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Fandom 50 #31

I wish to save the world by cam
Fandom: Pluribus
Characters/Relationships: Manousos Oviedo, Carol Sturka, Carol/The Hivemind
Medium: Vid
Length: 3:47
Rating: SFW (note: contains spoilers for all of s1)
My Bookmark Tags: drama, ambiguous ending, resistance, perseverance, survival, injury, loss, identity, minor character death
Song: "The Old Religion" by Florence + The Machine (slowed-down version)

Excerpt:

"Maybe, in that last fleeting moment, you might just realize you treasure your individuality."

I used the tag 'ambiguous ending' because I don't know where canon will take us from here, but oh man, does this video (rightfully) feel like resisting and continuing to exist as yourself against overwhelming odds and pressure is its own triumph. My heart ached, my heart soared.

The editing choices are superb, focusing on the later episodes but deploying moments from the earlier ones to subtle but devastating effect to support the vid's thesis and to bring home the weight of everything that drove us to the finale. The combination of the music choice and the way Manousos and Carol's journeys up until now are portrayed—their losses, their struggles, their stubborn perseverance—gives me a new appreciation for everything that makes them them, and leaves me feeling incredibly tender toward these two Difficult (read: human) People.

"Imagine the Angels of Bread" by Martín Espada

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges,
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.