freedom from its grip is truly possible in our future only if we are willing to face the uncomfortable truths of our shared violent past in our present. But DS9, her books are not pulled back to nostalgia by a system. 

In Dawn, the first book of the Lilith’s Brood series, Butler turns her lens toward humanity’s future, asking what it means to rebuild after destruction. The story begins with Lilith Iyapo, a Black woman who awakens centuries after humanity has nearly annihilated itself in a nuclear war. She is rescued by the Oankali, an alien species that seeks to interbreed with humanity to create a hybrid race. The Oankali are neither saviors nor oppressors; their genetic manipulation is both a means of survival and an unsettling violation of autonomy. Butler uses this dynamic to interrogate the boundaries of identity, agency, and consent, posing difficult questions about what it means to be human and whether humanity can evolve beyond its self-destructive tendencies.

What makes Butler’s work so profound is her refusal to offer easy answers. In both Kindred and Dawn, she dismantles the binaries of victim and oppressor, self and other, survival and domination. Her stories grapple with the complexities of power, connection, and transformation, inviting us to imagine futures that reject the cycles of exploitation and control. Like Le Guin, Butler saw storytelling as a means of refracting reality, revealing possibilities that challenge the status quo. But she also understood that transformation requires discomfort and confrontation—both with the systems around us and within ourselves.

And yet... society generally does not talk about Le Guin or Butler as often as Asimov or Clarke. Their names dominate the conversation, upheld as the architects of science fiction’s golden age. But where Asimov and Clarke sketched orderly futures driven by logic and reason based on the worldview they were privileged enough to believe was inevitable, Le Guin and Butler wove stories that embraced complexity, ambiguity, and the humanity in struggle. Their works weren’t about controlling the flow of the future but about understanding it—its possibilities, its failings, and the radical empathy needed to build a better one. Defying the current systems of our world.

This defiance is precisely why many men, especially those steeped in fascist or reactionary ideologies, reject works like those I have discussed. These works varied invitations to introspection and collective imagination undermines the narratives of power and control they cling to. For men trained to equate emotion with weakness, these works quiet insistence on feeling becomes unbearable. In rejecting vulnerability, they reaffirm the hollow systems of power that oppress them, perpetuating their own alienation.

There’s a common theme threading through all the works I’ve touched on—a resonant echo that asks us to look inward, not to retreat, but to confront the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we belong. Each work delves into the internal battles we wage, the narratives we construct to protect ourselves, to isolate, to survive. They remind us that these self-constructed fortresses, born of fear or pain, often become prisons. These are stories that insist on the power of community—not as a sentimental ideal, but as a raw and necessary truth. They ask us to risk vulnerability, to let others see the bruised, beating core of who we are, and to trust that in doing so, we might find strength—not in ourselves alone, but in the spaces where our lives intertwine. Solidarity, they tell us, is not just a strategy; it’s a lifeline. It’s what turns despair into action, pain into purpose, and isolation into something profoundly and beautifully shared.

 Each story also illuminates a way out: first through finding ourselves, then through connection, then through solidarity in fighting back, then through finding a way to heal our scars of the violence we have endoured, and using those scars, not ignoring them, to see a future. That is the narrative of these stories when shared together. 

There are so many artists and so much art striving and dreaming and pushing for collective futures in this way, I’ve explained just a small amount of the magnitudes that have been made and sent out, many in recent years and in the mainstream. I just mentioned Butler but, for heaven's sake, also read N.K. Jemisin’s groundbreaking Broken Earth trilogy - a powerful deconstruction of systems of oppression and environmental exploitation, weaving a story that refuses to separate personal pain from societal devastation. Similarly, Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun draws unapologetically from Indigenous cosmologies, not to "reimagine" or "translate" them for Western audiences, but to fundamentally rewrite the conventions of epic fantasy itself. It refuses the sanitized, Eurocentric frameworks that dominate the genre, creating a vibrant, complex world that resists the erasure and commodification of Indigenous narratives. Likewise, Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon takes a scalpel to the Western medievalism that suffocates so much of fantasy. By centering unapologetically Muslim protagonists and embedding the story in rich Middle Eastern folklore, Ahmed not only revitalizes the genre but forces a confrontation with its colonialist underpinnings. The extraordinary TV show Reservation Dogs captures the resilience of Indigenous youth on a reservation, celebrating their enduring connection to culture, history, and community despite centuries of genocide and erasure. These works don’t just expand the canon; they demand we interrogate who built it, who it serves, and who it excludes. Filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho, Hideo Miazaki, Guirellmo Del Toro, Celine Song and the Daniels have redefined cinematic language, using the medium to dissect deeply ingrained systems of class oppression and colonial influence while bridging cultural gaps with searing, deeply personal narratives. These artists know how to craft endings—not in the Western sense of closure or cyclical justification, but in the profound sense of change, renewal, and rupture. 

Western storytelling clings to the illusion of eternal cycles, epitomized by Joseph Campbell's "monomyth"—a self-serving narrative that claims all myths tell the same story. This lie erases nuance, cultural specificity, and the vast diversity of human tales, forcing them into a one-size-fits-all framework to justify power and control. Many marginalized creators break free from this cycle, not by rejecting storytelling but by reclaiming its purpose. They remember and reimagine stories as tools to preserve cultures beaten down by oppression, to dismantle systems of harm, and to imagine new beginnings. I start with trans stories because they are my story—how I found my heart after being born into a system that buried me. Many white trans folks like myself grow up within this myth, told to embody it while turning colonization inward. It’s a story I believe resonates deeply with many in my audience, particularly white people who need to understand this internalized dynamic. But this is just one way out. Different cultures and marginalized groups have their own stories, shaped by their unique relationships to systems of oppression. We’re all fighting the same fight, just on different fronts. Different cultures’ stories aren’t simply alternative versions of the same Western "monomyth"—they’re radical rejections of it, pathways toward liberation grounded in the specific truths and experiences of those who tell them.

These stories aren’t whispers—they’re screams, demanding to be heard. Yet they’re often ignored, dismissed, or drowned out. Why? Because the systems we live in—the media we consume, the narratives we’re fed—don’t provide the prism to truly see them. These stories challenge the deeply ingrained Western ideals of individualism and extraction, and so they’re pushed to the margins, labeled “niche,” “too political,” or “not good enough.” But these stories hold the keys to the futures we claim to desire.

Throughout this essay, I’ve shown how these narratives are minimized, ignored, or erased. Western culture has long been a battleground for domination, severing connections by telling us who is “Other,” who doesn’t belong, and who must be excluded to uphold power. It teaches us to internalize hierarchies, to see division as natural, and to disconnect from others—and even from ourselves if we belong to those deemed lesser.

But the human heart resists. Even as white supremacist patriarchy spins tales of endless cycles of violence, we rediscover our truths. We long to connect, to grow, to break free from domination. And yet, stories from the so-called "Other" are dismissed, reduced to the same frameworks of power they defy.

This brings us to a hard question: has the left truly failed to tell these stories, or have many chosen not to listen, retreating into the static of a hollowed-out world shaped by fascism? A world that teaches silence, emptiness, and despair as all we’re meant to know. Is yelling back the way forward—or just another voice lost in the noise of those who refuse to hear?

THESE STORIES EXIST

We cannot say these stories don’t exist. That is the true lie. They have been written, filmed, and sung across generations and geographies, cultures and hearts.  The challenge is not their absence but our collective failure to amplify and contextualize them in ways that resonate with broader audiences even as the status quo attempts to hide them from us.  It is our duty to create the platforms and prisms through which these stories can shine, to dismantle the barriers that keep transformative narratives from reaching the people who need them most. The stories are here. The question is, are we willing to listen? I’ve spent the last year on my channel talking about how to deconstruct the toxic stories we’ve been fed and what better ones we can offer in their place. I, with my cowriter Aranock, have said and even done videos on most of these exact stories in greater detail. And I now many others have. 

But no matter how hard we try to talk about this, our cultural conversation - the algorithms we dance within, don’t reward nuance or empathy. They reward anger. Binary takes. “Destroy the Right-Wing Grift!” clicks, while “Open Your Heart to New Narratives” dies in the feed. It's the core ethos of colonialism, capitalism, and its ineffectively fought against by even progressive seeming neoliberalism which views the idea of the free market as the best expression of a natural order, a natural order that is not really natural but made to seem normal by centuries of colonial thinking - thus just how it should be - and all it can do is try to put tape onto a system fundamentally built on a white supremacy that it refuses to acknowledge.

And that’s just the first problem. The second is how these stories are weaponized and stripped of meaning. Young, angry white men, white women upholding patriarchy, those clinging to bootstraps story of the American Dream, Republicans scapegoating to maintain power, and Democrats debating which “inconvenient” people to discard—they’re telling the same story. They’re primed to reject anything outside their worldview, seeing compassion as antagonism and stories of change as attacks. So when they see the stories that could save them, and encounter stories that are new and different, they’ve already been primed to reject them. They see compassion as antagonism. Transness, like so many other identities, is reduced to a symbol in this binary political war. Support it? You’re left. Oppose it? You’re right. It’s either vilified as a threat to the status quo or commodified into hollow representation. The actual humanity and complexity behind these identities, these stories, are erased. What could have been a bridge to understanding becomes just another battleground, another talking point in a war that ignores the hearts it claims to fight for. And the people within them, pleading to be seen as human, are left unheard.  They see me, a trans woman trying to open a door, no matter what I say or how I say it, as symbol of this battle in a political binary war, not a person creating a conversation between hearts. 

Do you know how exhausting that is? This is what I have to offer. This is what I do. I try to tell and explain stories about how to open your heart, trust yourself, and trust others. But this system, this poisoned culture, doesn’t let those messages through. I’m tired of being dehumanized for the very work that I’m doing - desperately trying, pleading, to get people to see that I’m human. Even people on the left—sometimes bristle at what I and other people trying to uplift other narratives do. Literally, I have been more vilified by supposed leftist creators than right-wing folks these past few years when I have said things like we shouldn’t be focused on what we are against because, as LeGuin said, to oppose something is to maintain it. Because we like easy narratives of antagonism, its simpler. Its what we know. Find the bad guys and fight them till dead, this proves yoru cause is just, and repeat on a cycle until you are all that is left, a culture of endless war and death. We should not be focused on winning a fight but on what we are building and let THAT lead us to fight as we have to. But instead my words and all marganlized stories get stripped of context to fit into an easier narrative.

It’s maddening. It’s heartbreaking. And yet, here I am, still trying.

We need to stop. Stop centering the conversation around them. I’m so tired, especially post-2024, of the same framing: “How do we get angry young men to care? How do we break down Republican lies? How do we get Democrats to stand up for us?” Why is it always about their grievances, entitlement, and tantrums, while the harm they perpetuate is ignored? The right claims their success proves meritocracy: “We won because our ideas are better.”

We need to stop fighting in their sandbox. It’s time to build, imagine, dream, and play. Instead of reacting to their narratives, we need to create stories that challenge, inspire, and offer something better—a feast for those ready to move beyond their empty promises.

Because we’re not here to fight for approval. We’re here to make something better, for ourselves and for everyone who’s tired of begging for scraps from systems that will never feed us. Let them get mad. Let them rage that we’ve taken the conversation away from them. Let them scream about being ignored while we’re over here, laughing and painting and building cities out of cardboard and dreaming about worlds that could be. Let them stew in their resentment while we’re busy making something new, something joyful, something real out of the imagined.

The truth is, it’s not even about leaving anyone behind. It’s about not waiting for them to catch up before we start. About not centering the most privileged. And when they finally do notice the incredible things we’ve built—our stories, our worlds, our communities—if they want to join, then great. But the only way in is by playing fair. The only way in is by leaving behind the entitlement and anger and recognizing that everyone gets a piece of the game. Otherwise? They can’t take part. And if they get mad about that fact? Fuck it. Stay mad. We’ll still be here, playing, until they get over themselves - or they won’t and it won’t matter to us.

Because this isn’t about reaching some mythical “center.” This isn’t about crafting narratives that convince those who CHOOSE not to listen. Intead, we need to realize how to focus on ourselves and our hearts, and stories help us. Ursula K. Le Guin gave them to us. Octavia Butler gave them to us. Wallace Shawn, The Wachoski Sisters, Jane Schoenbrun, Tony Gilroy and so many others keep giving them to us. BIPOC creators are giving them to us. Disabled creators are giving them to us. Queer artists are giving them to us. They’re not just writing for the future—they’re screaming into the present for us to SEE the future. That there is STILL TIME to create it. But it's not infinite. And we’re over here wasting that time trying to figure out how to get angry white men to listen?

Fuck that.

The system isn’t going to reward us for building something better. It isn’t going to algorithmically amplify a vision of compassion and connection. It’s going to keep pushing anger because that’s what it needs to survive. It’s going to keep centering the angry men, the aggrieved masses, the loudest voices shouting into the void. But that’s not where the magic is. That’s not where the future is. The future is in the quiet spaces, the small acts of creation, the moments where we look at each other and say, “What if?”

That’s where I want to be. That’s where I am. I’m done bending myself into knots trying to make space for their anger. I’m done being reduced to a symbol for their rage. The right offers false certainty and empty simplicity, but we have something more powerful: meaningful possibility. If we can build narratives that embrace that possibility, we can show not just young men, but everyone, that belonging and identity don’t have to come at someone else’s expense.

And if they want to join us, great.  But I’m done begging them to come. And this goes for all of you out there. Because let me be absolutely clear—I’ve been framing this video around the so-called edgelords and the young right-wing men radicalized to Trump, but you need to understand: I am talking to every single one of you. We all need to hear it.

So many have been striving to express what SOLIDARITY actually means. And let me tell you what it doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean shouting over others. It doesn’t mean demanding everyone conform to your strategy, your worldview, your way of thinking. It doesn’t mean steamrolling over someone else’s voice because you’ve decided yours is more important. Solidarity isn’t about winning at someone else’s expense. It’s not about leaving people out in the cold because you think their fight isn’t as urgent as yours. It’s about recognizing the ways our struggles overlap. It’s about listening—to the right people, at the right time—and supporting each other in our distinct fights against the same system that does not attack us all in the same ways, not taking from each other. And we need to recognize that we do this accidentally because we have all internalized colonialism’s story and we are all constantly having to deconstruct it. Listen, or don’t. But if you can’t recognize what solidarity is, and what it isn’t, then don’t pretend you’re here to build anything at all.

Here’s the truth: Trump didn’t gain that many votes—he won because fewer people voted and he managed to rally his own base of racist supporters to come out for him, perhaps even more so in face of a biracial Black woman. On the surface, that lack of voters coming out in sure felt like a gut punch, but that disillusionment is actually a sign of hope, even if Trump winning is a terrible thing. People aren’t apathetic; they’re fed up with a system that demands everything and gives nothing back. That exhaustion, that refusal to play along, shows they’re ready for something different—they just don’t see it yet.

By centering ourselves—our communities, our joy, and our creative visions—we model the kind of world we want to live in. A world that welcomes anyone willing to step out of the binary, out of the anger, and into something more meaningful. A world that doesn’t frame empathy as a limited resource to be bartered or begged for but as a fundamental principle that guides how we build and how we live. This is how we convince people. This is how we propagandize—by creating something vibrant and undeniable, and growing from there - not in the past they cling to, but in the future we are already building. Grassroots movements, mutual aid, community-driven change—these are the seeds we can plant to show people that they don’t have to accept the world as it is. That we can tell different stories about ourselves - not of hero with a thousand faces that will save us by winning elections or systems that fail us to enable our true selves, but of communities that come together. 

No matter how dark it gets, the truths of the human heart endure, resisting even the systems that demand we extinguish them to conform. As long as at least one heart remains, there is hope. The flame will always flicker. Part of that is learning new stories - not just for their sake, but so we can truly understand what it means to be human. To find our hearts.  It’s about reigniting belief—in each other, in the power of collective action, in the possibility of a world, a community, that actually listens and cares - not drives us apart. People haven’t given up on hope; they’ve just stopped looking for it in the same old places. That’s where stories come in - reminding people to try. (Andor clip). That there is still time (ISTTG clip). That you can paint the sky with rainbow (Matrix clip). That you can boldly go. (Trek clip). That any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings (LeGuin clip). That in order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn (Butler clip).

We’ve got our own worlds to build, and I want to do it with the people who are here, ready now. I want to build cool things with cool people, and I trust there are enough of you out there—because I’ve met you—that we can do it. I’m not giving up. I’ve just given up trying to convince people on their terms. For those who resist, I’ll drag them kicking and screaming into this world we’re building. And when the rest finally see the future we’re creating—vibrant, caring, and undeniable—and want to join, I’ll welcome them with open arms. But it will be on our terms: terms of solidarity, not selfishness; of care, not control.

The only way forward is through creation, not conflict. Through joy, not justification. Through trust, not terror. So stop asking what they want. Ask what we all need. Then let’s make it—together. But the question YOU have to answer, right now, is this: how many hearts will we lose before we reach out, each flame igniting the next, until we start a roaring fire? Because there is still time… but not infinite. We are losing flames. That is the burning urgency I leave with you. Let’s not wait. Let’s build. Now.