The Flannel - 2021 Edition

features

contents

4 10 20 35

NOVEMBER 2021

sections

30TH ANNIVERSARY ZAC TAYLOR speaks to editors of the past about some of the best bits of the last 30 years

SPOTIFY AND MONEY JAMES GRAY dives dives deep into how Spotify has changed the music industry forever

ORANGA TAMARIKI ROSE LIVINGSTONE examines the contentious organisation

PREPARING FOR ADULTHOOD Are any of us ready for the next step after high school? ISSY GILCHRIST-HALL answers the question we’ve all been asking

one-offs

71 75 76 77 78

What Aesthetic Are You Quiz

Horoscopes

What’s Hot, What’s Not

What’s Hot, What’s Not - through the years Year 13 Yearbook

MUSIC 6. Album Reviews 8. Playlists 10. Spotify + Money

TEENS 14. Biology of Love 16. School Prize-givings 17. BLM Aesthetic 18. Gender diversity 19. Being Female 20. Free the Titties 34. Youth Spaces 35. Preparing for Adulthood + QUIZ

CULTURE + POLITICS 21. The Haka Party Incident 24. Systemic Racisim 25. Prisons + Justice 26. Highway of Tears 28. Oranga Tamariki 32. Billionares

ART + REVIEW 37. All Gas, No Breaks 38. Adventure Time 42. Kentaro Miura 46. Omori Review

FASHION 50. WHS Fashion 2021 55. Fast Fashion NZ

MEDIA 60. Non Human Characters + Race 61. Autism in the Media 63. Parasocial Relationships 67. Violence in the Media

MENTAL HEALTH 72. Eating Disorders 75. How to be Happy

1

The

Flannel

Speaks

Let’s be honest, this year was a slap in the face.

be better.

2

Freya, Ryan, Maya, Zac, Issy, William, Emily, Joel and Emma

30

Years l e n n a l F e h of T “GIVING SOME LIP”

4

lip.

The second edition of The Flannel, published in 1991.

5

DONDA - KANYE WEST (2021)

REVIEWED BY RYAN STOCKS

CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST - TYLER, THE CREATOR (2021) REVIEW BY FINN HAWKER

CotCC - LANA DEL REY (2021)

REVIEW BY WILLIAM JARDINE-LANGSTON

OK COMPUTER - RADIO HEAD (1997)

REVIEWED BY FREYA JAMES

BLOOD SUGAR SEX MAGIK - RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS (1991)

REVIEWED BY JAMES GRAY

TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING - JAMIROQUAI (1996)

ANONYMOUS REVIEWER

ALL PLAYLISTS ARE AVALABLE ON SPO

N SPOTIFY - FreyaJames (@mini_freya)

History

15 years ago, a man by the name of Daniel Ek began working on a platform where users could pay a monthly fee and be given access to a library full of music. This was a relatively new concept in the music industry, with the current main form of music being services such as iTunes where users would pay a certain fee for individual songs and or albums, equating to an upward price of $10+ per album and $1.79 (NZD) per song. Crazy right? Ek’s concept was to remove this ‘pay to play’ system and present a subscription-based service where users would be given access to millions of songs with the cost of a small monthly fee. Now, all they needed was a name for this new system; the company combined the two words “Spot” and “Identify” to form the name of Spotify.

while paying its artists a sufficient salary from this, which you would expect right? An infographic released by informationisbeautiful.net displayed data showing artists can expect to earn approximately $0.0016 per stream. Now that is quite a small number, but when you consider that the song Driver’s License made approximately $1,407,276(NZD) from 879 million listens on Spotify, pairing that with the listens from other streaming platforms, that adds up to be quite a sufficient amount now pairing that with the sales of physical format music as well as merchandise and tickets to gigs at bars and venues.

This new model of music listening became known as streaming which became a common occurrence in the media industry on how users interact with media, proceeding the music purchasing platforms as well as the physical music format as a whole, or did it?

How much can artists expect to earn?

The service offers 70 million songs as well as over 2.6 million podcasts all for free, but with the price of $14.99 a month, it will enable you to download tracks, eliminate ads between tracks as well as granting you unlimited skips on your tracks. This leads to an investigation into how the service can afford to be so cheap

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Because of streaming services, it has given artists the privilege of being able to release their music under their own right without a record label, meaning a lot of the time you earn 100% of the profits. Before this it was more difficult for smaller artists to strive because of the record labels and how you needed to appeal to a record label who would invest in your music, paying for recording as well as distributing. In turn earning them a cut out of their music, also known as a royalty rate. This led to artists sometimes being pushed by their record labels to release music more consistently, putting artists under

pressure and affecting their creative freedom. In turn, this creates a different system where the distributor becomes the holder of your music, meaning that different distributors can charge you different fees under different agreements. Some distributors will charge you an upfront fee of a smaller sum of money per year, giving you access to release as much music as you please on your Spotify page, with the possible consequence being that they essentially own the rights to your music, meaning they can take your music away from you as you please. Many opt to pay the larger sum of money to give them security over their music, meaning they keep all royalties with the safety in knowing it is theirs to keep.

This source of income was majorly affected because of the impact of Covid-19, globally in 2020 and as of writing this when you are reading in 2021, still affecting the state of the world. Governments putting prohibitions on large gatherings means that artists cannot hold large concerts without precautions, putting a halt to thousands of artists performing globally. Although some countries have eased restrictions, this still means artists are unable to travel to countries that still have their borders closed.

This all means artists are unable to reach their audience the same way and profit off of their tickets, leaving Spotify and other merchandise as their last resort. Now if we take the numbers I stated earlier, this would leave a smaller artist who scores 100,000

listens a month on Spotify a total of $110.

Not much is it. The celebration of Spotify giving users access to millions of songs and artists means that it is impossible to pay artists a reasonable amount without charging users too much that Spotify could potentially lose them as valuable customers, especially considering that the market price is already so low at the cost of $14.99 per month for most music streaming services and Spotify isn’t planning on raising them anytime soon as they have recently been fighting a battle in court against Apple themselves over the tax the Apple App store raises over any app-based subscription. In 2020 Spotify introduced a feature where Artists could add a fundraising button to their Spotify page where listeners

could donate to them to either support the artists or to support a charity of some sort.

This has lead to the controversy surrounding whether Spotify should be the ones to pay their artists more instead of leaving it up to the listeners. As a listener, I think it is a good feature to be able to further support the artists you like and unless Spotify is going to start charging us more money to use their premium services anytime soon, I don’t anticipate artists will be getting paid any extra either. Because of this loss of revenue from live performances, artists are stuck with the task of earning money mostly via people keeping the spirit of their music alive by listening to it, and that’s all that can be done.

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Accessibility

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Because we are able to carry this entire service on our phones which we carry with us practically everywhere we go, it has made listening easier than ever, making it possible to listen to the music you want whenever, wherever. Because of this large variety of music accessible with the tap of your fingers, this has widened the variety of music the user will come across, benefiting the artists with more users to potentially be exposed to their music. This is partially due to the algorithms used by the service which compile the songs and particular genre(s) you enjoy and constructing playlists of songs you may or may not listen to that are similar to your listening patterns, helping to expanding your music taste.

Many of you reading are probably familiar with these ‘Daily Mixes’ as well as playlist sharing. Arguably one of the best features of the platform is being able to search the database for other user’s playlists or created by Spotify using keywords. I personally was introduced to psychedelic rock by looking up ‘Sleepy playlists’ in the search bar, displaying playlists full of songs you can sleep to. These playlists do have their downsides though. For many, chucking on a playlist based on your mood is more simple than creating your own playlists and having to scramble up songs that you like.

These mood playlists are convenient, but a lot of the time you may prefer listening to the playlist and become oblivious to the artist who created the music. This results in less attention to the artists as individuals where they can become clumped under a common theme instead of being recognized individually. This leads me into the next section, why some appreciate vinyl for some of these reasons, recognizing the artists and their albums for their true intentions.

The Return of Vinyl This here is a chart, showing the ever so often changing usage of different music platforms from 2012-2020. That purple line, sad isn’t it? The compact disc really took a hit in 1999 when Napster introduced a free music service to the world wide web which had access to songs uploaded from all over the world for free (highly illegal), then again in 2001 when iTunes released.

One platform that really thrived with the slow death of the CD was the Vinyl, the vinyl was a platform that had been running dormant since the 1980s when the Cassette and then eventually the CD took over as an easier, smaller, and more convenient way to listen to music. People still listened to Vinyl, of course, only it was a more scarce industry. When online music platforms started to take the heat, many took a turn back to vinyl.

Since 2006 the vinyl industry has increased in popularity by 26.6% in the US alone, commemorating the times when music was not compressed into small audio files and printed out. You see, when music is recorded, it is recorded in extremely high quality for mixing reasons, too large for you to store multiple on your computer. Because of this, the audio must be compressed and during this process, some of the original quality and detail intended from the producers of the music is in turn lost but the quality is an exchange for practicality. Vinyl on the other hand is a format that doesn’t involve files, where the pressings are taken straight from the master meaning you don’t miss out on any of that quality.

Many also like to argue that listening to Vinyl over streaming keeps a sense of ownership over your music

and adds an appreciative experience for your music, looking after your records, playing an entire album from an artist instead of a ‘best of ___’ playlist on Spotify means you get to appreciate the entire content and story the artist is attempting to tell in their Album, with many artists making the albums come off as one continuous song that is intended to be listened to as one big song instead of multiple.

This leads me to my final question. Is Vinyl going to take over? It is probably not as practical as Spotify is, but at the rate currently we are going, I believe many will begin to get into the vinyl industry as a further way to support and appreciate artists and their work. As for Spotify, I hope this piece leaves you educated on how you can further support the artists you love, especially the smaller ones who don’t make it to those top 50 charts. I am not trying to stop you from using Spotify nor making you switch to Vinyl, I am merely bringing light to issues many were previously unaware of.

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Love: A NeuroLOgical Con-Job

A cynical LOok at THe existence of LOve

High School is like a minefield, minefields are designed to destroy and disable the enemy. A direct blast from the land mine causes damage to the enemy by shrapnel. The enemy, in this case, is us; teenagers. We are responsible for the fragments of those mines that are memories of cliches, social groups and the hatred of being uncool. These pieces of shrapnel bury deep and you’ll carry them forever. Pubescent love doesn’t help navigate the war of the teenage years. School is already tough as it is, I don’t need to see faces that are going through puberty, swap spit. Not now. Not when I could possibly be standing on a landmine.

Everyone says love is overrated. I actually mean it. I am in no way a “hater of love” but I struggle to understand the obsessions and desperation some people have to be in a relationship, especially at the age of ten.

Foreigner once sang, “I Want to Know What Love Is”. Well, Mick Jones my friend, scientifically if you boil down love, it is essentially just a bunch of happy chemicals. No soul mates or the perfect match or true loves, just chemicals that you also get when looking at food or listening to Teenage Dream by Katy Perry while driving in a pink convertible off to start the best summer ever. You can’t do that here, not without your hair becoming a bird’s nest and at least three bugs in your mouth. You even get these chemicals when taking a walk, so the next time you are feeling horny don’t hit up that one mate and be horny dumbasses with regrets the next morning, instead go check your mail. That’s definitely a better walk of shame. Feel shitty about the lack of mail instead of the boy you left in that bed. Life isn’t as easy as a supposedly sexy vampire coming in and claiming you as his. Edward and Bella’s love doesn’t exist, I mean hell, he doesn’t even exist. Twilight was a shitty film.

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And anyway, according to Dr Helen Fisher, an American anthropologist and human behaviour researcher, “Romantic love can be broken down into three categories: lust, attraction and attachment… Testosterone and estrogen drive lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin. We are all simply just horny and trying to convince ourselves that it’s more than our primal needs, because who doesn’t love Hollywood?

So why are we so stressed about being single? We’re making a big deal about the absence of a few chemicals we have romanticised because of Hollywood’s soulmates trope.

You’re a teenager… you don’t have to find the one right now, or anyone.

Being single is the new cool (despite the fact the only people who say this are single people trying to convince themselves that they are in fact okay alone). Own your confident sexy self and strut that single ass down Lambton Quay. People are taking relationships a little too seriously. I watched a comedy special on Netflix by Daniel Sloss and he’s right when he says that “If you only love yourself 20% that means someone can come along and love you 30%. That’s less than half. If you love yourself 100%, a person that falls in love with you has to go above and beyond the call of duty to make you feel special.”

There is nothing wrong with putting yourself first or being happily single.

Now, I’m not completely oblivious to how important love is to some people, nor is my heart made of stone. The idea of love itself is beautiful. It’s been the subject of some of the greatest songs, films and literature of all time.

William Shakespeare, Frank Sinatra, Al Green and the old Taylor Swift have all fallen into the hype. However, just like Russian novelist, philosopher, and journalist Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”

I blame unrealistic expectations of love for this global and timeless hype.

I blame Disney. I mean who falls in love with a glass slipper wearing girl just by dancing with her once? Or who trades their voice for a pair of legs in hopes that a boy she met once falls in love with her? I blame human nature for romanticising every little thing. Not to keep quoting Daniel Sloss but he

sums it up, “Some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece and jam them into our jigsaws anyway, denying that they don’t fit. We’re gonna force this person into our lives because we’d rather have something than nothing.” We are more in love with the idea of love than the actual person we are with. I’m guilty of that. My bad, Jake. I blame the fact you asked me out in that underwater aquarium at the mature age of 12. How can a chick say no to that?

55% of marriages end in divorce, and 90% of relationships that started before they are 30, end. If that 90% was the death stats for fucking sky diving, I’m positive no one would drop out of a plane and depend their lives on what’s basically a sheet to hold them up and make you float instead of fall back to earth. I mean if these were stats for surgery, almost all of us wouldn’t jump onto that operating table and say “cut me open Doc!”. If those stats represented your chance at falling off a bridge every single one of you wouldn’t walk across one. Where’s the Disney princess who spends the entirety of the film striking out, and in the end sits at home alone? But because it’s love, and we’re horny eggs, we just lie on the operating table hoping that this time you’re not one of the 90%.

That this time I won’t die, but that everything will end happily ever after.

I have mixed feelings about love and that’s all good. I’m too busy dealing with land mines to really figure out everything to do with love. I’m trying to make you all realise that we are still young and have plenty of time to chase the ‘one’. Ultimately, just like Foreigner, I can’t decide what love is. This is just a plea to open your eyes a little wider and create a more physical distance between your hormone-filled bodies at school. A plea to stop looking for your ‘better half’ and recognise that you aren’t a half by yourself, you’re whole. Don’t settle for crappy water as that kind of love is (as Hillary Duff in A Cinderella’s Story said) useless and disappointing. Instead, follow the motto, I’ll always take the opportunity to quote Hannah Montana, “chill it out, take it slow then you rock out the show.”

by Emma Kane

b

The Classic Makeout Spots of Wellington High (for all you desperate people to get some action and can’t wait till after school) 1. In the doorways of your next class: Not seeing the “love of your life” for an hour must be rough and I’m sure you would all describe it as the exact same feeling you get when having to rush to the ocean’s surface as you’ve misjudged how far you can dive but imagine me in this situation…Waking up at 7am and rushing out the house with a slightly brown banana and a handful of biscuits because I know I should have packed a lunch the night before but the third and fourth season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills had been just put onto netflix and god damn if I don’t find out what Brandi spilled about Adrienne…and then having to sit on the god awful 2 and then switch onto the 3 Metlink bus at 8am and listen to the RC boys play the occasional old Miley Cyrus or Demi Lovato song in between bad rap and their target quality freestyles is already a nightmare enough. Then having the last 50 meter stretch to class being blocked right by the finish line by two 15 year olds reenacting the one kissing scene between Cry-Baby and Allison. I mean Johnny Depp being that hot in the film almost makes watching that kiss alright but I promise you these 15 year olds are no Johnny Depp look-alikes and they are standing between me and passing the last year of highschool. I’m not above shoving these kids out of the way, especially if they ruin my chance of getting out of this water stain on the ceiling of my life.

2. Between the stacks of books in the library Though this is rarely seen, I know that this is a keen makeout hang out. We’re not even allowed to eat here so surely swapping spit is also included in that ban?

3. In the linkwells Come on, this place is a constant ice box. How can kissing anyone here be enjoyable? I doubt the energy you create when kissing is going to make you less cold (although as someone

pointed out to me, kissing technically does create heat… but to hit back at that argument, not enough to make it worth it. You wouldn’t kiss someone with hypothermia to try and keep them warm). Plus only juniors really hang out in between the M and S block during breaks so if you’re trying to impress the seniors, by showing that you can pull and you have pulled, that is not going to work. That’s not impressive, especially because most of us (or maybe this is just me) don’t look back at our first makeouts with much fondness. All that you are accomplishing is scaring the little guys.

4. Level 4 bathrooms The stalls? That amount of desperation you must need to swap your gross DNA there is bigger than my need to be validated constantly… and I have some issues. Well, not really. I just said that to make you guys feel like I’m not this unflawed god judging you from my place up in the sky. (I totally am.)

Seriously though, there are people around you pissing… if that is modern romance then I’m going to pass away.

5. Between the gyms Come on, you’re surrounded by sweaty, greasy kids who definitely don’t shower before heading to their next period. The stench oWf pubescent teens is overwhelming when I seek a dry passage to any of my classes in the M tower and although it doesn’t have the bitter icy temperatures of the linkwells, that link between the gyms is not warm.

6. Down the hill to the Basin Maccas I just want some cheap greasy food that is 100% gonna lower my life expectancy man. Lunch is a little breather from my gray, bleak 6 hour school existence, don’t ruin it by touching tongues. Also poor Shona… Directly outside her home? I don’t think she wants to see you guys make out either.

And especially don’t make out in the booths in the corner inside Maccas.

You are still seen, even if they can’t see you. Number one rule of tag: if you

can see them, they can almost 100% see you. (WC boys also don’t make the greatest audience for all of this).

7. Memorial Not exactly school property but come on, do you even wanna go that public with your love? And everyone who is allowed to leave high grounds goes there. I just want to eat my diy-under-$10- the warehouse-picnic with my mates and swap shitty gossip. Swap gossip… not spit.

8. In a cloud of vape at a party Guilty as charged. Alcohol mixed with our young impressionable minds is not the wisest idea but it is certainly fun. A vodka cruiser (bought by your 3 day old ID) and the colourful flashing lights creates a romantic space where PDA is bound to happen. Now making out at a party is definitely not as bad as any other place as you’re drunk, they’re drunk, everyone is drunk, meaning there is definitely more than a 30% percent chance no one will remember seeing the tangled limbs in the corner.

9. In the back of a white sketchy van that your “almost but not quite boyfriend” picked you up in and drove you to go around the bays This would appear as so sketch to anyone who is viewing this walking past, especially if there is groping involved (and there is always groping involved in cars.) Put some pillows down or add something so it doesn’t look like you are the potential victim of sex trafficking and please don’t go at it in a public place. Being in a car doesn’t equate to no one being able to see you guys. Install curtains or just park somewhere else.

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The Problem With

Prize Givings At Wellington High we are all about inclusivity right?

We don’t separate people into labeled groups, do we?

What if I told you that at the end of every year an event happens that divides our school: prize-giving. It’s been the traditional way to celebrate those academically driven students, calling their names to the stage, and giving out those big shiny trophies that lie around at home all year. Prizewinners and their families get sent an invitation email, whilst the non-prize winners are left in the dark. This highly competitive behaviour has been embedded in us as five year olds starting school when the torments of prize giving first begins.

I spoke to a student who has not received prizes at prize giving before. Alex* is not particularly bothered nor motivated by prize giving. They think that because they have never been to prize giving before, it has never been a motivator for them: “only prize winners are motivated to win prizes, so the same people are getting motivated: if you don’t win prizes you aren’t motivated by them in the future.”

Right from the beginning, we are setting certain students up for success and giving the rest of them the short end of the stick. Those who get the feeling of the shiny, metal cup in their hands will want that feeling again and again, whereas those who never experience it will never have the drive.

Every year we hear speech after speech about the WERO values our school apparently holds. The first being ‘W’ for ‘Whānau’ - but how much like a ‘family’ is competing against our peers for a trophy and sometimes even cash? We need prizes that celebrate ropu’s, groups or classes that have succeeded or worked well together, not just individual ‘Excellence’.

Out of the 23 Students who responded to a google survey sent across six year 11-13 media studies classes, 19 had a negative depiction of prize giving.

They described it as making them feel dejected, inadequate, shit, bored, guilty, stressed, uncomfortable, awful and anxious. It doesn’t sound like prize giving is a positive experience for many people, so why do we still have it? Nor are we looking after our students’ mental health or ‘Ora’ by running this event. Being a teenager is hard and a generally strange stressful time without the added pressure prizes put on students.

Last year Frankie* received prizes in all but one of their subjects. When they got home their parents asked them why they didn’t receive a prize in Maths.

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The expectation set by not only their parents but also themselves, they tell me, has always been high. They describe prize giving as a motivator but not a positive one, “it has trained me that I need prizes for validation and that it is just the base-line for success.” They acknowledged that they come from a privileged position, where the school system suits their learning style and that they are lucky to get rewarded for their effort.

Prize giving in the perfect world would be able to accurately celebrate the efforts of everyone who had put in extra effort, not just the lucky students like Frankie. Teachers will no doubt try to ‘choose’ those who they think are most deserving, but we do not live in a perfect world, teachers will never be able to perfectly choose students who deserve prizes and prize giving will never be truly representative. Students who deserve the acknowledgement will always be left out, there will always be disappointment, and it will always undermine peoples’ achievements. Sounds like life, right? Sure life can be unfair at points, but why should we inprint another unfair experience onto our children? Instead of setting our children up to believe that life will be competitive and unjust, we should encourage them to foster collaborative behaviour: how learning can be done together, not just individually.

Yes we need to acknowledge students who put in extra effort, but let’s do so without creating division.

Personal emails from teachers thanking the students who put the extra mile in or the special awards being handed out during class time would take away the parading and shameful atmosphere prize giving creates. Why do we need to see those top prize winners walking across the stage and feel shitty about our own achievements?

Lets celebrate more than just academic success, lets celebrate everyone and lets do so with a new event: celebration evening. This would be an evening that all students and families would be invited to, dedicated to showcasing what the school had achieved that year - Kapa Haka, excerpts from drama classes, music items, science challenges (Epro8), vegetables that horticulture classes had grown, short films, all the awesome things that our school creates together. Academia is the main focus during the school year, so let’s take a moment to acknowledge everything that happens outside of exam results and written essays.

Our future is collaborative not competitive and the beginning of our future starts by canceling prize giving.

Vita Jerram

Monty O’Rielly

Black Lives Matter- Aestheticized I’m sure everyone reading this has heard of the tragic death of Geroge Floyd on the 25th of May 2020. He and many other innocent people of colour have died at the hands of predominantly white police. His, and other similar deaths, led to a justified public outcry and continued race-based activism. While modern activism continues to move online, much of the news today comes from social media sites like Instagram or TikTok, which were not designed to be news sites, more sharing pictures of friends, products, comedic videos etc. This is not to say that amazing activism cannot be done, I’ll leave some links to other articles about the amazing work being done by mostly youth activists currently. However, many times the result can be toxic: the combination of activism being undertaken on social media platforms, and those platforms not being designed to properly disseminate news, with the platforms prioritising aesthetics over fact.

It can be really problematic when powerful activist movements turn trendy. I’m sure you’ve all seen it. There was a big trend of “hello kitty says ACAB” a while back, showing the popular cartoon character Hello Kitty next to signs that say something like ”disarm the police” as a funny contrast between the innocence of Hello Kitty and this political movement steaming from literal murder. However, the same imagery of Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters was being used for aesthetic purposes, and the combination of the two led to ridicule of the movement.

By using these cute kawaii aesthetic images it dulled the meaning of statements such as “All cops are bastards” which caused people to take the issue less seriously than they may from an actually informative post. If you’re already sceptical about the whole movement then seeing a post with a children’s cartoon character, you aren’t exactly going to be convinced that this is something you should care about, in fact, it makes it really easy to make a mockery of it.

It’s also very common to see Black Lives Matter being used for reposts, for example, a few weeks ago a friend of mine reposted an image onto her Instagram story. It was a cartoon image of the killing of George Floyd with a text above it reading “Repost or else you’ll have one year of bad luck”. I was absolutely disgusted by this, George Floyd didn’t die because of “bad luck”, he died because of a corrupt system and posting this shit isn’t helping take it down. It’s using someone’s horrific murder for your own gain.

It digusts me to see this poor excuse for “activism” being us when there are people having tear gas thrown at them for actually trying to make a difference.

Now, you could argue that by making these aestheticized Black Lives Matter posts you’re just spreading awareness, surely people are more likely to repost something more pleasing to the eye, or something that suits their feed than something that doesn’t? And surely any awareness on the issue is good, regardless of how it is presented? Yes, it is definitely important to spread information about social issues such as racism in the police force, and sometimes the best way to spread this information is by making it “aesthetically pleasing”, to appease the social media algorithms that would rather you post something bright and colourful than the gory reality of this movement.

“People have entire Pinterest boards called “Black Lives Matter Aesthetic,” (yes those exist, look it up) ...”

However, there is a thin line between appeasing an algorithm and making the protests “trendy”. When you have people who have entire Pinterest boards called “Black Lives Matter Aesthetic,” (yes those exist, look it up) I think it becomes an issue. Sure, you can have some aesthetically pleasing posts on your story reading “Defund the Police” but you also need to have resources where people can help. You need to attend protests, sign petitions, keep updated with news articles. And everyone reading this can help with this, encourage your friends to protest, put petitions in your bio just do the little things.

We can’t let this incredibly important political movement be sullied by turning it into a trend, leaving people associating it with the image of Hello Kitty and teenagers who will forget in a week. Too many people have already died, we can’t let the movement die too.

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GENDER EXPRESSION GENDER EXPRESSION GENDER EXPRESSION !"#$%&'()(&*$&*+$,"-$#(./$0+12+*$+34*+55("16

You may be used to thinking that if somebody has male genitalia, they are male, and if they have female genitalia, they are female. However, somebody can remain the same biological sex, and express themselves as an entiresimply, ‘your biological sex.’

I can’t count how many times I’ve spoken to my friends and family about the topic, and have been hit with the same old. ‘But how can someone be NOT male or female? You either have a penis, or a vagina. That’s that.’ I’m sure that you’ve heard something similar. Now what if I told you… gender isn’t about what’s in your pants anymore! You could, for example be a female biologically, and identify as a male, and vice versa. Or you could even identify as non-binary! You don’t have to be cisgender, if you’re not comfortable being cisgender. (Cisgender meaning, staying the same sex and gender identity that you were assigned at birth). According to Healthinfo Canterbury, approximately one in one hundred people identify as transgender.

You might be confused as to how you can be ‘not male or female’, but it is all with the magic of ‘gender expression!’

7/&.$&*+$1"189(1&*,$4+*5"156$ You might ask this question a lot, since you may have heard of people who identify as non-binary, but not know much about the topic. Well, for your information they are people that identify their gender as something other than simply male, or female, the two binary genders. It doesn’t matter what their body looks like.

Non binary as a whole, might be perceived as strictly angrogenous looks. Though, this is untrue. A person could look and dress in a feminine way, and still be non binary. The same could be said for a person that dresses or looks a masculine way. A lot of non binary people might just look masculine or feminine, but they are still non binary. Like Jonathan Van Ness, who is well known from the popular tv series, Queer eye. They have a beard, which is typically labelled by most as a trait of somebody who is masculine, but they are still non-binary.

!"#$2"$,"-$9+$*+54+:.%-)$"%$1"1$:(580+12+*$+34*+55("156 The key thing for this question is, Pronouns! the list goes on! There’s even less common ones such as ze, hir, hirs, and xe, xem, xyr. Plenty of information out there! For example, on many websites out there, for example, lgbtlifecenter.org, which gives information on what pronouns some people may use and how to address them properly, along with another few terms regarding gender that you might not know. The polite thing to do is just to ask them what their pronouns are. If you are unsure, you talk about them.

In today’s world, there is still a lot of hate being directed towards those who choose to identify themselves as something other than their biological sex. According to beyondbullying.com, 83 percent of trans young people say they have experienced name calling, 35 percent have experienced physical attacks, and a shocking 27 percent of trans young people, have attempted suicide. If you want to help to make the world a little more comfortable for those who don’t identify as their biological sex, you can start with two things.

First, you can make asking about people’s pronouns more normalised, by doing it with new people you meet!

Encouraging the sharing of pronouns would be a major step up for everybody. You can add onto a conversation with somebody you’ve just met, by sharing your pronouns. This way, they will feel very comfortable with sharing theirs! It also shows that you genuinely care about their identity, and are willing to accept them for who they are.

What kind of person wouldn’t want people to give them that dignity?

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ple like they’re weird for having non cis-gender expressions.

Treat them with the same respect that you would with any cisgender person. Because they are just like you, and have the right to acceptance, like everybody else.

Article Written By: Willow Williamson

Being Female TW: sexual assault, harrasment

Image from Wellington City Council

Phaedra Romond 19

FREE THE TITTIES What’s the best feeling ever?

That’s right, taking your bra off at the end of the day. The sigh of relief that signifies the freedom of your tits. It’s the one thing that brings pure joy after a long hard day of imprisonment.

Bras are boob prisons.

If it’s the greatest feeling to take them off, why are we putting them on in the first place?

This thought lingers in my mind every time I slip on my ‘good ol reliable’ that is most definitely due for a wash.

Bras were first manufactured in the early 19th century. The purpose of them was not to support your breasts, help back pain, or solve any of the concerns that come to mind when talking about ‘going commando’. They were created by Henry S. Lesher, with the purpose of enhancing cleavage for the male gaze.

Yeah, sounds about right that someone without boobs created bras.

It’s not just the fact society expects us to always cover up with these bras though, but if we choose not to, it’s completely looked down upon.

Imagine you’re at the beach, it’s a nice sunny day and everyone’s out enjoying the heat.

You look around. Dozens of topless men are going for a swim. You think nothing of it, but suddenly you’re taken aback as you see a woman, also shirtless, swimming next to the man. Why is it so unacceptable and shocking for women to show their nipples at a setting

“They’re just boobs...” like the beach, if it’s the norm for men to?

They’re just nipples, for God’s sake!

I’m not saying I don’t enjoy a cute bikini that makes me feel confident in my body, I’m just saying if I wanted to free the girls, then it should be acceptable and ‘normal’ for me to do so. Big-tittied WHS student Catie Peach said “If the NZ Human Rights Act includes freedom of movement, those rights should apply to my boobs too.”

The oversexualization of breasts has made it impossible to show them without everyone immediately commenting on it.

‘Slut.’

‘Whore.’

And if you’re not slut-shamed, then people think that simply not wearing a bra or bikini is an invitation to cat-call, or make sexual comments on your body.

Why should we have to hide them?

They’re just boobs.

by Holly Bowman

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A MOCKERY OF THE HAKA The haka party incident shows how stories can be hidden away and forgotten, leaving lessons unlearnt.

Lulu Shepherd

“Kamate! Kamate! Hori! Hori! I got the pox from Hori, Hori!” These words were uttered by a group of white engineering students on May 1st, 1979. Demeaning and belittling Māori culture, these students had annually marched around Auckland city performing a mockery of the haka. That year, after years of asking politely, Māori stood up for their rights, only to be depicted as the culprits and vilified in the press. This shameful story is a crucial part of New Zealand history, demonstrating a turning point in the fight for racial justice. Yet it has been largely overlooked, as we continue to be hesitant about acknowledging the undeniable racism in our country.

For twenty years a group of Māori activists, named He Taua, had written to the engineering students at Auckland University, pleading with them to stop the annual event because of the racism and the hurt it was causing. This annual event involved white students dressing up in grass skirts and mockingly performing the university’s haka ‘Akarana.’ By the late 1970s the event morphed into a horrific joke. The engineers would draw curse words and penises over their body in vivid and get intoxicated, causing chaos around the university. In the later afternoon they would proceed to march up and down Queen Street, stopping traffic, in order to perform their drunken haka.

In 1979 a new generation of activists were emerging, intolerant to the racist ways of Pākehā and ready to fight to preserve the dignity of their culture. Māori had been suffocated by colonilaistion, watching the government disregard their culture and identity time after time again. Enough was enough. On the 1st of May 1979, the activist group He Taua marched to Auckland’s campus to confront a group of white students who were preparing to commence in their annual ‘tradition’. He Taua demanded that these engineers stop. The ten-

sion, anger and frustration grew, and as one thing led to another, violence broke loose. This incident caused outrage across New Zealand with the front page of ‘The Auckland Star Times’ stating “Gang Rampage at Varsity.” In 1979, few New Zealanders were on He Taua’s side, and the justice system was biased against them. The engineers were let off without a charge, but He Taua were questioned brutally by police and charged with numerous offences including rioting.

Systemic racism in our country failed to provide justice, allowing a group of white men to be let off scot free, despite participating in the same acts of violence. The media was no different. All across the country, various newspapers were recording the event, with titles like “Too Sensitive Over Race” printed on ‘The Southland Times’ and “Haka Fracas, A Lone Incident?” The media created an image of a violent ‘gang rampage’ taken by ‘overly sensitive’ Māori. An engineering student, recently interviewed by New Zealand Herald, had no remorse for the part he played due to only being a “kid”. He said “to go and beat up a bunch of people just because you don’t like what they’re doing is totally inappropriate.”

Despite New Zealand’s ‘progressive’ stance, this is still an incident that continues to divide us. Our nation is still struggling to acknowledge our racist actions, past and present. So why is the haka so important? What is the historical and cultural significance?

Why is it unacceptable that these white students dare to mock it?

The haka was traditionally created and performed by numerous Māori tribes as a war dance, showing strength and power. Not only would it intimidate their opponents, it was also believed that the haka would allow them to call upon the god of war, helping them to

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win battles. Overtime, the haka became so much more.

It became a way for communities to come together.

Performing this collectively, they were able to display their resilience in a country where colonisation had disavanged them. The haka isn’t exclusive to Māori, but when Pākehā perform, they need to be aware of its history, significance and maintaining its dignity. When the engineering students performed the haka, their intent was clear, this was a joke to them, a bit of fun that would get a laugh out of some bystanders.

I had the privilege of interviewing Katie Wolfe (Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Mutunga), an award winning actress and director. Alongside her successful career, Wolfe has a strong passion for racial equality in New Zealand, using her plays, and films to depict hard issues that leave the audience with a deeper understanding of racial injustices. She recently wrote and directed the play ‘The Haka Party Incident’ with the help of the Auckland Theatre Company, portraying the story and perspec-

tives involved with this tragedy. Wolfe was inspired to write and direct the play after reading Ranginui Walker’s book; Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou. Wolfe states; “I found it enlightening. It included the haka party incident and that’s when I first heard about it. I was struck by the fact that it was a moment of violence between Māori and Pākehā and how astonishing that was. Why, how have I not heard of that before?” After a number of tries to get the story off the ground through a TV series and docudrama, Wolfe decided to present the haka party incident in the form of verbatim theatre, using the voices of the real people involved.

Wolfe spoke on the dismissal of the haka party incident, saying that “this is just one of many, many, many, many stories that are dismissed in New Zealand’s history. There is just so much material about stories that have never really been looked at, or have been

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presented to us through Pākehā lenses.” To Wolfe this story was specifically important, as to her it allowed a conversation to form between Māori and Pākehā, with discussion needed in order to address the issue at hand. She hoped that “the audience goers would walk away from the theatre feeling that they have a deeper understanding of the hard issues in the play which is most importantly systemic racism.”

This incident from the late 70’s was a massive wake up call to New Zealand, showing that the haka party incident and other instances like this would no longer be tolerated. When asking Wolfe whether she thought the haka party incident affected race relations in New Zealand, she responded; “I think it did, because for the very first time it showed what systemic racism is, it’s probably something that no one had even thought about or knew about. So the idea that actually institutions and in this case The University of Auckland, who were asked for twenty years to stop doing this haka and just turned

a blind eye really got a wake up call.”

It took a long time for our wider society to acknowledge this incident as an intolerable, racist act, but once it was, it allowed us to see how systemic racism was so ingrained within our nation. Wolfe spoke on this, stating; “We could see that it wasn’t the engineers, they were just students who were doing what they were told and had no cultural depth, or knowledge to understand what they were doing was wrong. They were just the children of their generation, living a very privileged, white, Pākehā male upbringing. There were no women, no Māori in the department at that time, it was only white, Pākehā men. The people who were in power in terms of the structure at the Auckland University are the ones who really turned a blind eye. Those institutions really had to really wake up and then we could see it being reflected, right through many other institutions around the country.”

The haka party occurred over forty years ago, yet similar trends are continuing to occur, as racism continues to play a major role in New Zealand society. Wolfe firmly thinks that racism is something deep rooted into New Zealand society, stating “We are absolutely struggling to acknowledge racism, people are very frightened by the word. People who are good hearted who absolutely believe that they are not racist, have no idea that they

racist as the haka party incident, 40 years ago but it is a trend that continues to exist. Why is it that Pākehā continues to appropriate Māori culture, when it is so obviously upsetting and insulting? What is not under stood is that mockery of Māori culture is especially hurtful, as Māori culture has been suppressed in New Zealand for so long. In March of this year at an America’s Cup party, a video was circulated online of a group

“We are absolutely struggling to acknowledge racism, people are very frightened by the word” are inside racist institutions.” Acknowledging racism in our society is necessary but still isn’t enough, in order to grapple with this issue we need to change our education systems, our inherently racist biases/stereotypes and the institutions that allow white Pākehā men to excel.

of white individuals filming themselves pulling pūkana faces, and showing no sensitivity towards Māori culture.

While the viral video was instantly called out for being a “shameful” example of “cultural appropriation,” it remained shocking that Māori culture continues to be ridiculed in this degrading way.

At the time of the incident, the media played a key role in promoting racist attitudes. Our media has continued to infocred these harmful stereotypes against Māori, failing to show diversity, by highlighting news from a Pākehā perspective. Wolfe spoke about these issues, stating “You’ll absolutely see how issues of race are dealt with in the media, you get to see how there are still people holding very racist views online, it can be very, very shocking.” In late 2017, Mike Hosking, presenter on Seven Sharp, made racist comments regarding New Plymouth’s mayor, Andrew Judd. Hosking called Judd “out of touch with New Zealand” for his position in supporting Māori seats in local government, and stated that “Māori who want to council should be elected only if you’re good enough.” Hosking’s willingness to reinforce racist attitudes through his platform in the media, resulted in Judd being spat at along the streets.

The haka party incident deserves to be remembered. It is a crucial part of New Zealand’s history, exposing how racism was constantly tolerated in our nation, without a second thought. This incident allowed big institutions to see how they were acting in a way which drastically favoured Pākehā, and for one of the first times in our history, opened an honest conversation. However, we haven’t come all that far, we continue to see racist stereotypes actively portrayed in the media, institutions continuing to advantage Pākehā and the appropriation of Māori culture. Is there even a way we can solve such a major issue? As Wolfe discussed earlier “racism is based in fear, which is a primal instinct, so racism is something we are never going to solve, rather something we always must tackle with.” There is no easy answer. We must continue to face these issues head on, changing the systemic ways in which our society has disadvantaged Māori in the hopes to see real change.

In 2021, we are also still witnessing the haka being mocked and disrespected. It may not be as blatantly

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SYSTEMIC RACISM Emily Rutledge

When a police officer walks past you on the street, what are your thoughts? How many times have you been questioned about your intentions while in a store? Have you ever had anyone comment on the colour of your skin? If you’re reading this and thinking, ”nothing” or “never”, then this article is for you. While we may like to think that skin colour doesn’t drastically affect how we move through society, it does. Everywhere. Across the world for people of colour, these are daily occurrences that have wide-ranging effects. While individual racism plays a part in these situations, the root issue is systemic racism, which this paper will address.

Systemic racism or institutional racism, by definition, is a form of racism that is embedded within society or organizations. It can lead to such issues as discrimination in criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, education, and many other issues. This type of racism often goes unnoticed because of how deeply rooted in society it is; how ‘normal’ it is for the dominant culture.

Right now, here in New Zealand, systemic racism is prevalent. In 2020, there were reports of Māori youth in Wairarapa being stopped and photographed by police on the street. In March 2021, this was revealed to be a nationwide practice. Police deny that there was any racial profiling involved, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

The police admit there often isn’t any general reason for the photographs to be taken. Police Minister Poto Williams has now warned the police that they shouldn’t be taking photos of the public outside of the law, but there is still a vocal concern coming from Māori whānau.

If you read this and think “aren’t they just protecting the public?”, then you need to reflect on that opinion. Imagine walking down the street with your friends and suddenly a police officer stops you, either to question you about what you’re doing or take your picture with details. Would you be confused or scared, maybe? Now consider the more intense fear involved when you are a racial minority, more likely to be harmed by the police. Within a systemically racist society, white people aren’t deemed ‘suspicious’.

In a letter sent by Kelvin Davis, the Corrections Minister, regarding the wrongful treatment of women in New Zealand prisons, he acknowledged the need for change. Yet, only a month prior, he ignored the situation, saying that he’d been assured that prison staff were acting appropriately. Māori women make up 63% of the female prison population, which raises the question of mistreatment being connected to race, given how high this rate is and how often concerns of abuse within female prisons arise.

This attitude prevailed until a full report was received from

the Chief Inspector. This letter means little until we see change, words without action, however, it is a promising start. Rose, another journalism student, and I had emailed Minister Kelvin Davis requesting an interview regarding prison systems within New Zealand. Due to his busy schedule, he was unable to respond in time for this article.

From police on the street targeting Māori youth to the treatment of inmates in the prison system to the major disproportion of Māori population in New Zealand (15%) against the Māori population in prisons (50%), it is clear that systemic racism has taken hold in our own country.

New Zealand’s core values include ‘fairness and equality’, but this is shown by these examples to be just words.

This form of racism, however, extends beyond NZ borders: In Australia, systemic racism within the justice system has resulted in the disproportionate treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to white people. Indigenous people make up 2% of the Australian population yet 28% of the adult prison population.

In South Africa, Black urban shack-dwellers deal with the remains of Apartheid, their leaders still being imprisoned or killed for actively opposing the authorities. Apartheid was institutionalised racial segregation in South Africa from 1948 till the early 1990s and is still evident today.

In Guatemala, Mayan healer Domingo Choc was accused of witchcraft and was tortured and burnt to death by a mob, a ritual dating back to the 1600s. Does this show you we’ve evolved and progressed as we say we have?

Awareness and an understanding of systemic racism in today’s society is the only way it can be stopped. It will take time, but we must begin now. My paper only scratches the surface of systemic racism and I strongly encourage you to look further into the topic. Even though this article focuses on systemic racism, we can’t forget about the terrors of individual racism. This might be hard to accept, but we have all probably done or said something casually racist recently unknowingly. You know, laughing at a racist joke or saying nothing when a racist comment was made by a friend or family member. This is not right, but we should reflect and accept these errors and become better aware of ourselves and work to change our attitudes.

We must fight for those whose voices cannot be heard. If you are apart of the non-oppressed society, I ask you to use your privilege for good. Calling others out does not make you a bad person, or a “snowflake”, it makes you a concerned person.

Do good by others and stand up for those who are less fortunate. Help make living on earth a better experience for everyone.

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PRISONS AND JUSTICE Rose Livingstone

Waikeria Prison Uprising The beginning of 2021 started off with a bang (almost literally): the 29th of December saw media outlets across the country breaking news that fires had been started at Waikeria Prison, one of New Zealand’s oldest and biggest prisons. Over the following six days, at least 21 participating inmates destroyed Waikeria prison’s high security “top jail” unit. The whole prison was evacuated and at the end of the whole ordeal it resulted in a third of the bed capacity being destroyed - and the top jail facility condemned.

Does hearing this fill you with anger towards those 21 inmates? How would your view change if I told you that the prisoners were protesting due to inadequate living conditions?

Waikeria prison was built in 1911 and has a current maximum capacity of 806 inmates. After more than 100 years in operation it is in a state of disrepair, and no longer fit for purpose. A recent report into the prison in August 2020 by the Office of the Ombudsman found that “while the low security areas were well-maintained, the high security areas were not fit for purpose and this was seriously affecting prisoners’ treatment.” While these people have committed a crime and are serving their sentences, should they be housed in a facility that is rotting, moldy and with brown drinking water? Justice officials are stating that they hadn’t been previously made aware of any complaints about the prisoners’ living conditions, however, inmates were unable to even access complaint forms in the first place. Even though no formal complaints were made, justice officials should know better than to house people in conditions like those seen at Waikeria Prison.

Corrections minister Kelvin Davis has the job of overlooking everything related to the corrections system in NZ and yet he was nowhere to be found on the scene of the Waikeria prison protest. Hon Kelvin Davis refused to comment on why he neglected visiting Waikeria during this ordeal. Many MPs such as Rawiri Waititi made the effort to travel from all over the country to be there in support. So why was it that the Minister of Corrections, the person who is incharge of the whole corrections system in our country was ‘unable’ to be present at the scene? As minister of corrections Hon Davis has the responsibility to uphold the correct treatment of inmates in our prisons, so therefore not being there in person suggests that he was disregarding the points the inmates were trying to make.

It’s not just the living conditions that tipped the prisoners to breaking point, but also the justice system in itself. Recently a new strategy has been implemented: Hōkai Rangi. This new system is designed to foster aspects of ‘humanising and healing’ with an aim to focus

on Māori Tikanga, this is an important factor to consider, as Māori make up 52% of our prison population. The system is also designed to see people as whole and worthy of dignity and care. However, was the attempt to somewhat starve the prisoners during the protest a good example of emphasising these values? Lawyer and justice reform advocate Julia Whaipooti has discussed in an article around the backbone of the protest. In the article she states that “It was inevitable prisoners would retaliate, because the system was failing them and in some cases sending them back out into the community worse off.” We cannot expect that putting people in a system without adequate support will rehabilitate them and make them ready to return to our communities. Instead we need to look at criminals as humans and not raging animals, they need to be treated with dignity and if Hokai Rangi is to work effectively then it is important that we emphasise the tikanga behind it.

Top left: Ex-prisoner and hunger striker Tuta Ngarimu is supported by two Upper Hutt Mongrel Mob members on the steps of Parliament buildings in December 1987 Right: Exterior of Addington Prison with police officers in riot gear preparing to enter during a riot at the prison.

The main question that I think the justice and corrections department should be asking is: how well do prisons actually reduce crime in Aotearoa? We all hear about the violence that happens in prisons and this is often because adequate support systems for prisoners are either inaccessible or taken away. This leaves prisoners in an environment where violence is generally the only way to cope with their problems. The general public often fears the idea of having no prisons in Aotearoa, due to the concept of ‘what do we do with the bad guys.’ However, if the current prison system is already failing prisoners and resulting in them going back into our communities worse off, then we are already living in a society with the ‘bad guys.’ Yes, there are some people in our society that truly are a danger and a threat to us, so occasionally there is a need to protect us from them. But, for the majority of our prison populations these people simply don’t have proper support systems, which is why they keep re-offending. It’s apparent that change is needed and in order for this to occur it is up to the corrections and justice department to be bold enough to make changes that go against the normality of what prisons are currently considered to be.

The Waikeria prison protest should be a clear sign for both us and the corrections department that our current prison system is not an effective measure to solve crime in Aotearoa. It is important to remember that inmates are still humans like the rest of us, as this is not being recognised at the moment. Prisons are currently just a way to cage individuals in our community, because they have committed a crime. If prisons were a place of rehabilitation then the continuous cycle of reoffending would end and those same inmates wouldn’t end back up in the same cages.

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The Highway Of Tears

By Bree Gerritsen

There were 18 known murders and disappearances from the Highway of Tears from 1969 to 2006. 10 of these were indigenous women. From 1980 to 2012, almost 1,200 aboriginal women were murdered or went missing in canada. This isn’t just a scary story, it’s the terrifying reality for aboroginal women and girls living in Canada. The justice system has failed in keeping them safe.

baby out of her stomach. During the initial search of the apartment the baby had been under a blanket next to Hoens and Savannah’s body had been in the closet.

Crews and Hoens were both sentenced to life in prison, but nothing would make up for the carelessness of the police’s searches in Savannah and her family’s time of need. The baby was left with the father (Savannah’s boyfriend), but there will forever be a hole in the family left by the police’s ineptitude.

Jodi says this particular case inspired her, as Savannah reminded her of friends from college, her niece and her

The exact number of murdered and missing girls in these areas is unknown, in large part due to minimal resources and effort provided by the local police department. In a desperate attempt to find missing girls the community has taken measures into their own hands and is searching the Red River themselves after the failure of the justice system to provide closure. Disproportionate rates of violence towards indigenous women have been ignored by the government even when brought to their attention through movements such as MMIW crisis (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) - a group which organises peaceful protests to spread awareness around missing indigenous women in hopes of their cases being solved.

The chair of MMIW Texas, Jodi Voice Yellowfish, became involved after the disappearance of Savannah Greywind.

Savannah was 22 years old and pregnant when she disappeared. On the 19th of August 2017 she was asked by her neighbour, Brooke Crews, to model a dress she had made. Brooke lived upstairs with her partner, William Hoens. Savannah agreed and told her mother and boyfriend her plans with Crews. This was the last time her family ever heard from her.

sister. The challenges she faces while trying to help with this crisis stem from the way indigenous people have always been treated. “Many people in this world view our people as disposable”. As for the justice system, she feels as though no matter how many times they are asking for help with this crisis they are ignored. The police are an obstacle and are quick to call missing people runaways and ignore the issue. This just continues to prove the racism in the justice system that is prevalent against indigenous people.

Many protests have attempted to bring awareness to the crisis. These have been a call to action for the Canadian and American governments and the way the justice system has been handling it. Protestors often paint a red hand print over their mouths to represent the silence that has been forced upon the indiegnous community.

Savannah’s mother called the police and reported her daughter missing. The police searched the neighbours house but turned up nothing. Frustrated by their lack of results, Savannah’s mother went to a local reporter, accusing the police of not taking her daughter’s disappearance seriously. When police looked further into the case they heard Crews and Hoens had a new baby at home.

They had found no sign of a baby when they originally searched the apartment which raised suspicions, leading to another search of the apartment. The search found a baby girl in the apartment and Crews and Hoens were immediately arrested.

Crews and Hoens had murdered Savannah and cut the

In 1994 the Violence Against Women Act was establised.

However, this failed to include specific protections for Native women. In 2013 this act was amended so tribes have jurisdiction over domestic violence cases against Native Americans committed on tribal lands. In 2019 this was again changed to further tribal jurisdiction to include acts of sexual violence and stalking. In November 2020 President Trump signed an order forming a task force to specifically address MMIW. This was initially met with gratitude from the indigenous community, but complaints were made about a lack of funding, and lack of tribal representation on the force.

Similar task forces have been established in several states across the US in an effort to address the crisis.

These include Washington, Arizona, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. These actions have helped the indigenous community feel more safe, but lots still needs to be done. Aboriginal communities are still failed by the system, left entirely to fend for themselves.

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Oranga Tamariki, The Organisation that is Currently Failing Vulnerable Tamariki

F Kupu & Definitions: Oranga Tamariki: Oranga meaning wellbeing and Tamariki meaning children Rangatiratanga: having sovereignty, this was promised to be given to Māori in the Treaty of Waitangi Uplift: The term for when Oranga Tamariki remove a child from their whanau/ home. This is often carried out with intentions to protect the child Mokopuna Māori: Grandchildren, can be used to refer to children Tangata Whenua: People of the land, indigenous people who were the original inhabitants of an area

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rom July 2008 to now, Oranga Tamariki has uplifted 4,300 children under the age of one, of which 62% were Māori. This number may already seem high, however, it is only set to rise further and cause an even larger disproportion between the number of Māori to non-Māori within our state care system if things don’t change.

Oranga Tamariki previously known as CYF (Child Youth & Family), is the governmental organisation dedicated to ‘protecting’ vulnerable children in Aotearoa, yet the organisation is currently doing the complete opposite. Whilst there is a huge importance for an organisation like Oranga Tamariki, when the organisation is doing more harm than good then it is clear that integral change is needed. Systemic racism has been an ongoing social predicament for indigenous Māori ever since the arrival of European settlers in the early 1800s.

This racism has become so institutionalised throughout our governmental sectors and organisations that it is now heavily impacting the welfare of Māori tamariki.

Oranga Tamariki was first established in 1999 under the name of Child Youth and Family and was then later on made a governmental agency within the Ministry for Children. The transistion to Oranga Tamariki was made in 2017 after the government finally admitted that CYF’s performance was inadequate. Vulnerable

children within the system were repeatedly ending up in homes that didn’t fulfil their needs and in many cases often resulted in deadly consequences. The five-year mark since this transition was passed just earlier this year and while there had been hope that things would be different this time around, it is evident that there needs to be much more extensive change in order for things to properly improve.

There are a few key things that are wrong with the organisation. The first one being that the number of Māori children being uplifted since the shift has been significantly rising. Many of these uplifts are often unethical and go against the morals that Oranga Tamariki strive for. Within less than ten years the percent of Māori/ Pacifica children who have entered state care has risen by 7%. All while the number of non-Māori entry into state care has dropped by 8%. These statistics show that there are systemic problems that run far deeper than only making surface-level organisational changes. Secondly, the treatment of children and their families in the system is astounding. Numerous families or foster parents who have either reached out to Oranga Tamariki for support or who have directly had interventions carried out by the organisation describe the actions that they take as wrongful and completely dehumanising.

source of the disparity in the alienation and dispossession that flowed out of colonialism, and the failure to honour the Treaty of Waitangi.”

“We’re a Ministry dedicated to supporting any child in New Zealand whose well being is at significant risk of harm now, or in the future.”

Reading this on Oranga Tamariki’s homepage along with the many other inspirational goals that they ‘strive for’ makes you wonder how an organisation designed with the intent to provide protection for vulnerable children could cause such harm. There have been 18 enquiries since the establishment of the

Powerless: the prominent word that so many families use when they describe their experiences with the organisation. It’s far too common to hear stories of social workers verbally abusing foster parents and families of these children to the point where they feel completely powerless in a system where everyone should feel heard. Power is everything that Oranga Tamariki holds right now.

Power to enter a hospital and uplift a Māori baby right off of the delivery table without the mother having any prior knowledge. Power to place the most vulnerable children in Aotearoa in homes that threaten that child’s life. Power to absolutely destroy the

Inside our Government

I interviewed a spokesperson from The Office of the Children’s Commissioner, which is an independent entity of the Crown that work to make Aotearoa a place where all children can thrive. The office works alongside many other organisations, governmental departments and individuals who have powers in relation to the welfare of kiwi kids, with the aim to make sure that children in Aotearoa have adequate access to services or support. This interviewed helps to understand what relation the office has with Oranga Tamariki.

In my interview I asked a multitude of questions surrounding the office’s role with Oranga Tamariki and their viewpoints on the recent backlash the organisation has been facing.

I was able to gather that The Of-

“They have enough money and everything else and they will sink you. They will destroy you and your family.

They don’t care.” organisation into the practises and methodology that are carried out. 18 enquiries, yet where is the change?

These are enquiries that are supposed to highlight issues and promote actions to be taken, but have currently resulted in barely anything apart from a change in the organisation’s name. The lack of actions that have been taken in relation to these reports shows the amount of ignorance that Oranga Tamariki has towards the issues at hand.

The most recent review carried out by the Waitangi Tribunal has suggested the organisation needs to have a transition led by Māori for Māori through what the Waitangi Tribunal suggest to be a ‘Māori Transition Authority’. This authority would properly reform state care in Aotearoa and would have it being returned back to Māori. Rangatiratanga was an aspect Māori were promised but yet stripped of through the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Re-establishing Oranga Tamariki would also result in Rangatiratanga being returned back to Māori, which is longer overdue. As stated by a spokesperson for the Waitangi Tribunal; “The tribunal locates the

slightest amount of confidence already discriminated against minorities had in the system. Power can be such an extensive aspect in our society, but somehow it continues to end up in the wrong hands. Hands who are continuing to destroy the lives and opportunities of tangata whenua.

fice of the Children’s Commisioner is currently the main government sector that monitors both the practises taken by Oranga Tamariki as well as the ten institutional care and protection facilities that are found around the country. At the end of June this year, a care and protection facility in Christchurch was forced to close by the government after videos showed staff within the facility tackling children who were currently in care within this facility. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner was made aware of this footage with the Children’s Commissioner himself stating that he has “long called for care and protection residences to be phased out, saying the model had fundamental issues.”

It was made clear in this interview that The Office of the Children’s Commissioner does not and will not defend the actions that Oranga Tamariki has been carrying out. While I was skeptical that the office would defend or at the minimum not outright slander Oranga Tamariki I was rather surprised to receive a reply from them where they did just that.

The spokesperson that I talked with described the importance of

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having a statutory role like Oranga Tamariki, but that the current system is completely failing Māori and that in the view of the Children’s Commissioner, the system

state care at a rate five times higher than that of non-Māori babies that systemic racism is clearly playing a major role in the practises carried out

by Oranga Tamariki. However, through

at the recent statistics surrounding COVID-19 vaccination rates, Māori are currently sitting around half of Pākehā, proving even further the disparity within the system.

“The ‘child rescue’ model inherited by Oranga Tamariki has for decades failed to work for mokopuna Māori, and it never will.” needs to be “completely transformed” in order for this to change.

When I brought up statistics around how recent reports have shown such a high disproportion of Māori to NonMāori tamariki being uplifted by Oranga Tamariki, I was told “The statistics are not new and are symptomatic of a “child rescue” approach which has failed to consider a child’s right to be connected to their whanau, hapū and iwi, or how central that is to their wellbeing.” The Office of the Children’s Commissioner believes that there have been past opportunities for Oranga Tamariki to make sufficient changes to their system. A major one being the implementation of the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act in 1989. However, Oranga Tamariki failed to see this and have continued to operate in a system that is built off of colonisation and supported with systemic racism.

Ultimately, The Office of the Children’s Commissioner believes that what is currently going on inside Oranga Tamariki needs to change.

It is evident that when Māori babies under 3 months of age are taken into

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my discussion with the spokesperson for the office, it was clear that The Children’s Commissioner is pushing for the government to commit to transferring the leadership and resources for a by Māori for Māori approach. I was told that changes to the organisation need to go well beyond a change in leadership or ‘focusing’ on Māori Tikanga and Mātauranga Māori if we expect to get things finally right for tamariki in Aotearoa.

The Wider Context

It’s not just the foster care system that has been discriminating against Māori. But there has been systemic racism towards Māori throughout many government sectors and systems for decades. Society as a whole is overall systemically inclined to better of non-Māori to Māori. A clear example would be the healthcare system. Māori are predisposed from birth to experience inequalities within the healthcare sector as a whole. As a result of this Māori are far more likely to contract preventable health issues. Looking

A major element that results in Māori being less likely to receive adequate healthcare relates back to socio-economic deprivation which produces barriers to primary healthcare facilities and treatment. Illnesses such as rheumatic fever have for decades been attached to Māori, the disease is said to now be an exclusive disease that only affects Māori and Pasifika individuals. Rheumatic fever is an autoimmune disease that is caused when strep throat is inadequately treated. A combination of crowded housing conditions and healthcare factors that Māori often have to face is what has a major influence on subsequently higher rates of rheumatic fever occuring in Māori.

Now you may be wondering why and how some diseases relate to the is sues that are currently in discussion around Oranga Tamariki. There is a strong stereotype in our society that Māori are the ones more likely to live in lower socioeconomic status because the Māori culture is ‘lazy’ or they aren’t good parents because they are involved with gangs. But what often isn’t under-

stood is that the reasoning behind why Māori are often more likely to be exposed to lower socioeconomic circumstances is because of the bias our government has towards non-Māori. Māori end up becoming connected with gangs, because gangs are often the only ones there to support them when our government and society won’t. The example of the healthcare system heavily relates back to what is currently being seen within Oranga Tamariki, as it shows that an organisation like Oranga Tamariki is only just one aspect to the bigger problem at hand.

“Oranga Tamariki is not alone – it is one of many organisations operating within a structure that has been created by colonisation and is supported by the effects of modern-day systemic racism” There has recently been positive actions in the healthcare system taken that look to potentially show a way forward for other sectors of our government. The recent national budget release for 2021 has dedicated a total of $1.1 billion towards

Māori health, housing and other related initiatives, this is an increase of $200 million from 2020. Within this budget, $242.8 million is to be dedicated towards Māori health. A major announcement that came alongside this budget, was the news that the government has intentions to set up a Māori Health Authority separate from the current healthcare system.

Our current healthcare system is heavily inclined towards westernised beliefs and practices that often result in Māori not being unable to access adequate healthcare. This new authority would help to show a new way forward for our government as a whole. The creation of a Māori Health Authority will hopefully help return leadership and control back to Māori over their hauora. Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare states that “The Authority will give Māori a voice and influence in how our system needs to perform better for Māori.”

The End Result

This is all evidence that goes to show the extent of the amount of change that is needed in order for things to be properly improved within our society. If we expect the problems within Oranga Tamariki to change then we need to take a relook at our entire government, in particular the lack of equality resulting in Māori being left behind and essentially ‘forgotten’ about. The problems that

are currently being faced highlight the major impact colonialism and systemic racism can have on indigenous communities. The development of the Māori Health Authority should be used as an example of a way Oranga Tamariki could be re-established. If done in the right way it could result in a re-establishment that is by Māori for Māori. The effects of this would greatly benefit Māori tamariki and their whanau throughout Aotearoa, ultimately returning rangatiratanga back to Māori.

This isn’t something that is going to necessarily change overnight, especially when you look at the extent of what needs fixing. You may be wondering, why does this article relate to me and why should I care? As young people, it will be up to us in the future to make substantial changes that will be long lasting. It may seem as though this issue is irrelevant to us, however, the more people that voice concerns for systems such as those inside Oranga Tamariki the more pressure that puts on our government to make changes. We need to be pushing for Individuals high up in our government to collectively take actions towards a society that provides equal opportunities for everyone and not just those who are privileged on the basis of race.

Rose Livingstone

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Billionaires and COVID-19 How have billionaires made their wealth and how have they been efected by the COVID-19 pandemic?

All money values in NZD

Imagine you had one billion dollars, it is such a huge number It’s pretty tough to visualize. One million seconds is 11 days but one billion secconds is 32 years. How have some billionaires made hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than any one person would ever need? With families and small businesses struggling as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, now more than ever, there is no reason for individual people to keep so much money.

“The top 26 richest billionaires own as much money as the poorest 3.8 billion people” - TIME 2019.

One million Hunderd million

What is a billionaire, how do they make their money?

A billionaire is someone who has a net worth or assets of at least one billion dollars in their native currency.

Currently there are 2,755 billionaires with a combined wealth of $18.7 trillian. Billionaires’ assets commonly include stocks, real estate and business. There are two ways to become a billionaire, you can either inherit the money like 44% of all billionaires or be ‘self made’ like the other 56%.

Inheriting wealth A lot of billionaires’ wealth is passed down to them from their families. An example is Bernard Arnault. A French investor, art collector and businessman, he owns 70 luxury companies including Tiffany, Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton and Sephora, all bought by his parents’ family business that he now owns. Arnault is not in the public eye but with a net worth of $269.2bn he is one of the richest people in the world. Jim, Rob and Alice Walton, owners of the American store chain Walmart, inherited the company from their parents. The family is known for providing bad working conditions to their workers. In September 2020 workers spoke out to the Guardian about cuts of their hours and pay all whilst their workload was increasing.

Meanwhile the Waltons’ are able to live luxurious lifestyles, hoarding their wealth instead of using it to better the working conditions they are profiting off.

One billion

Walton family

Warren Buffet With a combined stake in Walmart of $351.5bn, the Walton family is the richest family in America. Currently run by Jim, Rob and Alice Walton, their wealth was passed down from their parents.

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An incredibly successful investor, businessman and philanthropist with a net worth of $142bn. He is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company for many different American businesses.

Self-made billionaires Billionaires like Jeff Bezos: the founder of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg: the founder of facebook, and Bill Gates: the founder of Microsoft, are all ‘self-made’.

Although these companies are used by billions of people, their creators have not earned their wealth all by themselves, as the name suggests. For most ‘self-made’ billionaires, labor creates wealth. If you made $142.5k a year (three times the New Zealand median income of $47.5k) it would take you 7,017 years to earn 1 billion dollars. With an average New Zealand teacher’s salary of $63,645 a year, it would take 15,712 years to earn 1 billion dollars. A billionaire is not working 15.7 thousand times harder than a teacher. Even though these self-made billionaires have had a good idea and run successful businesses, if they are making so much money why can’t they afford to pay their workers fairer salaires?

Or improve working conditions to the people they wouldn’t be successful without?

Self-made billionaires’ wealth is often thanks to unethical working conditions. At Amazon, workers get fired for not producing enough packages per hour or taking too many bathroom breaks. This is on top of having unsafe working conditions and lunch breaks that are too short. When one worker named Rina Cummings complained about the working conditions, she talked about how her fellow workers often get injured at the job. Even after Amazon had been notified of the high injury rate, all they did to combat it was put up screens around the factory telling workers that safety is Amazon’s number one priority.

Jeff Bezos makes more in one minute than one of his workers makes in one year.

Jeff Bezos

CEO of Amazon, a still fast-growing company especially over the COVID-19 pandemic, and the largest internet company by revenue. Bezos is the richest billionaire with a net worth of $273.5bn.

Recently Bezos took a flight to space in a rocket made by his company Blue Origin, becoming the second billionaire to go into space.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected billionaires?

Since March 2020 the world has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. While small businesses are going broke and families are struggling, billionaires have been majorly profiting off the pandemic.

According to Oxfam the wealth of the 10 richest billionaires rose by $772bn during the pandemic.

“Billionaires got $800bn NZD richer over the pandemic, making $60bn NZD a week on average”- Business Insider This massive increase in wealth is all thanks to billionaires owning companies that are able to run successfully online during the pandemic. Some billionaires largely affected are Elon Musk whose wealth increased seven-fold, from $35.2bn to $260.4bn over only 11 months and Jeff Bezos whose wealth rose from $161bn to $270bn, an almost 70% increase over the same time. Oxfam says that the billionaires’ fortunes rose due to a “rigged economy”, causing more inequality during the “worst economic downturn in a century”. Oxfam believes the money made by all billionaires from the pandemic would be enough to vaccinate and prevent poverty for all.

Over the time it took you to read this article Amazon made around $5.88 million.

Bill Gates

One of the most famous billionaires, known for founding Microsoft and his charity work. In 1975 Gates dropped out of Harvard University to form Microsoft, a company that made small, at-home computers— brand new technology at the time.

His net worth is currently $177.7bn.

Maya Hobman

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Since the closing of the original ZEAL location on Ghuznee street in 2016 Wellington has had no consistent all-ages venue for young people to go and see live music. Conversely, there are also few places for young artists to play and network with other artists and get their foot in the door of their local music scene. For a city with so much artistic potential in its young people, it’s such a huge missed opportunity to develop and continue Wellington’s reputation as an artistic mecca for New Zealand.

[him] to come see his band playing at ZEAL.” These allage venues are the “main reason why hardcore in New Zealand has stayed around after decades of its existence is through the proactiveness that bands and promoters have to run all-ages shows and support young bands.” For Moore, ZEAL “acted as a lot of things” that he took for granted at the time, but he “really cut [his] teeth learning to perform on that stage”.

As a young artist, I have experienced and seen the difficulty many young artists and music fans have had in their local scene. Age prevents them from getting into music clubs in town and not being able to get early entry and experience in the music scene is a waste of potential great artists and performers.

When it comes to weekend activities and nightlife, most of it is built around the commercially manufactured drinking culture funneling everybody to bars on Friday and Saturday nights.

So what does that leave people who are too young to drink or just want to have a good time that doesn’t revolve around getting “fucked up”? Well, not much.

Wellington caters to its large population of students coming in from all over to study at Victoria University who use their newfound freedom to go out with their friends and not know how they got home. This causes its own problems of public safety around areas like Courtney place and Te Aro Park.

Now, this is no fault of the promoters or venues, as it’s just the position they find themselves in. Beer sells more than door sales, and the bills are not going to pay themselves but, I think for a city that prides itself on its schools and universities, that have well funded and successful art departments we should see some funding and support from the council to put in place venues and places for that art to be expressed.

I wanted to get the perspective of someone who has had more experience in the Wellington scene, so I contacted Ian Moore. Moore has been active in the scene for many years playing as drummer in the band Severed beliefs and has his own solo Digital hardcore project where he goes under the name DEATHTRIPPA for views on this topic. He told me that his passion started when he was at the “Red Rabbit cafe on Leeds street and a barista noticed [him] wearing a Killswitch Engage band shirt and invited

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I asked if he sees a future where Wellington can have another thriving all-ages venue, this led to the sad truth that “In Wellington, it’s near impossible” running a venue costs lots of money and “in 2021 where property rent is through the roof, you’d need a venue to be able to monetize a decent income to pay for rent, power, sound people, backline among many other things.”

Moore compared this to the old ZEAL that “worked because it was government-funded and non-profit so unless anyone was able to get a government grant or has rich as f*ck parents who can straight buy a property - we’re not in luck.”

Despite the bleak conclusion of this interview, it did tell me that the Wellington scene is not just open but actively supportive of younger artists as most people in the scene were in the same position I am now in, except they had the platform to express their vision. But both Moore and I agreed on the fact that “the government should be putting more funding into youth venues.”

To summarize, this article I could not say it better than Moore did in one of his final anecdotes: “I think All Ages shows play as so much more than just exposing young people to live music - it really gave me a whānau and did wonders for my well-being and offered an alternative to just getting really cooked.”

Issy Gilchrist-Hall Leaving school, let’s face it. It’s not going to be easy unless you’re planning on staying at home, partying and all that fun stuff; you haven’t got much to worry about then.

When the idea of leaving school is at the forefront of our minds, it’s easy to forget how difficult it might be. When a group of senior students at Wellington High School were first asked the question, “On a scale of 1 - 10, how prepared are you to leave school”, 33.3% of students said that they were at around an 8, claiming that they’re pretty prepared. However, when this question was broken down, effectively asking students what they didn’t know, their answers altered. The survey results showed that the percentage of people who know what a kiwi saver is is about 8.3% more than those who currently have jobs. The survey indicates that there is at least an understanding of how budgeting and planning for your future works; however only 20.8% of students, who took this survey, knew how to pay bills. This is only looking at the money side of things. I believe that there are more ‘practical’ or hands on things to worry about, so I asked.

It turns out 45.8% of people don’t do their own laundry and out of that percentage, 8.3% of people have never used a washing machine. And the same goes for cooking; only 58.4% of students regularly cook meals. Let me tell you something, this is not going to fly in the real world. So why don’t we know how to do these things?

Let’s face it, as we get older we take on more responsibility for our own cooking and cleaning with less of our parents or caregivers’ help. It is a big part of managing ourselves, gaining commitment, and becoming independent in our own homes. This means the only people we blame for not developing life skills is ourselves. Be that as it may, my question regarding why we don’t know basic things like having an understanding of tax, how to pay bills and a simple idea on how budgeting and money works is why is it not a compulsory part of the high school curriculum? Not just for the people who choose those subjects. Granted, schools allow us the opportunity to learn these things, but only if we decide to take a subject such as business studies, accounting or economics, which a majority of students do not take. These subjects include a lot of valuable skills like managing taxes and budgeting, but many students do not understand why it is beneficial or necessary for their future.

Instead most students have to find out how to pay bills, do their taxes, organize and understand their kiwi saver and budget, as soon as they leave school and get their first job.

But to be very honest, these aren’t our real concerns.

Sure they are incredibly important things, especially to adults who forget what it’s like to leave home for the first time. Our concerns are usually regarding our families, like “what if I need a hug from my mum”, rely-

ing on oneself for everything, and dealing with mental health sturggles pretty much alone, failing, fear of losing support and not being organised enough to manage living on our own. Luckily there are some great support networks around for wherever you end up. Many universities in New Zealand have ‘Student Associations’, which manage events, clubs, societies, student representation and, most importantly, create support networks for students. Suppose you were to end up in Dunedin at Otago, your student association is called OUSA, if you were to stay in Wellington, Vic is VUWSA and Massy is MUSA. If you were to go to Auckland University, it is AUSO. You can easily find information on students association by searching up what university you’re going to and ‘students association’ at the end of it. It will take you to websites or Facebook pages regarding your university, and this is where you can find support on many things, like budgeting, flatting, academics and general support from “people who get it”. Alongside student associations, the Ministry of Education has a great website with links to pages created to support tertiary students. There are so many sites on the internet that cater to your needs around support once you leave school, which is a lot more than what our parents had when they were leaving secondary school.

Overall, leaving school is extremely difficult for everyone. No matter what we go on to do, where we go or who we do it with. It’s hard. Leaving a 13-year routine to go out into the real world where we’re responsible for ourselves, feeling like those 13 years were wasted because you have no idea what you’re doing. You know what, this is all okay. We’re all in the same boat.

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ALL GAS NO BRAKES Pushing Down on The Pedal of Journalism

In 2021, our world looks more similar to Blade Runner than the 1980s’. Our technology is moving faster than your grandma’s Lenovo PC, and with the ever-changing levels of tech, the industries that rely on them have to move pretty fast too.

When everyone else was boarding the train to digitalism, the journalism industry was still running to the platform. Even though they made it in the end, it took a while for journalists to find their footing and place within this new world. Even though mainstream news platforms such as Time Magazine, the New York Times, and the Guardian are digitally releasing almost all of their content, they’re still getting left behind in the dust.

In the past years we have witnessed rapid change in journalism and the cookie-cutter method it has followed for centuries. Not only are more publications and articles reaching a completely digital standpoint, we’re also witnessing what I believe is the greatest turnaround for journalism ever: the age of video journalism.

Video journalism is exactly what it sounds like: people reporting on current affairs and issues in short video documentary form. With the surge of platforms such as YouTube, Vine, and TikTok growing in popularity, short videos of almost anything are the most exciting thing on the internet, and in the wake of the political nightmare universe that we call 2021, people want to know what’s going on.

With only twenty four videos and over 90 million total views, All Gas No Brakes is dominating modern journalism with his crass, fast paced and gritty interviews with “America’s underbelly”: and America’s underbelly, they certainly are. Whether he’s going to the depths of places such as Burning Man Festival, a Proud Boys rally, Flat Earth conferences, or simply just Florida, Andrew Callaghan, the brains and face of All Gas No Brakes takes us on a journey of reflection and self discovery.

All Gas No Brakes started with Andrew Callaghan donning an oversized thrifted suit, grabbing a cheap microphone, and heading to Bourbon Street, New Orleans to navigate and document the night

time wildlife. After gaining popularity for his man-on-the-street style interviews, a campervan and three new members of All Gas No Brakes were thrown into the mix: and All Gas No Brakes reached its final evolution. After gaining speed and subscribers, Andrew began to slowly transition his locations from more gimecky coverages such as AlienCon, and the 2019 Area 51 Raid, to more serious subject matters such as Trump rallies, anti-lockdown events, and BLM protests. His deeper and grittier content racked up double the amount of views that his previous work was receiving. He started attending more protests, fought back against hate speech that was spewing from the interviewees, and created his own podcast.

All Gas No Brakes now has a new home on Channel 5 News following a hiatus after being fired by their network. In a short time span, All Gas No Breaks has already left tire tracks in the meida, and a wave of new creators are following in their footsteps. Not only are independant journalists saturating the market, but even some of those multi-million dollar companies that refused to budge are publishin their own videos such as Vice and the Washington Post. All Gas No Brakes has given the journalism industry the tug out of the ditch it needed, and is towing it off into the sunset.

Written by Freya James

Interviewees labelled by video:

proud boys rally

QANON conference

QANON conference

2019 furfest

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L.A. PUNK SHOW

What Time Is It? Taking a look at one of the most popular animated TV series of the 21st Century Adventure Time is a timeless masterpiece, which whilst obviously not perfect, will forever hold a special place in my heart and many others alike. This is thanks to its fantastic writing, outlandish comedy, and iconic characters.

The show first aired properly on the 5th of April 2010. The first two episodes to air were Slumber Party Panic and Trouble In Lumpy Space, which whilst not the highest-rated episodes in the series by critics and fans alike, held a viewership of 2.5 million viewers which was a significant increase from Cartoon Network’s 2010 average viewership of 2 million. At the show’s

peak, there were 3 and a half million viewers watching episodes as they first aired, making Adventure Time the most viewed show in Cartoon Network history. With the release of the new mini-series on HBO max, I rewatched the entire series in the span of about three weeks, from slumber party panic all the way to come along with me.

In doing this I started to notice just how well the show had aged, from the strong feminine representation in the show to the treatment of trauma that a lot of the characters have by way of living in a world that is the colorful product of a

world-ending nuclear war. Adventure Time is a show that hides deeper meanings under the glossy, bubblegum-like finish of its exterior, this in turn makes its more mature themes digestible in a way that only the best cartoons can really do.

I gotta say too, after having watched the entire series, I felt the sudden, insatiable compulsion to ascertain the opinions of literally anyone possible on the show.

That being said, in this article I’ll be breaking down the best episodes and songs in the show, as submitted by people I asked, as well as my own thoughts on what make the show so damn good.

Fionna & Cake & Bad Little Boy These two episodes probably were my favorite episodes when I was a kid (Okay if I’m being honest I really preferred Bad Little Boy by like, a LOT.). I had originally seen Fionna and Cake after buying the Jake V.S. Me-Mow DVD. I liked that episode quite a bit. I never really n o ticed how

weird it was that the Ice King made weird gross romantic self-insert fanfiction of the young boy he often fights. And I certainly didn’t notice when I got around to watching Bad Little Boy after I bought the season 5 DVD, how Marshall-Lee was being a huge creep the entire episode, being far too distracted by Donald Glover’s silky smooth voice to listen to the actual words he was saying.

But that being said, Bad Little Boy has one of my favorite songs in the whole series in it, and as much of a filler as the episode may be, I still love it to bits.

I personally think the design for Fionna is really funny because it pretty much breaks every rule they’d previously set up for how their characters are built. Not many AT characters have actual shapes in their body that aren’t just t h e classic t u b e l o o k ,

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with exception to any muscular characters like Muscle Princess or Billy.

Fionna & Cake worked so well for me as a kid because there wasn’t a huge excess of characters like her, I mean even now, Finn and Jake are so unique because of that signature Pen Ward flare. For this I congratulate the show, when I was a kid this was one of the rare places I didn’t let my toxic masculinity get in the way of my viewing experience.

In the rest of this article I’ll be talking a little about the season five Ice King and Marceline episodes before moving into a far longer section on the music of Adenture Time. The music section will introduce you to the wonderful artists behind the unique and highly recognisable audio idententity of the show, as well as mini profiles on some of my favorite songs in the show.

All pictures used in this article belong to Cartoon Network, and were taken from screenshots of the show.

Adventure Time!

Simon and Marcying&people I they Remember You cited the well crafted received some pretty universal ac-

When the show was airing, season five had begun strong with the first two episodes of the season “Jake The Dog” and “Finn The Human” being direct tie-ins to the previous seasons finale “The Lich”. After the massive success of the first two episodes, a lot of people felt the season began to dawdle around with the long slew of filler episodes that happened for the next ten episodes after the premiere, So as you might imagine, after a season starts like that (though I’ve gotta say I really enjoy Adventure Time filler) having Simon and Marcy show would have been like a breath of fresh air.

At its core Simon and Marcy is the perfect Adventure Time episode. The way the tone of the episode stays on course desprite all the goofs and gafs in the episode, you still get the emotional connection between Simon and Marceline. One of the more, er, articulate responses I got from ask-

shift in tone to the darker and yet still palatable post-nuclear war setting as one of the reasons they liked the episode so much saying: “Even though Adventure Time is a relatively bright and bubbly looking show it tackles darker or more serious things quite well, I think Simon and Marcy is one of the best examples of this in the entire show”. That response was very similar to an IMDB review of the episode by Rectangular_businessman who says: “I think that is worth noticing that, despite the very dark setting (Which reminded me post-apocalyptic movies like “The Road”) this episode still manages to have a certain degree of humor and optimism”, The only other episodes that do this so well I’d probably say are Come Along With Me and I Remember You. I Remember You is episode 25 of season 4. It originally aired on the 15 of October 2012 to a live TV viewership of 2.535 million people. The episode

“That’s Going In The Vault”

I really think that a significant part of the appeal of Adventure Time comes from the attitude creator Pen Ward had towards making the show when he was still the showrunner, and how that good attitude translated to the rest of the production crew when writing and making AT.

Pen had the attitude that instead of making a “kids show” he was just making a cartoon, having fun along the way. Years after Ward stopped being showrunner (though he was still showing up to voice LSP very often) Adventure Time carried that same attitude, I think also the way they went about writing the show really helped the rewatchability was the unwillingness to let censorship get in the way of both the stories and the jokes that they wanted to tell.

Adventure Time was constantly pushing the boundaries of what will and what will not get them censored

which actually lent to some really good storytelling of darker subject matter, or jokes like that one time Finn saw Marceline naked (which actually did end up censored in a number of countries, New Zealand included). The previously mentioned episodes are all actually very good examples of this.

The mushroom war heavily featured in Simon and Marcy and the allegory for Alzheimer’s in I Remember You are both emotionally deep and absolutely morbid. This being so, Adventure Time presents these things in ways that are both highly enjoyable and incredibly poignant at the same time. (I don’t think I’ll ever not tear up at the sound of Simon’s second rendition of the 1982 TV show Cheer’s theme song “Where Everybody Knows Your Name”. And even in the finale they weren’t afraid to finally have Marceline and Bonnibel act on their age old sexual tension, something

claim with many fans and critics alike praising the unexpected depth of the episode along with its exploration of mental disorders, memory and loss.

The episode is a notable tear jerker in the series, with Steven Aoun of PopMatters saying in their review “[during the episode] the sound that takes you by surprise may be your own crying”. In the episode itself Marceline collaborates with Ice King to write a song, and Marcy tries him to remember who he really is.”

I Remember You paints a powerful image of what I’d consider a daughter watching as her father-figure forgets her, and eventually, abandons her.

The main song in the episode which shares the name of the episode is an intensely emotional climax to the episode, Marceline truly realises Simon has completely forgotten her, having become a crazed shell of the man he used to be.

that genuinely surprised me when I watched it.

Before I move on to the music section of my article I’d like to talk about the real reason I love this show so much.

Imagine being a little kid, you wake up late in the morning every saturday. Everytime this happens you rush over to the TV cabinet where you pull the most recent AT season out and stick it in your PlayStation.

You sit back on the couch and your dad hands you breakfast, And then you sit down and watch Adventure Time together. This routine is stored in a collection in my head of my favorite memories. And sure! Often we’d watch Gravity Falls or Regular Show instead, but nothing was ever quite as snug and cosy and curling up on the couch with a bowl of microwaved porridge and a cup of Milo.

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Music Of Adventure Time Rebecca Sugar, Timothy Kiefer & CJB

I think it would be safe to assume that for a lot of people, if I started singing the theme song to Adventure Time, they’d start singing along with me. The only shows that may elicit a stronger response would be the Steven Universe theme and Family Guy’s. Adventure Time’s music, all of it not just the stuff with lyrics, is absolutely iconic. Rebecca Sugar, Casey James Basichis and Timothy Kiefer are the main musicians in the show, Casey and Tim in charge of the scoring of the show and Rebecca in charge of most of the character shows right up until she left the show to make Steven Universe.

Obviously, there’s tons of music in adventure time, from all of the background ambience that are mostly overlooked to the bigger and more famous pieces sung by characters within the actual diegetic parts of the show. I created a list of six of the best diegetic songs in the show (according to mostly me, but also supplemented by the AT wiki awards winners). Though I do think the lesser-known background pieces deserve recognition for how great they are too and am gonna give you a small list to check out in the link from the QR code to the right.

The best songs Gooey Gangsta from episode “slow love” a song composed by Tim Kiefer featuring famous rapper Biz Markie, known for the song “Just a Friend”, beatboxing over the iconic synths that the show loves to use. I chose this song not because it’s iconic, but because I personally just really like the song and listen to it all the time. I’ll admit that it doesn’t really fit the criteria that I used for the rest of the songs on this list, I mean literally no one even suggested this and it’s not even a song that has lyrics but I still like it enough that I’m putting it on here anyway.

Plus, Gooey Gangsta is technically diegetic thanks to Biz’s character in the episode Snorlock using it to attract some honeys.

Lost In The Darkness. Composed by Michael Moynihan, this song appears in the episode “Breezy”. The song isn’t iconic like “Bacon Pancakes” or “What Am I To You?” but it’s an important moment for Finn’s character as he is brought out of a depressive state he’s been in since his father ripped off his arm in one of the previous episodes “Escape From The Citadel”. The soft melody Finn sings in the night is both calming and melancholy and when accompanied by Breezy’s soft, enchanted voice it becomes a love ballad that equals Finn’s rejuvenation.

Time Adventure. Composed by Rebecca Sugar this is the song used to subdue GOLB in the series finale “Come Along With Me”. Sung by BMO

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to Jake after the destruction of the iconic treehouse causes him to go berserk. The song’s lyrics are lamenting the end of a good thing, songwriter Sugar saying “I wanted to write about how even if something ends, it continues to exist in the past, nothing ever really goes away, you only feel like it does because our mind has to process information one moment at a time in order for us to function as humans”.

This message is incredibly fitting for the series finale, and paired with the song itself featuring every character in the show singing, it culminates in an incredible tear provoking scene in the episode.

Good Little Girl. Composed by Casey James Basichis and Tim Kiefer, this song is incredibly iconic and features in the episode Bad Little Boy. Pretty much most of the people I asked immediately said they want this song on the list for nothing other than the fact that it’s a damn good song, and deserves to be here. Good Little Girl is the last thing Rebecca Sugar wrote before leaving the show to make Steven Universe. The lyrics to this song are a little, uh, weird… It’s a two minute song of 1000 year old Marshall-Lee heavily flirting with 14 year

old Fionna. Most of Marshall’s lyrics have a vaguely sexual undertone, and Fionna’s do not share the same sentiment, rather heavily focusing on trying her best to successfully friendzone him. And yes, even though this episode was talked about previously I still put the song on here, what of it?

Island Song (Come Along With Me).

Written and composed by Ashley Eriksson, this song features at the end of almost every episode of the show and has the series finale named after it. Few television outro songs are as iconic and titular to their respective shows

Music Of Adventure Time and Island Song really is an irreplaceable part of the show. The “Adventure Time Ending Theme” is a portion of the song “Christmas Island” or “Island Song” by Ashley Eriksson with slightly altered lyrics. A version of the song also appears on the LP Let’s Build A Roof by LAKE, the band Eriksson is a part of. The end credits sequence does not include the main characters, but instead shows a bee, a Worm, a ladybug, and two butterflies on a grassy field. The song plays in almost every episode’s credits, with notable exceptions being Shh!, The Suitor, Jermaine and Chips and Ice Cream, as well as the eight part Stakes mini-series.

And finally, what would an AT best songs list be without some Marceline classics? I promised myself I wouldn’t put more than one of her songs on

here since she really could fill up the whole list. There were some heavy contenders for this spot in the list (I spent about a half hour contemplating “I’m Just Your Problem” v.s. “Fry song” and ended up going for neither). Eventually I had it down to “Monster” (from the recent mini-series reboot episode Obsidian), “Slow Dance With You” or “Everything Stays”. After thinking about it a little I decided on Everything Stays, Everything Stays is the first song that Rebecca Sugar wrote for Adventure Time after leaving the show to work on Steven Universe. This song was inspired by a stuffed rabbit Rebecca Sugar owned as a child which at one point was lost in her garden. Spinel, a character from Steven Universe, was inspired by the same toy .In a 2019 in-

Thanks For Reading Homie :] Adventure Time is very near and dear to my heart, so I’d like to thank you for reading if you got this far. This show was very formative to me as a kid and I think it was pretty much the only thing that made me not completely insufferable as a child.

I didn’t really touch on it in this article but the shows gender representation was really good, and despite the level of scrutiny they were under whilst making

the show under Cartoon Network, they managed to slip some non-binary rep in with BMO, who switches up their pronouns quite a bit over the show. which they (CN) no doubt only let happen because they’re a robot. As a kid I struggled a lot with internalised misogyny, and yet adventure time managed to have me literally in love with every woman to grace the screen (yes, LSP and Turtle Princess included).

terview on Cartoon Network’s YouTube channel for SU, Sugar says “The song Everything Stays was about this toy: I left this stuffed rabbit in the garden and I completely forgot about it even though it had been my favorite toy, and I found it maybe half a year later, it had been upside down and sun had faded the top of it which was its belly.

So when I picked it up it was like this black rabbit but it had this belly. I had my first existential crisis of realising that even though I had left [it] alone it changed without me.” The song’s lyrics are used to sooth a young Marcy as her mother is singing to her to calm her down when she’s scared in a flashback during a scene in the second episode of Stakes. This song is both really nice and a big part of Marceline’s character, perhaps even fueling her love for music.

As cheesy as it may be, I genuinely think I wouldn’t be the same person without this show and even though I’m sad it’s about to (presumably) end forever after the upcoming release of the Distant Lands final episode Wizard City, I do, however, think it’s good for the show to be left off on the good note that it ended on, lest it get Teen Titans Go treatment.

Waitohi

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THE LOVE, LOSS, AND FINALITY A REVIEW: To be Berserk - Out of control with anger or excitement.

It’s difficult to imagine that something with a title like this could detail some of the realistically grief-stricken characters learning to trust each other in a world striving against such an outcome. It’s even harder to imagine that a group referred to as Berserk fans would be united together in mourning the author for what most of them consider to be one of the greatest stories written. Berserk is written

by Kentaro Miura, a manga artist who is famed for his long time work in the manga industry, with Berserk first premiering in 1988, and continuing through to still receiving updates in 2021. Manga being a form of graphic novel created in Japan that follows a typical art style. Berserk details Guts, and his journey through a world of medieval barbarism slowly collapsing as elements of dark fantasy begin to invade, brought to life through the marvelous art of Kentaro Miura. Miura used every aspect of his medium to his advantage, and as a result, his story became greatly popularised, even in western culture, far from his birth country of Japan. While I’m only talking about the manga, it is worth mentioning that prior to wider internet usage, Berserk spread through dubbed versions of the 1998 anime made available in western countries. From there, it established a foothold in the minds of many a future creator, and is now considered one of the most influential works in Dark Fiction, described as being comparable to Blade Runner in terms of the legacy it created through pure inspiration. Miura’s works would influence artists both in Japan and overseas, with series like Attack on Titan, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Demon Slayer, God of War, and Fullmetal Alchemist all giving some credit to Berserk.

Berserk involves graphic depictions of violence, torture, and sexual assault, and is inaccessible to some as a result, and that is completely fine if

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Finn Hawker

you don’t want to read about those subjects. Not to mention, that as a discussion of the whole series, it will contain spoilers, and that if you are okay with the content contained in Berserk, I still highly recommend reading it, even in it’s unfinished form.

WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT: THE RETROSPECTIVE OF BERSERK...

THE CHARACTERS OF BERSERK: The characters of Berserk are the key to its emotional story. The way they experience the world and the people around them is where so much emotion is derived from, and where Miura centres the readers for the story he wants to tell. Guts is our protagonist, a man that we first see in a state of untameable rage, lashing out at everyone around him, and often speaking few words, choosing instead to speak with the iconic sword he wields, a 5 foot tall monstrosity described as resembling a hunk of iron more than it does a sword. The early story is meant to imbue Guts with this near demonlike strength, paired with the inability to care for anything in the world that isn’t whatever target he next aims to crush under his boot. But, being set up are the pieces to what made him like this, and suddenly we go back from Guts’ rampage through the kingdom of Midland all the way back to his birth, born an orphan under a hanging tree, already alone in the world.

We follow his childhood, becoming a mercenary from as young as he could fight, and raised by a surrogate father and military leader Gambino. In his late childhood, and if you ignored the content warnings above, this is the final warning, Guts is sexually assaulted by another mercenary, who paid Guts’ father to commit the atrocity. Guts reacts by killing him and Gambino, and fleeing, and the event has immeasurable repercussions on his life. Guts is withdrawn from any contact with humans, afraid of being around other mercenaries because they remind him of the father he wrongfully trusted and killed, and only learns to possibly trust other people thanks to Griffith. Griffith is the leader of a new mercenary group known as the Band of the Hawk, and around the same age as Guts. His hair is long, curly, and white, in stark contrast to Guts’ short-cut spiky jet-black hair, and his frame is smaller and far more traditionally feminine. This ties into themes of subversion Pictured on both sides of the page is the character Griffith, changing between dark and the light.

within black and white and good and evil as the story progresses, but for now, we know that Griffith and Guts become fast friends on the battlefield, though we know little about Griffith. In comparison to Guts, whose whole life story we know, Griffith is unnervingly left as a blank slate, with the audience only knowing of his dreams to own a kingdom. A third character joins our main cast, Casca, a rare female member of the Band of the Hawk.

Though she originally despises Guts for his connection to Griffith, something she envies, they come to form a trio of what feel like realistic and well formed friends. This begins to extend to the Band of the Hawk, and we feel as though Guts has found a family in a world so determined at first to punish him. However, as I will discuss soon, the narrative structure unnerves us as we reach the pivotal point of Berserk. Everything changes in a singular event, all for the worse, and we see Guts lose everything he gained.

The rare moments of warmth he captured in surrounding himself in others and their dreams is ripped away from him, and we see this grief on an unimaginable scale turn around and manifest in a rage that drives him Berserk.

And we rejoin Guts at where the story starts. And it is here that his brilliance as a character is shown. He is the typical male action protagonist, especially for Japanese media, and especially in the 80’s. He is near unkillable, stronger than any human could ever be, and in a near constant state of rage, with the only break being stoicism. However, he is a subversion of these tropes, and a really well-developed and tragic one. His rage comes from the grief of losing the only people to ever love him in his world. His stoicism and distance from other people is not from some macho desire for being a lone wolf, but rather trauma inflicted on him at a young age. In a sexual scenario, where we would expect most male action heroes to be heightened to the pinnacle of masculinity, he is instead struck by panic and fear because of his past. He is a complex and truly hurt man, and as the story progresses, his rage changes and grows, as he finds a new family in the slowly breaking world. Unfortunately, we do not get to witness his full arc, ending with the tragic death of Kentaro Miura.

But, Guts has connected with the audience in the space he has gotten, and has served as a wonderfully deep protagonist, and I do not feel that is an overstatement to say that his characterisation is one of the reasons Berserk has grown so strongly in popularity over the years. And hopefully, past Miura’s death, Guts continues to strive through his journey as new readers join in, and collectively are enthralled by the centrepiece to the legacy of Miura’s artwork. Berserk’s genius lay in the complexity and beauty of narrative arcs. Berserk opens with Guts at his lowest point, rarely accomplishing anything but saving himself.

When we go back to his past, we remember where he ends up, and the idea that he could be changed so greatly is always with the audience. We spend the happiest time of his life sharing his insecurity that it is fleeting, because of how the story starts, and yet the audience is still

THE NARRATIVE OF BERSERK: surprised and shocked at the discovery of what happens.

At the end of the first arc, the Black Swordsman arc, Guts manages to overcome a foe that leaves him near dead, and immediately afterwards, he encounters someone who he recognises, who holds a power over him so immense he can’t even move. We hear that his name is Griffith, and immediately after, we’re back to where it all started. After Guts leaves the Band of the Hawk for a short while, even after befriending them, he feels as though he has no place there. After his leave, Griffith loses his rational thought and ends up imprisoned and tortured for nearly a year. However, upon his rescue, the truth is revealed that Griffith has been broken beyond repair, and could never fight again.

The Band of the Hawk despairs, having lost their leader, and in that moment, Griffith finally reaches his destined point in life where a necklace of his awakens, taking him and the entire band to a new location. What follows is a terribly tragic event, of a near biblical scale, wherein gods and demons descend, with no distinction between them in their physical form, heightened by the artwork of Miura, with highly detailed beasts twisted from human forms, and what the reader experiences is nothing but hopelessness.

Here, everyone that Guts loves is slain and eaten before him, his survival only the result of his drive and eventually a rescue made by another force. We watch as Griffith is raised to a point of godhood alongside those that caused the massacre, seizing the opportunity to rule a kingdom at the cost of the lives of every one of his comrades. It is a deeply tragic and horrifying event to behold, and it brings us to a point of despondency. It is a cyclical ending that due to the use of narrative structure, has put us on our knees right next to Guts. And as the story goes on, we continue to hope that Guts can reach a place of happiness again, and that despite everything, as Griffith becomes the central antagonist and strives against him, he can succeed, not in the traditional sense of action stories where he beats the bad guy, but instead by finding people to love again, who love him.

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THE WORLD OF DARK FANTASY IN BERSERK: The world of Berserk, centralised in Midland, is one of a dark medieval Europe, where at some point in history, humanity is on the verge of collapsing beneath its own wars.

The world that is established is one of light fantasy, where the wide world does not accept the existence of magic, but due to the viewers beginning further on in the world, where magic is present, going back to a world where we are yet to see demons is unnerving. The world of mercenaries is devoid of the horror we first see in the world, and it results in the build-up to the Eclipse, the event previously mentioned wherein tragedy strikes. This build-up creates a sense of tension, where we are left unsure of what could happen to cause this world to devolve into the state that we see it in later. After this point, the fantastical has made its way into the world. However, the ramifications are terrible for the world. This was one of the earliest popular modern texts to use pre-existing mythos and related fantastical elements of a world as an evil force, referred to now as Dark Fantasy. Their presence in this world serves to raise stakes continuously, and to create visual and narrative scenarios that are intriguing and unique, and would serve to inspire the world of many fantasy writers since. I likened it previously to texts like Blade Runner for Cyberpunk, or Jaws for The Blockbuster, and while it is not quite as monumental as these two, but for those who haven’t read Berserk, I hope this helps you realise what it did for it’s genre, and how important that was.

BERSERK’S DIVINE AND DEMONIC ART: The art of Berserk is one of it’s strongest aspects, even compared to the high praise that I have just given every other element of its creation. It is grand in its portrayal of events on a biblical scale, and minute in how it shows the individual grooves upon a tree, or the expression of a face.

In a 2D still-image medium, portraying action is something of great difficulty, a fact that can be recognised even to a novice of genres like this. Done wrong, it can be confusing, with characters and their movements lost between the panels, seeming to teleport between random positions. However, Miura uses the massive sword Guts wields to provide these large frames dominated by the sweeping attacks, with each swing followed often by a trail of wind, showing the terrible force used but also creating a flow to follow the implied action between each panel. And even in these cluttered and grand scenes of war and action, Miura always puts an emphasis on detail, often to a ridiculous degree. Armour with its individual scrapes and bumps, houses with their own wooden planks and furnishings that fill it with life, and often such vibrancy brought about in a black and white medium. Miura had been drawing since a young age, and by the age of 15, was able to produce works that differed wildly in quality to his peers of the same age. His art style continued to evolve, and this is visible throughout the 30 years of his work. We see the change, slow over time, as things become more refined, and more consistent. This is especially apparent in how Guts changes throughout his drawing in how his face is

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drawn, and the rare moments in which he smiles and is happy. If you are a fan of Berserk, it is likely that you knew about it’s long hiatuses throughout the years, with multiple months passing by in between chapters being released. I believe that the extreme amounts of effort Miura was willing to put into his work, in the details of his art and the nuances of each character, even beyond the central cast, was the cause of these hiatuses, but in the end, were also the reason for his legacy.

THE LEGACY, AND FANDOM OF BERSERK: Berserk was incredibly inspirational to many creators of fantasy that had grown up with it in an age where the west was beginning to be introduced to japanese media more commonly, and the incredible foundation that I have just described created a shockwave. For example, the Dragonslayer sword wielded by Guts has inspired the designs of many other characters, most obviously Cloud from the Final Fantasy series. I mentioned in the beginning people who have stated quite clearly that they were inspired, and that doesn’t take into account the likely millions that have felt motivated or reached by Berserk. I mentioned the various series such as Attack on Titan or Dark Souls that saw inspiration on both an artistic and personal level from the works of Miura. Beyond even the fields of fantasy, or even the creation of art, I have talked to people who have taken influence from this series in how they approach their work, and that is something truly amazing. In fact, as much as I could talk about the long lineage of products and art pieces inspired by Berserk, but I think that in terms of remembering Miura, it would be more imperative to talk about the majority here, the normal people that take time out of their life to read Berserk and go on to become a fan of the series. Now, I obviously love Berserk, so in an attempt

to get a more rounded perspective, I interviewed some people, but found that almost immediately I was drawn right back into the majesty of this series, with people describing individual things they picked up from panels of the art that I had never noticed before. Demons seen in the foreground that are horrifying to think of in motion, but never noticed until pointed out. Vast landscapes where villages or the ruins of war can be seen from afar, setting this world up as a tangible location, but only observed by a few readers. Small expressions on peoples faces, that painted their emotions during that scene, which I had missed perhaps due to how I was feeling on that day, but was able to be interpreted and appreciated by someone else because of how they felt. I found that in an action series, a lot of people answered that their favourite chapter was Chapter 47, Wound. “The chapters where Guts opens up about how he feels” and “made me tear up everytime” were both things said by those who had read this chapter, and that strikes me as an exception amongst fans of an action story. This chapter is specifically about the PTSD experienced by our main character when he is at his most vulnerable, and how someone loves him and supports him through this. I loved revisiting the journey of the characters, and each time I felt a renewed sense of love for Berserk by going back to read further.

This enthusiasm for the series is infectious, and I found that one of the reasons that Berserk was able to become so popular was because of how many people would recommend it. In fact, just within the last month, I convinced a friend of mine to begin reading, and it is my earnest hope that in time he too will recommend it to someone.

And with that, it is time to finally discuss the man himself.

Kentaro Miura died at the age of 54 due to acute aortic dissection. This heart disorder is capable of being caused by stress, and when considering Miura’s intense level of detail put into his work atop the demands of the manga industry within Japan, it is not difficult to arrive at the conclusion that Miura died before his time. This is truly saddening, seeing that a man who was so clearly in love with creating his story never was able to finish it, instead succumbing to the stress of an industry that is known for intense crunch and pressure being glorified. Other popular series in the same format like One Piece have a chapter released in a finished state every week, and this pace is maintained if someone wants their work to continue to receive support. This workload is difficult to balance well, with life outside of work, and the detail and effort that Miura would put into his creation proves this. The fact that his industry may have killed him in the end is disgusting and an extremely poor reflection on his art that in a better world would fuel his life rather than weaken it. But, I am not here to throw criticisms of an industry, I am here because I wanted to share with an audience how I felt about Berserk, and how the life of Miura is able to be appreciated by people around the world now because of the art that he literally poured his life and soul into. If you were to take anything away from this article, it wouldn’t be to go and read it yourself (although I do highly recommend it), to go and tell your friends to read it, but to appreciate the things you put your energy into in order to make it. I hope that one day you too can be remembered and loved by many for what you’ve done, regardless of whether it’s art or actions. Rest in peace, Miura.

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OMORI AND THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL Through blinding shame and guilt, OMORI is a beautiful commentary on the human strength to continue and forgive.

I downloaded OMORI in December last year, directly on release day, and I must admit; before playing, I was pretty certain I was going to be disappointed.

There’s just this specific genre of games that always draw me in no matter what; this weird subculture of abstract and artistic RPGs (role-playing games), almost always made by small teams, which try their hardest everytime to weave together a tale that is just so emotionally deep and profound and just tells us so much about life and the human psyche… and then, the majority of the time, end up being underwhelming. It’s a rare thing to truly connect with a story on a deeply personal level, and I had been searching for a very long time for some kind of media that would give me that connection. My interests were waning, my passion for my hobbies dying down fast, and all I wanted was something, anything, that would spark that passion again. I kept looking for new movies, books, tv shows, and games that looked interesting to me, each time entering a new story praying that this would be the one that would make me bawl my eyes out for hours; that this would be the one that would

fill my thoughts for months on end, that this story would be the one that would stick with me forever and rekindle my love for storytelling anew.

And then, completely out of nowhere, OMORI happened to be just that.

This article is about the RPG ‘OMORI’, an ambitious first-time project that took over 6 years to create, a story that has deeply affected me and many others since it’s release, and a lesson about the ‘Downward Spiral’ of guilt many of us find ourselves in once in our lives, allowing us to experience it through new eyes and see the many ways it manifests and grows inside us as time progresses, and most importantly, how

we can learn to forgive ourselves and move towards the future. Through this article, I hope to provide a pinpoint review on why the videogame OMORI is so effective, why it is so important and revolutionary in the realm of videogames, and why you should give it a try!

Before I begin, I want to talk briefly about spoilers.

First and foremost, this review is meant to help share this game and experience with as many people as possible, so this review will mainly avoid any large spoilers, as I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. However, I will be spoiling a specific reveal that happens around an hour into the game, as without it I feel like I would be overly limited in my analysis and responses

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to my three questions. If you are already interested, I suggest you hold off on reading this review and just go and play OMORI!

Why is OMORI so effective?

One of the biggest reasons I think OMORI is so effective in telling it’s story is because, through its constant use of symbolism, it manages to express the main character’s perspective and story in an extremely clear level of clarity and emotional strength.

Throughout OMORI, a large majority of the game is completely non-physical; that is, it’s all in Sunny’s (the main character’s) head. Sunny’s personal ‘Dream World’ is the main setting for this game, and even in the real world we are still constantly haunted by visions of things that aren’t there and representations of our fears and traumas. This circumstance is used to utmost effect to convey Sunny’s perspective on his world through symbolism, in short, the game allows you to perceive Sunny’s feelings in a profoundly strong way through giving them a visual and audible form. You physically battle your phobia of heights, spiders, and drowning, all three shown on screen in disturbing visual detail, accompanied by audio that conveys the unique horror of each of these encounters. While Sunny barely talks throughout the entire game, you get an extremely strong sense of his personality, his feelings towards others, his interests, and much more, all through effectively ‘exploring his mind’ through your journeys through the dream world; each character’s personality, actions and

dialogue showing a different part of Sunny’s life and psyche. The many unique features of video games in comparison to other forms of media also play a strong role in heightening your immersion into Sunny’s mind, using the decisions the player has to make in battle to convey different approaches Sunny might take to deal with the psychological ‘enemies’ he’s facing, such as strategically using a special skill called ‘Calm Down’ to remove your emotions and regain your stamina. Through

the personifications of repressed memories, wants, desires, fears and trauma we encounter throughout, OMORI uses the videogame medium to it’s true potential to heighten immersion into Sunny’s viewpoint, through all of our visual, audible, written, and kinesthetic senses.

Why is OMORI so important?

In essence, the reason OMORI is so important and revolutionary in the videogame industry, in my opinion, is because it’s such an effective story.

My perception of the videogame industry and my tastes as a whole have shifted greatly through the past few years, and one thing that

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has started to catch my attention is how storytelling is, in my opinion, not focussed on and/or done well enough in a large majority of games on the market today. There are only a few games I can name that were made with the sole focus of telling an effective story in mind that actually, sucessfully, pull it off, and I think OMORI is a really important step in this direction. OMORI pours it’s soul into it’s storytelling focus with an amount of passion, thought and vigour that surpasses many stories I’ve ever read in other forms of media, be it novels, poems or movies, and furthermore it uses the medium that is videogames to go beyond what is capable in these other me-

diums; using that added level of complexity given through the player’s own ability to input alongside the visuals, audio and writing to strengthen the immersion and truly put you into Sunny’s shoes.

I also often find that with videogames, you can almost always feel the creator’s passion for the medium itself while playing, but there is usually something that is lacking; a passionate, emotionally-driven core message. Having a strong purpose and reason to tell your story (the ‘moral’) is extremely important in creating an experience that truly sticks and emotionally effects the player, and I feel like OMORI is the first game I have played that

has given the ‘moral of the story’ the attention it needs to make the game really shine. With OMORI gaining traction, I really hope that we find more budding developers making videogames with a strong and primary focus on storytelling and with their own strong personal message and morals they want to convey, exploring the different ways gameplay can be used to further enhance and innovate the ways we tell stories in our current age.

Why should you play OMORI?

Now that we’ve talked about why OMORI is so effective, and why it’s important in the realm of videogames as a whole, I want to talk about why the story itself is important, and why you should give OMORI a try! The best stories can help us view things from a new perspective, whether that be our own circumstances or the circumstances and actions of others, and I believe OMORI has the power to help us, the players, view our own and other people’s respective struggles with guilt and grief in a new light, showing the different ways people cope with these feelings and how we can learn to forgive ourselves and move on with our lives. The nature of guilt

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as a feeling makes it extremely difficult to reach out about, as the shame for your actions and past can generate extreme anxiety around speaking about the issue, and I found that in my experience OMORI was my first step towards reconciling with my personal guilt in a much less fear-inducing way. It played a really important role in helping me understand what I was going through, comforting me, making me feel less alone in my situation, and guiding me to realizing that I need to forgive myself for my past. Even for people who might not have gone through this type of ‘Downward Spiral’ of guilt before, OMORI’s lessons still apply to many

other mental health struggles that many of us go through in our daily lives, as well as provide a way to strongly understand and empathise with others who are going through these struggles with guilt and mental health. Finally, and in my opinion most importantly, OMORI can teach you how to deal with guilt at the source so that you don’t have to go through an experience like we see throughout the game. The knowledge of the futility of locking your guilt inside, how guilt can grow into something exponentially more difficult to deal with as time goes on, and the importance of self-forgiveness and making that first step towards the future makes this game hold an extreme amount of importance and relevance for all audiences, and is why I highly recommend this game to you, the reader!

In the months after finishing OMORI, I’ve been completely floored with it’s impact on me. The emotional moments, scenes and overall story still affect me just as strongly as when I first played, the innovation and emotional passion behind the game’s message continues to inspire me and push me forward in my storytelling journey, and, most importantly, the lessons around the self-consuming ‘Downward Spiral’ of guilt, the futility and danger of locking shame inside, and the importance of self-forgiveness continue to help me as I make my own steps towards my future. I hope that my article has persuaded you to try ‘OMORI’ out, and if you do, I hope that you love it as much as I did!

Jack Jordan

Thank you for reading!

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2021 FASHION THERE IS NO DENYING THAT THESE PAGES ARE SOME OF THE MOST ICONIC PAGES IN THIS ENTIRE MAGAZINE. EACH YEAR IT HIGHLIGHTS WHAT PEOPLE ARE WEARING AND FOR EACH YEAR IT HAS SHOWN THE TRENDS THAT HAVE COME, GONE AND FOR SOME REASON, COME BACK AGAIN. SO HERES TO WELLINGTON HIGHS FINEST FOR 2021!

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The Rana Plaza Collapse Six years ago, photographer and activist Taslima Akhter took the haunting photograph ‘Final Embrace’, showing two garment workers embracing in the rubble, killed by the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Time magazine identified the photo in its top ten of 2014 saying “A Final Embrace captures Bangladesh’s united grief of the Rana Plaza disaster in a single shot. No one knows who these two people are. The relation between them remains unidentified”.

“15 hours passed before she was saved from the remains.”

On the 24th of April 2013, Rupaly was working her usual job as a machine operator in the New Wave Style factory.

On the day prior, workers noticed cracks spreading across the walls that were not there the previous day, for this reason, they refused to enter. The supervisors insisted that the situation wasn’t as serious as they made it out to be saying “should problems occur, we’d face them together”. The manager then threatened to cut the wages of the employees who refused to enter as normal workers. Rupaly reluctantly agreed to walk into the building.

They had only worked for a short time when Rupaly felt the floor underneath her feet began to sink. She attempted to run, however, the dividers encompassing her imploded.

Everything was thundering, and in her desperate bid to escape, she fell. The following thing she recalls is being unable to move, with two bodies lying directly opposite to her. She understood that there were living

Individuals close by, yet she was unable to see a thing.

More than 15 hours passed before she was saved from the remains.

Rupaly couldn’t work for a year after the accident. She managed to sustain herself with help from private individuals, NGOs (Non-Government Organisations) and the State in the form of donations. She also had the emotional support of her husband Farid and her daughters Fahmida, 10, and Fahima, 7. When she finally did return to work in 2014, the very first garment factory she laboured in caught fire within weeks of beginning work. Nobody died in the incident but it was a major blow to Rupaly’s mental health, meaning she required a lot of courage to start work within a factory again.

Four years after the collapse of Rana Plaza, Rupaly feels that the memories of the accident are not haunting her as much. “I feel stronger and braver than before”, Rupaly says.

Before the disaster, Rupaly didn’t give much thought to society and politics; she saw herself as being responsible for her misfortune. Later, she came to understand that the factory owners and fashion brands bore the responsibility for the Rana Plaza factory collapse. Rupaly says that she now knows that workers and women have rights.

Since this tragic incident, Rupaly has received a compensation fee of £4000. With this money, she has been able to buy a small property in her home village where she plans to build a house for her family.

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Highlighting The Issue This disaster was the catalyst of a fashion revolution starting to be seen around the globe. We can see how far this movement has come in the short time it has been alive thanks to the various organisations such as Tearfund or GoodOnYou working tirelessly to bring to light the true horrors of the fashion world.

Well, known, high-end Brands such as Gucci, Prada, Versace and Moncler all fashioned garments at the Rana plaza. Each of these fashion houses ensures that the image they portray is one of class and high stature, yet they manufacture clothing items at dirt cheap prices, Utilising the cheapest labour possible. The legal minimum wage in Bangladesh sits at NZD 138 per month, meaning that workers are paid a minimum wage of $1.20 per hour of labour. The cheapest item I could find on the Gucci website was a singular pair of socks that cost an absurd NZD 205, with the cheapest t-shirt on their website sitting at NZD 650.

Micro Plastics In Onceania Around a decade ago, an Australian ecologist by the name of Mark Browne was in the process of examining shorelines around the world with the expectation that he would find fragments of plastic from common items like packaging and bottles. What he found instead were thousands upon thousands of microfibres – tiny fragments of polyester, nylon and acrylic. They accumulated around sewage outlets and, as it turned out, could be traced back to our washing machines. These fragments of plastic-based clothes were coming out in the wash, travelling through sewerage and storm-water systems and ending up in the sea.

For a brand charging such a high premium for its items, you’d think they would focus on where their clothing items are being produced, resulting in happier workers and better quality items. Yet Gucci seems to have no intentions to make a change. The individual scoring systems used by GoodOnYou.eco and cleanclothes.org both rate Gucci dismally low. With “Worker Empowerment” and “Commitment and Practice” not breaching the 2/10 resulting in an overall score of 4/40 on cleanclothes.org.

A statement from cleanclothes.org states, “Gucci says it produces 100% of its goods in Italy, where it says rights are upheld. However, the company has more than 3,000 subcontracted suppliers and it is unclear to us what its policy is for upholding rights in these workplaces. Previous casework found some Gucci products (uniforms for employees) being made in Turkey. More effort than a simple statement in a policy document is needed.”

“Fast fashion brands use open-loop productions cycles that pollute water and land” (The New York Times, 2019)

Gucci may have 400 legitimate, high-end retailers, but this figure is overshadowed almost tenfold by the 3000, undocumented subcontracted houses utilised to creates its catalogue of clothing. They like to display and publicise the glamorous side of the business in Italy (where workers are still on minimum wage) and keep the rest of the iceberg concealed where the real production for the fashion house occurs. The sad thing is, Gucci is by no means the worst when it comes to the ethical production of non ethical clothing

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Browne continued his journey across shorelines from Oceania to Asia and Europe to the Americas. On every single shoreline that he studied, he found the same result. The microfibres washed out to sea via washing machines were and still are an epidemic that is overshadowed by everyone talking about the plastic microbeads and packaging coming from other industries.

These plastics come from major overconsumption of clothing across the globe. Clothing is produced under slave labour in poor countries with workers unable to fend for themselves, shipped to a large empire of multi-billion dollar corporations like Zara, H&M or Fashion Nova, stacked on shelves across the globe, washed and worn a few times in some household, then chucked away for the ocean of tip to consume. As far as life cycles go, the fashion industry may just take the crown as the most unsustainable cycle on the planet.

Workers are locked away by authorites in Bangladesh

A mother strugling to support her two hungry children in less than ideal living conditions

Firefighters attempt to put out a fire at a garment factory in Tazreen as many familys and workers wait outside for the 124 missing people still inside

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TearFund NZ Tearfund NZ is trying to combat this very issue by educating and implementing strategies to help people in NZ shop with ethicality in mind. They have achieved this through the production of the 2019 Ethical fashion guide where a huge catalogue of brands and fashion houses have been rated depending on their productions and ethics and the 2020 covid Fashion report where tips are given on how to shop sustainably while maintaining whatever style you may like.

I managed to get in contact with Ian McInnes, the CEO of Tearfund NZ. Here are a few questions I had to ask him about the fast fashion industry in New Zealand.

What is the future of fast fashion in New Zealand?

“Most people in NZ buy an estimated 60 and 80 items of clothing a year (based on US stats). Three-quarters of the clothes we buy are seldom worn. These trap garment workers in poverty, clog our wardrobes, our landfill sites and ultimately end up as microfibres in our rivers and oceans.

We need a different circular economy – one in which we buy what we need, wear it for a good length of time, repair it when it frays, and recycle it to someone else who will love it second hand just as much as we loved it new.”

Are we seeing a conscious change in the way NewZealanders are shopping?

“Yes. There is a growing segment of consumers who care about how their clothes are made and disposed of, and how workers are treated in the process. We’re seeing more and more awareness as people consider which brands to buy.

Many want to know how their favourite brands are graded and what they’re doing to counter the negative impacts of the fashion industry. The easiest way for us at Tearfund to tell this is on downloads of our Ethical Fashion Guide which sit at around 8,000 to 10,000 downloads most years. But we know that many more are aware of the news items around fashion consumption and slavery issues in fashion and are uneasy with fast fashion. Also, the second-hand clothing market is booming – and this is made up of very conscious consumers, many of whom have cut back on new purchases and find they can dress just as well from well-run recycled clothing stores.”

Why did Tearfund start the Ethical Fashion Guide?

“Tearfund started Ethical Fashion Guide in 2016 to tackle slavery in the fashion industry. There are 65 million garment workers employed in the Asia-Pacific region alone.

Too many faced appalling conditions in the factories that supply leading global fashion brands. We thought consumers would care about that and this proved correct. We’ve since added environmental factors to our survey which grades companies, as consumers care about that as well and there are plenty companies can do to minimise toxic waste and reduce water consumption – two further problems which the fashion industry must get right, alongside paying living wages to garment workers.”

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Continued . . .

Can ethical clothes be made on a budget?

A helpful explanation of fast fashion’s production model, and why cheap clothing means someone else is paying the actual cost: One of the main issues with fast fashion is that it’s built on a production model that exploits people and governments with weaker labour laws. It goes like this: we, the consumer, want cheap clothes because we consume so much of them. So, companies have to make sure their clothes are produced as cheaply as possible while still maintaining a high profit margin. A key cost in the production of goods is the cost of labour. By vastly reducing this cost through outsourcing labour to countries with less strict employment laws and really low minimum wages, it becomes extremely profitable for a company to sell products at lower prices. The issue here is that garment workers are the ones paying the unpaid cost. Factories in places like Bangladesh or India are under massive pressure because in order to keep major clothing companies from just picking up and moving to another, even cheaper supplier, they have to keep their labour costs low and ensure that they complete the massive orders on time. The consequences of this are two-fold: garment workers are paid very little (they’re often paid by the hour or per piece of clothing), so then they’re forced to work extremely long hours just to 1. make enough money to survive on and 2. ensure the clothing orders are fulfilled and they get the job done.

So to your question, “Can ethical clothes be made on a budget?”. Currently, there are brands who will, for example, buy clothing at about $2 per piece and then sell it for upwards of NZD $40. One necessary change for clothing to be ethical is the guarantee that the worker making the clothes is paid a living wage. This means brands need to factor in a living wage for garment workers at the start, and be willing to pay more per item, which means they either need to raise their selling prices in NZ or accept a lower profit margin. To make it ‘budget friendly’ for New Zealanders, companies really have no choice but to accept lower profit margins. I believe there needs to be a fine balance between this, and us consumers recognizing that clothes shouldn’t be cheap, and we need to just learn to buy less of them so that we can spend a bit more on each item.

Is the climate or people aspect of fast fashion more harmful?

“Both. As a planet of consumers who employ millions of workers in the garment industry we simply have to get both parts of this right. Fast fashion is unnecessary. We need an economic model that enables slow, quality fashion at prices high enough to enable families - in Bangladesh say which employs 4.5 million garment workers - to raise their standard of living, not just eke out a living. We also need regulation strong enough to control hazardous waste and minimise the destructive side of the industry. Ultimately we as consumers need to be a lot more considerate in what we buy, only buying what we need and wearing it out! How old fashioned is that!”

Story MFG is a brand that I first saw last year and have kept a close eye on ever since. Their clothing items are by no means what you’d call cheap but every single step of their process is done in the most ethical way possible. From Natural dyes extracted from tree bark to paying all workers living wages, they set an excellent example for what all brands should be striving to achieve in future forms of themselves. I see their clothing as more of an investment for the enviroment than anything else. I can’t recommend checking out their website enough.

I can guarantee you’ll find something that surprises you.

Je Pleure is a local NZ brand that first caught my attention as the logo has the same initials as mine. After digging further into their catalogue, it became apparent that I’d stumbled across a hidden gem. Je Pleure creates intricate pieces of clothing with a dark feel to them. They ooze style and originality in a way that I haven’t seen before. Even the pricing isn’t too steep by ethical clothing standards.

“The name Je Pleure is French for - I’m Crying. The reasoning behind this nwame is because the imagery of crying displays many emotions with endless meanings. A name like this helps me portray unlimited thoughts into my work, it helps me create personal, worldly, or made-up feelings in hopes that others will be able to relate. I think that crying is our strongest emotion which is why I like to be as raw as possible.”

“Je Pleure is currently based in Dunedin, New Zealand. All products are of high quality and are produced ethically. So far Je Pleure has hosted 6 NZ showrooms displaying the latest collections and artwork, with a lot of work that has only been available to the ones who attend. Each showroom has helped me connect one on one with customers & artists as well as the joy of having my own creative space.”

“I look forward to sharing with you the raw energy that makes Je Pleure what it is.”

“Jack.”

“STORY mfg. was born out of a desire for a more authentic, fulfilling and kind approach to fashion -- one that doesn’t involve a trade-off between aesthetics and consciousness.

We are a husband and wife team and work with a large group of dyers, weavers, embroiderers and tailors.

We want to make things and choices that help change the fashion industry for the better and show that being considerate and kind (to people and the planet) is not only important but an enormous strength. We believe fashion can be a form of social activism and the STORY mgf. Can help create a more positive future.”

There is no ‘waste’ in nature. A seed grows into a plant with energy from the sun, lives, dies and turns into life-giving soil for everything else. This approach of not only ‘zero impact’ but ‘positive impact’ is our ultimate goal.

We collect our natural fibre offcuts from production and reuse them for lining, stuffing or other items. If they’re too small to be used in that way they are driven down the road and turned into the paper which we use to make hangtags and packaging.

While we use very little synthetic materials, what we do use is recycled or easily remove-able and widely recycle-able and we use no single-use plastics anywhere.

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Curb Your Unintentional(?) Racism

The semi-recent controversy around the removed “evil” Dungeons and Dragons races was something that I had never expected would happen. Unlike a lot of poc around me, I had never noticed how uncomfortable the portrayal of fantasy races such as Orcs, Dwarves, Goblins, Trolls and Tieflings was, not just in Dungeons and Dragons, but in most general fantasy as well. 2020 chinese game Genshin Impact, my inspiration for this article, revels in making you continuously massacre and destroy entire colonies of the “Hillichurl’’ people, who have been very pointedly depicted to, despite not being able to speak english (or whatever language your game is set to), house their own languages, poetry, and culture. If you’re a member of the societal majority, which considering the demographics of this school, you probably are, you probably didn’t know there was even anything wrong or off about these portrayals of non-human races in fantasy stories, or maybe you have heard the discourse and still think there’s nothing wrong. Well friends, I’m actually here to rationalize whether or not the change in D&D specifically was worth it.

Starting off with the big guns, we have to talk about how dungeons and dragons used to describe Half-Orcs and Tieflings, both of which are on the racial alignment for genetically evil. For the purposes of keeping this article the correct length I’ll only pull out the “Racial Traits” section of the Half-Orc player race description:

“Half-orcs tend to be short-tempered and sullen. They would rather act than ponder and would rather fight than argue. Those who are successful, however, are those with enough self-control to live in civilized land, not the crazy ones.”

The two sentence leave one hell of a bad taste in my mouth, the description immediately jumps into calling Half-Orcs impulsive and short-tempered, and heavily implies that that impulsiveness is linked to a lack of intellect. To make matters worse the next sentence downright states that only Half-Orcs with “self-control” are the only ones who are “successful” (I couldn’t actually tell you what that even means) and “not the crazy ones”. This could potentially be a fine assessment to make of a person, except for the fact that it’s listed under racial traits, which alone makes the whole thing stink of yucky eugenics. When I read these paragraphs the first time I thought it’d be funny if I gave them to my Maori family members so I could hear their thoughts on the way these orcish people are described. The results were as expected, my sister replied with a simple “yikes” and my father replied with a long string of expletives about racist white people that’s better suited to an article not written for a school project. He did, however, give me a long lecture about colonialism that I’d like to use whilst looking at the second and last paragraph of the description:

Half-Orc

“Half-orcs love simple pleasures such as feasting, drinking, boasting, singing, wrestling, drumming, and wild dancing. Refined enjoyments such as poetry, courtly dancing, and philosophy are lost on them. At the right sort of party, a half-orc is an asset. At the duchess’s grand ball, he’s a liability.”

This second quote really sells the (once again, intentional or not) racism embedded into the orcs, all of which is heavily influenced by colonialism. As my father pointed out when I talked to him, a lot of these “simple pleasures” are very associated with tribal cultures. For example “singing, wrestling, drumming, and wild dancing”. Most tribal and indigenous cultures have heavy spiritual ties with dance and percussion, and they are often described from a euro-centric perspective as “wild” when in actuality they’re just dancing normally. My father called this entire description “colonialist propaganda”, and I’m inclined to agree at least a bit. He said the Orcish activities were all described in a derogatory way, and it makes him angry to see that people are so fine with descriptions such as this. The reason he thought the descriptions were derogatory was because of the wording used, whilst not directly dogging on Orcs for their different cultures immediately, going on to afterwards describe western-centric activities as “Refined enjoyments” or saying that the only success a Half-Orc finds is in integrating with “civil” society even though there’s nothing at all inherently wrong about living in camps in the forest like Orcs do. If there’s nothing else to take away from this small article, it’s this: If a tiny snippet from but two paragraphs in a series that has tons of content attached to it can be this thoroughly influenced by racist colonialist ideals, once again whether intentionally or not, it’s a distasteful thing to see for someone who can pick it up. After all I’ve said today I think it would be easy for me to say that I’m happy for the changes made by the D&D team, because no matter the intent, the effect that these old descriptions subconsciously have is not lost. In spite of what I’ve just said, feel free to draw your own conclusions, god knows I’m not one to tell you what your opinions should be.

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Article Written by Waitohi

Tiefling

Savant or Social Reject The effects of misrepresentation of Autism Spectrum Disorder in TV and film Have you ever thought to yourself “but they don’t look autistic”? Some have done this consciously, some not, but you may be surprised how many have.

I have heard this countless times myself, phrased differently from time to time but all a variation of the sentiment “You do not fit my idea of an autistic person.”, as if autism is one size fits all. After years of hearing this I have developed a theory that the reason this widespread idea that autism looks a certain way exists is television. We’re all familiar with characters like Sheldon Cooper, Rainman and Sam Gardener, these are some of the most well known autistic characters today and they are clones of each other. All of these characters, as well as most other autistic characters, can be described as a white male savant. The autism spectrum is described as such because there are many varying factors which contribute to the experiences of individuals with autism, each of them finding their place on a spectrum so while this is representative of some on the autism spectrum, it is only a small fraction. The lack of accurate representation in TV causes audiences to believe autistic people are all the same, reflecting negatively on autistic people who do not fit this idea of autism.

The narrow representations of autism are often overtaken by a couple traits and otherwise fall short considering character and story development. These traits include: A cold demeanor, narcissism, innocence, and high intelligence. The representation of autistic characters often fit into one of two extremes: the Adult Baby or the Idiot Savant. The first is simple, the autistic character is unable

to do anything themselves, work a job, study, or communicate clearly, they rely on everyone around them to do seemingly simple things. The second is similar and is the most common in media today, the Idiot Savant describes a character who is unable to function in most, if not all, areas of life other than the one where they exceed expectations. In this area they are more successful than their peers and are often only seen for their ability, an example of this is the TV drama the Good Doctor. Sean Murphy the protagonist - who is autistic - is only known for his amazing abilities to remember every word from a medical journal making him an excellent surgeon. This makes for an extremely one dimensional character whose only characteristics are awkwardness and extreme skill, in Sean Murphy’s case surgical skills.

The overarching issue seen across film and TV with autistic characters is that autism is seen as a plot device more than an opportunity to shine light on a community that often has no platform. This was made evident earlier this year when the musician Sia released a film entitled Music following the lives of a young autistic girl, Music, and her two unexpected caregivers. Music includes harmful treatment of Music, acting which mimics stereotypical and inaccurate behaviours of autistic people, and an overall overstimulating film filled with overwhelming colours, noises and other stimuli which makes it unwatchable for many autistic people. Sia describes her film as “a love letter to caregivers and to the autism community,” this ties into a common theme in television about autism, focussing on the impact of autism on the caregivers and peers. This is

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a harmful theme as it communicates to the audience that autistic people are burdens to the people around them.

After receiving backlash from autistic audiences Sia was defensive and refused to listen: her film caters solely to allistic people. While this is unacceptable, it is not uncommon. Autistic characters are rarely played by autistic actors and only a few autistic people are ever included in curating the autistic characters because they are regarded as difficult and incapable if they need any accommodations on set.

This pattern was broken by the family show Everything’s Gonna Be Okay created by Josh Thomas, an autistic comedian and actor. This show not only features autistic women but also starrs many autistic creators and covers topics including sex, dating, family relationships, grief, and ableist views that often go unmentioned. This authentic presentation of autism shows the many ways autism presents itself in different people. Kayla Cromer, the actress who plays the protagonist is autistic herself and is able to voice any unease with the script if she feels it to be inaccurate or offensive. If the show included the voices of autistic people of color it would encapsulate the ideal portrayal of autism.

Interview with an Autistic Student at WHS Q. Have you ever felt fully represented by the autistic characters you see on TV? A. There is a very limited circle of autistic characters in the media in general. I did begin to watch the Good Doctor and I was like “so much of that stuff makes sense”. I had already done research but so much of the stuff I saw even in the first episode made so much more sense to me, I felt quite represented then but in everything else I’ve watched, I’ve never really seen many autistic characters.

Q. What do you feel should be done to improve Autistic representation on TV? A. Probably breaking the stereotype of characters with autism being geniuses because that’s not true, and knowing it’s not just about social cues I want it to be more to the sensory side other than as comedic relief, for example I can’t eat fruit, I can’t touch velvet, I’d like to see those kind of things being considered so kids like me and their parents can recognise those kinds of things.

Recognising that the character has autism but not making it their whole identity while still being educational and seeing issues from the perspective of the autistic person rather than the neurotypical person.

Q. Has the representation of autism ever impacted your life negatively?

A. I think it’s mostly to do with people coming up to me and being like “you don’t look autistic” I’d like to say I have a decent fashion sense that suits me as an individual and from characters who have autism they have like quite a different taste in fashion from me, I like to put myself well together and sometimes I think autistic characters can come across like they don’t care about how they look and that is frustrating to me because I like to take care of myself and people say “you don’t look autistic” or that kind of thing, that makes me feel quite whack sometimes.

Television and film cannot be expected to cover every single way autism presents itself; however, the media should be expected to produce the most accurate representation possible. To do this it is necessary to listen to the voices of autistic people. The overwhelming consensus within the community is that autistic characters need to be created and produced by autistic people in order to be accurate. Along with this the characters need to showcase a wider range of traits and presentations showing the diversity of the autism spectrum. These changes are necessary because of the inaccuracy of the current portrayal of autism. Many autistic people and their peers are unable to recognise themselves as autistic due to the stereotypes and stigma perpetuated in the characters. As well as the effect on the autistic audience, these representations lead allistic audiences to categorise autism as they see it; white, cisgender, man. Because of this categorisation, females and people of colour are written off. We have to learn to advocate for ourselves when our peers and even psychiatrists dismiss us. While this is deeply rooted in misogyny and racism and we have a long way to go, good representation helps.

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Q. What would you say a good representation of ASD is?

A. Autistic characters being treated fairly like everyone else but also Show the disruption that neurotypical people have caused autistic people because I’ve had plenty of people bullying me. It’s something that we need to recognise, how people are being treated unfairly to move past that. Something I really don’t like that neurotypical people do to autistic people is to undermine them, like being nice to them but not considering their point of views or them really, as a person, just thinking that they owe them because they’re autistic. I don’t like that, we should all be treated as equals but we should also respect each other’s boundaries.

Q. What you think is important to talk about when discussing representation of ASD in the media?

A. I think we shouldn’t worry about social cues too much but how we can respect autistic people and how we can supply their need to be in a comfortable environment, like lighting and sound those kinds of sensory things are really important I often try to tell people I can’t have people eating food around me or like avoid loud sounds because I deserve that respect and that’s something that should be shown in media.

THE

PROBLEM

-Ludwig Ahgren 2.6m Twitch followers That quote might raise some questions: Who is this person? Who is he talking to? And why doesn’t he want to be friends with them? I’ll answer those questions next, but first I’ll answer probably the most pressing question on your mind, what the hell is he talking about?

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-Oxford Reference Parasocial relationships have been a hot-button issue to many as of late, for those who know of it at least. If you don’t follow content creators who talk about it, it’s pretty unlikely that you’d have heard of the concept of a parasocial relationship. Out of all content creators I’ve seen, none of them have been more vocal about the issue than the aforementioned Ludwig Ahgren. He’s made it abundantly clear to his audience that while he wants to be treated with respect, he also wants his viewers to treat him “the same way you treat a TV show”, even if it leads to a financial or viewer-growth loss. The issue has obviously been present in human psychology for as long

as there have been higher figures to idolize and identify with, but many different factors have led to this becoming enough of a problem to bring to people’s attention, including the over-broadcasting nature of social media as well as the fact that some have raised concerns that some content creators may be outright manipulating or at least conveniently ignoring the issue because of the financial repercussions that acknowledging that some fans’ unhealthy relationships can have on growth.

Twitch Streamer Mizkif who has accumulated over 1.5m followers since just late 2019, has also expressed the lengths that viewers can go to just interact with him:

“I feel that people like me [and other big streamers] have this relatability where people feel like they could be friends with us, and they feel like they could know us in real life which makes them more inclined to watch us over other people. [...]

I think the people that really try to make a friend out of me are the people who donate like crazy.

You’ll have guys that gift thousands and thousands of dollars and those people want either a lot of attention, or they’ll typically want to be my friend. They’re trying to buy their way into my life, I’ve had multiple people give me tons of money then ask for a favour like collabing with me or checking their DMs, and when they start trying to keep up conversation, then what am I gonna do? Theyjust gave me thousands of dollars, I’m gonna feel guiltyif I don’t answer their messages.”

-Matt “Mizkif” Rinaudo 1.5m Twitch followers The issue Mizkif talks about here is the idea that is - for better or worse - linked to all content creation online: Giving money to someone is a surefire way to get their attention. In specifically streamers this manifests in donations. In a sea of literally thousands of messages sent by thousands of people every minute, donating $5 to lift your head above the water and get a direct message sent to your streamer may be the only way to be heard.

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I know all of this is a very cynical lens to look through, I believe that most people who pay a content creator in whatever method, genuinely just want to support someone they like who they know is a real person - typically not run by a team - in the easiest way they can which is giving back for the content they have received. In spite of this, I still think it’s important to specifically highlight the lengths that the more captivated of fans can go to just to get some kind of interaction or attention from their favourite content creators to feel a sense of connection. This at its core, is what a parasocial relationship is.

p

-Marc Wilson Victoria University

I spoke w i t h Professor of psychology at V i c t o r i a University Marc Wilson, who gave some insight into how parasocial relationships form, what consequences they can lead to psychologically and sociologically, and how the context that parasocial relationships are in has changed as media has evolved. I asked him what he thinks motivates people to “get into parasocial relationships” and if there’s any reason for people to be wary of the risk. His response was: ““Motivation” implies that there’s something that people are striving towards here, and that is the case, but it’s not that people are striving to engage in this one-sided relationship.

Rather it reflects two things.

First, we are fundamentally social. This is evolutionary we are more likely to survive if we are parts of groups. We’re very sensitive to feeling like we belong to the point that many experts say that belonging is a fundamental human need. We look for relationships in our environment

to help us do this, and I think that these parasocial relationships are an indication that our ‘connection-detector’ t is overly-sensitive - we develop relationships even with people who don’t know of our existence. Second, we’re more likely to develop parasocial relationships with ‘people’ we ‘interact’ with regularly.”

He later elaborated on the second point when I asked if he believed there to be any risk of parasocial relationships being fostered and manipulated intentionally and maliciously by content or media creators, he replied “I think we already have that. [In America especially] it’s relatively common that the people who produce the products, who are not necessarily the same people that produce the [entertainment] will take advantage of the fact that we already engage in some kind of relationship with [the entertainers]. [...] To some extent there probably have been parasocial relationships with characters and entertainers before the term was coined in the 1950s, but it’s much easier to do that if we can hear their voices and especially if we can see their faces as well.”

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I wanted to clarify with a psychologist why people should care. There were obvious reasons that are more surface level that I touched on earlier, such as parasocially engaged fans donating sometimes exorbitant amounts of money to the unreasonable extremes all for attention from someone who doesn’t know they exist, but I wanted to know about more specific mental ramifications that engaging in an unhealthy parasocial obsession can have. I found interest in the topic of parasocial relationships because being a social media slave myself, I’d seen people online especially on Twitter or TikTok dedicating themselves to degrees that just felt off, and I wanted to learn why, and how long something like that would last.

I finally asked about what effects a parasocial relationship could have on someone mentally, where the line is crossed between a parasocial relationship, and whether there’s a certain group of people that are more at risk of tipping over. He replied: “If you’re completely obsessed to the point where you’re constantly rewatching or engaging and you aren’t taking care of yourself and doing the things that help you function in the real world then that becomes problematic. There’s some research that says that people who are lonely are more likely to develop parasocial relationships with media characters and entertainers. On one hand, that temporary solution may actually make you feel better, it may make you feel less lonely, but if it actually prevents you from going out there and engaging in face-to-face relationships, then that will have a passive negative effect on your

well being because it’s preventing you from something that is pretty explicitly accepted as a good and healthy thing. [...] There are definitely dimensions to it, it can escalate from things that feel normal, then it can grow up to that intense borderline problematic level, all the way up to full on obsessionality. Those who appreciate media on the first level of it just being good entertainment, they can relate to it, the dynamic seems fun, are more likely to be extroverted and can lean towards an entertainment-social parasociality. Those who veer further and further towards the obsession side are probably not extroverts, they usually have other personality traits that can be problematic such as n e u ro t i cism (people whose emotions are typically more variable or intense than other peoples).

“I get sent to me all the time: “Ludwig, you saved my life!” No, I didn’t save your life. What do you mean I saved your life? I’ve been playing Pokemon and Among Us. Where in that journey did I save your life? Did I pick up a scalpel and take out a tumour? No! All I did was play games, and you used me as a distraction to get through a bad period. You could’ve used Taylor Swift’s new album. You could’ve used anything but you used me.

Don’t give the credit for the work you put in to me. You saved yourself.”

-Ludwig Ahgren

I want to end with some positives on a fairly negative article. Firstly, if you’re even just aware of the concept of the parasocial relationships, just that can make you less at risk of engaging too heavily. Staying connected to real people and fostering relationships with them, doesn’t just prevent the risk of engaging in a parasocial relationship, it’s also the main way to get out of one. A parasocial relationship will typically be centered on a human need for connection, and even if you’re not totally isolated they can also just exist to fill social gaps in any aspect of your life. Staying conscious will be beneficial to both yourself and to content creators who are also real people who won’t know how to deal with thousands of people relying on them. Question your consumption and you will be thankful of yourself.

Felix Quade

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF SIMULATED VIOLENCE A DISCUSSION ON HOW WE DISCUSS VIOLENCE AND MEDIA Ryan Stocks

The year is 1980, and John Lennon is dead.

In retrospect, as we learn more about his life, Lennon has become somewhat of a controversial figure, but this doesn’t change the fact that at the time this was kind of a big deal. People wanted a reason, something to blame.

Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s killer, gave a multitude of reasons for why he did it - most of them relating in some way to his faith - but perhaps the one that has stuck in the public

consciousness the most is how he resonated with 1951 classic Catcher in the Rye. On the night he shot Johnathon, Chapman was found with a copy of the book, which he had signed with “This is my message”. Later, during his

court sentencing, Chapman quoted a passage from the book to the court. As you can quite possibly imagine, this wasn’t great for the book’s reputation, and greatly contributed to how we remember the case. Since that fateful day, the connection between media and violence will be made time and time again. But the question remains to be answered; is it fair?

ren

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“From a certain point of view, cinema was fast becoming a pit of sin and indulgence.”

Although the case of Chapman and Catcher in the Rye certainly didn’t help, people have been talking about the implications of media for as long as there has been media to discuss. If you wanted, you could take this back to like, the bible, but let’s keep it a little more “this millennia”. So let’s take it back to the 1920s, just as the golden age of Hollywood was dawning, an era dubbed pre-code Hollywood. An era between the mainstream adoption of sound pictures yet before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (or the Hays Code) censorship guidelines, which would come about in 1930, however, would not be properly enforced until 1934.

At risk of sounding stupid, this era really was the wild west of cinema.

During this era the screen was practically unregulated, for better and for worse. Whilst it is true that perhaps some regulation was required, pre-code Hollywood was far more open to things that would take nearly a century to be properly revisited in a mainstream film environment. Political commentary was far more common, female characters were depicted with more agency than one would expect, and homosexual relationships were depicted as something other than a punchline something that

the industry still hasn’t fully caught up with. To be clear the representation wasn’t good but it was… there.

However as the popularity of the medium increased so too did the calls for regulation and censorship, particularly from religious groups.

From a certain point of view, cinema was fast becoming a pit of sin and indulgence. In 1933 the American Roman Catholics established the Catholic Legion of Decency, a group that was launched to lead

“During this era the screen was practically unregulated, for better and for worse.”

a campaign against the “immorality” of American cinema. This, compounded with rising fears of a government takeover of film censorship led the major studies to place more importance on the upholding of the code.

So here we are, it’s 1934 and the shape of the film landscape has been changed in a way that will be felt for at least the next 100 years.

Surely no other new medium will experience rapid growth leading to concerns over its contents and how that affects the audience.

Right?

Wrong. The year is 1992, and videogames are starting to really get big. Whilst nowhere near the astronomical heights of the industry today, it’s a far cry from the dead state of the industry not ten years prior. Anyway, it’s 1992, and a certain video game release for the Sega Genesis is about to shock the world so severely that a new ratings system would be established just to stop poor innocent children from ever being exposed to media like this again. So what was the game? Mortal Kombat, right? Wrong. No, this satanic game carried the name Night Trap, and it was released unto the world like a wolf in sheep’s clothing on the 15th of October 1992.

Night Trap is essentially an interactive - and I use that word lightly - B movie. The player is tasked by defending a house of young women against masked intruders, who are later revealed to be vampires. It’s cheesy, it’s corny, and it’s entirely tame. However in 1993 this game, along with the infamous Mortal Kombat became the scapegoats of the industry during the 1993 congressional hearing on video game violence. Hearing

“Rising fears of a government takeover of film censorship led the major studios to place more importance on the upholding of the code. “ leader senator Joe Lieberman claimed that the game featured gratuitous violence, and encouraged sexual aggression against women. Lieberman also admitted to never having played the game, but hey, why should someone be knowledgeable about a piece of media they’re discussing at a congressional hearing, right? But I’m getting away from the point. This game was bad, like… really bad, but it wasn’t harmful. Night Trap was about as clean as a game in 1992 could get, but the premise sounds just evil enough that it worked as a convenient scapegoat to sell as a villain to a room full of out of touch senators. So from these hearings came the Video Game Rating Act of 1994, which would itself lead to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or the ESRB. A board which would rate videogames on their content. Games would be given a

rating from K-A for Kids to Adults (later changed to E for Everyone) to AO for Adults Only. Despite the questionable more measly $6 billion industry exploded to being worth over $300 billion, the conversation was sure to return.

And return it would, like with the film industry in the 30s, the video game industry would become a

“This was an inevitability, and a ratings board for video games was both logical and necessary.” common scapegoat for anything bad. In 1998, four students and a teacher were killed in a shooting.

What was the reason? Well the murderers had played Goldeneye for the N64, so that’s probably the cause. In 2012, videogames were blamed for the horrific Sandy Hook shooting. Initially, the shooter was misidentified as the shooter’s brother, who had posted on facebook about his liking for the game Mass Effect. In response to this, angry mobs brigaded the game’s facebook page, calling its creators “child killers”. After the correct man was identified as the shooter vid-

eogames were again blamed, with early news reports citing the games Starcraft and, bizarrely, Dance blame for the El Paso shootings on video games, saying “We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.”

I’m not trying to say that there is nothing wrong with how violence and other topics are depicted in video games, there’s a whole, very long conversation to be had there.

It’s an important issue to discuss especially with the rapid expansion of the industry. But that conversation isn’t being had, not really. Instead the same tired rhetoric from over 30 years ago is being recycled over and over again as a way to avoid having to talk about any of the actual issues present in our entertainment media.

JUST THE FACTS An issue often ignored in discussions around media violence is how we depict these things in our informational media, your mainstream news media and whatnot.

I’m not saying this isn’t something people talk about, it is, but far too often it’s ignored in contemporary discussions around the topic.

Depictions and representations in news media is extremely important, potentially even more so than your entertainment media, because a very large amount of people trust news as fact. People are far less likely to question the

way something is depicted in the news compared to in a television show, because what do they have to gain from being anything but entirely truthful?

Because believe it or not, our society does have an issue with violence, and potentially one of the biggest causes for this comes from our news media, and how it tends to glorify and sensationalise violence. Recent research suggests that the contagion effect - a term

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-

-

This isn’t to say that covering

Not on the shooters, not on how

contagion is the extensive coverage that these events receive, the radio, their words in the paper.

of this year on this very topic,

coverage and avoiding sensation-

-

ings .

-

over the years, starting with a

SO IS THIS REALLY AN ISSUE? tion matters. How you represent topics, ideas, and attitudes in your on-screen media is undeniably important. Representation in the media can be an extremely powerful thing for extremely good things. For instance, accurate-

ly depicting a diverse range of people can help validate people in their identity, it can help normalise these ideas to people as they grow up, it can change how culture evolves. But it’s a double-edged sword. Toxic depictions in media can skew the perception of things. This is why stereotypes can be so harmful, they tell people that this group of people are 2d caricatures, without depth. It’s at best even in cases where stereotypes may be based on some sliver of truth. It’s never the whole story being shown, yet it’s the whole story shown. So naturally, yes, this extends to

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concepts and ideologies. And yes, this traces back to the introduction of the Motion Picture Production Code. The code was introduced because certain groups thought that the way certain topics were being depicted were steering people in a direction they saw as sinful. Whether they were right or wrong is not up to me, and honestly, it doesn’t really matter.

It is just one of many cases where groups have recognised how repviolence it’s possible that these depictions are subconsciously psyche. And when we see the way mainstream media depicts mass shooters, It’s inevitable that in some small, possibly unconscious part of our brain, we dehumanise the tragedy of these events.

This is an issue, and this is the most current issue with simulated violence.

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WHAT AESTHETIC ARE YOU?

FIND OUT WHAT SERIES OF BUZZWORDS BEST DEFINES YOU QUESTION 1: Choose a musical artist A oji B Mer bow Sweet Trip C Mother Mother D Wee er Radiohead The Smiths E mxmtoon

QUESTION 5: Choose a Video Game A Undertale B eometry Dash C Animal Crossing D League of Legends E Minecraft

QUESTION 2: Choose a Musical A I don’t like musicals, it doesn’t make sense to start singing.

B: Cats C Be More Chill D Dear van Hansen E In Blind aith

QUESTION 6: Choose a Social Media A TikTok B Miiverse C Tumblr D: Reddit E: Instagram

QUESTION 3: Choose an Animated Movie A nd of vangelion B: Coraline C The Cat Returns D Megamind E My eighbour Totoro

QUESTION 7: Choose an actor A: Zendaya B Adam Sandler C Aubrey la a D Heath Ledger E irsten Stewart

s o r fi A Black hoodie with the docs and the dyed black hair.

B: Nothing C astel coloured sweaters that are too large D reen amer Shirt and cargo shorts E Vintage Victorian Clothing for living out in the woods

QUESTION 8: Choose a drink?

A Ari ona Tea B Sparkling Water C Monster ink D Monster Black E Sasparilla

QUESTION 9: What are you like at parties?

A Smoking a cigarette on the lawn, grungy as hell, main character moment.

B Turns up late, steals small valuables, drinks bong water, ghosts.

C Drinking the sweet selt ers, asks for a follow back on twitter, going home early.

D “You ever seen that one wojak, y’know the one where the guy is standing in the corner as he ruminates to himself about how nobody truly knows him. So yeah that wojak is basically me” E ot drinking, trying to cue Mitski, running off into the woods and starting a coven.

A - Slowed + Reverbcore Congratulations You’re the new nightcore, changing the music around you to reflect the empty hallway of a life you live. You can see yourself in that three second looping anime gif, and you clutch your heart as the drop of a song is stretched out to be wayyyyy longer. But, like, therapy would maybe be a good choice as well. Suit yourself.

B - Weirdcore this section is all lowercase baby. youre dry, youre creepy, youre weird as hell. several hours of noise music and thinking that a room having a single light source makes it a liminal space. But yknow, finding that sense of community in an external interest that’s unfounded by anything else in the sphere of pop culture aint even that bad.

C - Sanriocore You probably thought this was a bu feed qui for your Divergent faction right up until you saw you got this. But well, here we are. The great splintering of Alt Counter-Culture has led to here, where the dark rejection of society is shown through pastels and cartoon characters edited to have chains and piercings.

D - Incelcore If you got this one and didn’t want it, I’m ALMOST sorry for you. You’re part of the great modern movement of the new “outcasts”, a community that has inflated so greatly in their si e to the point where this word doesn’t even mean the definition anymore. Whether you murder, manipulate, mansplain, or misogynise, possibly some malewife buisness on the side , your choices led you here, and y’know what little guy? I’m proud of ya.

E - Cottagecore Reject Society, return to the great wild life we once chose to live. With creeks flowing through the woods, and our escape made from the panopticon of capitalistic society that once trapped us, we can finally unwind and delight in the simple pleasures of nature. Until someone inevitably trips and requires urgent medical attention or everyone simultaneously realises they can’t actually get a pot to boil over an open fire.

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Starving for Praise TW: Mentions of Eating Disorders I never asked to have an eating disorder. I just wanted to fit into my favourite jeans again. I was 14 and I’d been given new jeans for my birthday. I loved them. But for a few weeks, I couldn’t find them. When they finally turned up, they were too tight. I asked mum if I’d gotten fat. She hesitated before replying, “I guess I have noticed you getting a bit bigger.”

That sentence carved itself into my brain. Maybe if I had grown up in a world where weight gain and the word ‘fat’ weren’t overwhelmingly negative, maybe I wouldn’t have spent the summer of 2019 counting calories, running off my weight and dreading the thought of putting food in my mouth, knowing I would only rush to the toilet afterwards and force myself to throw it back up.

That summer, food became numbers. Mirrors became fear. Words became controlling.

When my already slender friends started diets to lose weight, I wondered how I must look in their eyes? Suddenly it seemed like everybody was talking about what they looked like.

I became smaller and as I evaporated, praise of my new body encouraged me to keep starving myself or throwing up. Even when my jeans became too big for me, when I began to avoid breakfast and lunch, when I fainted in class, I convinced myself I wasn’t sick. I told myself I had control. I didn’t. I was losing myself to the words I was hearing.

Words matter. Words from others, words from the media and our own words influence ourselves and the people around us - and they can do damage.

Somehow, we are conditioned to comment on our own and other’s appearances.

Social media certainly exposes that.

Children learn early to comment on appearance, even in a negative way. They see com-

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Jessie Davidson

ments on friend’s and family’s posts. They’re told they’re so pretty, so tall, so little. Or they see comments on their favourite celebrity, dragging them based on height, weight, clothing choice.

We are conditioned to associate thin with healthy and good, measuring ourselves and others against slender ideals. We ignore the damage caused when the drive to be thin becomes a mental illness. We ignore when that illness causes physical issues such as heart and kidney problems, or even death. Eating disorders are one of the deadliest mental illnesses, second only to opioid addiction.

Katie Babbott is an eating disorder researcher at Auckland University and co-founder of the eating disorder support website, Āhei. She told me about a study of primary school students where researchers asked young kids why health is important.

The children said things like “So that you won’t be a fat blob”; “So that nobody will laugh at you for being fat”; and “So that you aren’t ugly and lazy”.

“As young as five they’ve already picked up this fatphobic language and bias, so it’s unsuprising that the language we use around weight, shape and size is powerful. We need to be really careful how we talk about food and bodies.”

We are teaching children that weight equals worth.

New Zealand is seeing children worried about their appearance at increasingly young ages. Kids as young as 8 are waitlisted for eating disorder clinics. Everyday, more than 10,000 girls ask Google if they’re pretty enough. Entire generations are growing up feeling inadequate because they don’t match the aspired body type that was fed to us all from birth.

“Food became numbers.

Mirrors became fear. Words became controlling.”

“It’s common for friends and families to encourage weight loss,” says Babbott. “This can be knowingly or unknowingly. This comes from the massive belief that skinny equals healthy, which is not true.”

Family and friends strengthen the idea that how we look measures our worth. These messages can be as subtle as a waiter pointing out the lite options on the menu or asking if you need that second helping, or as unsubtle as unsolicited diet advice.

Babbott says fatphobia has been around for decades, and these conversations would have contributed to eating disorders prior to the rise of social media. However she says that with the internet and social media, messaging is much more readily available than previously.

“We are living in a culture with an extraordinary emphasis on bodies, food, and appearance. Along the way, we’ve somehow gotten morality muddled up in the mix, as though certain bodies are ‘good’ and others are ‘bad’, and that we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on the type of body we live in.”

She mentions that encouragement and praise about weight loss can be dangerous because it may be encouraging harmful behaviour such as purging, restriction and over-exercising. These can become difficult to stop if they’re regularly praised.

Babbott says many individuals with an eating disorder struggle with things like perfectionism and control. Food, whether under or over eating, is a way to exert control and power over a situation. Most eating disorder patients experience high anxiety, so controlling dietary intake and eating the ‘perfect’ amount of calories reduces the anxiety.

With this in mind, we can see how the messages we spread can exert a heavy influence over those who suffer from eating disorders.

Lara (not her real name) is a survivor of bulimia. She de-

scribes her early-teen self as “geeky, blessed with braces, an anxious perfectionist, and an incredibly normal looking girl going through the bodily changes that everyone goes through.”

Lara says weight was an often-discussed topic in her household growing up and believes this resulted in her ever-present concern about her appearance and the development of her illness.

“My mum and my sister were always very focussed on how they looked and it rubbed off on me. I was always being told I should join them on one of their diets,” she says.

“When I was 7 my mum was worried about my weight so she made me get up and go on runs with her 4 days a week before school. But I believe the trigger for my eating disorder was watching a talk show where they had a girl talking about her experience with bulimia. She began describing exactly how she would make herself sick after meals.

“That night, I made my way to the bathroom. I vividly remember looking in the mirror and thinking, am I really going to do this? I think some part of me was trying to fight this urge. Because what people don’t realise is that once you start, it’s nearly impossible to stop. I was 12.”

Lara spent the next three years in a state of on-andoff surges of bulimia that she didn’t initially believe was serious: “I treated it like a diet. I convinced myself that if I wanted to, I could stop at any time. I was very wrong.”

Year 11 hit Lara like a brick. Surrounded by peers constantly comparing themselves to each other, both in looks and grades, it was at this point that Lara’s bulimia took full control.

“I began to hide in a very depressive state. I didn’t sleep,

“I treated it like a diet. I convinced myself that if I wanted to, I could stop at any time.

I was very wrong.”

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I didn’t eat, if I did eat it came back up. Most of my time I spent in front of a mirror listing reasons why I was an awful person. I think the worst part of it was my friends and family telling me how great I looked, how skinny I had become. I didn’t want to exist anymore.”

It was only until the start of year 12 when Lara and her family began to seek help. August this year marked Lara’s first six months of being purge free in the last four and a half years.

Lara’s story is one of many examples of growing up in a weight-stigmatised household. She was taught from a very young age that skinny is beautiful, and watched her sister and mum struggle with this idea for much of her life.

When Lara told me that her trigger for the development of her eating disorder was the TV show she watched, I began thinking: Can talking about eating disorders be the reason some people develop eating disorders?

Katie Babbott says it’s a good question but the idea that talking about eating disorders causes eating disorders is a bit of a myth.

“People believe this about lots of things actually, and that’s a big part of the reason why there’s so much stigma around discussing things like self-harm and suicide.”

She says research has found that safely acknowledging and talking about mental health may in fact reduce, rather than increase the risk. Although there are always exceptions, talking safely may even lead to improvements in mental health, helping people feel more comfortable disclosing that they have a problem or seeking help for their issues.

“The worst part of it was my friends and family telling me how great I looked, how skinny I had become. I didn’t want to exist anymore. “ However, not all talk is safe, Babbott says.

“Talking about eating disorders in the context of safe conversations with a loved one is really different from talking about eating disorders or getting ideas from other people who are actively struggling - on pro-ana websites, tik tok and so on. The former is really important, and the latter is really dangerous.”

Babbott says it’s best not to talk about bodies, weight, shape or size at all. Whether it’s their body, your body or others. This advice can also be used in general, not just for those suffering with an eating disorder.

“There’s this really interesting concept called body neutrality, which is the idea you don’t have to hate your body OR love your body - you just have to respect it and take good care of it. This is a really good goal, not just for eating disorder sufferers and their families, but for everyone! The goal of body-neutrality allows for a healthy middle ground between hating your body and loving your body.

“Just like a relationship with a partner, parent or sibling takes work, so too does your relationship with your body.

Your body is your home; a vessel in which to live a meaningful life. Working to nurture it and treat it with kindness and compassion is the ultimate goal of body-respect, and using kind, neutral, and respectful language when talking about bodies is really important.”

What can we each do to change the narrative that focuses on our bodies?

My own advice to anyone whose loved one is struggling with body image issues or an eating disorder, is just to truly listen to them.

We can all make a difference by noticing weight stigma and fatphobic behaviours and calling them out. Be aware if you use them yourself.

Support your friends and family who struggle with body image before it develops into something bigger and harder to control.

Focus less on someone’s appearance and more on their strengths, ideas, ambitions and dreams.

At the end of the day our bodies are not the most interesting part of ourselves.

Besides, life is too short to live without chocolate.

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EDANZ - Freephone 0800 2 EDANZ or 0800 233 269 Healthline – 0800 611 116

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What’s Hot, What’s Not

2021

Not:

Hot:

vaccinated g in t t e G • s in bio n u o n o r P • • Red hair eping • Gate ke docs • Platform jackets r e h t a e L • nd UK • Love Isla • KJ Apa kins • Chris Hip loves ss g • Fingerle Clothing • Layering eal ie M • Saweet

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• Disrespec ting people’s pronouns • Shein • Delta • Archie An drews • Kanye • Met gala t heme • PDA in the hallways • Chris Hipk ins • Library sm ell • Wearing y our mask wro ng • BTS Meal • Unsustain able shoppin g

What’s Hot, What’s Not Through the decades

Best of What’s Hot What’s Not from past Flannels (1997-2016)

Hot:

s (03) e i l o o • W s (02) e y E n • Gree rd Minty (02) wo • The iry (12) a D s ’ a l • Ja ti (11) a n i m u • Ill (07) s l r i G (11) e • Spic Longbottom 99) lle Gellar ( e l • Nevi l e h c h Mi • Sara s (01) ie • Slink rails (99) lT 99) • Snai es that glow ( h • Watc o flutes (01) bo • Bam rsyth (11) Fo • Iona

Not:

• Joh n Key ( 09 • Pub lic pas ) hin • Can celling g (02) the Cu Carniv ba St a • Smo l (02) ki • Carg ng (99) o pa heels ( nts with high • Aus 03) tra • McD lians (02) o • Jun nalds (99) ior • Coll s on Laptops Boys (1 (11) 1) • Leo nardo DiCapr io (98)

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CLASS OF 2021 Connor Abbott

Dominic Abbott

Orlando Abdust

Leo Alagh

Naia Alkhouri

Rory Allan

Nawar Alnader

no quote

no quote

no quote

PERTRUDILF PURES PATSTUMI PANCAKES

no quote

I dont know where I am but I want bagels and money.

forgive others not becaue they deserve forgiveness but because you deserve peace.

Quinn Amis

Sam Bain

Rory Barraud

Nick Becker

Dylan Belke

Ben Bellamy

Lucas Beltran McLeod

no quote

It takes three wipes to tell you only needed two

sh*t when you can, not when you need to.

no quote

no quote

Still waiting on those free drugs I was promised

no quote

Ethan Benham

Anthony Bennett

Jessica Bevan

Manon Bird

Jay Blair

Emily Bray

Lucy Brennan

‘Even just to reach is a triumph’ -F.A.

I embody every stereotype I know and I’m proud

no quote

arrived at mola mola crib

Stay cozy

not stoned, had eye surgery

Hjacking the French press

Ryan Bright

Iris Broadly

Daniel Brooker

Beatrix Brown

Beau Buckley

Au Bui

Hayley Bulmer

no quote

no quote

they go to high school, I go to school high

Warm soggy Cabbage

Go forth, kick ass

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Ateo Bunhe

Diego Calderon Rodriguez

Edith Callaghan

Lestat Camona

Riley Campbell

Juan Cantalapiedra

Vincenzo Carozza

no quote

Casi no cuenta, asi que vete pal carajo

no quote

Memento Mori

no quote

“I’m gonna miss school so much” said no one ever

no quote

Anthony Cater

Gewan Chann

Henry Chapman

Joseph Chapple

Cadence Chung

Yawshu Chwa every one writes their own story.

Issac Carran me when i, when when im like - yea

no quote

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Gomex.

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“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” - Oscar Wilde

Ella Collins-Peka

Milan Collins

Tim Collins

Xanthe Cooling

Perran Coppard

Quinn Courche

Violet Cowan

no quote

no quote

no quote

this was nothing like high school musical

no quote

sooooo trueeee

eat, sleep...

Piper Craven

Ava Dalmer

Ethan Dalzell

Caleb Davies

Fiver Dearnley

Lily DeGroen

Asher Dingi

no quote

It’s soo easy I barely made it

no quote

no quote

And they never knew I used wikipedia

no quote

‘The only ones in need of love are those who don’t recieve enough, so evil ones should get a little more’ Laplace’s Angel

An Do

Ned Dodds

Muazzam Domingo

Hannah de Toit

Sean Duggan

Marcus Dustin

Joseph Edwards

no quote

Tu hueles a sudor con etreñimiento, como burro en calor

I literally have no idea whats going on in my life, I’m just in charge of the outfits

Yearbook Quote

no quote

no quote

yes.

79

Tom Fitzpatrick

Oliver Ford

Vita Foster-Ward

no quote

That rug really tied the room together - The Dude

Find something to do that you love and stick with it. Make it a job and you’ll never work a day in your life.

no quote

Sadie Galloway

Carlo Gamble

Aquila Gibbs

Issy Gilchrist-Hall

Liam Gilliespie

no quote

no quote

no quote

with just a hint of lust - Fairy Godmother, Shrek 2

Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die

Life is like driving, sometimes you gotta go fast by letting go of the accelerator

Dominique Gilling

James Goode

Emma Grainger

James Grey

Wharo Gray

Gabriella Guermanoff Lowe

Will Gulliver

no quote

it’s hard to fall into obscurity when you were already there

dude

no quote

no quote

no quote

Kian Haberler

Arlo Haig

Aris Halliwell

Kereama Hape

Meg Hardie-Boys

Pieta Harris

Elijah Hassett

“you were born and don’t die a” - Freja and Jay

I love kombucha

I’m gonna put some dirt in your eye

no quote

...fortnite, repeat.

Barely went here

This is Fine

Keiji Hata

Ethan Hawker

Finn Hawker

Basil Hayman

Billy Healy

Tom Hicks

Sophie Hider-Kirby

no quote

you jerk off to pornography, I jerk off to abstract ideas like money and success. we are NOT the same.

It’s only a model

so much to do with so little time

no quote

Bits

Joy Elzenaar

Elvis Fan

uwu

Feel happy to study in here and I learn a lot of things but not just only knowledge.

He tried

Mia Fowler

Matt Frost

no quote

I had a great experience to study here as an international student

80

Luka Fenbattista

Caleb Fenton

Matt Hirst

Maya Hobman

Charlotte Hofmann-Body

Noah Houghton

Te Okanga Huata Wagner

Haru Huia

Maatai Hume-Cook

no quote

maya he maya ha maya haha

Tu madre

no quote

one of the the only horis in kura

Oh, bother...

Nothing is illegal until they catch you

Matthew Hume

Dylan Husson

Riley Israelson

Sophie Jackson

Joshua Jacques

Freya James

Molly James

no quote

no quote

no quote

no quote

A pure race is a race that accepts difference

The only straight I am is straight up bitch

|300|3$

William Jardine-Langston

Maya Jarvis

Rose Jenkins

Vita Jerram

Becky Jones

Emily Jones

Jack Jordan

co-star says I should avoid you today

i’m not cinderella, i’d never leave my shoe behind

no quote

hype.

thank f*ck that’s over

What have my bones ever done for me?

“Let’s make some new memories together, ok?”

Emma Kane

Dre Kemp

Magnus Kennedy

Isabelle Kettles

Will Kirby

Morgan Knight

Ari Koed Chang

The only thing bigger than my IQ are my tits

no quote

no quote

“I’m playing devils avocado” - Simon Russell

no quote

no quote

no quote

Authur Kraemer

Tiana Krafft-Soffe

Minh Quan Lam

Hunter Lander-Smith

Sasha Langridge

Noah Latham

Alex Le Quesne

This sh*ts bananas but at least i havent peeled yet

“Enjoy the best things in your life, cuz you ain’t gonna get to live it twice” - Mac Miller

All Blacks prpop 2022

School is like chess, only without the dice.

My Mum’s been keeping a cabbage in the microwave.

What kills us is memories :( :(

no quote

81

Alexa Lee

Olivia Leeman

Polly Legge

Felix Lenihan

Isabelle Lepoamo

Eva Levack

Mazikeen Liu

https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

The earth is not a cold, dead place

It’s noicee, it’s different, it’s uniquee

no quote

the writing on the level 4 bathrooms are life mottos

Man I Love Fishing

no quote

Rose Livingstone

Leroy Lock

Solomon Luddon-Muir

Claire Lynch

Ossian Lynch

Matthew MacDonald

Charlotte MacKenzie

no, i’m not vegetarian.

no quote

Maple wood with a unicorn hair core, 13 1/5” and a rigid fexibility.

No Thoughts

Ossian Man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land.

no quote

Why do they call it oven when you of in cold food of out hot eat the food?

Nico Maiden

Lauren Malony

Katja Malso

Alice Markwell

Floyd Marsden

Eli Martin

Nina Mathaisen

I want to take this time to give a shoutout to my dog Ruby

no quote

Grundstücksverkehrsge-nehmigungszuständigk-eitsübertragungsverord-nung

“Peachy keen, jellybean”

My personality is taller than you

Vi ses!

lima echo sierra bravo india alpha november

Alen Mathew

Elsie McAlpine

Toby McCarthy-Watts

Magnus McCarthy

Brooke McCloy

Thomas McCormack

Edward McDaniel “Such devastation... This was NOT my intention!”

no quote

All I got from school is mental illnesses

What are you doing STEP LADDER

Babe if you’re reading this I’m sorry I gave you herpes

The only straight I am is straight

“Prince Zuko, you’re really going to get a kick out of this, your honour was in my sleeve the whole time!”

- Uncle Iroh probably

Mia McDougall

Sidney McIntosh

James McKay

Griffin McMillan

Stella Meikle

Friday Meulengracht-Madsen

Frankie Millar

no quote

“Obviously you are not a golfer” - The Dude

a human can alter his life by altering his attitude

If u look at me and dont like me,. what does that say about u

It’s an innacurate representation of the self :)

can i offer you a nice egg in this trying time?

shidded on him

82

Louis Mills Szabo

Seth Mitchell-Webster

Leah Mitchell

Sakurako Mizunuma

Hugo Moffat

Salome Montoya

Spencer Mooney

no quote

no quote

Real G’s move in silence like lasagna

1-0

“Who’s this by? A$AP Rocks?”

- Mr. Russell

no quote

Brothers everywhere raise your hands into the air. We’re warriors, warriors of the world

Oscar Morrison

Dan Moskovitz

Donnchadh Munro

Kasumi Murakami

Zac Naufahu

Sandy Nguyen

Akari Nishioka

no quote

Please refer to Isaac Carran’s quote for further information

i hope it gets better than this

wassup this is Kim petras and I f***ed your boyfriend

Clm cuối cùng cũng xong ạ--

peace begins with a smile

Arunan Noble

Ruby Nolan

Anna Osborne

Pakira Pancholi

Jett Partridge

Kaia Patton

watiyatalkinabit donnie you farkin drug addict

no quote

“My hair colour has nothing to do with my psychological problems” - Cat Valentine

Ursula Palmer Steeds

You know, if I look back in 10 or so years. I might wonder why I spent so long worrying about Integral Calculus

irish pride

no quote

Oliver Penty

Sunny Percival

Hazel Perigo-Blackburn

Jay Philip

Noah Phillips

Ryan Ponnet

Cameron Powell

Regrets at WHS? giving a denial to my learning, Losing my shoes but not bothered, living too far from WHS, Nah

E kore koe e ngaro, he kākano i rua mai i Rangiātea. Moe mai rā Matua Mike

no quote

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are.

Julia Randerson

Saskia Rice

Jess Riddell

#girlboss :/

“sass did you bring your car?”

see kids i told you mum was hot in highschool

dont remember this

no quote

no quote

no quote

Anita Pownall

Marley Prime

Joel Purchas

Felix Quade

sigma

“I want people to look at me and say, that’s Felix Quade man, that’s quality.”

#gucciswag

‼️

no quote

83

Ella Rigby-Crayford

Riley Rillstone

Jack Riversdale

Ruby Robertson

Taiaroa Rose

Emily Rutledge

Vasilisa Rybkina

I honestly have no idea what’s happening

Don’t fish from the warf

no quote

no quote

all you need is love

i don’t know my lefts and rights

no quote

Jasper Rynhart

Kelsie Sammons-Gray

E Scott

James Shadbolt

Libby Shallcrass-Wong

Bryn Shanks

Peri Shaw

Edi you vomited on my cat

Aim low, Reach your goals, Avoid dissapointment

“If you treat me like a stranger, this is what you ****ing get” - Cian Ye

i dont even go here

do you think i think before i think

no quote

Nour Sheikha

Ramona Sheppard

Zoe Shima

Charlie Sim

Renwick Sinclair

Sophie Spencer

Harvey Spicer

no quote

no quote

Left the clubhouse

#Emlaw #Sugget

no quote

“and they were roommates” oh my gaga they were roommates ...

I don’t have a quote can you just leave it blank

Lee Stanton-Barnettt

Summer Steele

Thomas Stevenson

Gregory Stewart

Arlo Stocker

Ryan Stocks

Tara Stockwell Williams

See you in Paris 2024

no quote

Your mum, my ****, you do the math.

1960s pictures

no quote

the ultimate gemini has survived

no quote

Pelagia Sutcliffe

Fuyuko Takasu

Zachary Taylor

Sixty Telfar

Aryana Theodorou

Lewis Thomson

Harry Thornburrow

Where did the years go? Just last week i was a mute, socially awkward year 9, now i am an ALMOST mute, socially awkward year 13...that’s it really

no quote

Exit, perused by a bear

The NZ flag is just Britain doing a reaction video

f*ck b*tches get money

I’m leaving.

100% attendance for all of high school

84

CJ Trinidad

Josh Turnbull

Frances Upton

life is not a game of luck, you have to work hard

I will find my way and as Winnie the Pooh said “I am not lost for I know where I am....”

gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss

Luke Wakeling

David Wang

Mahon Welsh

Phoebe Wenlock

no quote

Q: In latin, when pairing foods with the verb **edo** (I eat), what case should you use?

A: The om-nom-nominative.

The only thing that’s guaranteed in life is if you don’t chase it it’s losing.

Punch cones, not your spouse

I dont know I dont have a quote

Ruairi Whittaker

Tez Wilde

Joy Williams

Baxter Williamson

Ellie Williment

Hannah Wills

no quote

no quote

no quote

no quote

your mum lol

no quote

no quote

Leo Wilson

Zahquantre Witoko

Matthew Wood

Joe Wyles

Jackie Yan

Cian Ye

Milla Ymker-Williamson

“No naps just long sleep, hibernate” - Rich Homie Quan

little bit classy, little bit sassy and a little bit assy

real men f*ck up. what defines a man is up man man are the f*ck steps he takes with f*ck can after he checks up - the joker.

no quote

no quote

Physics is over rated, we should just fly instead

no quote

Riko Yoshino

Hamdiya Yussuf

Ashley Zhu

no quote

no quote

Sweet but psycho, stay hydrated:3

Ali Tobin

Ford Tobin

If asked, don’t design the leavers hoodie

i’m just myself, that’s the best way to put it, anything i do, im doing it for a reason.

Jazz Toomey Guard that p*ssy

Jack Ure

Alex Verran

Anaru Wairau-Timu

My bad.

They say “Those that can’t do, teach”. If that’s the case, I feel sorry for Sex Ed Teachers.

Luke Weston

Linh Tran no quote

85

Signatures

86

87