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a-cai-jpg · 4 years

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“what do you think is the biggest issue plaguing our society?”

hm. capitalism? or this idea that life is a zero-sum game? or the blatant disregard for human life that isn’t our own? or the prioritization of our wants over other people’s needs?

READING LIST:

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander Fatal Invention - Dorothy Roberts The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot The Case for Reparations - Ta-Nehisi Coates (and bruh, if you're too lazy to read a book, check out the nice Instagram graphics)

Today, I heard a song that I used to listen to a lot when I drove to and from work. In the past three months, memories of work have muddled and swelled and distorted until they become small snippets in my dreams that have increasingly made less sense as quarantine drags on. The frequency at which I speak of my students and teammates at the dinner table have decreased, even more so in the past week as the program ended and we are no longer obligated to get up around 9 in the morning and sit in a half hour to one hour call with each other.

Parts of me miss it. Although I like being able to lounge in bed until the sun is begging me to throw my covers off and wash my face, I am somewhat wistful for the structure that those days had offered me.

But the thing that gets me the most--the thing that makes me suddenly interrupt the comfortable silence in the ktichen with a sigh or the thing that makes me accidentally press the brakes a little too hard when I'm driving--is the fact that my work e-mail is now terminated. I now have no access to the lesson plans I've created for my students, the student profiles that I still sometimes think of when I'm alone and want to add to, the OneDrive that my laptop screen has been so accustomed to hosting. With a "Log-in Denied" screen, the disconnect between my students and I had become permanent.

Someone recently asked if I was going to write about my experience, and although in the beginning (like really beginning, like August 2019 beginning) I had planned on doing it, as time wore on, I realized how measly my written account would compare to the actual experience.

See, what made the experience worth it was the smallest, most trivial interactions with my students and my teammates. It was the delirious mornings before 7:15 AM, the semi-hysterical 10 minutes before 3:00 PM, the weariness of 4:30 PM when a student is still chatting and not leaving the classroom, and the restlessness of a Friday afternoon. It was when a student wandered into our classroom during class (uh oh) or right before the end of lunch just to update us about something or when a student showed up for our after school program and all of us cheer and the student takes an even longer detour to walk over to our table because they were lowkey embarrassed. Fuck, it's when a student fell off his chair laughing but the process of falling took over a minute so I didn't notice until he was physically on the floor, when another student and I hid in the back of the classroom to play Super Smash Bros and I was so stressed because I swore the substitute teacher knew we weren't doing schoolwork, when a student kept saying these two words that I didn't get and after asking him to repeat it so many times he was going "MISS STOP PLAYING" I realized he was saying "cookie jar," when a student tried to play Battleship against me but underestimated by psychic powers, when a student finally understood mRNA transcription and protein translation and gained confidence in himself and in biology as the year goes on, when a student was causing a ruckus but then we waved hi and he beamed at us and came up to greet us like we have made his day, when a student tried to tell me I have a chance in marrying Jackson Wang because we're about the same age, when a student screamed "Congratulations miss" across the classroom because he thought it would be appropriate for the beginning of English class, when a student conspired very obviously with my teammates to play "Happy Birthday" for me on my birthday, when a student found a two-person game to play with me even though I suck at computer games because he wanted to include me in whatever he was doing with his friends--see.

I can list all these memories, but what they actually mean wouldn't make sense to anyone but me and my teammates.

And there are other things that I can't really describe in a sentence. Like the contours of a connection with a student, how it starts off from hello's and compliments to their hair, and then becomes conversations about racism and sexism.

Sometimes I ask myself, Annette, you spent a year supposedly serving to alleviate inequity in schools. Why are you not talking more about whatever the clusterfuck is happening right now? The racism, the discrimination, the white supremacy clusterfuck that's apparently ripping apart families (to which I applaud).

In the beginning, I talked about systems and inequity a lot. I remember a friend and I literally sat in a Jollibee's all the way in West Covina, debating angrily and passionately about racism until the sun set. I would have lengthy text message conversations about it, sit in cars and talk and feel angry but also like I was doing something.

But fuck, as the school year went on, I just got more and more angry.

Fuck talking about it, I would think as I drove home near tears. Fuck talking about it if no one is going to do anything.

I suddenly hated talking about systemic inequity. It was just such a jarring feeling, sitting in a classroom discussing inequity and not fucking being able to do anything about it. I was so pissed that superintendents, policymakers, all these people with important titles would talk and talk and talk and fuck all would happen in the schools. I felt like a fucking hypocrite, talking to the students about systemic inequity and then not being able to do anything about a racist teacher or a punitive administrator. It was like fighting a damned uphill battle with just your 8-person team when it was promised that everyone else--schools, programs, fucking lawmakers--was fighting the same damned battle with you.

I was pissed that money and programs flood the schools, but fuck all is happening in the community or all the money is being used in the wrong places and there's inequity in literally whatever the fuck we were doing as we march into schools declaring that we're alleviating inequity.

And honestly, I'm still fucking pissed.

I ride a thin line between being an elitist about systemic inequities and having a holier-than-thou attitude and being fucking pessimistic about the world. It was sitting in that classroom, that I finally felt, for the first fucking time, utterly hopeless.

And it was a weird feeling, because I didn't really know how to talk to other people about it, because the fuck do I know about systemic inequity, living in my sheltered ethnic enclave, cruising through innocuous YouTube videos about sewing or some shit?

See, the thing I can't fucking stand about people who talk big ideals and policies and shit is that human beings become a statistic. They become a damned number or a martyr or a beneficiary.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a numbers, data-oriented person, and being able to have statistics to back up my claims about racism makes me feel safe. BUT why the fuck does a person have to become a damned statistic before they matter?

(yes i know there's a cause and effect that happens, but that's not right. no one should have to fucking die for people to realize damn, yeah this shit's messed up.)

I remember in sophomore year, I attended a race seminar, and was called in to chat with the two seminar leaders a little while after the seminar ended. After a while, I just kind of fell silent and stared at the table for a while, and one of them asked, "Annette, what are you thinking?"

And I said it fucking pissed me off that people die and become a statistic and then suddenly so-called change happens and people start caring but what about that person who died? And maybe it was the first time that I fully recognized the value of a human life and the potential of a human life, and that was why I was so distraught. Because I had been seeing Black men killed by police as a damned statistic, but during that week when all we did was talk about race and protests and riots and Ferguson, all I could think about was what if Michael Brown hadn't died, what he could have done and what color he would have had in his life.

This is such an elementary and rudimentary point to make, but fuck, people don't get it. A human life matters.

Period.

A human life matters.

So what if there is a criminal record? So what if he isn't a college graduate? So what if she is a sex worker? So what if they were intoxicated and in a stolen car? Fuck you, none of that constitutes a fucking death sentence, and who the fuck are you to indict them anyways?

(wow this took an unexpected turn.)

But.

I think it's important to talk about systems. To recognize the political implication of the BLM movement, to understand the historical and political context of racism. You can't fight systemic racism without that understanding. But all of it has to be rooted in viewing each person as a full human with full dignity. There cannot be White saviors in politics, fucking old, White men who are honestly both sexist and racist being hailed as heroes because they're fighting for minority rights like no calm the fuck down that's literally what they're supposed to do.

Like yes applaud them but fuck, applaud the minority women in Congress who are doing so much fucking more.

I think everyone needs to have that kind of reckoning, where they sit and fucking realize that damn yeah, Black people or poor people or trans people or gay people or fucking women are like.

People.

With potential and dignity and life and are wholly deserving of potential and dignity and life.

And to have that cut short by something that was a product of the very fucking system created to strip away potential, dignity, and life is unjust and not something that should be ignored.

And once you have that kind of reckoning, you can move on to understanding the system and how American history was literally shaped by racist, White men with the overarching goal of creating a society where they would always be in power.

And maybe the two learning processes have to happen in conjunction. It probably should happen in conjunction. But regardless of how it happens, nobody should just sit back and say "Yeah, I'm a good person, it sucks that so and so was killed or arrested," because that does fuck all.

If you can't do anything about it, at least feel fucking pissed about it, so pissed that if one day someone said something dumb as fuck, you will have the courage to tell them they are fucking dumb as fuck.

(ok maybe don't put it that way, but honestly, if you're righteously angry, who can determine how you are to show your anger?)

READING LIST:

We Were Eight Years in Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates The Health Gap - Michael Marmot The Color of Law - Richard Rothstein

(books to be read by me)

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theartofmedia · 5 years

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The Art of Review: YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

I have been sitting here for about two hours with this tab open, trying to find out how to properly introduce this. At the time of writing this (May 7, 2019, 10:02 PM), I have just finished watching YIIK several hours ago. However, I have been doing just about everything to avoid actually writing about it, because I have no idea how to ease the reader into this.

YIIK is so reprehensible that I created this segment--”The Art of Review”--because I needed to talk about this game. I needed to explain just why this game fails on every single account, and is so blatantly offensive. Initially, I was going to do a piece on something creator Andrew Allanson had said about games and his protagonist, Alex. It had to do with character development, and a common criticism was Alex’s sheer lack of it; naturally, I decided to watch a walkthrough online in order to see this for myself first-hand.

I was not prepared for what I saw. I have never had to take as many breaks from any media before due to sheer anger at what I was witnessing. I have never seen a game that fails in every single sense, that is regarded as such high art by its developers. Except maybe David Cage, but he’s a topic for another day.

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is one of the worst pieces of media I have ever had the displeasure of viewing... probably in my entire life. I wish I was exaggerating.

Before I go any further, I would like give immense credit to GrandmaParty and the others at the Something Awful forums for doing an LP of the game with commentary and cutting out the fights. GrandmaParty graciously linked the thread to me--which is full of sources that I will also be linking to throughout this piece--and made the entire game tolerable enough for me to power through. It wouldn’t have happened without you guys, so thank you very much for extending a hand to a small creator trying to get her footing in the world. <3

I will also be linking to the various episodes of GrandmaParty’s LP with timestamped links to show particular scenes or dialogue. I’ve heard that one Andrew Allanson likes to say that people doctored screenshots of his game to make him look bad. Sorry, but I don’t like being accused of forgery, so I’m going to just preemptively strike that claim down.

Now then. This is going to be a big, long review. Allow me to tell you how we’ll be separating this.

We’re going to have two main sections: a non-spoiler review, and a spoiler review. This is mainly due to the fact that a lot of the game’s issues come from its mess of a story, one that can only be understood fully if you’ve seen it through to the end (and its multiple endings).

But let me be clear here.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

Don’t buy it for a laugh. Don’t buy it to see how bad it is. It’s broken, it’s offensive, and the creators and proven themselves time and time again to be genuinely awful and prejudiced people. Do not give these people money.

The non-spoiler and spoiler sections will be divided into subsections, which may also have subsections of their own.

With that said... let’s begin my review of YIIK: A Postmodern RPG.

Non-Spoiler Review

Plot:

The plot of YIIK (it’s pronounced like Y2K, but I’m going to pronounce it as ‘yick’ personally) follows Alex, a freshly-graduated college student, and the strange events that begin to occur once he returns to his hometown of Frankton. He follows a cat to an old factory/hotel, where he meets Sammy, a young woman who appears to live there. When she is taken by some mysterious creatures in front of Alex, he begins a journey to try and find out what happened to her, and begins to make discoveries that could endanger the very fabric of the universe. In theory, at least. In reality, the story is an absolute clusterfuck of vague metaphysics, and the rules of the world were never clearly established, so everything just becomes an incoherent mess.

Characters:

The characters are bare-bones at best and absolutely insufferable at worst. Alex especially is infamous among critics and detractors of the game for his arrogance, ignorance, underlying racism/sexism we’ll get to that, and lack of properly-written development. I’m not going to go into full detail with Alex just yet--there will be an entirely separate post on him. Something also to keep in mind that general consensus appears to be that Alex is an author-insert for Andrew Allanson. Whether that is or isn’t true is frankly up to the viewer, but there’s no definitive proof of it.

(Oh!!! Quick thing!! This image here keeps circulating around--this person is not Andrew! That is someone named Cr33pyDude on both Twitter and Reddit! He just so happens to look like the main character. Don’t rag on this guy, everyone, he doesn’t have anything to do with this shitshow. <3)

Most of the other characters are bland and underdeveloped, but all have potential to be better (Rory especially, in my personal opinion) if they were in the hands of a better writer. The female characters, though... either they are fawning over Alex, being written as nagging and overbearing, or having so little significance that taking them out entirely would change nothing. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. Other NPCs are forgettable, and enemies are out-of-place monsters that hold no consequence to the story.

Writing:

And the writing--dear god the writing. The writers don’t know the phrase “show, don’t tell.” So frequently would Alex monologue about nothing. Upon coming back from seeing a woman get taken by supernatural creatures, he goes home and reflects--only to go on a tangent about his mother. Immediately after that, he goes on a rant about p/o/r/n/ when sent an email and how girls that he used to go to school with wouldn’t be doing “particularly unladylike” things. And the entire game is like this. Alex will go on pseudo-philosophical rants to himself, and they reveal nothing about his character except that he thinks he’s better than everyone else. He’ll also frequently describe things as though talking to someone--while this does get explained later, it still is completely frustrating when the narrative says “I said this and she said that” instead of just having dialogue or actions between characters. A lot of the dialogue doesn’t exactly... sound like anything a human would say. It’s stilted and unnatural.

Graphics:

The graphics are... bad. Really bad. The style is supposed to be a throwback to old-school, very polygonal games, but environments lack any and all actual texture, making them incredibly flat and uninteresting at best and painful for the eyes at worst. Everything is extremely colorful, but in the sense of neon colors. Everything is so bright and vibrant, and there is barely a place where someone’s eyes can rest--it’s balance in art. Brightness like this needs to be contrasted with darker, more muted shades, or else it just hurts to look at. The viewer’s eyes need places to rest, and the muted shades allow them that reprieve. You don’t get that with YIIK. It’s just a constant bombardment of colors and lights, to the point where if you are sensitive to these kinds of things, you may not want to look even at game footage unless you’re prepared. The character portraits are fine, even if some expressions are odd, but the in-game chibi-esque models are... bad. Really bad. They’re so uncanny and unsettling, and their expressions almost never change. (Also Alex has detailed teeth and it’s just as horrifying as you might think.)

Music/Audio:

The music is. Awful? It’s awful. It’s genuinely really bad. Case in point: one of the boss battle themes. You can hear this poor guy trying so hard to put power behind his voice, but it just sounds unnatural and strained. (Also he clips the mic at some points, and the balancing in general is. Bad.) He’s out-of-tune and occasionally off-beat, and it just makes for a very unpleasant listening experience. And a lot of the music is like this, being just an assault on the ears. The one real exception to this is the track “Into the Mind” made by one Toby Fox, presumably before he made Undertale and was doing freelance work. (He has since deleted his tweet promoting it. Screenshot of the tweet here, courtesy of @GameTheoryRejects.) The audio in general is poor, with irritating sound effects, occasional distorted audio that’s supposed to be scary but is so poorly done that it just hurts to listen to, and voice acting that’s lackluster at best and utterly emotionless at worst.

Gameplay:

Full disclosure: I did not personally play the game. But just looking at it shows how irritating, slow, clunky, and repetitive it is. Each character has a minigame that you play in order to attack, defend, use special attacks, and even run away. These minigames, unlike in something like the Mario & Luigi series, are slow, drawn-out, and completely break up the flow of the fight. And none of the other characters matter then anyway, because turns out if you max out your LUK stat, you can use a particular move that hits all enemies and completely one-shot them from critical damage. (And this move can even glitch out the game in some cases!) The menus are crowded and visually uninteresting, making everything sort of meld together. (Another minor criticism: YIIK has a tendency to put the player in unwinnable fights. You are never aware of what fights are winnable and which fights are designed to kill you. More on this later.)

Speaking of gameplay, the leveling system is... bizarre and tedious. You get EXP, but you don’t gain the ability to level up (yes that is an ability you have to gain) until a couple hours into the game. Leveling up is done in the Mind Dungeon, which you access from save points, and you have to go through doors that increase the stats you assign it. There are four doors per floor, and when you go to the next floor, you and all of your teammates (even if you haven’t met them in-game) level up. Sounds simple, right? Well. It’s slow and repetitive, and NOTHING HAPPENS. You walk in a door. You walk out the door. Rinse and repeat for 70 floors. (280 doors, by the way.) Here’s GrandmaParty doing this for an hour to get an idea of the tedium that this induces. You get to play a minigame when you banish certain enemies, but that serves less as ‘spicing up the gameplay’ and more of ‘adding more steps to this already-boring section.’

So to recap: Flat characters, word-salad plot, painful prose flat-out ugly graphics, backwards gameplay and leveling system.

Tl;dr: Game bad. Don’t buy it.

... This ends the non-spoiler portion of the review. And also the section where we start to talk about some... sensitive topics.

As such, I am going to issue a legitimate trigger warning: the following pieces talk about suicide/depression in detail, as well as physical & domestic abuse situations.

And a small content warning for those who aren’t legitimately triggered by these subjects but still feel uncomfortable reading about the following: homophobia/transphobia; sexism; racism; and the actual use of a real-life woman’s death as a plot device. No I am not fucking kidding about that last one.

So. Let’s get into the real shit about YIIK.

Spoiler Review

Plot:

Let’s start with the plot. There isn’t really a driving force for this plot; initially, it’s finding Semi “Sammy” Pak (well, everyone except Rory says “Park,” even though all of the written lines say “Pak,” so that’s great) after she is taken by mysterious figures. However, as the game progresses, the search becomes less about finding Sammy until she’s just a footnote, and becomes more about... meandering around the world going from one goal to another while fighting things. (The game points this out, but self-awareness doesn’t excuse the fact that it happens. Especially considering the upcoming plot points...)

Then the metaphysics start--people have been trying to decipher this world’s rules for a while with little success, so bear with me, I’m going to try to make as much sense of what we’re given as possible.

There exists a “place between places“ known as the Soul Space. It exists between parallel realities. A person can actually will themself into the Soul Space via... depression? One character, Vella, says that another character, Rory, left his body when he “surrendered himself to his misery” following the death of his younger sister, and explained herself that she fell into a deep depression as well before entering the Soul Space... but it’s not dying? Or it can be? Here Rory asks The Essentia 2000 oh we’ll get to her don’t you worry if dying means you enter the Soul Space. She says that it’s complicated. Her explanation boils down to, “if you care only about material goods and not about your bonds, when you die, you will cease to exist. If you don’t care about materialistic goods when you die, then ehhhhh???”

Also, if your reality is destroyed but you go into the Soul Space, you can become a Soul Survivor (aka the not-Starmen, seen in the cutscene with Vella and Rory linked above) and get stuck in other’s realities as you try to find a physical body. Also, people share a Soul across parallel realities--meaning, parallel versions of yourself would share the same Soul. But they’re not the same people. They have different lives, races, genders, names, but they share the same “Soul.” Only one person with that “Soul” can exist in a reality at a time, hence the form that the Soul Survivors take if they enter a reality where another person with that “Soul” lives. If, however, that person with your “Soul” is no longer in that reality, you can retake physical form and essentially take their place--though not as them, but as you.

And if you go into the Soul Space you apparently understand the secrets of the universe and are beyond normal human follies.

Confused yet? Me too, and I wrote this damn thing. The worldbuilding is so vague, and the players aren’t given set rules that the world plays by. Even when the more surrealist elements of the game start to appear, there should still be rules. Perhaps nonsensical rules, but rules nonetheless. Instead we get talk about Souls and parallel realities, scenes of bright colors and strange imagery that never gets explained or really acknowledged (other than a mention of them being “breaks in reality” like, once), and some plot twists that imply... a lot.

Let’s talk about the characters before we get to the ending.

Characters

Besides Alex, there are five major characters in YIIK:

Michael, who is Alex’s childhood friend and who doesn’t really have much relevance between the beginning and the end of the game. No, really, for the middle portion of the game, he doesn’t really do anything. He hangs around, that’s about it. He gains relevance again during the end of the game where he goes into the Soul Space and becomes Proto-Michael, and that... happens, I guess. I think it contributes to the revelation later on about reality breaking.

Vella is... a strange character. A strange character forced to contradict herself because the plot demands it. She’s shown to be a character who takes no shit, but also bends at the first flimsy apology Alex gives her. She is compassionate to someone like Rory, but spends most of her time calling out Alex. (And yet, somehow, they fall in love???) These notes I took previously on Vella’s first appearance show how what kind of walking contradiction that Vella is as a character:

”Stop creeping on me while i’m at work”

”Okay I’ll go to the house of two strangers who i just accused of perving on me, in the middle of my work shift, to look at these pictures of me on this website i’ve never heard of that can’t go wrong”

”So let me tell you about this traumatizing experience i had with a supernatural creature, saying how emotional and painful it was without any emotion in my voice”

”also i’m not going to tell you how I got to where the supernatural creature was because it’s very personal and I don’t know you and revealing that would make me vulnerable”

”By the way I’m going to give you my number as well as this other number for a training dungeon basically because I like you two”

... yeah,

Rory is probably my favorite character out of this dreck, and he deserves so, so much better than being in this shit. He’s a quiet scene kid who initially gets roped into the plot with the disappearance of his 12-year-old sister--turns out, however, that she killed herself, and Rory struggles with the resulting grief, trauma, and depression that follows. He’s a sweet kid who’s a pacifist, is teaching himself how to make games, knows a lot of random bits of information about many things, and overall deserves so much better than this game. Sorry Allansons you’ve lost your Rory privileges he is My son now

Claudio and Chondra... are just kind of there? Claudio’s a stereotypical weeb. Chondra is the “sassy black girl”/little sister type (which is later revealed to be even stranger, because she’s apparently a graduate student). They don’t have much outside of that, and that’s a shame, since they had a lot of potential to be really good. However, they also seem a bit... tacked on and included for diversity’s sake, as both of them mention racism at some point, and... yeah. The game isn’t very graceful with that topic, as I’ll soon get into.

There is also the character of Panda, who appears out of nowhere in the factory/hotel and is never questioned. It becomes very clear that he’s a figment of Alex’s imagination, and is Alex personifying him as his sort of “conscious“ when he is, in reality, only a stuffed bear. He only talks when Alex is alone. A lot of people really don’t like him, but I will admit that I got mildly emotional when he drifted away in space near the end--but only because I myself make stuffed animals and dolls, so nearly any stuffed animal holds a place in my heart. However, I can very much see why people wouldn’t like him at all.

Anyway.

The Fucking Ending:

So everyone just kind of meanders around for the middle portion of the game until surprise! On New Years’ Eve the world is going to be destroyed. Not just the world--the entire reality. And it’s going to be Alex’s fault, somehow. Also Sammy--who Alex becomes obsessed with--Vella--who is an explicit love interest for Alex--and an android--the previously-mentioned The Essentia 2000, who Alex has a dream about and immediately becomes infatuated--with all turn out to be the same person! Why pick between love interests when they can all just turn out to be the same person?! Also, Sammy was taken by apparent demons because her Soul was in the process of going into the Soul Space, and the creatures the took her were actually the other 2/3rds of her Soul that had already gone into the Soul Space and they were just collecting the last piece. I think.

The game turns into a watered-down version of Persona 3, where you have about a month--from Thanksgiving until New Years’ Eve--to train and get strong enough to stop whatever is going to destroy reality. (The actual Y2K thing is mentioned about halfway through and serves little relevance other than to mark when the end of the world is, since Y2K isn’t actually the cause of the world ending). Then there are some weird plot twists about how reality has been breaking for a long while (this was briefly foreshadowed in Alex going to Michael’s house only to be told that Michael doesn’t live there, and then going to another house where Michael is) and it makes a lot of things really confusing?? And then New Years’ Eve comes where everything is really breaking. Turns out the end of this reality is caused by a meteor with Alex’s face on it a la the moon from Majora’s Mask, no I am not fucking kidding. And it moves around like an inflatable arm-flailing tube man, no I am not fucking kidding.

And then everyone dies. No, really, this is an unwinnable fight. You die. Your entire party dies. Their reality is destroyed.

Alex wanders around the Soul Space for a while until he finds other versions of himself, and various “dark versions” merge together to create the Proto-Comet (’proto’ being the suffix to describe the end product of parallel selves merging together to form one entity). Alex follows the comet around as it destroys reality after reality until...

He finds one that hasn’t been attacked.

And gueeeeeeess what?

You, the player, are a parallel version of Alex. So he enlists you and another party of parallels (using the names you were supposed to input in the beginning) to destroy Proto-Alex. Here, you meet a spectre who is very obviously Sammy Pak, and she says that she’s sorry that Essentia “used her to get to you,” and you hug her.

Eventually you do get to Proto-Alex, as well as a different form of Essentia. Turns out that Essentia lied to you about Sammy and Vella--turns out, Essentia IS you. Well, Essentia is part of Alex, and she tricked Alex into destroying Proto-Alex in order to free herself from the “Soul” that they share. So you can choose to fight Proto-Alex, and if you do, you lose. Again. The boss fight in unwinnable.

And then this... really weird section happens with the character of Roy from Two Brothers, Ackk Studios’ previous game that got pulled from Steam due to bugginess and crashing. Roy basically says that people were “trying to stop his quest” (aka critics) and that Alex shouldn’t give up. (Note that this is a complete non-sequitur to anyone who doesn’t know who Roy is, where he came from, or the story behind the game being pulled.)

After that, you control both the player avatar given and Alex in order to “unplug” Proto-Alex and Essentia, which will make them “whole”? It basically means that all the versions of Alex will merge together into you, the player.

Then the game ends.

At least. Kind of. There’s more than one ending.

But... we’ll get back to that in a bit.

There are many questions the game raises without answers. Why was Sammy bleeding and screaming for the Soul Survivors not to take her because “you promised you wouldn’t move me again!”? Who actually is Vella? Why did no one question Essentia and Vella being in the same space if it was already said that they couldn’t be? Who actually is Sammy? Why is she a ghost and not a Soul Survivor? Why were Proto-Alex and the other “dark Alex”-es trying to destroy realities? Why does Proto-Alex look different than the other Alex-es, who look relatively similar? Who actually was the voice on the phone--it was implied to be Proto-Michael, but he didn’t exist when those phone calls were made? Is Claudio and Chondra’s missing younger brother actually a version of Alex, as this clip implies (esp. w/ the anime shirt)?

Good luck getting answers, because we sure as hell don’t get any.

Also--glad to know that the entire month of training that you spent the latter half of the game doing was all for naught, since the last two major fights you’re in are unwinnable. There are four minibosses to fight, so it isn’t all for nothing, but still. You don’t even get the satisfaction of killing the final boss. You pull a lever and he and Essentia get weirdly electrocuted.

One more thing: the twist of “Essentia lied to you” made a metric fuckton of exposition in her Mind Dungeon utterly pointless, and also feels like a flimsy excuse to absolve Alex of blame for the shitty actions of his parallel selves--more on that later.

So let’s touch on some controversy now that we have gone over the rest of this incoherent mess of a plot.

Elisa Lam

One of the most famous controversies of YIIK is the use of Elisa Lam’s death to propel the story. This is true--the creator admits that he “was very moved” by Lam’s death.

For those not in the know, let me give you a brief summary of the case of Elisa Lam. (Yes this is going to be primarily from Wikipedia but it also has news sources cited for it.) Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who was reported missing at the beginning of February 2013. On February 17th, the workers at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles (where Lam was visiting) discovered her nude body in one of the hotel’s water tanks after guests complained about the taste of the water. The police released footage of Lam, from the day of her disappearance, acting strangely in an elevator, appearing to be hiding from something, pressing elevator buttons, and gesturing and talking to no one. There was controversy surrounding her death, as people wondered how she could have locked herself in the water tank, and how the police could rule her death as accidental. People have suspected that it was due to paranormal activity that she was acting like that, or others said that she could have been having hallucinations (as Lam was diagnosed with bipolar and depression). Her death was quickly spread through internet circles as some paranormal myth.

YIIK incorporates this as a huge part of its starting plot.

Semi “Sammy” Pak is very clearly inspired by Elisa Lam. The two bear striking resemblance to one another, being young Asian women in their early twenties with straight black hair (even parted in the same place)--and this photo from the LA Times shows that Lam wore rounded glasses, like the ones Sammy wears. (Lam is Chinese-Canadian, while Sammy is stated to be Koren-American. Sammy is also 23 when Lam was 21.)

This photoset from JamJamJamJamuel shows the biggest criticism of YIIK: the recreation of the elevator video. It’s obvious by the angle and some of Sammy’s movements that this was, in fact, meant to emulate the elevator video of Lam. The game also shows that people are less concerned about Sammy as a person and more about the mystery of the elevator, like the internet stopped caring about Lam as a person and more of a supernatural myth.

However, there’s more than just this.

There’s a weird... almost fetishistic nature when the in-game protagonist talks about Sammy. Alex describes his meeting with her as “intimate” (they met for like. an hour), calls her “my Sammy” when comparing his story to the story of the news, says that he “misse[s] her. I didn’t know her really, but I felt like I did.” And the very next line is uh. “In the unreal twilight hours, in-between sleep and waking, she slipped into my dreams, got tangled in my thoughts, like the blankets tangled between my legs, her brain melting with mine.”

... Gross, to say the least.

And yes, by the way, Sammy basically becomes a love interest. That’s not completely disrespectful and disgusting to the actual human woman that the devs never met or anything at aaaaaaaall.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

Rory basically goes on to describe a “creepy urban myth” about the water tower near his town. You can imagine what that leads to. It’s a beat-by-beat retelling of the finding of Elisa Lam’s body, except they make it a “nameless girl,” and the writers basically insert their opinions of how it was definitely a murder and the police called it an accident.

More tasteless than a fucking saltine.

OH BUT WAIT THERE’S EVEN MORE.

Near the end of the game, you find the ghost of Sammy Pak. Since she’s not a part of Essentia, it seems that Essentia used her form to get to Alex. She says that she’s sorry and that she’s going to go back ‘home’ now, and you hug her.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

Allow me to tell you about the second ending.

Second Ending:

YIIK has more than one ending--both are considered canon. Ending 1 is the one described above.

Ending 2, however...

Just before leaving the house for the last time, in order to get this second ending, you have to look at the computer in Alex’s house and read this post. It implies that you need to go find Sammy. (It also has some things to say about postmodernism but that’s for another day.)

You go outside... and she’s hiding behind a tree outside your house. No I’m not kidding. (Granted, this is the part of the game where reality is beginning to break apart, so.) She also says “I love you” which, given her “inspiration” by Elisa Lam... yeah. That’s not creepy and tasteless at all. And it also doesn’t make any FUCKING SENSE BECAUSE ALEX KNEW HER FOR AN HOUR AND NEVER SAW HER AGAIN.

Okay, okay, anyway, if you go back into the house and leave through the back entrance, you’ll be taken to the world map. Your destination is the KNN--the Korean News Network, where Sammy had been employed before she vanished. The faceless NPCs only refer to Alex as the name you put in at the beginning of the game, so presumably, everyone from this point forward is now talking to you, the player. (Also everything is pink. Really pink. For no real reason unless it’s “””symbolic””” of something?) You wander around for a bit, doing menial tasks, until you finally get to a pink version of the room you first met Sammy in. She calls you on a phone and tells you that she’s sorry for dragging you into this mess (because Alex/the player went looking for Sammy in the first place), and that she “has a solution” to prevent Essentia from using Alex any more.

You find yourself in front of an elevator, the same elevator that you rode with Sammy when she disappeared. She calls you on the phone again and says that if you go through the elevator doors, there’s no turning back. If you step through, you see the spectre of Sammy again, and she wants to show you where she’s been. You hug her, and she says that she’s so glad that she met you, “even if it was just a game. We’ll be together in your waking reality one day, I’m sure of it. For all I know, we may already be.”

... Roll credits!

No. Seriously. That’s the second ending. You, the player, (presumably) go into the Soul Space with Sammy for eternity, and Sammy basically gives you a love confession (after all she says “I love you” before anyway).

Need I remind you all that she is based off of a REAL-LIFE WOMAN WHO DIED THAT NEITHER OF THE ALLANSONS KNEW?!

Hi, yes, sorry, I’m fucking livid about this. Not just because of the disgusting use of a real-life woman’s death in your game, not just because they fetishized her and turned her into a love interest, not just one of the endings--which is a canon ending--had her telling you she loves you and having you go off with her...

... but because this game has been in development since 2013.

Elisa Lam wasn’t even dead for a fucking year.

Yes, other media has cropped up about Lam’s death, and I think it’s just as tacky and tasteless as this. But these guys had so much time to change it, to have someone say “hey maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and it happened anyway. The sheer lack of respect that the Allansons have for not just Lam but also her still-grieving family is astonishing, and it genuinely makes me sick. My thoughts and condolences to the family of Elisa Lam, having to deal with the press, internet conspirators, and people like this. I hope that they all can still find some sense of peace, even with all of this going on.

Racism:

So this game can be really, really fucking racist sometimes. Let’s start with the more explicit dialogue.

In the very beginning, Sammy calls Alex a ginger, and he says “that’s our word.” He’s equating “ginger” to a derogatory slur.

Here’s the next instance, with Alex referring to Vella--an Asian woman--as “vaguely ethnic” and “exotic.” (He doesn’t face consequences for this, either. Just a slap on the wrist of “don’t talk about race.”)

Later on, Chondra talks about race in an actually not that bad rant about how “I bet if [my brother] had been a beautiful white woman, everyone would have cared that he vanished.” This actually is somewhat insightful, as... well, it’s rather true. POC, when it comes to investigations, are often pushed aside, ignored, or given the least amount of effort. And then Chondra also calls out Alex’s lowkey racist fantasy of “being the white knight swooping in and saving the exotic Korean girl.” However... that’s it. Alex doesn’t get any insight from that, or rethink his reasons on why he wants to save Sammy.

And that’s where we get into Claudio and Chondra and the more implicit racism in the game. Neither of them have much in terms of personality--Claudio likes anime, Chondra is there for quips. Neither of them have any significant arcs, nor do they serve much story purpose beyond being extra party members and talking about race--which feels racist in and of itself, just to have characters of color there to talk about race. (Claudio even goes into an extensive rant about how it’d be racist to think that he knows how to pick locks, but he does know how to pick locks, just not the type that they need open. It comes out of nowhere, is utterly unwarranted, and is completely against the rather chill persona that Claudio has had up until then.) Their characters had a lot of potential to be good! However, much like every other character, they’re very underdeveloped.

(Also, if you have either Claudio or Chondra in your party when you get attacked by cop enemies, they will only shoot at either of them, you know, the only black characters in the main party, and my god I wish I was kidding.)

And then... the love interests.

Sammy is a Korean woman. Vella is an Asian woman of unknown descent. The Essentia 2000 has shown that many of her parallel lives are women of color. All of them are love interests for Alex, the white hero. Yeah. And the game calls it out, but no actual repercussions are given!

Speaking of these ladies...

Sexism

This game is really fucking sexist. Like, genuinely, it’s really sexist.

I think a lot of Vella’s contradictory character comes from this sexism and seeing her as a love interest rather than a character. Though she calls out Alex and is upset with him most of the time, she still accepts his weak apologies very easily--apologies that seem very manipulative and insincere when almost immediately after, Alex tries to convince her to let him into her Mind Dungeon, and if you take that as a metaphor than it gets even worse.

As well, Vella’s backstory includes her being used by a much-older man. What can you do after she tells this traumatic story about her being used by a man? Kiss her. And she doesn’t even get upset or angry with you; she just blushes and says to head back to the others. Because that’s not gross and manipulative or anything. That’s not taking advantage of a vulnerable woman at ALL.

The only female characters of importance that aren’t lusting after Alex are his mom and Chondra--I’ve already mentioned that Chondra has little story importance and personality, and Alex sees his mom as nagging for asking him to get groceries, gets angry at her when she says that she lost her job and asks him to get one to support the house (please note that she paid for his and his sister’s college educations in full, including semesters she didn’t plan for), and gets annoyed with her freaking out when he went missing for five days.

So yeah. The game doesn’t have the highest view of women.

But let’s talk specifically about Essentia. Essentia mentions that Alex has hurt her in parallel realities--but it’s okay, because they’re parallel versions, not actually him! And Essentia reveals that Alex’s parallel was the person who hurt Vella! But it’s okay, because she’ll love him unconditionally no matter how much he hurts her. It’s... really reminiscent of domestic abuse. And it frankly doesn’t matter that Essentia turns out to be a part of Alex and that any of the story of Vella or Sammy isn’t true; the game frames it as perfectly okay that it might have happened. It’s okay that parallel versions of Alex have hurt parallel versions of Essentia, because she loves him. It’s incredibly twisted, and it’s honestly a dangerous message to be sending.

(Also, in a very weird instance of sexism against men, out of all of the parallel selves that Essentia shows Alex, the only man is extremely hostile and violent towards Alex. It’s... kind of weird, honestly.)

Depression/Suicide:

Oh boy. Oh fucking boy.

A little background on myself.

I’m two years into my undergrad for a Psychology/Criminology double major. Classes I have taken include classes about pathologies of the mind and mental health (Psychopathology of Childhood, Developmental Psychology, Personality Psychology, Seminar on Positive Psychology, and of course Basic Psychology to be specific). I have also been clinically diagnosed with anxiety/depression, and both of these are genetically based, meaning that I have lived with them my whole life and will continue to live with them. (I am medicated, for anyone wondering. The meds are the only way I can function at a normal level.) I have felt suicidal before, I have had friends who have been suicidal before, and I have talked others down from self-harm or suicide. I’m not an expert, but I know a thing or two about mental health, depression, and suicide.

This game... this game doesn’t fucking get it at all.

(Just a quick thing: the game makes an OCD joke. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder jokes aren’t funny, folks, since people who have it are affected by it all the time to the point of it often being debilitating. Just wanted to mention it a) to give you an idea on how the game handles mental health and b) because it really doesn’t fit anywhere else.)

Most of this surrounds the character of Rory, as he clearly suffers from depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as feeling grief surrounding his sister’s own suicide. When this is revealed, you know what Vella says to “comfort” him? “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. I understand what you were feeling. 'This depression is unbearable.' 'I can't take it anymore.' The 'depression/pain' part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can overcome it is up to you. You decide if you're going to keep going. Your sister is dead. Nothing can change that. [...] You can't help but feel the pain, but you can get through the suffering. That will go away. Look, I understand that it's easy for me to say. I'm not the one whose sister is dead. But you have to understand that I am telling you the true reality of the situation. You're playing with some otherworldly dangers here!“

Let me break this down to show you why this is not something to say to someone who is traumatized and in a deep depression due to the loss of a loved one.

“[W]hether or not you can overcome it is up to you.” This puts full responsibility of overcoming grief and depression onto the person suffering from it, which is not okay, and not true. Rory lost his 12-year-old sister to suicide! Very recently in the game’s timeline, as well!

Vella is basically telling him “it’s your job to get over your grief and depression.” Putting full responsibility on someone for feeling depression and grief is disgusting. If someone is grieving, what they should do is reach out. If they aren’t, reach out to them. Don’t let them suffer alone. Suffering like this is not a choice. People don’t choose to suffer.

By saying that suffering is “optional,” it subtly blames the person suffering for their own suffering, which makes their chances of getting better plummet. So frequently will people suffering from mental disorders put the blame on themselves for “not trying hard enough” or “being broken” or “not being good enough” because they think that this is all their own fault, and they won’t seek help, because “it’s all my fault.”

Now, when someone is in recovery? Yes, they should definitely try--even if it’s in small bits at a time--to to learn to cope with their disorders in healthy ways. However, when in recovery, the person is assisted by therapists, friends, family, and possibly medications. They aren’t alone. They aren’t alone, and are often guided by those who know how to help them and want to help them. The responsibility isn’t pushed solely onto them. One doesn’t “get over” being depressed. They learn to cope. They learn to accept it as a part of them, rather than all of them, and learn that they are more than their depression. The suffering never truly goes away; it can lessen, though, and a person can learn to live with it.

Some people may defend this by saying that the Allansons lost their mother very recently, and this is how they handle their grief. I lost my father in February of last year. I know this type of grief. And just because that’s how they handle their grief, that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy way of coping, nor the type of coping mechanism you should promote in your game. (I will admit that my own methods of coping weren’t great, and that I’m trying to improve on that now.) There’s a quote that I heard somewhere that goes something like, “grief never really goes away. We just learn to live with it.” That suffering doesn’t ‘go away.’ It ebbs and flows, some days being bearable, and other days not.

But that’s not the end, friends. Oh, far from it.

At one point, you can flat-out tell Rory to “stop being depressed. Being depressed is a choice.” It is noted to be the “wrong” choice, however, Rory barely reacts to it, making it not seem like the wrong decision. I don’t feel like I need to explain why “depression is a choice” is a take colder than the depths of space. Depression’s not a choice, folks. Hell, I would love it if it was, I would love to stop the fatigue, the emptiness, the lethargy, the lack of motivation, the irritability, the messed-up appetite, the fucked-up sleep patterns, the fits of crying. That would be fucking great. But I can’t. BECAUSE IT’S NOT A CHOICE, YOU WALNUT.

Okay, okay, sorry, back on topic. So let’s say you’re mean to Rory. You wanna know what happens?

He kills himself. And according to this user, the story doesn’t change and barely acknowledges Rory after his death. (Obviously there’s not footage out there of the characters mentioning that Rory committed suicide. However, the developers themselves commented on the previously-linked Steam forum post confirming its legitimacy. This is so unbelievably fucked up. Suicide is already a topic that should be handled with care, but having a main character commit suicide and have that death have no impact on the story? I don’t even have words for how deplorable that is. (Doesn’t help that the game basically pushes whether Rory lives or dies onto the player, which is also disgusting, because I don’t think the developers had the insight into suicidal ideation to know that it’s a multitude of factors that lead to suicide, and not just one person being )

(Sidenote: here are the links to the National Suicide Prevention Line and the Crisis Text Line in case anyone needs them. Please take care, friends. <3)

[Addendum: as I was working on this review and listened to the podcast linked a little further down, Andrew Allanson had this to say at 2:08:47: "When you make an unlikable character, people expect Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House. They want flawed heroes, but only to the extent that they’re beautiful and intelligent and slightly Asperger-y."

Thank you for basically saying that having Asperger’s Syndrome is an unlikable trait or makes people unlikable.]

Anti-LGBTQ+

So let’s talk about the prejudice against non-straight and non-cis people!

Andrew Allanson has been rather fucking clear about his prejudice against trans people and non-straight people. In the “The Dick Show” podcast, starting at 1:45:45, Andrew Allanson was interviewed by the commentators. I will be providing timestamps of quotes since I can’t directly link to them.

(Sidenote: I was listening to this podcast and waiting for Andrew’s pa rt to start, and one of the commentators was talking about Women’s History Month, and saying “If a woman doesn’t have a man, she’s going to expect the government to be her man. That’s just the way they’re wired.” [1:44:24 - 1:44:31]. Yeah. That tells you the type of people who run this podcast and the type of people that Andrew decides to associate himself with.)

[1:52:15 - 1:52:] “... we made the mistake of asking the player, ‘what name did your parents give you?’ And it turns out that that is a very offensive question. Because some people, um, are trans, and don’t use the name their parents gave them. So immediately the game is targeted as being transphobic. [...] So we wanted to basically create a character off of the player in the game, the first thing we ask you ‘are you a boy or a girl,’ ‘what’s your name’, and people were so bent out of shape over this. Look, I’m sympathetic to trans people, I understand why it upset them. But the problem was when we apologized, that wasn’t good enough. People then took it and said ‘what else can we find in this game to prove that it’s offensive?’”

So here’s the thing: that... is lowkey transphobic? Because it’s like you said, these people don’t use the names that their parents gave them. You’re asking them, intentionally or not, to deadname themselves. There’s a reason they call it a “deadname.”

Later on they ask, “which of these do you identify with?” and show a male figure and a female figure. Which frankly, is alright.

And then they changed it in an update to “what do you look like?” which feels like a very direct jab at trans people, especially the ones who were upset by the initial question relating to names.

Oh, and then there’s this part (I only know DIck and Andrew’s voices, I’m afraid I don’t know the third, sorry m8).

[1:54:35 - 1:55:10]

Andrew: So you play as this guy, Alex, you just come home from [college, audio cut out here], you’re an entitled asshole--

Dick: You get points for stomping queers, as I understand it, that’s the game, right? You go around and--

Andrew: The goal is to establish the white ethnostate.

[unintelligible as others laugh and talk over each other]

Dick: --you have a little ‘gaydar’ in the corner and it points you to the nearest homosexual, and then you go, y‘know, “Hammer [X]”

Andrew: It’s - it’s - yeah, it’s a hack-and-slash.

Dick: If you buy the game they send you a special overlay you can put on your controller that turns all the buttons into ‘K.’ So it’s not ‘A’--

Andrew: Yes!

Dick: --Just ‘K,’ ‘K,’ and ‘K.’

Andrew: Just ‘K,’ ‘K’--yeah, exactly, exactly.

So we not only have the mockery of gay folk, but also mention of murdering them (whether in a joking fashion or not, this still isn’t fucking funny and not something to joke about, especially if you are not LGBTQ+ yourself. And to my knowledge, none of these men are).

And that’s just from the creator himself, as well as the first few minutes of the game.

Let’s talk bout The Scene.

What is The Scene? Well, it’s the scene where Alex and Rory talk, where you can tell Rory that “depression is a choice.” Should you be kind and supportive to him, you know what you can do? “Try to kiss [him.]” And there’s art for it. There is literally no reason for this to be here other than “haha it’s a guy trying to kiss another guy, gay people are funny!” It seems to be an attempt at humor, but it fails... rather miserably.

The Legendary Third Ending

I call it “legendary” because no one knows if it actually exists or not, because people can’t find it, regardless of the hints given by the developers.

Andrew, while doing “The Dick Show” interview, mentions that he put DIck Masterson (the host of the show) into the game in the third update [1:45:56] , and that you have to give Dick a pair of aviator glasses, where he will give you a red pill [1:47:15 - 1:47:33]. Dick is also found in Chapter 4 of the game [1:47:40].

The devs also tease it on Twitter, saying that it’s “sad and challenging to complete”, and they give vague and unclear hints that don’t seem to help even the fans of the game--after all, no one has found it, apparently. Even the YIIK Discord (though this is just hearsay) has been losing steam in trying to find this ending.

I think it’s a testament to the quality of the game when one of your major three endings is nigh-impossible to find. (For the record, I feel the same way about how PT went about its ending, and how arbitrary it felt to do these very specific things that the game barely tells you about.)

Miscellaneous Other Things That Don’t Fit In The Above

There are a couple other things that irk me about this game, so time for a rapid-fire round!

You can kiss Rory, who’s implied to be a senior in high school (due to this talk of college). So he’s, at best, 18. Alex had 5 and a half years of college (the game says “five and a quarter” but unless I’m mistaken colleges work in semesters not quarters,), so he’s probably 23-24. Yeah. (There’s also the issue of consent--when you kiss Vella she just blushes and acts more docile, while with Rory, he rather vehemently rejects it. So women just accept an unwanted kiss? Hm.)

You fight a flasher as a miniboss. Because sexual harassment is hilarious. (And if neither Michael nor Rory are 18 yet, then there’s the possibility of minors being involved. YEAH.)

The title card is intentionally glitchy af and it hurts the eyes, honestly.

If you go through New Game+ and go to the 70th floor of the Mind Dungeon, Alex will basically talk to himself about some things:

It mentions that “crows are ugly.” You fool. You absolute buffoon. Crows? Excellent. Very intelligent birbs.

This is basically “hey we suck, but so does everyone around us, it’s fine”

This game unironically uses Wonderwall lyrics in an emotional scene, like I know it was popular and not a meme in the 90s but my guy, you gotta think about the connotations with the audience you’re releasing this for,

“I sighed as the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion.” Thank you for using three words to describe the elevator shaking,

The One Thing That I Liked

Surprisingly, there is something I liked about this game. Not solely in concept, not in its potential, but in its actual execution.

It starts on the day of New Years’ Eve. It’s dark outside and inside. Alex suddenly starts getting many random calls, some from people he knows, others he doesn’t. Some voices are distorted, some aren’t. Some are talking to him, some aren’t. And they’re quick little calls before they hang up, and Alex barely says a word. He can’t leave the house, and keeps getting phone calls that get more and more distorted as time goes on.

That? I think that actually really works.

It’s a more subtle way of showing reality breaking: getting calls from people, both friends and strangers, that are slowly getting more and more broken, and you can’t do anything. You’re trapped in your house, you can’t see outside, you don’t know what’s going on. You can’t help your friends, even when Michael screams for your help. The slowly deteriorating stability of the calls are your only indication of what’s going on outside.

And for me, that works. It was the one section of the game that I felt legitimately invested in. So, kudos to the devs for that one.

Conclusion

YIIK isn’t just bad. It’s offensive. It’s ignorant, it handles serious topics incredibly clumsily, and the worst of it is that Andrew Allanson considers it to be ‘art.’ (If you’re wondering why I didn’t talk about the “video games aren’t art” quote, don’t worry. That’s going to be its own essay.)

YIIK fails on every level, from technical to storytelling. Please, I beg of you, don’t give this game money. Just go watch the LP.

You may have noticed that I didn’t talk much about the “postmodern” aspect of the game, nor much about Alex as a protagonist.

Both of those are going to be their own separate essays.

This wild ride still ain’t over, folks. Hang on.

#yiik a postmodern rpg #yiik: a postmodern rpg #yiik #andrew allanson #yeehaw #holy shit this one is SO LONG but im so proud of it

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vapormaison · 4 years

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2019 Best Vinyl Pressing 1/4: 魂のための歌 by 憂鬱

Preface: Throughout the month of December, Vapor Maison will be nominating “BEST OF” albums of 2019. Slots will remain open for this month’s releases. Categories include Best Vaporwave Release, Best Future Funk Release, Best Re-Release (V & FF), and Best City Pop Re-Release, among others. This is one nominee for best Vinyl Press.

Author’s Note: For the writer’s ease of writing and readers ease of reading, I’ll be using the transliteration of 憂鬱:Yūutsu, and the translation of “Soul’s Song” in lieu of “魂のための歌”. I’ll maintain the Japanese track listings for easy reference. Apologies to Purity, a maiden as tedious as she is cruel.

Are the merits of a vaporwave album on vinyl even worth reviewing?

Obviously, you’re reading a vaporwave vinyl review — creating a sort of circuit — so in the strictest sense of the word, yes, — but naturally, a follow up question must be asked by any smart music consumer. If so much of vaporwave, and by extension future funk, is centered around digital manipulation of either computer programs (vocaloid, electronic loops, midis, drum kits, etc), and pre-existing digital rips of j-pop (by definition most of future funk) — what’s the point of a vinyl press? Pressing mp3s onto vinyl is pointless — as no amount of “warmth” from a vinyl-based Hi-Fi system will ever make up for a low-quality source. What’s more, the indie releases of these tracks can make it hard to justify an expensive vinyl mastering session. In my most unfortunate purchases, I’ve had MP3s outperform certain 45s.

But sometimes, you can get just the right format, just the right mix and master, and it just makes your hifi set sing. You, as a Vaporwave/Future Funk/Chillwave/etc. enthusiast, can certainly approach the sonic repro quality of lore — that Platonic form of an “audiophile’s album”. How can I prove this? Look no further than Soul’s Song by Yuutsu. Point blank, full stop. This is the one of the rare vapor records for a true audiophile. In this next section, I’ll be giving my thoughts on the album’s tracklist. In Part 2, you can join me for a trip into Hi-Fi World for a discussion of Vapor-Vinyl’s legitimacy.

PART 1: THE MUSIC

小さい鳥 opens the album with a moody, synthetic mandolin-like twang and elegiac Vocaloid vacillations extended in a sort of melancholic embrace that brings you — willing or otherwise, into the arms of this project. The arrangement of the loops are of particular note here, with the layering of additional sonic flutters that culminate in an anti-climactic crescendo that leaves you as sad and disappointed as the album no doubt wants you to feel.

それは愛を返さありません ends up being the most “atmospheric” of all the tracks, a listening experience I’d describe as a fitting background track for a KEY visual novel — eerie, haunting monosyllabic Vocaloid chants of comprising the long, long hooks. While running at 5:24, it definitely feels longer — perhaps created by a symphonic discord between vocals and music at intermittent portions of the piece. I’d characterize this piece as the most experimental of the album, deftly playing with my expectations more than any of the others.

闇 is incredible — and without a doubt the highlight of the tape. Because it departs from the simple string looping and gives us something more — something resembling a tragic and contemplative harmony, however discordant, and one that builds into lyrically what I consider to be a genuine contemplation of spirituality and the other world — a natural place, topically, for an album titled “Soul’s Song”. A sort of hollow computerized synth also left me considering — was this song about the soul of the Vocaloid program itself?

The digitized horns, eerie synths, and what I could best classify as the crackling of amplifiers introduce the thirty-eight second interlude of 変更 and serve as the riser to the climactic shift of the EP beginning in おやすみ. This four-minute piece deftly blends electric and analog strings and brings the vocaloid program to its emotional and sonic heights, really making the high-end pop in a for a surprisingly refreshing experience.

We conclude the album with a hybrid piece ネコチャン which captures the electric energy of おやすみ, the distorted samples of 変更 and adds a fleeting feeling of warmth with that familiar sound of tennis shoes on a waxed gym floor, evoking nostalgia that never was of doldrum days in a Japanese high school. The album fades out, with our familiar vocaloid’s calling out of Neko-chan, melting away like memories.

PART 2: THE VINYL LISTENING EXPERIENCE

When re-starting this review blog in earnest over the past month or so, I made a point to get my best gear serviced. I couldn’t claim to be fulfilling my broadened duties without having a fully-serviced, properly functioning kit. One of the more essential and dreaded refurbishments was getting my KEFs over to the local stereo shop wizard for a re-foam. I’d be without my workhorses for a week: an audiophile Alexander without his binaural Bucephalus. In the meanwhile, my backup speakers — a pair of Cambridge Audio SX-50 bookshelf speakers that I use as computer monitors, stepped up to the plate as pinch hitter.

I provide this anecdote for a reason: the very afternoon I dropped my KEF’s off at the shop is also the afternoon I received my copy of Soul’s Song by Yūutsu.

Admittedly, I can’t say I was particularly hyped for this release, or very eager tor receive it in the post. The previous evening I had been sleeplessly experimenting on a DJ set of city pop for the journal’s launch party at my alma mater. I was decidedly on an upbeat, caffeine-fueled kick of positive thoughts and big dick energy. Success had triggered the dopamine receptors, and the idea of sitting down for a serious listening session of an album that many BandCamp users had dubbed as “peak sadwave” seemed like an unnecessary vibe check.

But— being a self-appointed music blogger— a craft which I imagine has real pretensions about it somewhere, I buckled —a serious listening session was attempted.

And I was utterly blown away.

***

A final word on gear. The Cambridge SX-50s — and Cambridge Audio in general— do have a bit of a cult-following among guitar enthusiasts in various audiophile spheres. I also am familiar with a listening bar in Nagoya (where I studied abroad for a semester) that uses top-shelf Cambridge Hi-Fi gear solely for Vocaloid listening sessions!

Suffice to say, I was not actively thinking about either of those two facts when I first let the needle drop, but when the twangy synthetic guitar loop and the eerie vocalic chants of それは愛を返さありません began, a sudden wave of melancholy set in and brought my mind back to a lonely winter spent in that basement bar after breaking up with my girlfriend. And to the Cambridges. At that time, I became intimately familiar with how an upbeat, poppy — sometimes even jazzy track— accompanied with Vocaloid vocals could really make those speakers sing. And it was happening right now, as I was cuddled by the warmth pouring from those drivers in spite of the cold sadness of the arrangement. That dichotomy was on full display as “Ya-aa-mi” invocations of 闇 reached its penultimate hook.

In may respects, these Cambridges were and still are petty. I had previous experience with them butchering a poor quality vinyl of the Luxury Elite/Saint Pepsi Late Night Delight EP two years ago. My KEF’s usually take it upon themselves to run cover for a bad release. Cambridge-chan couldn’t be bothered. On a bad day, with a bad play, they’ll seem like the most clinical JBL studio monitor — but here they were, absolutely singing. This album was making them slap — metaphorically. And that’s when I realized what a magical press this was.

Five days later, the KEFs were securely hooked up to my amp again. The first vinyl to be put through the paces was, of course, Soul’s Song. Again I was impressed. The exquisite layering of this album can’t be expressed enough — and while the SX-50s brought out the synthetic string and vocals to the fore, my 104s filled in the rest of the sonic picture. I felt as if I was being re-acquainted with a piece of sculpture upon viewing it from a different angle, or witnessing a church’s mosaic in person after seeing a small reproduction in a well-printed textbook. This is a pressing far and above the previous standards I’ve set for vaporwave.

***

As any Vapor Vinyl review would be incomplete without a brief take on the overallＡｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ of the release, so I’ll just start by saying that I really enjoy the three-tone front end. The lavender, beige and white undeniably make this a very “Aloe” release, who tend to make things easy on my very nearsighted eyes by never making the cover too busy. This is perhaps with the notable exception of VR 97’s recent cassette release — not a trend, I hope!

I do have to admit I’m getting a bit tired of pink vinyls, though — and Soul’s Song unfortunately now joins a very crowded pack. I suppose if you were being pedantic, you could compare the “pinkness” of the album vis a vis the 2nd pressing of Macros 82-99’s Sailorwave (fuller, more saturated), or even the “bubblegum” first pressing of Vektroid’s Floral Shoppe (just naming two iconic releases) — but I think this release would have been fine (and moved units) as, say, a picture disc — making use of the powerful, emotive cover art to its fullest extent. In short, it takes something unique and then commodifies it to the point of exhaustion. While I suppose this criticism could be leveled at all of the genres I cover— I think generally speaking Vaporwave and Future Funk (to a lesser extent) treads this line of “capitalist critique” and “modified consumption” rather adeptly.

The main thrust in the previous paragraph, I should qualify, is not a specific criticism of Aloe City Records, however — I think they’ve done a fine job generally. If I could make a list of three releases that justify a special edition vinyl — this is certainly one.

For audiophile vaporwave/chill-wave fans, I’d encourage you to snap it up while you can. You can even buy it ethically — it’s still in stock on Aloe City’s band-camp page. It’s in my mind — without doubt — one of the best presses of the year.

#vaporwave #bestof2019

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prodiderat · 5 years

Note

“stay in bed and let me look after you.”

hurt sentence starters

((Putting this under a read more due to potentially triggering content involving mentions of accidental self harm, mental illness, and trauma.))

This was why he couldn’t ever, in a million years, go against Ciel Phantomhive. This right here. A flicker of kindness in an abyssal darkness. He was his only coworker, the only other ‘Earl of Evil’ so to speak. At least, to a point where they would commit murders for the Queen if asked well enough. Ciel was the watchdog, the detective... He was the spider, the assassin. His expertise was murder and it got him into quite a bit of trouble. Killing someone and then framing someone else for the Queen’s sake was always a difficult and dangerous job... On occasions he’d do his own detective work, and on occasions Astre would commit a murder, but for the most part they had their roles... Sometimes they worked together, sometimes they worked autonomously, they were cogs in a machine constantly playing off of each other but hardly truly interacting. It hurt his heart, just a little bit, for a number of reasons. There was a part of him that obsessed over the earl, and there was a part of him that craved his attention and recognition. To say that the other was a role model would be a grossly large understatement-- a permanent fixation was much more akin to what fit. At the same time however, he wanted to turn down this kindness so graciously given to him... He felt he didn’t deserve it, not with how these wounds came to be.

His emotions were easy enough to predict while all the while being the most chaotic things on the face of this earth. for days on end, weeks, maybe even months he would be happy-go-lucky. in such an overwhelmingly good mood that he seemed to be on cloud nine. he would smile, grin, play, hell he’d even treat servants like Hannah with much more kindness and grace. other than a few small outbursts, he was, for the most part, utterly impossible to bring down. However his emotions were like a rubber band being pulled taught, eventually, to avoid breaking altogether, the band will have to snap back to form; and that’s what exactly would happen. He would be happy and then suddenly snap into a heavy aggression. He would enact violence and then immediately after fall into a deep depression. These aggressive spells could last minutes, or the entire day. He’d rip apart wallpaper, tear down curtains, beat his servants, even Claude wasn’t safe from his wrath on some days. by The end of it the room, or even the manor in it’s entirety, would be in shambles. Everything would be falling apart. But that wasn’t the most terrifying part… His aggression is terrifying in one way, but the deep depression he’d fall into after that was what really frightened most.

For almost twice the time(usually) that he’d been happy, he’d fall into this pit. He wouldn’t have the energy to get out of bed save for bathroom trips, wouldn’t have the energy to change his clothes, and wouldn’t have the energy to eat. It wasn’t uncommon for Claude to have to force him into a new night gown, or for servants to have to team up to lift him up while they changed his bedding. It also wasn’t entirely uncommon for Claude to have to force food into his mouth. He’d struggle against it, but as soon as whatever meal he was trying to get Alois to eat touched the earl’s tongue, he’d take it with little complaint. At one point the child had even bitten into the butler’s arm in one attempt to refuse a meal, only for it to be his own downfall as Claude wouldn’t allow Alois to close his mouth until a forkful of stake was on his tongue. Then that jaw would be forced into a closed position and that’d be the end of it. if Claude was a human there would definitely be a scar on that arm from the earl’s sharp canines. But he wasn’t, so no evidence of the violent action was left behind. In these deep depressions his world view would become malformed, so distorted in fact that he would often suffer bouts of what seemed to be psychosis or even vivid hallucinations. He would have flashbacks and terrible nightmares which only added to the terrible illusion of reality.

It wasn’t uncommon for him to request Claude stay by his side during terrible nights… This in of itself wouldn’t be too bad if not for how restless he’d be in the night and how at some points he’d still wake up screaming… It is in the delirium that he faced from his fragmented mind that servants would be ordered to keep a close eye on the earl, keep sharp objects and poisons away from him at all time, monitor all the things he has in his rooms– no belts, no rope, no buckles, no glass, nothing that he could inflict any damage upon himself. Alois didn’t want to commit suicide or hurt himself, not truly. In fact most of the time he didn’t even realize he was doing it until someone pulled him out of his near sleepwalking type of state. Often times, when this would happen, he would panic and attack whoever stirred him– as such it was imperative to grab him in a way that would neutralize any danger he posed. If he had a knife and was cutting up his legs, grab his arm and disarm him before he has a chance to truly struggle, then subdue him. That was the orders given, that was the instruction received. There was always the idea put forth by some that perhaps he needed mental care, but the prospect of an asylum was so outright awful that instead of treatment the only option was to hide his mental deterioration behind closed doors. He did well enough in public, it was just in private where things fell apart.

Sending the ‘young master’ to an asylum just to be tortured for ‘treatment’ was never a viable option and was something nobody would allow.

When Claude found him, the his white nightgown was stained a deep red. Blood caked his legs to the point where it was near impossible to tell wound from coated skin. He had to be washed before any bandaging could be done and by the end of it all, the bathwater was red and his wounds were being staunched by restrictive bandages. Bed rest was what was forced upon him. No leaving his bed until he recovered unless someone was there with him. There were so many scars upon his legs now, hidden behind his boots and socks. Perhaps a pair of tights. He wouldn’t allow for a soul to see them. They were his sin, his delusion, and nobody could see into his fragmented mind. And yet... there was one person who he knew could see through the veil he hid behind. Someone who had yet to step beyond it but could see ever so clearly through it to the other side. The only person that could possibly enact that switch to flip early in his brain to return him to either a positive or negative state of mind... Depending on how it all played out. The Earl of Phantomhive was easily a mental catalyst...

“Why would you want to do something like that?” He asked him, blue eyes somewhat downcast, he couldn’t find the will to look him straight in the eyes. There was a heavy feeling of shame fluttering in his mind. Why is it he felt no shame for the bad things he did on purpose, and yet felt so much shame for the things he couldn’t control? Why did he pull his hair out when he thought about how he fell on his ass while dancing with someone, but not when he thought about how he gouged out Hannah’s eyes. “Look after me, I mean... It cannot be pleasant I imagine, to care after your... wounded coworker.“ He was going to say ‘mad’, but held his tongue. He didn’t know the extent for which the other knew. While he trusted Astre, he also did fear that he’d tell the Queen, not truly knowing how awful Asylum life was. “You don’t have to stay here, Ciel...” And yet he wanted him to... He wanted nothing more than the company of someone other than his servants. Someone that understood him much better... Even if just a little bit. Just one more soul.

Just one more wounded soul.

@falseearl -- ((feel free to turn this into a thread if you’d like))

#falseearl #verse:butterfly #tw:self harm #tw:blood #tw:gore #tw:mental illness #tw:trauma #tw #blood #gore #mental illness #self harm #trauma

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plutonic-astrology · 7 years

Text

Uranus & Past Life Trauma

In Evolutionary Astrology, Uranus is a trauma signature. This is because Uranus is considered the higher octave of Mercury, which pertains to the lower mind or short term memory. Uranus then represents the higher mind, or long term memory, reaching so far back that it’s actually able to give us an idea of difficulties we may have faced in the past. We may not remember, but Uranus does and typically responds well to meditation and regression. And because karma is considered to be a series of patterns, these traumatic themes are likely to play out in our lives at one point or another. There could be subconscious fears or issues surrounding the archetypal themes Uranus embodies in our chart, and this can go so far as to create triggers, much like a form of PTSD. When looking at Uranus in a chart, it’s important to consider the sign, house and aspects it’s making to other planets, namely the conjunction, square or opposition. (Sources: Uranus: Freedom From The Known by Jeffrey Wolf Green and Healing The Soul by Mark Jones.)

Uranus in Aries, the 1st house or in aspect to Mars: Here there is trauma on an instinctual, bodily level and is not necessarily rational. This can indicate some type of physical struggle, violence, sexual violence or overexertion. There’s a strong need for freedom and a sense that the will has been thwarted in some way. There could be subconscious memories of having died young, which can cause the individual to push themselves physically or sexually, trying to overcome a feeling of being ineffectual or having been cut down in their prime.

Uranus in Taurus, the 2nd house or in aspect to Venus: Trauma here can correspond to a narrowing of the self, as if the person shuts themselves off from other possibilities before those possibilities have even occurred. This is because they've experienced a loss of security and have been met with famine, lack of resources, sexual assault, perpetual anxiety, or mass catastrophe. They subconsciously fear the loss of self that comes from being reduced to survival mode. As a self-fulfilling prophecy, the life experience is reduced as they build a wall around themselves out of fear and seek to fulfill their own needs in a very narrow way that leaves no room for possibility or anything “new.” There could be a subconscious aversion to intimacy (an indicator of sexual assault) and they may struggle to open up to others as a result.

Uranus in Gemini, the 3rd house or in aspect to Mercury: Trauma occurs when others contradict or disagree with their viewpoint. There may be memories of alienation, imprisonment or having been tortured for speaking their mind, seeing a political or cultural conflict differently, or being the messenger of news no one wanted to hear. Trauma can also occur through siblings in the form of incest, bullying or opposing viewpoints. They may feel trapped in a narrative or a pattern of thinking, often feeling intensely victimized by things others have said or done to them. Over time this narrative can become deeply toxic and re-traumatizing to the point where even talking about the trauma can feel frustrating because they’ve already exhausted themselves analyzing it.

Uranus in Cancer, the 4th house or in aspect to the Moon: Traumatic fragmentation and dissociation within the inner child. This indicates very difficult family experiences and a core wounding to the emotional body. In this instance the family itself will mirror past life experiences, playing out a narrative drama the individual has gone through themselves in order to help the child learn and grow. Uranus here can indicate intense losses that have shattered the emotional body and sense of safety in the form of intense abandonment from loved ones. There could have been violent separations through war or betrayal, having been taken away from the family or given up for adoption. Either way there has been a theme of separation, lack of nurture, or difficulty with the mother or caregivers in past lives and as a result this person will have unmet childhood needs.

Uranus in Leo, the 5th house or in aspect to the Sun: Trauma occurs when the person realizes they are unable to create from a highly inspirational place at all times and burn themselves out. There can be a sense that their creativity has been hurt or damaged in some way or that they’re dissociated from it. They may have thrown themselves into one too many situations that didn’t work out, and feel crushed, futile or depressed as a result. There could be memories of aristocracy or a certain amount of artistic achievement that brought them money, power or prestige. There may be memories involving the loss of such power and a sense of having fallen from grace. Their creativity may have been met with hostility by others capable of inflicting great damage on the individual and as a result they can feel intensely traumatized if their creative contribution to life is not acknowledged, or worse, is negatively received. There could also be memories that involve the loss of a child or difficulty with children, which could make them particularly averse to the idea of being a parent.

Uranus in Virgo, the 6th house or in aspect to Mercury: The individual has desired to understand themselves and the nature of other people in a humble way. Unfortunately this has manifested as intense critical feedback from others and that feedback being deeply internalized. The mind runs like tape loops of negative thoughts and there’s a considerable amount of effort applied in finding evidence of why they’re shameful, bad, or why other people don’t like them. Without learning self-acceptance they will continuously struggle to quiet their anxiety and go out of their way to prove their own guilt.

Uranus in Libra, the 7th house or in aspect to Venus: Traumatic separation or termination of relationships that were experienced as shattering due to codependency. Because they believed they needed these individuals, once they died or left there was a feeling of having been cut off from what was considered joy in life. There has been excessive codependency in the past, an over-definition of the self through others. More weight has been given to how others see them versus how they see themselves. Trauma through having been disappointed and let down by others or a feeling that their true potential was never acknowledged by them.

Uranus in Scorpio, the 8th house or in aspect to Pluto: Trauma through relationships experienced as conflict. There is a sense of having been used or abused by others. Because of an intense desire to be close to other people, they may have found themselves soulfully engaged with another person only to feel a tremendous sense of betrayal once that person suddenly turned away from them or began acting selfishly. They could have been betrayed by a friend, lover, family member, or anyone they believed to be a trusted confidant. The overall experience has been one of psychological power dynamics prevailing over love and friendship. There could possibly be memories of destruction, the torturing and killing of someone close to the individual or perhaps they were the victim themselves and were utterly destroyed by someone they once trusted.

Uranus in Sagittarius, the 9th house or in aspect to Jupiter: The individual’s beliefs, vision of reality, or view of the world religiously or culturally has been the source of trauma. They may have been fundamentalists or died in a religious war. There’s a tremendous fire and purpose and a tendency for the person to want to do it all, but at some point they may have become messianic or over-driven. Ultimately it’s the way the individual has seen themselves fitting into all of life that has caused trauma.

Uranus in Capricorn, the 10th house or in aspect to Saturn: The way the individual is perceived by society, religion, their parents, or any situation in which authority applies itself judgmentally has been a source of trauma. There may be memories of being born into very cold family situations in which duty, devotion to order and social standing took precedence over love and understanding. There may also be memories of intense persecution or imprisonment from society or political regimes for not fitting in or having acted in a rebellious way. A sense of having to “follow the rules” could invoke anxiety due to memories of having been punished for breaking them. There’s a certain futility or despair in regard to following the rules since in certain families or totalitarian regimes, these rules could have changed frequently. Because of this, these people crack under societal pressure. Whether it’s filling out medical forms or applying for a job, these day to day societal customs evoke memories of such regimes or dysfunctional families in which power was used abusively. In this life or other lives there is a theme of having been at the mercy of insecure, absent, tyrannical or bullying fathers, bosses, and political figures. People who wielded their power and authority without empathy and mistreated others as a result.

Uranus in Aquarius or the 11th house: Here there is tremendous dissociation, as if the self has become a fragmentary identity. Trauma occurs when the individual has reached some kind of recognition that the way they’re living is not true to their own nature or who they really are. When they have recognized that there are parts of them that aren’t real or are distortions, fictions made up about the self in order to protect against the vulnerabilities of life.

Uranus in Pisces, the 12th house or in aspect to Neptune: Trauma often accompanies a sense of being overwhelmed by larger forces. This can cause distressing inner states of futility, meaninglessness, and feeling victimized or attacked by life. It can also correspond to certain psychological states of imprisonment or enslavement, or even chosen imprisonment.

#astrology #uranus #past lives #past life trauma #mine

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adventure-hearts · 7 years

Text

tri. Chapter 5 - Recap, Analysis, Review [part one]

This is me trying to make sense of of a dense, multilayered chapter that for once brough us more answers than questions. My notes got very long and I ended up taking dozens of screen-caps, so I decided to split this post into four segments (one for each part of the movie). You can expect the others soon, over the next few days.

I hope you survive this!

Chapter 5 (Kyousei - Coexistence or Symbiosis, depending on who you ask) starts where we were left off last time: Mystery Man torturing Meiko in order to make Meicoomon snap, and telling her she should not have been born.

At once, we get another flashback from Meiko's childhood - this time, with a very specific date: Autumn 1999 -- that is, shortly after the events of Digimon Adventure. This has ties with a previous flashback (set in the summer) of Meiko finding Meicoomon in the woods. While the exact time when Meicoomon met Meiko in the human world is still unclear, everything in this chapter points to this meeting happening shortly after August 1-3, that is, after the defeat of Apocalymon.

This flashback shows us two incidents of Meicoomon's past. In the first one, she attacks a group of birds, resulting in loose feathers and a pool of blood, and she soils Meiko's shirt with it. Symbolism aside, it’s unclear what caused the blood: was she hunting or defending herself? Did she “snap” because she was scared, after finding herself away from Meiko? Anyway, this was the first time Meicoomon shown she was capable of being violent.

The second incident is much more serious.

Meiko's father is taking Meicoomon to the lab to be examined by some Tokyo people. This happens in 1999, when human authorities were trying to make sense of what had happened with the Digimon that summer. Significantly, this seems to suggest that Meiko's father isn't exactly keeping Meicoomon's existence a secret from the authorities; nor does it seem that he’s using his daughter’s Digimon to conduct scientific experiences or anything suspicious.

However, Meicoomon snaps and destroys the lab, injuring Meiko’s father in the process.

We also learn that Himekawa was one of the people who came from Tokyo to see Meicoomon, and her connection to this digimon starts here. This gives us some clues about Maki's age; if in 1999 she was already done with her studies and working for the Agency, so she was at least in her early 20s then. You can do the math yourself, but basically Maki is at least 27 in tri., perhaps older.

Meiko witnesses the incident, in shock. But as soon as shes there, Meicoomon goes back to normal; she’s confused at first, but quickly becomes happy to see Meiko, as if nothing had happened. Maki watches everything with interest. Is this the moment when she realises Meicoomon could play a role in her plans for the Reboot?

Back in the present time, Mystery Man’s plan worked. Meicoomon has gone berserk and is wreaking havoc. The flashback serves to contextualise and explain what’s happening: It seems that what triggers Meicoomon’s transformation is being scared and/or being separated from Meiko -- in other words, Meiko's presence keeps Meicoomon calm and controlled... until now. All this will be explained later in the movie.

Anyway, it’s clear that the distortions Meicoomon is causing are making Mystery Man extremely happy. Digimon start invading the real world, a repetition of both Vamdemon’s invasion and Demon’s invasion.

Meiko calls the transtorned Meicoomon and there’s a tense moment when it seems that she can get Meicoomon to break away from her trance, just like before. Instead, it utterly fails: Meicoomon is confused, screams and agony and finally attacks Meiko.

Meiko is paralysed and apparently has given up, as she realises that she can no longer reach Meicoomon when she’s in her evil form. As she’s about to get murdered by her own partner, Meiko remembers happy moments they spent together… but fortunately Taichi plays the gallant hero and saves her at the last moment.

There’s another tense exchange of looks, but it appears that Meicoomon changes her mind about killing her and runs off.

The conclusion from this scene is simple: Meicoomon has snapped so deeply that Meiko can no longer reach her and bring her back to normal; yet, it seems that there’s still something inside her that keeps her from killing Meiko.

Does she? This is the first indication that Meiko’s will to live is perhaps being challenged in Kyousei.

Takeru recalls Mystery Man’s words about Meicoomon is “the key to destroying” the world - which seems fitting as they’re seeing the Digital World go crazy under her powers. Meanwhile, Meiko is closer to accepting the truth that Meicoomon may be beyond saving at this point.

Speaking of trauma, we find out what’s going on with Maki. After her reunion with Bakumon went wrong, she wanders around with a gun as she watches the destruction and fantasises that this time she will be chosen.

What does this mean? Now that the Reboot (the plan she spent years working on) has failed, has Maki lost her sanity? Or is she revealing her new plan, a fantasy that a new crisis will give her and Bakumon a second chance to be “chosen”?

Either way, it doesn’t seem that Maki is acting out of evil intentions or a desire to cause destruction. Raving, she wanders after her partner....

Back in the human world, Digimon are causing major problems. Taichi and Hikari’s mother is watching the news on TV and worrying about her kids. She decides to prepare a huge meal for them, her own little contribution to the cause. It seems that tri. Has picked Yuuko as the representative of the children’s families, and her perspective is an important one - especially in a Chapter that focuses so much on the Yagami siblings.

With Himekawa missing, nobody is listening to Daigo, who’s worried about the kids being stranded in the Digital World. He decides to take matters into his own hands and meets with Professor Mochizuki, who apparently is no longer invited to speak at the table during important meetings where decisions are being made. You have to wonder if Homeostasis is also behind this - don’t forget Meiko’s father has an emotional investment in this, meaning he’s probably biased towards Meicoomon (if anything, for his daughter’s sake).

Hackmon joins the conversation and finally drops some important answers.

Homeostasis only agenda is to protect stability. Libra (Meicoomon) is no longer fulfilling her role in that balance and has become to unstable. This was why she was banished (was this why she ended up on the Real World, perhaps after Apocalymon’s demise?).

Finally, with Meiko no longer acting as a balancing force to Meicoomon’s incredible destructive power, the latter is a loose canon and it must be destroyed.

This seems a pretty heartless decision from Homeostasis, but at least it’s consistent with their role in this universe. If you see things from the perspective of “keeping the balance at all costs” this is a reasonable conclusion. Sentiment has no place in Homeostasis’ job.

Meanwhile, the Digital World is trying to kill the Chosen Children (and failing miserably at it; but then, after Sora’s improbable survival last Chapter, maybe they’ve all developed inhuman invulnerability). They seek refuge in a cave and try to make sense of what’s happening.

Hikari is the most intuitive member of the team and the one who has a deeper connection with the Digital World, so it’s fitting that she is the first one to sense this and to convey it to the others. Again, this is a side of Hikari’s personality that plays a big role in this movie.

Back in the office, Homeostasis has spoken its sentence. Without Meiko’s protection, there’s no hope for Meicoomon.

Then we get the scene by the fire, where we get some very subtle, and some very interesting character moments. Everyone’s core personality gets to shine through. For instance, there’s the funny contrast between Mimi’s childlike comment that they could be seeing shooting stars, and Jou’s deadpan pragmatism:

(You can go really meta and pretend this is a reference to “I wish!)

Yamato has made his decision and is as determined as possible. Remember that he means just that - “stopping”. After all, they all realise that Meicoomon is the source of this mess and she’s causing all these troubles in the real world. But no one is considering destruction at this point. Taichi is asking Koushirou to find a way to get them home, and he’s trying.

The scene then focuses on Meiko, who’s blaming herself because this time she couldn’t stop Meicoomon. The group tries to cheer her up.

There’s a very nice sentiment there. But, remember, at this point the kids aren’t seeing the bigger picture and they still don’t know what we know. They have no idea that this trouble with Meicoomon can’t be solved with good ol’ fashioned friendship, “believing” in each other, or “accepting each other’s faults”.

Still, this scene beautifully explains the wonderful relationship between the partners, from Meiko’s point of view - specificially how they balance each other perfectly and how each duo has its own dynamic. She’s been paying attention to this. Comparing.

But Meiko is reasonably questioning their assumptions. If Meicoomon is so different, how can their relationship compare? Moreover, the partner bonds seem to have been broken beyond repair. Sora reminds Meiko that she’s stopped running and has accepted responsibility for being Meicoomon’s partner.

But now Meiko’s starting to wonder if the fault is actually on her side - she has interpreted these last events as Meicoomon snapping because of her. She’s feeling powerless, thinking that if she was a different type of partner - a different person - this wouldn’t be happening.

This sentence sums a big theme through out this episode (and throughout this series), as multiple characters come back to this difficult question, again and again.

Consider Meiko’s position at this moment: She knows something is wrong with Meicoomon (she’s always had a “problem”) but now she can no longer do anything to make her stop. Meiko did everything right: She faced the truth, she believed in her partner, she came back for her -- and Meicoomon just tried to murder her. What if she's the problem? What if a more capable partner could have stopped this?

The main point here is this: Meiko’s right to have doubts and to be scared. This isn’t a repetition of her conflict in the previous chapters, because there has been a definit breaking point in her bond with Meicoomon. Meiko isn’t being cowardly or weak, she’s being reasonable before the facts.

#digimon #digimon adventure tri #kyosei #review / recap #analysis #meta #no one needs to get this deep #this part was pretty short in comparison beware #suggestions corrections criticism always welcome!

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lrambling · 7 years

Note

Out of curiosity, I looked at the twitter of one of the people claiming "we don't @ him, we're so respectful." In the couple hours before that, she retweeted about bottom Louis, called him Baby Model and Tiny, laughed at the idea he's as tall as some of the other boys, retweeted about E&D being beards, retweeted about SBB, the gay bar, and implied the brand homme means homosexual. And she's flipping the definitions of Larries (good!) and Larry Shippers (invasive harassers!). Cool story, sis.

HAVE said no to it. But anyway these larries saying that are the same larries who, when the argument is different, go off about how “if Larry isn’t really than Louis/Harry are homophobic for the way they deny Larry! Why wouldn’t they just playfully deny it instead of being mean to larries if it was fake!!” Especially when they did start off with lighthearted denials (“ppl GENUINELY believe!”) & start sternly shutting it down when it got out of hand. Anyway I’ve don a shit job expressing myself

But whatever tldr; larries are shit and hypocrites and frequently switch between contradictory argument viewpoints to try and keep their ship alive and I’m 90% sure they don’t even realise they’re doing it

OK I’m sorry to interrupt the Louis-stravaganza that everyone is Going Through (so so so happy for all my happy Louies!!) but this message is so great, even with the missing second message (UGH TUMBLR), that I had to share it!! In a way, I feel like nothing defines Larries more than a lack of self-awareness. They have to isolate themselves so much from the impact of their actions and those of their community.

And some of it definitely comes from just like… how utterly, outrageously distorted their view of the world is. You know, i guess in part they just don’t register how wrong it is to make jokes about Freddie because they’re literally so convinced he doesn’t exist. Like, it is hard, even for me who has been trying to figure out how they think, to fully grasp the extent to which the unquestioned assumption that Louis is hiding this fake life causes them to behave in ways that seem totally irrational - made worse, of course, by the fact that they’ve encouraged the approach of seeing the world as whatever fantasy you want, so it’s not even a logically coherent approach to a closeted celebrity.

So some of the lack of self-awareness is that they aren’t evaluating themselves in terms of how their behavior would come across in a world where they’re completely and utterly wrong. But there’s also obviously an element of just like… protecting themselves from their own behavior. Just as they allow themselves to craft whatever fantasy version of Harry and Louis that makes them the happiest, and people who attempt to suggest more realistic explanations get shouted down, or how they manipulate people into believing Larrie by painting Louis as a monster if it’s not real and saying “which do you want to believe??”, they also allow themselves to embrace whatever version of their own self-image that makes them happy. Larrie as a community is all about ignoring anything that makes them feel bad. Which means that being told they have to stop doing something that makes them happy, they see that as a cruel attack, no matter how many OTHER people are being hurt by their actions (or their failure to object to the actions of others).

And then of course, as you say, they switch constantly between contradictory perspectives - like with this post, where suddenly “we can’t possibly do any harm” becomes “how can they disrespect such a powerful part of fandom.” No logical coherence whatsoever. No intellectual honesty (on top of all the regular lying). It’s like switching between Louis being a great, powerful negotiator who Simon Cowell fears, and Louis being trapped in the worst contract in music history. Or the stunt being super extreme vs fake babies being super normal. Whichever perspective best answers whichever nagging doubt they need to stamp out at any particular time, that’s what they go with.

And the same with whatever they need to tell themselves to feel good and excuse the harm they cause. “Other fans are worse! At least we’re not stalkers (except when they are but anyway), we just closely analyze every single thing they and their entire extended family and friends do!! I personally don��t directly message them! I never speak up about the misogyny or harassment but how can you possibly blame me for it?? Also there is no misogyny and harassment and when I said I wasn’t responsible for what other people did, I wasn’t referring to anything in specific because we’ve never done anything wrong and anyone who attacks us is just homophobic and hates fangirls!!!”

They HAVE to keep denying their influence and their responsibility, they have to minimize the many many cases of huge groups of Larries sending people negative messages and they have to deny the way these invasive, harassing, misogynist attitudes are encouraged on the most popular blogs. Because in their minds, anything that would require that they give up something that makes them feel good, that’s what’s bad and wrong.

#Anonymous

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qqueenofhades · 7 years

Note

Omg I'm the original anon that asked you for Lucy/Flynn smut and IT'S BECOME THE GLORIOUS TRASH SAGA I DON'T BELIEVE IT. Bless you and also your cow. Also, er. More?

you are most welcome, this is officially an actual fic, i was just trying to write smut, why did i do this, why, why couldn’t the plot butt out and leave me in peace, whyyyyy – the trash saga of flynn and lucy is ruining my life k

It’s a long way through the dark forest on the back of ahorse, jouncing and jolting, until Lucy is thinking that she doesn’t care wherethey are going, so much as when they will arrive, and she can get the hell off.She is not the most gifted equestrienne in the world, as proven when they weretracking Flynn and Jesse James, and besides, she wants some answers. It occursto her that that mission was the one where Flynn found Emma hiding out in thewoods, and yet Emma’s clearly calling the shots now. Lucy still hasn’tfigured out who exactly their mysterious rescuers are. Their accents are modernAmerican – if she hadn’t guessed it by their unsurprised reaction tothe Lifeboat, these are definitely not local nineteenth-century GoodSamaritans deciding to charitably help out two lost women and a child. Theymust be those emergency contacts Emma was talking about, more Mason Industriespeople, strategically implanted to help stranded time travelers get home. ButLucy has good reason to want to stay away from Mason Industries, and is alreadystarting to wonder just what the odds are of some of Emma’s cohorts justhappening to be here, exactly when they need them. History, after all, is a very big place.

At last, they canter through a torchlit gate and up to astately country house, surrounded on all sides by forest and outbuildings –Maryland, after all, is just south of the Mason-Dixon line, and stillofficially a slave state, though its free black population is rapidly growingand in another few decades, Lincoln will force it to remain in the Union duringthe Civil War. If, of course, the Civil War even still happens as it’s supposedto. Lucy, the Lincoln historian, is well aware of this, but this wholesituation is reminding her of a rather different adventure, and she’s not sureshe likes it. As the man she’s been riding with helps her down, she glancesacross to see Emma leaping off her own horse and taking hold of Iris.“I’ll see to her, Lucy. You’ve done enough. Go inside and get warm.”

Lucy hesitates. “I want her to come with me.”

“Lady Preston?” Her escort touches her elbow. “The girl willbe fine. We really have been waiting to speak with you.”

Lady Preston? Thatis even more eyebrow-raising than ma’am, andmaybe these guys are just going native after however long in the nineteenthcentury. Still, Lucy is starting tothink that another night at the boarding house would not have been the worstthing in the world. Hopefully they can get the Lifeboat fixed ASAP, because shewants out of here, bad. Then, of course, she remembers that she can’t. She’sstuck.

At any rate, there are at least six of them, they all haveguns, and a doctorate from Stanford, while an objectively valuable life accomplishment,doesn’t provide many useful skills in terms of punching your way out of tight corners.That is decidedly Wyatt and Flynn’s department, and they, of course, are nothere. Seeing nothing for it, Lucy follows the men inside.

The mansion is well appointed for a house in the middle ofnowhere, lux and comfortable, but that’s not the first thing Lucy notices.There are security cameras, some kind of blinking doodad (she is alsonot the person to ask about this kind of thing, that is Rufus’s lookout) thatmust run on organic renewable energy of some kind, since there’s no electricalgrid to power them. Lucy is shown through a set of double doors and into asitting room, and at herentrance, a sandy-haired man in his mid-forties turns around and smilesbroadly. “Lady Preston! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Wh…” Lucy stares at him, completely lost. “Wh – do weknow – ”

“You saved my life thirty-four years ago, when I was just aboy. And you look exactly the same, so…” He waves a hand at the room. “Asyou can see, and given the fact that you’re here, it’s true. We’ve built abetter clock. And we owe it all to you, my lady. Truly, you are the queen andfounding mother of our order, and I promise, everything will be put right.”

At that, in one final, horrible moment, it crashes intoplace. Lucy feels as if the bottom has dropped out from her world, again, asshe stares at him. “John,” she breathes. “John Rittenhouse.”

He appears genuinely pleased that she remembers him.“Indeed. You stopped the madman who murdered my father in cold blood fromkilling me, and I have never forgotten it. Your bravery, or, dare I say, yourbeauty. I dedicated myself to carrying on my father’s work, in honor of hismemory. And meeting these good gentlemen – ” he indicates the men – the agents– the Rittenhouse agents – “was proof of the theorem. We will, or shortly atany rate, have a fully functional time machine. I cannot wait to travel to thefuture, to see it for myself. Everything we’ve worked for, at last. Our legacy.Mine and yours.”

His face is glowing with ardency and belief. Lucy wants tobe sick. “It’s not my legacy!” she snarls. “I don’t want anything to do withit!”

John Rittenhouse is puzzled. “Of course it’s your legacy.You’re the reason any of it was possible. Perhaps it’s destiny, Lucy. Thatwe’ve met again at last. But then, we worked very hard to make it happen. Itwasn’t easy. You’ve been difficult to get hold of.”

Lucy grips the back of the davenport until her knuckles gowhite. “Emma,” she says, stomach heaving. “Emma is – has been – a Rittenhouseagent. This entire time.”

“Of course she has.” John smiles again. “Our best andbrightest, the only one we thought capable of the strength and guile it wouldtake to pull this off. She convinced the madman to come here, you know. To thisyear, this place. She knew he would not be able to resist the lure of FortMcHenry – such a tiny, insignificant piece, given the larger goal. The pointwas, we knew you’d follow him. And circumstances were arranged, arranged sobeautifully, so that you would choose to send your protectors away at last, andhave no choice but to come to us alone. The beauty, the precision, theelegance. See, Lucy? See?”

She does. Thisis a trap to which even the word Machiavelliandoes no justice. Flynn didn’t erase her. Rittenhouse did. Everything thathas happened in 1814 has been because of Rittenhouse maneuvering to get her onher own, away from the men, here with John who is clearly more than halfconvinced that they’ll get married and rule the world together, with theLifeboat already in their hands and the Mothership about to be as well by thesounds of things, with her rendered utterly dependent on them for her futureexistence. This is so beyond bad that it isn’t even catastrophic. It isapocalyptic.

“You look pale, my dear,” John goes on, when Lucy saysnothing. “Sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea.”

“I-don’t-want-your-fucking-tea.”She’d throw it in his face. She is so far beyond angry that it is boilingin her very bones. Iris. Oh God. Iris, where is Iris? She’s delivered herdirectly into the jaws of the serpent. All Emma’s odd questionsabout how long Lucy has been sleeping with Flynn, and whether she might getpregnant, likewise make sickening sense. David Rittenhouse was also nastilyinterested in whether she had reproduced yet, and was certainly planning toassist her in that aim. Emma was scouting out to make sure that Lucy wouldn’tturn up here accidentally expecting Time Terrorist Junior. Bit of an awkwardsituation if she’s supposed to be the Bride of Rittenhouse, and breed asuper-race of crazy cultist clockmakers with a side hobby of worlddomination. Jesus, fucking, Christ.

John frowns. He still seems slightly baffled that she isn’trushing to thank him for all this. “Now, Lucy,” he says, in abe-gentle-with-the-mental-patient sort of voice. “I know you’ve been livingwith our enemies for quite a while, and of course you have a distorted view ofour aims and activities. I do need you to not to attempt anything foolish whilewe’re getting everything into place. I’m sure you’ll come around, of course,but it’s delicate, so – ”

“I will not.” Lucy is actually seeing red. “I am neverjoining you.”

John smiles patronizingly. “Yes,” he says. “Of course youwill.”

If there is one thing Lucy Preston hates, it’s people – men – knowingher future, or thinking they do, and trying to force it on her accordingly. Shereaches stealthily behind her for the heavy branched candelabra on thesideboard. As John takes a step toward her, raising a hand as if to caress hercheek, Lucy rips it up and slams him over the head with it, hard as shepossibly can.

He yelps and staggers, blood spurting from a gash on hisforehead, momentarily blinded by the scalding candle wax, and Lucy runs for it.“Iris? IRIS!” She races down the corridor, realizing that she is about tobecome a horse thief, and nowhere is far enough for her to go, not when theLifeboat’s dead and she doesn’t know how to pilot it anyway. Maybe ridehell-for-leather to Fort McHenry again and try to get Cochrane to shield her,with no answers about where Flynn’s gone or even who he really was. Oh God. OhGod oh God oh God. “IRIS!”

She sprints around the corner and headlong into fourRittenhouse agents coming the other way. They grab her by the arms and hoisther off her feet as she kicks and curses at them, struggling and spitting, andhaul her down the corridor to a door at the end. It opens into a narrow backroom, one of them unbars a trapdoor in the floor, and dumps Lucy into somethingthat looks like a root cellar – a tiny, dingy, dark bolthole. The grate slamsdown, and locks.

Panic sears Lucy’s throat, twisting her in half. She’strapped. Oh God, oh God she’strapped, she is in that coffin in the Murder Castle and H.H. Holmes issharpening his knives, and there is even no oracle for her to play to beguileherself out. She screams and claws at the trapdoor, bloodying herfingers, crawling in a circle. The walls, the walls are devouring her. She’susing up her air. Her chest jerks and shudders. There is not enough space.She’s going to die in here.

Think, Lucy. Think. You’restronger than this. You are more than your fear. Get a grip. Logic. Sense.Reason. Lists. Lists are good. How about the presidents? Recite the presidentsin order.

George Washington.

She met him, God, she met him, thirty-four years ago when hewanted Benedict Arnold caught, and then she saved John Rittenhouse’s life –

John Adams.

Thomas Jefferson.

She saved him in 1787, when she chained Flynn to a bed tostop him from going after the Constitutional Convention – remembers thatJefferson was an admirer of David Rittenhouse, he was another one, another one–

James Madison.

He’s president right now, but it’s changed, it’s all changed–

James Monroe.

John Quincy Adams.

Andrew Jackson.

The Trail of Tears. They were there. They were there, shesaw it, Jackson did that, Rittenhouse whispering in his ear. This used to be asterile, comforting recitation of established facts for Lucy, her solace andher happy place, theories and arguments and books. But now it is a wild,chaotic, terrifying swirl of unsettled scales and change and catastrophe, herown culpability in it wondering if any choice she has ever made mattered, orit’s still led her to this. Has shebeen saving history, or saving Rittenhouse? Is John right? Queen and founding mother of our order.

You, Lucy, thedarkness whispers to her.

You.

Lucy drifts into an exhausted, miserable doze eventually,from which she is jerked by the trapdoor rattling and aspear of sunlight falling on her face, feeling like a mushroom shut up too longin the dark. She squints and grimaces as rough hands haul her out; she wants tofight, but her legs are rubbery, she’s starving and trembling and stillterrified, and she needs to pick her moment carefully. She puts up noresistance as they march her off to a drawing room where she sees clothes laidout that are clearly at least a decade ahead of 1814. So they’replanning to travel. Did Emma fix the Lifeboat? What the –

Lucy struggles out of her filthy clothes and into the newones, because yes, she is going to keep an eye on these assholes somehow. Howexactly she plans to do that, she’s not sure, given that she’s still convincedthat she’ll be erased if she tries to leave this year. But if the restrictiononly applies to her present lifetime – i.e. she can’t go anywhere between1983-2017, because she does not exist when she was supposed to, but she canstill move around the past – then that might be less of a problem. Ghost in the machine, she thinks.Forever exiled from her own time, banging aimlessly around history, without anyhome or place to settle for long. Once it might have sounded like a dream cometrue. Now it’s nothing but an unending, impossible nightmare.

Once she’s made herself look less of a disaster, shestraightens her back, locks her knees, and opens the door to find Emma standingon the other side of it, clearly waiting for her. “Wow,” Lucy spits at her.“Thanks for saving us. Man, we’re in your debt.”

Emma shrugs. “I did save us, so you’re welcome. Come on,John’s waiting.”

“What is this? Our freaky cultist marriage ceremony?” Lucyrears back. “Don’t think for a secondthat I’m going to – ”

“No, he’d rather marry you when you want to. It’s a bitpathetic, but he is honestly rather in love with you, and thinks you’ll changeyour mind. No, we have another trip to make first. I’ve gotten the Lifeboatenough gas to make one short-term jump, but that’s all it needs to do. We’regoing to 1829 to get the Mothership.”

“1829?” Lucy stares at her. “What makes you think it’s goingto be there?”

“Oh,” Emma says. “I think it’ll be there.”

“What did you – ”

Lucy takes a furious step, but the clunk of a gun beingcocked stops her. “Close enough, Preston.” Emma’s voice is cool and low anddangerous. “Trust me, I don’t want to shoot you. It would make the higher-upsvery mad, especially John. But I wouldn’t press your luck.”

Lucy stares back at her with utter and complete contempt.“Wow,” she says again, after a moment. “You’re a true believer, aren’t you?Some of the other members, they must just use Rittenhouse for money or power orconnections or whatever else, but you, no. You’re a zealot. You actually buyinto everything they want to do, no matter the cost. No wonder they chose youto get in with Flynn, make him work with you.”

“Like that was hard,” Emma says, beckoning Lucy with thegun. “Just keep telling him how awful Rittenhouse was, how I’d do anything tobring it down, how I had so much proof of their depravity to give him. He ateit up. He’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, by the way. Mind you, therewere a few times when I thought he might cotton onto me, but he didn’t want to kill me – especially afterAnthony, and especially since he’d have no pilot – and I used that to myadvantage. Remember when you thought I was sleeping with him? That wasamusing. I did consider whether I mighthave to try to seduce him, if he got too many ideas about getting rid of me.But it wouldn’t have worked. I’m pretty sure you’re the only woman he everactually thinks about, no matter all his talk about doing this for his wife anddaughter. Reads your stupid journal all the time. Thought you could doanything. So this is going to really sting, won’t it?”

Lucy wants to kill her, but they have reached the main hall,a bruised and black-eyed John Rittenhouse is waiting for them, and makes her acordial bow, apparently not holding too much of a grudge for the candelabraincident last night. “Lucy! Are you ready?”

“I think I preferred LadyPreston,” Lucy growls under her breath, ignoring his offered arm. She isterrified to ask where Iris is – no way they’re wasting that much of a valuablehostage, she is most likely still alive, but for how long? “And why are wegoing to 1829?”

“Well,” John says. He looks like a kid in a candy store.“It’s my first trip forward, and this is the year, so I’m told, that one AndrewJackson becomes president. He’s one of ours. We’re traveling to March 4, 1829 –the day he’s sworn in. And it’s the meeting. The Rittenhouse meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“Our quad-centennial meeting. The last one was in 1804, justafter the Louisiana Purchase – Jefferson was also one of ours, by the way. Ithappens every twenty-five years. And given that we are going to acquire theMothership at this one, I think it’s especially vital that I attend in person,so we can map out how history goes forward from such a pivotal moment. You are,of course, welcome to help me, if you understand what your true identity is.”

Lucy gives him a demure, closed-mouth smile. Inside, hermind is racing. They must have found a way to make contact with Flynn, Wyatt,and Rufus in 2017, order them to travel to 1829 to meet them, and surrender the Mothership. This of course is the worst possibleoutcome. Maybe they won’t come. Maybe they can be persuaded to stay away, inthe name of the larger cause.

So, at least, Lucy hopes vainly for a few seconds. Shedoesn’t want to die as a martyr, butshe also can’t rule out the idea, if it means Rittenhouse won’t becomeall-powerful. Then she considers what the odds are that the terrible threesome,much as they may hate each other, won’t absolutelydrop everything and go barreling through history if she’s in danger. No matterthe cost. No matter the risk.

“Slim” is not a kind enough word for it.

——————

“Washington D.C., March 4, 1829.” Rufus stares at the screen. “That’s when these mysteriouscomputer-crashing gremlins want us to go with the Mothership, or ‘they’ die.And is this way too much of a stretch, or does anyone else get the feeling thatthat means Lucy, Iris, and Emma?”

There’s a loud curse and a crash behind him, and he whirlsto see that Flynn has just kicked over a display of middle-grade children’schapterbooks, at which there is no question of them remaining further in thelibrary. They grab their things and speed out chased by a flock of furiousmiddle-aged women, Rufus and Wyatt dragging Flynn between them, and into thedark parking lot. They barely get across it before they all start yelling ateach other at once.

“I should have known this was some kind of trick! By them!By Rittenhouse!” Flynn looks quite honestly deranged. “Now they’ll kill mydaughter again, all because we left them behind in the past by themselves,without – ”

“YEAH, FLYNN, MAYBE IF YOU HADN’T FUCKIN’ ERASED LUCY, WE WOULDN’T HAVE THISPROBLEM!” Wyatt is 0.00001 seconds away from breaking his promise to her andthrottling the life out of certain utterly insufferable tall, dark, and EasternEuropean prize-winning douchenozzles with his bare hands, and Rufus looks as ifhe’s thinking about helping. “You forget that part, huh? About how this is all your fault?”

Flynn raises his hands to his face and drops them. Hebreathes like a tempest, struggling to control himself. He whirls on a heel,storms to the end of the alley, stops, and stares up at the heavens, clearlywondering why he can’t just be smote down now and put an end to it. Then heturns and walks back, with far more control than he evidently feels. “Rightthen, soldier,” he says, vicious with mockery. “What’s your plan for the situation?”

Wyatt wants to know why it’s him to solve this heaping helping of shit sandwich that Garcia“Still The Worst” Flynn has loaded onto their plates, but there is only onepossible answer. “We have to go. We have to rescue Lucy. I – we – we can’t loseher. We can’t let this happen.”

“Man, you know I want the same thing,” Rufus says. “But – give Rittenhouse the Mothership? Wyatt,we – all of us – care about Lucy. In our own ways. I think it’s the only thingwe all have in common, in fact. But if we land there, they’ll be on us likewhite on rice. You know how bad it would be.”

“You can’t be seriously suggesting that we don’t save Lucy.”

“I’m not. I’m suggesting we be smart about it.” Rufus looks nervous but resolute. “Before somebody who I won’t mentionkidnapped Anthony, he was working on something that was exactly intended toprevent the Mothership from being stolen. A second layer of safeguard. It was aprogram that would lock the controls and put the Mothership on autopilot – aremote retrieval, basically, so if the human pilot died on a mission, we couldlog into its computer from the present and still drive it home by itself. Idon’t think he finished it, so we didn’t have time to install it beforeSomeone, still not mentioning him, did his thing. I might have been able topatch it in from the Lifeboat, but Someone,still not mentioning him, also happenedto cut the cord between the Lifeboat and the Mothership. And we don’t havethe Lifeboat, anyway.”

“So?” Flynn growls, clearly vastly chafed by thispassive-aggressive (barely passive, anyway) shade-throwing. “What good doesthat do us?”

“This.” Rufus lifts his chin. “If I can get that softwareand install it on the Mothership, I can lock its pilot console. I’d stay here in2017 and drive you guys remotely into 1829 like an underwater deep-sea robot.That way, even if Rittenhouse did get their hands on it, they wouldn’t be ableto use it. The only way it would run was if I pulled you out. They could sit init all and press all the buttons they wanted, but only another expert-levelpilot would be able to override it, and Rittenhouse doesn’t have one of those.”

“Split up again?” Wyattrepeats incredulously. “After how well the last time went?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And how do we get the software, anyway?”

“Well,” Rufus says, scratching his ear. “That’s the trickypart.”

“Oh,” Flynn murmurs witheringly. “That’s the tricky part.”

“Shut up, Flynn.” Wyatt looks back at Rufus, eyes wideningas it hits him. “Shit. It’s in Mason Industries, isn’t it? Probably buried deepin some encrypted server, and only you know how to get it out. But you mightnot even work there anymore, so who’s getting us inside the – ”

He pauses. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah,” Rufus says grimly. “Gotta convince Jiya to fall forme and take a chance on smuggling a perfect stranger into her top-secretworkplace to steal a bit of dangerous code for a time machine in what, fiveminutes? Should be a gas.”

It’s about thirty minutes later, in fact, when they’re backon Jiya’s doorstep – Flynn loudly protesting this plan and insisting they justtake the damn place by storm like he did last time, Wyatt making equally loudcomments that of course the terrorist thinks that is a good idea – and both ofthem shutting up on the spot when Jiya opens the door, sees them, and starts toslam it. “What? I told you weirdoes to get lost!”

“Jiya.” Rufus has wedged his foot in the door, and grimaceswhen it hits it, but doesn’t budge. “Look. I know this is incredibly bizarreand I can’t explain it, but… let’s just say that I know what Connor Masonwas working on, and so do you. We both know that it was possible that if it wasused, we’d come back and the world might be… different. Well, we have, andit’s important, and a friend of ours isreally in danger. I know you don’t remember her either, but her name is Lucy.You like her. We all do.”

Jiya frowns at him, but slightly less certainly than before.“How do you know about Mason – ”

“Because I work there,” Rufus says. “In the other timeline.And in that timeline, like I said, we… well… we’re sort of, you know.Together. You love Indian food and you have this Twitter account where you sayall these incredibly smart and funny things, and you’re bitchin’ at like, allthe video games but especially Assassin’sCreed, and the best vacation you ever took was to that tech convention inTokyo in 2014 where it rained the whole time and you just got to wander aroundand test all the gizmos. You’re such a nerd and you’re always changing up yournail polish and you secretly love sappy movies and cry every time the dog dies,because you have the biggest heart of anyone I know and I… I don’t deserveyou. I never really have. But you still like me for some reason, and I.” Heswallows. “I… sort of… love you.”

Wyatt and Flynn glance at each other, without meaning to.

Jiya blinks, clearly startled. She opens and shuts her mouthas Rufus continues to stand there, gazing at her with desperate hope. “And,” hegoes on. “I know you have no reason to, but I need you to believe me, and Ineed you to help us. We need to get into Mason Industries. Tonight.”

Jiya blinks again, rubbing her eyes as if hoping to wake upfrom this dream. She starts to look away, but he doesn’t. “I…”

“Look, girl!” Flynn takes a step, but Wyatt throws out anarm to catch him smartly across the chest. “It’s important!”

Jiya surveys them for a few moments, up and down. She bitesher lip. Then, and all at once, she turns around. “Okay,” she says, barelyabove a whisper. “I’ll get my keys.”

—————

“Rufus, you’re a badass,” Wyatt mutters, as they pull up infront of Mason Industries in Jiya’s car, step out, and wait tensely as sheswipes them in with her ID card. Even in this reality where they’re not wantedcriminals, it feels ludicrously exposed to be strolling in like this, and allof them flinch as the cameras swivel over. “How long is this going to take?”

“Shouldn’t be too long. Breaking the decrypt is the hardestpart.” Rufus takes a deep breath as they follow Jiya inside the gloomy steelwarehouse. “Then, well, the software is kind of, that is, it is very much is in beta, so – ”

“Now you’retelling us this?” Wyatt stops in his tracks. “No. None of this remote-retrievalbusiness. It’s too dangerous. You comewith us. I’m not losing you either.”

“No!” Rufus stares back at him fiercely. “Listen to me!Wyatt, you know we can’t let Rittenhouse have the Mothership, and we can’t racein there like idiots, just like they’re hoping we will, to save the womenwithout thinking of the consequences! Besides, if God forbid something does gowrong and you have to get home in the Lifeboat, it only fits three people,remember? One of us has to stay behind so there’s a spot for Lucy! It comesdown to this. Do you trust me to do my job or not?”

“Of course I trust you. That’s why I don’t want to leaveyou!”

“Then that’s why you have to.” Rufus remains unyielding. “IfI can get this patched in, I am the only one who can drive the Mothership, andthat means I have to do it on autopilot, from here. Otherwise it won’t work.This way, you and him go, breakheads, and get things straightened out so Lucy can come home. Istay here and pull you out. Yeah, you bastard, even you,” he adds, raising hisvoice and looking pointedly at Flynn. “Believe me, I’d like nothing better thanto leave you behind, but she seems to see some redeeming qualities in you. Noclue what those are. So you still get a ride back. Don’t make me regret it.”

“If you stay here to drive the autopilot,” Wyatt saysquietly, “and the timeline switches back to ours, you could be sittingin a roomful of Rittenhouse agents.”

Rufus considers. Then he says calmly, “Fine. I’ll take thatrisk. And drive you somewhere away from here. If I go down, you three keepfighting.”

Wyatt looks at him helplessly. Then Flynn calls, “If you twoare not going to make out, perhaps you could get on with what we came here todo?”

Rufus swears under his breath, turns to the terminal, andboots it up, overriding its login screen in about half an instant. Jiya’s eyesgo wide as his fingers fly over the keys. “You… you really do work here,don’t you?”

“Told you.” Rufus enters a few commands, deletes them whenthey don’t work, and starts running some kind of complicated algorithm. Ittakes him a while to locate the program, which is only half-finished, and thencompile the extra code, as Wyatt and Flynn are getting antsy. He tries a few launches,which don’t work. Jiya suggests something, and he tries that instead. Wyatt andFlynn are practically climbing the walls. Then at last, with a whoosh and aflash and a pop of bent space-time,the Mothership whirls into existence on the launch pad in front of them. Wyattbriefly wonders if there is a second Mothershipand Lifeboat here in this timeline, and then decides he would rather not gointo that. His head hurts enough as it is.

“Yes!” Rufus crows, punching the air, as he finishes theexecute command, copies the program onto a drive, and goes up the steps tocheck that it’s been properly implanted. Once it is installed, the Mothershipcan only be driven from this computer bank here. God, Wyatt hopes that theuniverse does not choose this moment for technical difficulties. The entirereason they’re running this risk, after all, is so they can stand a chance ofwinning the battle (rescuing Lucy) and not losing the whole war (lettingRittenhouse get their hands on the damn thing and torch history even morespectacularly than Flynn – much as he hates the son of a bitch, Wyatt knows bynow he’s not the worst thing out there, not by a long shot). This will work, ithas to. Maybe. Maybe.

“Okay,” Rufus says. “It’s installed. We don’t have time fortests, but I think it’s running properly. So if you two can not kill each otherbefore you get there, that would be good.”

Wyatt considers that just him and Flynn alone in a timemachine is going to be very, very interesting. Too much so, in fact. But theyhave to get to March 4th, 1829. They have to. It’s screaming in hishead – and again, no matter what he thinks of Flynn, it’s clear that he’sfrantic too. For his daughter, yes. But also for Lucy. Not that Wyatt hasforgiven him at all for getting them into this situation, but at least there’sthat.

Wyatt and Rufus clap each other hard on the shoulder, awarethat if this goes wrong, this might be the last time they see each other. ThenWyatt and Flynn go up the stairs of the Mothership, strap in, and stare at eachother in tense silence, as the door cycles shut. On the video screen, they seeRufus return to the command chair and start up the launch. He raises a hand. Good luck.

We who are about todie salute you, Wyatt thinks. He pulls the seatbelt tighter. If thisdoesn’t work, he’s killing Flynn. It won’t fix it, but it’ll make him feelbetter.

The lights flash. The engine revs. Wyatt looks back. Justonce.

Then the world is gone.

—————–

March 4th, 1829, in Washington D.C. is a festiveoccasion, red-white-and-blue bunting strung up everywhere and onlookers turningout to crowd the streets, newspapers and souvenirs being flogged as at anypublic event and plenty of optimism that President Andrew Jackson is just theman to get the damn redcoats out of the chunk of New England they have beensquatting in for the past fifteen years, ever since the fall of Fort McHenryand the sporadic, ongoing battles to chase them out. This is strange enoughthat it almost gives Lucy vertigo, even as she can’t help thinking that if theNorth is still partially under British occupation and control, there is no wayit’s going to be able to get its act together for the Civil War in another fewdecades. Is that what happens? The Union loses? Oh Jesus.

She is keeping a sharp eye out for her chance to get awayfrom John and Emma, as she has no intention of attending this Rittenhousemeeting with them. John is absolutely delighted by everything – if this is howhe feels going just fifteen years ahead of his own time, Lucy thinks, he’d befloored by her future. Not, of course, that she intends to let him get there. Sheremembers her own delight at first beholding the past in the flesh, in fullcolor, and then pushes it away. John is so happy because he thinks he’s finallyon the verge of controlling it. Of dominating it. Putting all those hands ofthe clock exactly where he wants them.

It takes Lucy a bit, but once they’re in the crowds by themuddy road, waiting to see President Jackson ride by in his carriageto the grandstand, she finally manages to give her companions the slip. Duckslow, shooting out the back of the crowd and starting to move. She doesn’t know exactly where she’s going, but if Rittenhouse put outsome kind of lure to get the boys here, they’ll be arriving soon.They’re not going to leave her behind, for better or worse. But they also don’tknow just how monstrous of a trap this is.

She can’t exactly ask anyone if they’ve seen a glowingfuturistic white orb recently, so she isn’t sure what the quickest way to findthem is. She doesn’t have much time; John and Emma must have noticed herabsence by now. She searches up and down, heart hammering. Thisis insane, this is insane, there’s absolutely no chance that she’s going tojust –

“Lucy?”

She really does stop breathing at that. Whirls around, lockseyes with Wyatt, who clearly can’t believe what they’re telling him, and theyremain frozen for an instant longer. Then they rush at each other, throwthemselves into each other’s arms, and hug the breath out of each other intotal disbelief, talking over each other. Lucy is trying to explain to him thatapparently she can travel, just not back to the present, and he’s babblingsomething about how much history has changed in said present, and then sherecovers herself and remembers the important point. “Flynn. Where’s Flynn?Where’s Rufus? Did you three figure out how to – Wyatt, listen, it wasn’t Flynnwho erased me. It was Rittenhouse.”

Wyatt stares at her with creased brow. “What are you talkingabout?”

“Rittenhouse. John Rittenhouse, Emma tricked Flynn intogoing to 1814 so he could get his hands on me. It’s a trap, it’s all a trap.”Lucy’s words are spilling over each other, not making much sense. “She’sRittenhouse, she’s a double agent, she’s been working for them the whole time.John knows, the whole time he’s been planning for this, for – ”

Wyatt continues to stare at her in incomprehension. But atthat, his gaze flares with shock. “What? Emma?Emma Whitmore? She’s a traitor,she –?”

“Yes.” Lucy grips his jacket. “It was all a plan to get meaway from you and Flynn and Rufus. We have to go, we have to find her, we – ”

“We met her,” Wyatt says. His face has gone white. “Jesus,we met her. Coming in, right after we landed. Told her to head back to theMothership and wait for us there. What – Jesus,are you saying – ”

“Where’s Rufus?” Lucy’s voice almost rises to a scream.“Where’s Flynn?”

“Rufus stayed behind. In 2017. Long story. Flynn – ” Wyattstops. “He was with me when we landed, I don’t – Lucy, if Emma’s Rittenhouse, we told her where the Mothership is – ”

They stare at each other a moment longer.Then they whirl and run.

It’s a torturous sprint out of the crowded city.Lucy doesn’t know how they can be here if Rufus isn’t – neither Wyatt nor Flynncan pilot the machines themselves, after all – but that appears to be aquestion for later. They veer and dodge and hurtle and run harder, untilthey finally blast into the treed grove where the Mothership must have landed.And do so just in time to see Emma Whitmore point her gun, pull the trigger,and hear the shot go off like thunder.

Garcia Flynn staggers, blood blooming on his shoulder, but he still tries to charge her. Emma shoots again. “That, by the way,”she yells, “is from Lucy. She was the one who handed Iris over to us, you know.So I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talkabout.”

Flynn roars, even as Emma vanishes inside the Mothership andthe door cycles shut. He runs toward it, grabbing it, as if he’ll keep it therewith his bare hands – even though if it jumps when he’s still holding it, he’llbe scraped gruesomely out of existence worse than being dragged by a freighttrain. It’s only Lucy’s scream that makes him turn his head. “NO!”

Startled, he lets go, as Wyatt jumps past, draws his gun,and starts firing. Bullets pop and bang off the hull – if he can shoot it likeFlynn’s goons did to the Lifeboat in 1754, disable it – Emma shouldn’t be ableto drive it – but what did Rufus say? Onlyanother expert-level pilot would be able to override it, and Rittenhousedoesn’t have one of those. Except, of course, they do. Emma knows it possiblyeven better than he does. If she overrides it, if she jumps –

The flaw in the plan, Wyattthinks madly. And holy shit, what aflaw.

He gets a shot off, close to the Mothership’s mainmotivator. It’s taking Emma longer than usual to launch; it’s clearthat even she can’t get around the autopilot lock immediately, and Wyatt feelsa brief, savage pride in Rufus’ genius. He shoots again. Sure, it might meanthat he is stranded in the Jackson administration for the rest of his life, butit’s still better than letting Rittenhouse have it. Lucy is on her knees, tryingto get to Flynn, who is completely beside himself. He struggles with his goodarm to get out his own gun, aims, and fires.

Something blows on the Mothership with a cascade of sparks. Butit’s too late. The next instant, it flashes out of sight, out of existence,rippling the trees. If she jumped successfully, or if she didn’t – if she’sstuck somewhere just outside the space-time continuum – Wyatt has no idea.

He turns around. Lucy’s face is dead white. Flynn has beenshot at least twice, and he’s losing blood. Rufus is back in 2017. Emma has theMothership. Rittenhouse has Iris. All the curse words Wyatt can think of – and believehim, he can think of a lot – still seem insufficient to encompass theterribleness of the situation. Even the world’s most prolific porn star hasnever been as fucked as they presently are.

“Flynn.” It’s Lucy’s voice that breaks the silence. “Garcia.Garcia.”

Wyatt has never heard her sound like that. It twistssomething in his gut.

Flynn doesn’t answer. He presses a hand to his bloodstainedshoulder, but it’s clearly not that pain that he feels the most acutely. “They haveher?” he whispers. “They have Iris? You gaveher to them?”

“Listen – it was a trap, all right? It was a trap.” Lucychokes on a sob. “I didn’t – Emma – ”

Flynn closes his eyes as if he doesn’t want to go onexisting just then. As if the one thing worse than losing something, someone,is thinking that you might have somehow, miraculously found them again, againstevery and any odd – and then realizing that you haven’t. That it is exactlywhat you feared. Wyatt is still determined to hate him with every fiber of hisbeing, but that twists an unwanted stab of sympathy into him. Losing Jess oncewas bad enough. Having to go through it again would completely destroy him.

“We have to get you looked after,” Wyatt says at last,barely above a whisper. “Then we have to find the Lifeboat, somehow makecontact with Rufus, and get the remote-retrieval program installed in there, sohe can pull us out. It’s the only way we’re getting home.”

Flynn stares at him with utterly flat dark eyes. He clearly doesn’tgive a single damn.

“Garcia,” Lucy says again. “Please.”

Flynn considers it. Tries to get to his feet, and reels.Without intending to, Wyatt lunges to catch him, as Lucy darts in from theother side. They manage to hold him up, if barely. He is considerably biggerthan either of them.

“Fine,” he says at last, and spits blood. “And then I’m going tokill everyone.”

#the trash saga of flynn and lucy #garcy #garcy ff #help me #anonymous #ask

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somefinelipstickonthatpig · 7 years

Note

I don't know if you still accept drabble prompts or not, but...how about Sorey trying to keep it together but finally breaking down after his awakening, taking in Gramps' death and everything else that overloaded him during his time as Shepherd, and Mikleo comforting him the best he can?

Krissey’s Notes: ohhhhh my gosh okay I’m sorry this took so long. When I first got this prompt, the idea was so good, that I knew I wanted to take my time with it.

but this prompt also gave me the opportunity to slip in a lot of my personal headcanons about Sorey’s reaction to waking up again, particularly in a sudden new world and all that?? so really this prompt was perfect and thank you so much for giving it

WITHOUT MUCH FURTHER A DO HERE ComES THE ANGST!!

The tears don’t come until the night, when the sun passesand the world falls quiet, settling down its weary self for slumber.

Sorey can hear nothing else but the deep breathing of Mikleoat his back with the tranquility of Elysia just outside their hut door. It isa sound he has always, always known, which alone brings a strange comfort sojuxtaposed from the rest of the new world around him.

Listening, straining his ear for every inhale and exhale ofhis bedmate, he rolls onto his back. His hands fold over hisstomach. But then, eventually, his fingers find a way to his chest.

That’s where it usually begins, too. No matter how hard hepresses, he can never find a pulse.

It is usually one thing such as that, that sets off thetears. And whatever begins it, other regrets and sorrows soon follow,compounded by the heavy grief inside him. It surprises Sorey every time that he could feelso, so sad.

He wonders sometimes if this is why humans who becomeseraphim usually and mercifully don’t retain their memories.

Sometimes Sorey gets really selfishly sad about missing outon certain parts of being human that he had, quite honestly, been lookingforward to. There is a certain joy to living and growing in the way he knewthat he knows he will miss, and that he’s sorry to never get toexperience.

Sometimes Sorey thinks of Gramps, and cries anew withmemories and sorrow that he was gone. It has been years since his passing—too many to count. But what would hit him the most would be the reminder that even though Zenrus had been a father to him, he still missed thefuneral rites the seraphim of Elysia performed for him. He had slept throughthe entire ceremony, whenever they would have decided to do it. He never got tosay his proper goodbyes.

Sometimes Sorey turns over further to touch the length ofMikleo’s hair, to see if he could measure with his own fingertips just how long it had been since he saw him—justhow long it was that he had slept—and just how much time he had missed out on. Sometimes, that hurt the most: to see with real manifest evidence how muchof his other half’s life he had slept through.

And sometimes, when the grief is heaviest, he wonders howmany times Mikleo cried while he was asleep, with pain equally so heavy andawful, that Sorey will likely never know about. How many times, while he wasasleep, was Mikleo afraid? How many times did Mikleo feel lonely?

Mikleo had to grieve Gramps’ passing alone, Sorey knew.

Sometimes, that regret alone made him sob until he couldn’tbreathe, fingers pressed over his eyes and clutching to his temple. Face hiddenin the night.

There were many times Sorey found himself sobbing silentapologies, gasping them into the air, fingers shaking, so utterly sorry for abandoning the light of his life when Mikleo had already losteverything else only moments beforethat final fight. Sometimes, Sorey felt like he had made the most horrible andselfish mistake to sleep the years away instead of find another way to achievetheir dream—together.

The grief came regularly each night in Elysia as Sorey foundit harder and harder to sleep with a body that no longer required rest. Themore hours he spent staring into the darkness with his thoughts as his onlycompany, tormented by memories of a five-hundred-years-ago yesterday that therest of the world had long forgotten about—that Mikleo might have forgotten about—he felt out of place. He felt astranger to his own home, to his own skin.

But above all, he knows he has made the gravest error ofall: he abandoned the one person mostimportant to him, most likely when Mikleo needed him most.

“Sorey?”

Sorey turns from where he stands at the cliff’s edge, aprecipice along the southern skirts of Elysia that he remembers fondly fromtheir journey together. His loose button-up flutters in the wind as he seesMikleo walking towards him. The water seraph’s long hair is pulled back in aponytail. When the wind lifts it up, it frames his pale, moonglow face likewings, and Sorey thinks how pure of heart Mikleo must be, that he managed tosurvive all he did and still stand before him wholly untainted.

Even after five hundred years.

Sorey turns back around to view the world beneath. In thebreak of dawn, the world is quiet and crisp. The sun has only just begun tocreep over the horizon, and the sky yields to its burning hues of red and gold.

“...what are you doing out here?” Mikleo says slowly as hereaches his side.

Sorey can feel the burn of his eyes on his profile, and hedoesn’t know what to say. He blinks once and bows his head. His eyes fall uponthe way his fingers clutch at the cuffs of his blue sleeves.

Mikleo continues after a long pause. “Sorey?” And when hestill doesn’t answer, the water seraph drops his voice. Maybe he knows. “Areyou…okay?”

Sorey shakes his head.

Mikleo exhales; it’s a careful breath, but in part relieved.“Bad dream?”

Sorey shakes his head again. But then his face tightens. Hefrowns carefully, and considers whether or not his answer is true.

Mikleo waits, as patiently as ever.

And it makes Sorey suck in a sharp breath.

Like the sun shining its rays down on their sorry worldbelow, even in the world above the world, Sorey realizes that he’s been makingMikleo wait for more time than they had ever even spent together. And all atonce, he thinks how selfish he must be for doing that to him, for turningaround and when the waiting period was over, expecting Mikleo to just pick himback up and accept him back into his life like nothing had happened. Likeall those years didn’t make a difference; like things didn’t change after allthat time. Feelings didn’t change; concerns didn’t change.

Like a waterfall, follows the thought: no more.

“I can’t believe you didn’t just—forget about me,” is the first thing he can think of to say andit’s nonsensical. Mikleo seems as surprised as him that it came from his ownmouth but now that it’s there, from it, spouts so much more.

“Y’know, I didn’t dream while I slept,” Sorey says and heshakes his head. “I closed my eyes and I opened them and then suddenly, the worldwas different.” He looks to Mikleo,and his eyes take in how much older helooks, how much taller he is. Thelength of his hair. Sorey looks away, back out over the edge. He shakes hishead, and the wind picks up his bangs.

He hates the way his breathing starts to get short.

Mikleo’s eyes go wide, and Sorey can’t conceive why.“Sorey…is…that what’s bothering you?”

Sorey just shakes his head, and chokes on his next words.“No!” he first says, and it’s stronger than he meant it to be. He can feel hisown throat go hoarse at the single word. He clenches his hands into fists. Heshakes his head again. “Yes? I—I don’t know. I just—I didn’t think it would belike this. I really didn’t.”

Mikleo stares at him. There’s a beat before he asks, just asquiet as he has been, “Didn’t think…‘it’ would be like what?”

“I didn’t think…” Sorey pauses. It’s hard to get the wordsout. But he says them anyway; Mikleo deserves closure and deserves release fromthe obligation he’s subconsciously held him to—all in the same breath. “…I didn’tthink I’d wake up to a world where I didn’t fitanymore. Y’know?”

The words go out through a tight, strangled throat. Sorey standsthere a moment more as the tension in his face gets harder and harder and hecan’t hold the tears back. He raises his arm to cover his mouth and the firstfragile ones break free.

When he next speaks, his voice is muffled, “I can’t sleepanymore.” He shakes his head, swallows and lets his arm fall to his side. Theworld starts to become hard to see. The tears distort his vision. “I know I don’thave to anymore, but…even if I could.I think I wouldn’t. I think I’m afraid to. I think if I sleep, I won’t wake upagain. Or—when I do wake up—I’ll wake up and the world’s different again—” –and you’redifferent again— “—and I’m afraid this time there won’t be anything I recognize.”

This time there willbe no one there in that uncertain future who still loves me.

Mikleo doesn’t say a word, but he listens. He stands thereon the precipice with Sorey, his expression hard to read.

“I lost…everything, Mikleo—evenwho I am—and I didn’t think thatwould happen.” He had thought so few things when he first accepted theresponsibility of being Maotelus’ vessel.

He should have thought more.

Sorey’s hands turns into a first and he sniffs. The tearscome faster now, and his voice turns shaky. “I’m not human anymore. I’m not the Shepherdanymore. I don’t know what I’m here foranymore. I don’t know why Maotelus brought me back as a seraph. I don’t knowwhy he let me keep my memories. I don’t—” –and perhaps this was the part he wasmost afraid of— “—I don’t even know if I’m still your best friend anymore, or if you still love me, because it’s been half of a millennia—and I don’t know what to d-do if—if I’m not—”

Mikleo’s hand touches his arm, and turns Sorey around toface him. “What do you mean you don’tknow if I still love you?” he asks, like it’s obvious.

And it flows out of Sorey; he could stop the tide if hetried. “I wasn’t there, Mikleo…! Forfive hundred years I slept, and I left you aloneright after Gramps died!”

He lets that sit in a hanging, awful silence, before it alltumbles forth, with a sudden fire and ringing pain that wasn’t there before.“Right after your mother died again—andthen me—” It’s a hard sob that breaks free. “I don’t know how you don’t hate me. I wonder if you do. I wonderwhy you don’t. I tossed the responsibility of the world on your shoulders when I decided to sleep, and I left you alone for—for forever, and I’m sorry! Iwasn’t there for you! I missed so much of your life—I missed countless birthdays—Imissed Rose and Alisha dying—I missed—!”

His throat gets too tight to talk, and he barely gets out,“I missed everything! I’m so sorry!”before he shakes too hard he can’t say another word.

Sorey sobs.

It’s unlike any other cry he can remember in his human life.It feels supremely inhuman, the wayhe feels like he’s crying from the depths of his soul and on out. He can’tremember crying this hard before, at a loss so deep and so grave and so sweeping.

But Mikleo doesn’t remove his hand from Sorey’s arm.

Instead, he pulls him closer. He wraps his arms aroundSorey.

And for the first time since waking up in this new andunfamiliar world, Sorey feels something like home.

“…I wasn’t alone, you know,” Mikleo whispers to him.

And Sorey clings to Mikleo, his arms wrapped tight aroundhis one anchor. He can’t form the words to respond back, but Mikleo continueson anyway, as if not expecting him to.

“When Gramps died? After the final fight?” He shakes hishead and Sorey can feel the soft movement of his chin against his shoulder. “Youdon’t have to feel like you abandoned me, because you didn’t, Sorey. Because of you and because of our journey together,I had friends who helped me afterwards to grieve him….and to grieve you. Rose, Alisha, Lailah, Zaveid—even Edna.”There’s a small rumble of a laugh in Mikleo’s chest. It’s so familiar, Soreyfeels more tears bubble to the surface. “They were there for me. And I wouldn’thave had them if it weren’t for you.”

Sorey shakes his head, but Mikleo doesn’t let him pull away.He tightens his hold, and he said again, “Yes.If you can believe it, I am gratefulfor you, and I don’t resent yourdecision, Sorey.”

He holds on for a moment longer, a beat of silence driftingbetween them, before he admits quietly, “I mean, yes, I was sad to not haveyou. Yes, I missed you.” Missed you so much that words cannot spanthe depths of that ache. “But I would never hold or have held that againstyou. Not in five hundred years. Not even in a million years.”

Sorey can feel Mikleo take his next breath, and he holds onto hear it. To feel it against his own chest. “You going to sleep was the onlyway to achieve what we’ve been dreaming about for all our lives up until thatpoint. And you know, maybe the reason you didn’t dream in all that time andmaybe the reason it’s so hard to sleep right now, Sorey, isn’t because you’reafraid to wake up. Maybe it’s because now, you have nothing to dream for.”

Mikleo loosens his hold and pulls back. Sorey looks up,lifting his head and tear-stained cheeks.

And Mikleo’s gentle smile that greets him is like the sun.

“…gosh, there’s so much more I want to tell you,” Mikleoconfesses to him, and he raises his hands from Sorey’s back to his face, tocradle the lines of his jaw with his own palms. His thumbs wipe away Sorey’stears.

Sorey sniffs. He raises a hand to cover one of Mikleo’s own,holding it to his cheek. Hope kindles in his chest at those words, a soft andlight-winged burn. Something to dream for, huh? “…y-yeah…?”

Mikleo’s smile widens. “Yeah,” he breathes back. “After all,it’s…all I’ve been dreaming about forthe past five hundred years. Talking to you again. Sharing space with youagain. Having the other half of me back.”

Sorey sucks in a sharp breath at those words. “…yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Sorey swallows hard. Despite all that Mikleo has said so far, despite all the promise of more that Mikleo wants to share with him too, the Shepherd-turned-seraph finds himself asking, “You—you mean still—”

“—Sorey.” And the single, familiar, chiding call of his namemeans so much more than any other word could. “I never stopped.”

A shuddering, shaky breath. A wet, incredulous laugh.

Sorey brings his forehead to meet Mikleo’s own, the risensun warm on their faces and their backs. And ironically, it’s him who feels released. It’s Sorey whofeels finally free of guilt and worry and shame.

“Not even in five hundred years?” he asks, breathless withthe impossibility of it.

But Mikleo always could do the impossible. And he alwaysdid.

“Not even in a million,” Mikleo promises.

The kiss they share tastes of home.

#zestiria #sormik #sorey #mikleo #tales of zestiria #seraph!sorey #mod krissey #krissey writes a thing #Anonymous

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tortuga-aak · 7 years

Text

Everyone asks me the same question about spending 4 days with Tony Robbins — here's what I tell them

Graham Flanagan/Business Insider

I interviewed and shadowed Tony Robbins over four days at his Fiji resort Namale.

For the last three decades, Robbins has been the premiere "performance coach," building a business empire and coaching clients like Paul Tudor Jones and Bill Clinton.

Robbins can be a polarizing figure, but I found him to be a genuine person with practical insights, not hollow positive thinking.

When I tell people that I spent four days with Tony Robbins, they always ask a version of the same question: "What is he really like?"

This can be asked with skepticism: "I remember his infomercials. He's just a con artist selling motivational speeches to desperate people, right?" Or they can be asked with reverence: "His lessons changed my life. Is he as inspirational in person? What did he teach you?"

I recently had the chance to travel to Robbins' Fiji resort Namale, where he was hosting the winners of Shopify's Build a Bigger Business competition, to form an opinion.

Robbins, who determined that his presentation and mentoring style was captured by a job he deemed "performance coach" at some point in the '80s, has been at it for almost 40 years now. In that time he's sold millions of books and audio tapes, and given thousands of presentations to packed crowds. He's coached people like Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, tennis champion Serena Williams, and even former US President Bill Clinton.

Robbins is as relevant today, having developed a massive online audiencee of fans who eat up articles and videos about his lessons.

It's hard to not have some sort of opinion of him at this point. Perhaps the reason why people can feel so strongly either way about him is because no one else really does what he does, and so it's hard to put him into a context where he's not just fitting an exaggerated archetype, for better or worse.

Before I first spoke Robbins during his 2014 book tour for his personal finance guide, "Money: Master the Game," I was unsure of what to expect.

As a little kid in the '90s, my dad would occasionally play Robbins' tapes in the car, and I remembered Robbins' deep, raspy voice more than the actual material. At one point, my dad asked our family to take a sort of personality test assessment from Robbins' website, and I objected on the grounds that it was all nonsense. This guy was monetizing meaningless motivation, I thought.

But about two decades later, I decided differently.

Tony Robbins genuinely wants to help.

When I met Robbins, I got a first impression that was confirmed over several more interviews and finally developed further during the Fiji trip: He's an incredible communicator with a magnetic personality and a genuine desire to help people. And rather than acting as a huckster, he's a shrewd businessman who knows how to develop products for both the masses and the wealthy. On top of that, he's invested in and assists 30 companies, directly running 12 of them — one of his latest projects outside of his coaching career is developing the upcoming Major League Soccer franchise in Los Angeles, LAFC.

I noted how practical his coaching approach is when seen in person. I'll admit that when I watched Joe Berlinger's 2016 Netflix documentary "I Am Not Your Guru," which followed one of Robbins' "Date with Destiny" multiday seminars, I felt that some of the interactions between Robbins and audience members seemed cult-like. Here was a god who appeared onstage to instantly solve the romantic, career, and spiritual problems of his enraptured followers.

But when such a long event is cut down to a narrative of just the dramatic scenes, it can take away some of the nuance of how Robbins connects with people. After spending four days hanging out with Robbins, talking about his career, observing coaching sessions he had with entrepreneurs and then discussing them with those entrepreneurs, I saw Robbins in a different light.

He's certainly one of those figures with, as it's been ascribed to the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, a "reality distortion field," that can suck you in, but even weeks after the trip, the documentary looked different to me on a second viewing.

The parts that previously looked to me like something out of a megachurch now looked like Robbins having fun with people who were letting loose rather than giving into a cult. Robbins seemed more like a rock star lighting up a crowd of fans than a televangelist preying on a weak audience.

It's this lack of context that can give a wrong impression of what Robbins actually does. For example, there's an old clip floating around YouTube, not from Robbins' official channel, with the title, "Tony Robbins — 30 years of stuttering, cured in 7 minutes!" It's portrayed like a David Blaine trick, and so further confirms extremist biases around Robbins in either direction. It's not worth getting into an investigation of it, but it seems much more likely that Robbins helped this stutterer with a sense of self-worth, and that increased confidence in speech projection could allow for a sort of coping mechanism to the stutter, rather than triggering an instant "cure."

In person, Robbins is quite practical. The heart of the vast majority of the stuff you'll hear him telling crowds or individuals can be found in books about behavioral psychology, leadership, entrepreneurship, and personal finance — his talent is connecting the dots on some of these ideas and relating them to people in an intimate way in a remarkably fast time. He knows how to read people well and speak to them in a way that works best for them.

Take his latest personal finance book, "Unshakeable" — there's no get rich quick scheme or dangerous advice in there. In fact, it's mostly the sort of stuff you could find on Vanguard's website. But with Robbins' energetic, simple way of writing, financial concepts that would make the average reader fall asleep suddenly become enjoyable to read.

Graham Flanagan/Business Insider

Wealthy, successful people pay him for his pragmatism.

He even takes this approach with his small batch of personal clients, which includes the billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, who pays him a $1 million annual fee and a performance fee tied to that year's profits. Jones hired Robbins back in 1993, when Jones had hit a rough patch after becoming famous on Wall Street for correctly predicting the 1987 stock market crash.

Robbins studied all aspects of Jones' behavior and decision-making, comparing how he behaved during upturns with how he behaved during downturns. "I uncovered for Paul Tudor what he was doing at his best," Robbins told Business Insider last year. "I got to interview all the people around him," Robbins said. "I watched films. There were patterns that Paul Tudor was doing when he was at his very best, and he had dropped them out."

Jones began making money again, and was convinced that Robbins had a big enough role in that turnaround that he kept kept him as his coach. The two have checked in every day since then.

"The amazing thing about Tony is how he can deconstruct what drives certain behaviors and help you develop a plan for action with carefully-considered risk and reward propositions," Jones wrote to me in an email.

Jones introduced Robbins to Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund. Dalio agreed to be interviewed for Robbins' first personal finance book. "He shocked me in his level of understanding because he had researched me and he had researched the investment area so well and he was so conceptual that the quality of his understanding was shockingly great, and the interview was very good," Dalio told me. Dalio became friends with Robbins after that interview, and flew to Robbins' Florida home to launch his book "Principles: Life and Work" with a Facebook Live interview in September.

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff often credits much of his success to studying Robbins' lessons from a young age, and he both meets with Robbins on a personal basis and regularly invites him to Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference.

There's a reason he's been able to inspire people for nearly 40 years.

A ticket to Robbins' three-and-a-half-day event "Unleash the Power Within" goes for $650 to $3,000, but he offers scholarships through his foundation (which, on a separate note has a 93.48 rating from the charity watchdog Charity Navigator), and unsatisfied customers can receive refunds for many of his products and programs. And aside from a paperback edition of his book, there's plenty of free material from him on the internet. My initial cynicism around his pricing has essentially changed to my belief that he knows his audience and knows how to maintain a massive business around himself.

Robbins isn't a therapist or a business consultant, but he's also a bit of both — combined with a football coach.

Marie Forleo, MarieTV founder and Oprah Winfrey collaborator, has worked with Robbins and said that he doesn't replace either, but is rather his own thing, and a valuable resource at that. "What Tony offers is something utterly unique that frankly, I've never been able to get from any therapist or consultant I’ve worked with," she told me. "And I've worked with a lot."

Billy Beck IIIIf the idea of going to a self-improvement seminar or reading a book with a title like "Awaken the Giant Within" turns you off, then what Robbins' does probably isn't for you. But after interviewing him several times over the course of three years and shadowing him for four days, I'm convinced that while Robbins definitely isn't for everyone, he's a sincere guy who truly lives what he preaches, and shows no signs of slowing down.

On our last day in Fiji, my colleague Graham Flanagan and I went to Robbins' private residence to grab some last minute footage. We hoped to stretch our promised 10 minutes to 15. Instead, as his team loaded up cars in preparation for their upcoming flight to Australia, he had his personal trainer (and friend) Billy Beck III grab an SUV and take us on a trip to "the waterfall."

As his team anxiously waited for us back at the house so as not to throw his schedule totally out of wack, Robbins took us on a tour of his favorite parts of his property, culminating at a beautiful waterfall. To our surprise, he dove in, pulled his shirt off, and, catching the camera, gave a Tarzan-like yell as the water crashed on him. Then it was my turn to jump in and try.

We drove back down the hill to his house, talking about the recurring coaching techniques he's built into a "tool box" over the years. Along the way, he chatted with some of the resort's workers and sipped from a coconut one gave him. Back at the residence, a collection of about 20 members of staff sang a traditional Fijian farewell song to Robbins before he left, which is what they do every time he leaves. Tears filled his eyes as he sang along.

Tony Robbins is a larger-than-life figure with plenty of quirks, but the person you're seeing is really him. You're either along for the ride or you're not.

NOW WATCH: Tony Robbins takes us on a private tour of his massive beachfront mansion in Fiji

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