so i'm unsure whether this is a me thing since many of the reviews don't seem to mention it much but i just can't get over how frustrating this first person present narration is? sure, we get a lot of intimate and personal information from the characters themselves but the writing is just so boring and unoriginal?

someone please tell me either the story and suspense picks up or the writing starts to get better because i kind of need to read this (potential comp title for future manuscript query) and i genuinely don't know if i can make it through at this point 😭

my FAVORITE essay of the collection so far, no doubt. now that Castillo has defined a lot of her own concepts and thoughts out in the previous pieces we as readers are used to what she has to say, and how she says it.

having only seen HBO's Watchmen once upon its release (in what feels like an actual lifetime ago now, even though it was only in 2019) it was amazing to revisit it through Castillo's lens. it's truly a shame that not enough media operates/frames the world the way this show does in certain regards, and i would never have realized it if it weren't for this essay. Castillo, more a member of the X-Men generation than that of the infamous wizardly bildungsroman series by a quite literal now-outed Nazi, makes supremely good points about the extortion and hollowness of white fantasy in its inspiration from Actual Events that didn't happen to them, but communities and cultures of color. once again just stunning overall!

a little more of a personal note/thought: there are largely two things that i greatly admire from a good essay collection - self-referencing, and getting to know more about topics that i otherwise wouldn't really have taken an interest in if it were not for the way the author specifically discusses it. Honor The Treaty, as both an essay and a piece from Castillo, is a prime example of how writing can transform knowledge, can expand and encourage what we know and what we want to know, and the forms in which we know it.

and despite everything i've learned about environmental colonialism and getting to know the late Merata Mita through Castillo's words, i am still the most shocked at the "revelation" (to me, at least) that the concept of carbon footprint was PR pushed out by British Pretroleum as a means of redirecting the target for corporate greed? that a concept so ingrained in a society like ours was created not to incentivize a future-forward thinking (what of the planet we leave behind?) as i had grown up to think, but to dispell blame towards those who cause the harm. maybe everyone knew that already but i just feel so angry, wow.