B'Elanna, Neelix, Tuvok and Chakotay needed to star in an episode where they just talked about their different beliefs and approaches to spirituality/religion. Paired off and all together. I need to gain more insight. I need characterization and I need it to be messy.

TW: Discussion of CSA

I'm Sick of This Shit

Sorry Mod, this is off-topic and heavy stuff, but I'm fucking sick of this cutesy little internet trend of insinuating the worst about people over fucking nothing. This is going to get heavy but I'm not sitting down and shutting the fuck up this time.

Please put a read more here? I don't want to trigger anyone, I just want to try and give a wake-up call to people who do this shit.

I cannot believe I just read a callout post for someone as a "dangerous individual" and it's about them drawing some fictional character. Or rather, I can, because it keeps happening, and it's the dumbest new trend I've ever seen. As a victim of that specific kind of abuse? As in, someone who's fucking tapes have a hash in the ICAC database? (Do you even know what that means? Do you even care to find out? Do you actually care about victims or do you just want some moral gotcha over the person you don't like? Because I have a feeling it's the second one!) Someone who's been really fucking impacted and harmed by this shit in my actual flesh-and-blood real life?

Shut the fuck up. No, actively, antagonistically fuck you. How fucking dare you equate the seriousness of my and others' real-life physical harm to someone finding some stupid WORTHLESS, UNIMPORTANT, NOT REAL ANIME CHARACTER HOT. Who in the absolute fuck actually sincerely CARES?? Do you think authors who write about murder want to secretly kill people?? Do you think people who make horror movies can contact the dead? You are so obsessed about thought crimes and unimportant bullshit to the degree that you are accusing people of being the absolute worst type of person over anime. OVER ANIME! Who the fuck cares if someone draws a fake person doing something sexual. I, as a victim, do not give a shit. I don't care if they draw a fake person getting dismembered. I don't care if they write about a fake person being subjected to death by 1000 paper-cuts! Do you know why?

They're not fucking real!

Somewhere along the way people seem to have forgotten that the reason abuse is bad isn't because it's "icky" and "gross" and makes you uncomfortable to think about.

It's bad because it's fucking hurtful to people who are actually really alive. It's bad because if you cut a real person we fucking bleed. It's bad because if you do things to our body, it leaves fucking SCARS. It's bad because WE LIVE WITH THE FUCKING TRAUMA AND CONSEQUENCES OF WHAT IS DONE TO US YOU STUPID EMOTIONALLY BEREFT ASSHOLE, YOU FUCKING MORALLY STUNTED BRAT. DO YOU FUCKING COMPREHEND THAT? DO YOU ACTUALLY HAVE THE CAPACITY TO UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REAL LIFE AND FICTION? LIKE DO YOU? ARE YOU AN ACTUAL CHILD? BECAUSE IF SO, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ENGAGING IN THESE DISCUSSIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??? AND IF YOU ARE AN ADULT, FUCKING ACT LIKE ONE. This isn't a slag against someone who does have empathy issues or anything like that- ironically they tend to have no problem differentiating real life from fiction crimes, at least in my experience. No no, this is against the specific type of person who willfully chooses to libel against someone because of what usually boils down to """fandom crimes."""

I am in a support group for people like me. Do you know what we bitch about lately? You motherfuckers. Clogging the actual fucking hotlines by reporting drawings of cartoon characters, do you even realize that there are real consequences to your moral crusade? The time these people are forced to spend deleting anime art from their email literally costs real-life children -- AGAIN, REAL PEOPLE BEING HURT, YOU FUCKS -- precious time from getting the help they so desperately fucking deserve. Do you even think before you act? Do you? Do you fucking consider for a moment the real-world consequences of your behavior, or do you just raise your head and preen over your moralistic victory against the nastybadwrong person that wrote a story you don't like? I hate you.

Sure. Maybe this person who was submitted about really is the scum of the earth, an absolutely toxic bastard of an individual who does deserve a callout post. Wouldn't surprise me, because lots of shitty people are out there. So then, if that's the case, how come you didn't present that proof? Because all I read (images didn't work) is that they drew some anime character horny. People have been doing that for decades. The fucking Disney animators have drawn Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse going at it. Who gives a shit. It's fiction. You are having a moral panic over nothing and blinding yourself to the real consequences of your actions and I am here on my hands and knees BEGGING you to have more concern for people who actually exist than you do for your stupid goddamn anime boy.

I actually HATE people like you, I actively fucking do not feel SAFE around people like you. People who create fictional works, even dark and fucked up ones? They generally know the differences you seem to miss: that thoughts and actions are different things. There was a post going around where some guy got thrashed on social media for getting a leg amputation for fetishistic reasons where he was called every name in the book and probably some new ones yet to be added to the Merriam-Webster's dictionary. Turns out he actually had cancer and the amputation was for medically necessary reasons, but one (1) minor looked at THE TYPE OF ART HE DREW and made assumptions about his whole entire character from that. And thus someone going through some incredibly emotionally challenging shit was forced to further stomach the trauma of an internet hate mob because of baseless accusations just like these. Don't fucking do that. That shouldn't even need to be said! And yet. So I'll say it again. Don't! Fucking! Do that! Fuck!

This is wildly out of the scope of this blog and I'm really sorry to Mod for having to see it, but I'm sick of seeing this everywhere online, I do not need it in my fucking safe space hobby. Actively go fuck yourself if you do this or participate in this. If you care about victims- if you have actual compassion for people who are real, and don't just want to control how others portray fictional characters for reasons of moral outrage, then don't do this. And if you've done this in the past, just... fucking try to do better from here on out, at least. The world is fucked up enough without needing to rip each other apart over, and I cannot stress this enough, goddamn cartoons.

And if I get sassed in the comments as "not a real victim" or some shit, go ahead. I've heard it before, I don't care. I've been told by people in my life that what happened to me was 1) a misunderstanding 2) deserved because I in some way asked for it 3) that I'm lying for attention, etc etc. Does not matter that mine was one of the cases that actually made it to court and resulted in a sentencing... victim-blaming is incredibly ingrained in my country's culture. I honestly don't care if I'm believed or not, I just... want to say my piece. I want to confess, to air my grievances, with a current trend everyone on the internet and this hell-site in specific. So, thank you for reading if you have, and fuck you if you dismissed it all because your precious fictional little meow meow matters more to you than the victims of the real-life atrocities you're so motivated baselessly to accuse people of perpetrating.

And mod, stay safe and practice self-care. To all the victims, I hope your abusers die horribly. You deserve the world.

~Anonymous

Mod: thank you so much anon for your response, nothing is out of scope here (kinda, I like tangents, just need to follow the rules too) so anons, don't be afraid of expressing yourself as you so rightly did here.

i don't get it. Favorability system= gameplay where we highten the character we wanna spend time with. Favorability system isn't equal to no canon gsd?

That's gameplay. And other one is an event. Sure its birthed because of that mechanic but but that's not how it works even in otome games?

I think what nojima is saying here is, technically all gsd are semi canon. Separate this from main story. But I still opt there's canon because most likely it'll be referenced in part 3. Would tifa after contemplating it's puppet cloud or real cloud get hurt or question the kiss / "not one bit" or is it non existent? Like that never happened? That's just jarring and strange? Cloti kiss is too huge and a big deal. The story pace since remake also talks about Cloti. It makes no sense for it to be anything else. Unless gsd is just that unimportant an event that whoever is fine? Which i think is wrong. That's just a cop out way to answer.

Favorability mechanic 3 choices is ❌. Take with a grain of salt (although there's still insight here, like way of talking or possibility of being Rude).

All gsd are semi canon. All are Totally Platonic, except Tifa's.

But there is only one canon to the main scenario, that would be Tifa. The one who kept being repeated in almost every gsd.

What they're saying is none of the events are superior to the other and one date did occur but they're not stating which is canon.

The events that happen on the dates are canon to the characters personalities, but again, you don't know which date he went on, so they all become irrelevant to the events that happen before and after it.

All you do know is that in Aerith's she literally confessed and Cloud rejected her, then later the rejection is repeated in her "dream date" which is set in a world where she has no responsibility to the planet, there's no Sephiroth, Zack or Tifa to consider their feelings or actions or interference and yet Aerith still doesn't know if she likes Cloud romantically, while he literally friendzones her again.

Basically no matter the world or situation, Cloud will never love her, and she will never have definitive feelings for him the way Tifa does since she was 13.

Reality check time: Is it okay, given that I'm Christian (basically, weirdly--I don't think gods exist but I think the religious traditions I grew up with are personally useful to me so I follow most of them), to feel REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE when posts go around Jumblr that are all about how ex-Christian atheists only exist because of a particular feature of Christian-dominated culture? Because I just read a post that said "you're all supercessionists" and I feel so uneasy.

I can only speak for myself and my own becoming an atheist (and later deciding religious practice is good for me even though I'm pretty sure God is something we made up, and therefore it's random and unimportant which one anyone worships if at all.)

But for me, it wasn't so much "I don't like this religion because it tells me not to be gay and kinky. Therefore I dislike all religion."

It was

"I'm already not sure there's a god, and therefore uneasy anyway, but WHY does god tell me not to be gay and kinky?"

"Tradition."

"What's the value of tradition?"

"...what kind of a question is that?"

"Oh, I'm doing that neurodivergent thing where you say a concept-word and I don't understand it and we can't even talk because you assume I do. 'Tradition' is weird meaningless neurotypical for 'There is a script. I don't care how it got here. It is my script.'"

"Yes?"

"Then fuck 'tradition.' Scripts should not be arbitrary."

"Whoa, you're scary and spiteful.... Say, what do you think of other religions?"

"Do they use 'tradition?'"

"That's pretty much all they are, if you don't think gods are real."

"Then I do not like them."

While it's true that for some reason, queer Jews don't seem to do the "Why is this rule here?" "Tradition." "Then tradition is bad." thing, I... feel like the queer Jews who DO find value in tradition come up with all these weird explanations for what the rest of us are doing to avoid "I'm neurodivergent, and no one explained what 'a tradition' is in a way that isn't hurtful. So I decided 'traditions' are bad, unless people can prove they are useful. Like having three meals a day--it's not necessary, but it works well for many humans, so it ended up just worthwhile to tell all the humans to do things that way, so now you know what it means that 'she's at lunch.'"

If I didn't know for a fact that MANY of the people saying this stuff on Jumblr are themselves autistic, I'd say it's that thing where neurotypical people keep using a word, and they think you must understand that word because you've heard it in context enough times that you can use it, but really you don't know what people are actually getting at and you're pantomiming, and the people Discoursing don't know that and are just hostile to neurodivergence and coming up with all sorts of weird "why they're like that" that are anything but "they don't know what this means."

I returned to religious practice, but even that's in line with this--I discovered in a tough time in my life that religious messaging about being loved unconditionally helped me to feel better when other things didn't, so I decided I wanted to hear it more often. It also helped to remind me to be kind and helpful to other humans.

Thus, for me, Christianity turned out to be a useful tradition. I didn't get the Unconditional Love from real people I knew, so I made up a guy and decided he feels that way. About me and also about other people who are struggling who I want to help but can't unconditionally love because, uh, I have a personality.

I'm less judgy of other religions now because even if they don't sound like useful traditions to ME, I can see why they'd be useful to others maybe. (I personally don't get the idea of religious law; life has enough rules without me taking on more of them, especially if some of them are "don't have gay sex" or "ritually cleanse yourself after gay sex as it makes you unclean." I get that other people can ignore that one, but if I agree to a set of rules I agree to all of them, and I want to have gay sex. The only cleansing I want to do is pee afterward. But I gather this doesn't work the same way for a lot of people who happily follow religious law, so.)

But I do not think I'm any closer to understanding why some people accept traditions without having personal reasons to do so. I just think that's part of my neurodivergence, honestly, and that many if not most "Reddit atheists" are neurodivergent in a similar way, which is why until I started noticing them being dicks and going redpill (just another tradition! Why are you gendertrads?!) I felt I'd found My People.

And I certainly don't think I'm secretly supersessionist. I think a religious tradition that puts less stress on Laws and Proper Tradition Following is better for ME, because of MY BRAIN (and also probably just that I grew up with it so I get it.)

It's not superior to any other piece of fiction with a big fandom that people use to improve their lives (by which I mean "any other religion").

on femcels and women's right to be horny (and have feelings in general)

i understand how being voluntarily celibate can be empowering especially for het women, but both men and women are in denial and believe women cannot be involuntarily celibate, even though the person who started the term was a woman named Alana. unfortunately now Alana's movement isn't about shy late bloomers, it's about stupid misogynist hateful serial killer rapist men. i hate that they took this term away from women.

why does everyone talk about Elliot Rodger but not Christine Chubbuck? why is a hateful misogynist serial killer tragic and overanalyzed and moralized and even worshipped while a sad, lonely woman who killed herself unimportant? in fact, many of the comments on a post about her suicide call her ugly or a horrible person, or worse, say they want to see the video, even asking where they can watch it. women's pain isn't real, it's just entertainment.

the way people talk about women's experience of romance and sexuality is very isolating for me. there's this belief that all women are swimming in dick and lusty DMs and men willing to drop everything for us and someone asked us to prom in high school and it's not true. i wish we could have more discussions about women who are late bloomers, women who are horny and unwanted and undesirable, women who are seen as below 'normal women' in a patriarchial society. if you aren't desirable, men may not see you as a sexual utility but they will still see you as free therapy, free to offload work on, and a resource to 'practice on' to learn to court and charm 'real women.' men ask for my number to pick my brain and drain me. to ask me to do their thinking and their work for them.

ugly women are invisible. sometimes this invisibility to men (and women) keeps me safe around them. sometimes it makes me want to curl up into a ball and cry because i've felt so inconsequential my whole life. like sometimes people see right through me.

i am not even that fucking ugly! i am black, and i'm flat chested with no ass, and my face is a little asymmetrical, and my top teeth need braces so i have a better bite, but i'm not even that fucking ugly! i dress nice, and i wear makeup (sorry radfems, i'm weaning myself off), and i smell nice! i'm not even that fucking ugly! i have reverse body dysmorphia or something. i look in the mirror when i've feeling like shit, and think wow, i'm actually kind of cute. would i get followers on social media? no. but i'm not even that fucking ugly.

it's deadly to your self-esteem to know that men would fuck anything and you're below anything. you are not just a woman, which is an object, you are a defective object. it's hard to talk about this because people see sexual exploitation as wrong, but don't care about emotional exploitation. when men aren't sexually active, it's a crisis and we have to talk about legalizing prostitution because women are resources not people, when women aren't sexually active, it doesn't matter because women don't have needs and feelings. especially as a black woman, i am expected to give give give. the only reason my body is not one of things i'm expected to give is because no one wants it. everything else? give give give. ever read the giving tree?

and everyone says well if it bothers u so much there has to be a guy willing to fuck you (use you as masturbation sleeve) somewhere in the world! after all u are warm body w pussy someone will come along to use u as blowup sex doll! go on tinder and sell ur body for $3.50 coffee! you want to have mutally enjoyable sex with someone who cares about you and maybe loves you and doesn't just see u as wet holes w legs? fuck you, uppity bitch! no wonder you're single!

u tried asking men out? they said no? well u must have went for 6 foot 9 figures 12 inch dick man? is that right? no? ofc you did, lying bitch!

no one would ever say this shit to a man. keep your head up bro! these hoes ain't loyal! lemme tell u what, take a shower and get a job and the bitches be flocking to u! i was just like u bro, then i met my hot wife! get ur passport and get out this country, these modern women are ran-through bitches, find urself a submissive traditional woman from (insert Slavic or Asian country).

the idea of femcels, especially dissatisfied femcels, makes terminally online men so so angry. because it suggests that women do have feelings and needs. and we shouldn't. femcels are transgressive. we're not supposed to exist. even funnier, it suggests that some of them whining and raving, have actually been turning down perfectly good women who don't fit their porn-informed standards.

if i say i want to have a romantic experience at least once before i die, i'll be told i'm just brainwashed or dick-struck (never seen one in real life) or some other kind of delusional. you don't really need it. you don't really want it. what is with the obsession of forcing women into self-denial? nothing tastes as good as skinny feels! stop fantasizing about getting to have a sloppy makeout session, you don't really want it. of course women are better than men at reducing their carbon footprint, we're used to limiting our consumption.

but it's not true, i fucked myself up already believing i didn't deserve to experience desire and have a sexuality because i was too ugly and you're not pushing me back there again. being horny is my right, i'm human too.

Do you feel Awakening's plot was let down by the need to be a male power fantasy, IE: kill lots of ugly people without remorse, get praised by everyone, all the woman want the avatar, ETC?

hmmmmm. good question. I don't think it's a power fantasy, per se - FE heavily ascribes to the design philosophy of "only beautiful people can be good", which is horrible for a lot of reasons, but I feel in this aspect it's plot structure is more hampered by the fact that it is a video game, and every chapter needs a Battle.

That's how you get basically every single generic brigand. There's a lull in the action, as characters talk, get to know each other, travel to the next relevant location. But you can't put any important battles inbetween, because those moments need to be slow - thus, an enemy who could just as easily be removed from the story without changing it.

In another game I like, Lord of Heroes, it's almost a running gag - the protagonist sees someone important, and wonders when they'll have to fight the next new guy, cuz We Need Boss Battles, even when the characters have no real need to fight each other. This is how you get comical misunderstandings only resolved after trashing each other, or your typical "I need to test your strength first" shtick.

These characters are engineered to be unimportant, for their deaths to mean nothing except some extra exp. It's just a problem baked into every FE game's chapter structure.

To compare to another SRPG, Triangle Strategy - you don't have plot unimportant combat in the story, ever. It's all optinal. Like yeah, there's bandits now and again, but the bandits are actually reoccuring characters, one of whom you can recruit, so they are made to be enjoyed as characters and sympathized with. The bandit characters even make good points sometimes! There's a part in the game where the main characters are involved in a black market smuggling deal, and bandits catch them transporting illegal goods. So, the bandit questions, what makes you rightous in this situation? Why is it right when you're doing it, but wrong when she does? What, because your goal is noble? What does it matter when you've sunk to the rock bottom of morality already?

However, Tristrat has an entirely different plot structure to FE. It also has a chapter system, but not every chapter includes combat. Some chapters only feature cutscenes, or exploration segments.

The game is just set up differently in a way that lets the plot breathe without forcing conflict. Combat gameplay isn't the main draw or a necessity. I'd fucking adore Tristrat if it had no combat whatsoever - It's the opposite of FE. Plot doesn't exist because combat needs to happen, no, combat only exists because the plot occasionally necessitates it.

Okay, this has been my triade on the disposable enemy archetype of Generic Brigand. To the next point - well, is Awakening a male power fantasy?

From the main plot? Not really. Like, yeah, sure, the avatar is the only person who can marry whoever. That's to give the player the opportunity to romance their favorite, I won't deny it. But the main plot itself doesn't have anyone fawn over Robin (besides Chrom). Hell, you could even go without finding out about Tharja's devotion to them if you benched her and never read her supports. Since her whole thing with Robin isn't included in her recruitment chapter at all. That utterly blindsided me when I played, cuz all I knew about her was "Robin simp." and then she didn't even simp robin in her first appearance.

If we're talking "recruiting lots of girls to your army constitutes a harem" then like, every FE game would be a harem. They're not. The game even forces you to be monogamous. I'd argue Fates is worse in this, because characters start falling in love and blushing profusely by A-support, even when they're already married, so everyone is Schrödinger's Cheating. In Awakening support chains, there's never really any romance outside of the sudden S support marriage proposal. I'll admit S-supports are well put together in recontextualizing the previous supports as falling in love, but all of them can also be left at A for a perfectly fine platonic dynamic between all characters.

Robin themself doesn't emphasize their own strength and intellect much, even if it is impressive in the world of the game. It's all about their bonds with others, how others give them strength and hope and all that good stuff. Robin is a well-developed character with positives and negatives. They're not just a blank slate. Hell, man, there's a whopping three choices you can make in the plot, and only one of them actually changes anything, and the first one is actually a choice for Chrom instead. Robin has their own thoughts and feelings and a great arc and if you ignore that in favor of "they're just me fr" then that's a you problem tbh.

You can argue till the cows come home about beauty standards and colorism in FE enemy design, fuck knows that I can freely admit a lot of Awakening enemy designs are racist as all hell, but that's sadly not unique to Awakening. Generic Brigands are ugly to signal that they're unimportant and morally corrupt and it's fine to kill them because only pretty people have morals. The only black people in Awakening are the shadowy desert cultists and the leaders of the "barbaric meathead" nation, so go figure what the game was trying to signal on that front. It's just shit design.

Awakening's finale actually makes me think of your typical fairytale hero story, and it's a great subversion of "the knight in shining armor kills the evil dragon to save the land." In that way, it's also a great subversion of other FE stories, since that summary is a lot of them in a nutshell.

Binding Blade did the subversion first though. Grima is just Idunn 2 (actual bastard edition) and I adore them for it (that much is obvious).

So like TLDR no, I don't think Awakening is a male power fantasy, because the main plot itself doesn't focus on romance or how awesome the main character is whatsoever. Less power fantasy, more "power of friendship" fantasy.

who cares about fandom. it's shows. shows aren't important american

This ask is really confusing to me. Are you calling me American as an insult? If so thats super funny to me since I most certainly am not American!

I know this is just someone being a dick for the sake of being a dick, but I will take this ask sincerely because I have the freedom of choice to do so. Who does care about fandom? Lots of people actually.

You know what is a huge and important fandom to lots of people worldwide? Football. Maybe you don't see it the same way because it's not about some dumb TV show, but its still a fandom. They even have different factions for different teams, and it gets weirdly nationalistic during global competition events. So who cares about fandom? Well, for football fans, I'd say about 5 billion people.

But limiting it to those unimportant shows anon has chosen to sneer at, well, in recent years comic cons around the world have reported a total of 1.8million+ attendees each year. And that is just a fraction of the fans who can afford to attend these conventions (plus these are only the big conventions not including the likes of Creation cons). Regardless of how much you sneer at it, fandom is huge and a huge part of many peoples lives. Fandom has brought people community, support, connection, and a mountain of creativity at its heart.

On a personal note, some of my best friends were met through Supernatural Fandom. We still talk regularly to this day and I try to meet up with them as often as possible even though we are all dotted all over Europe and America. Without Supernatural, a so called unimportant show, I wouldn't have those real life connections which mean so much to me and have made my life better.

Ask any actor from one of those unimportant shows, and they will tell you how they have met with fans who literally found reason to keep living through the shows that they loved, that the struggles and journeys of the characters they are passionate about literally saved their lives. Tell those people that fandom isn't important, that their shows are meaningless eh? Tell that to someone who was thinking of ending their own life but chose to keep living because they saw how important that was to their fave characters.

The Supernatural actors put out an actual crisis hotline to support fans struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. They started campaigns like Always Keep Fighting and You Are Not Alone because they saw how much their fandom relied on them and the fandom they were apart of, because the show was their only escape from a harsh reality. Misha Collins was able to get his Random Acts charity off the ground through the support of fandom, and to this date Random Acts has succeeded in supporting communities worldwide, including providing disaster relief in Haiti and building a school in Nicaragua.

So much for an unimportant show, when its very existance has spurned a crisis network and a charity that continue to support and save lives globally.

And thats JUST Supernatural. There is so much work done by fandoms everywhere, for all different shows. Fandom is Community. And when communities get together they create wonderful things, they support each other, and sometimes, they save lives.

Who are you to say community is unimportant? Who are you anon? a user of Tumblr.com, the fandom website, to make such a bold and wrong claim? Television is storytelling, and storytelling is one of the oldest art forms. It makes us human, connects us with our past and speaks to our hearts and souls. We share our love and joy and passion through storytelling. It is where we find escape from the humdrum of our daily lives, it is where true magic lies. There is nothing unimportant about that.

Can I ask what a realist is? You've described theo as one and I tried looking it up but the definitions are going right over my head, so I was wondering if you could help?

I described Theo as a realist because he described himself as a realist. This is his line from The Last Chimera (5x11):

Theo: I'm not the bad guy, Stiles. I'm just a realist. I'm a survivor. If you knew the things that I know…

But to be fair, in my opinion, he is not actually a realist. He, like many other villains both in fiction and in real life, is in my view a pessimistic fatalist. Of course, I'm going to have to explain what I mean by this.

A realist evaluates events and probable outcomes by analysis of observable factors. To ground it in a common scenario, if there is a battle against hostile forces approaching, the realist will examine how many members each side has, what supplies they have, what the external environment has, the respective training each side has received, and even their morale before predicting an outcome or planning a strategy.

What a realist doesn't take into account are things such as the morality of the outcome. This doesn't mean that they won't have an abstract goal in mind, but they don't believe that those abstract goals, on either side, will have an impact on the outcome of the battle. Virtue, in and of itself, doesn't matter to success or failure, and the ethics of the tactics employed are irrelevant. Again, this doesn't mean that these things are unimportant to the realist; it simply means that they don't think they affect the outcome.

The audience can see why Theo thinks he is a realist; he believes he is aping his mentors. As he tells Donovan in Condition Terminal (5x04), "you see, these guys, they believe in numbers." And he certainly talks about practical decision making, such as when he mentions allying with the Soviets in WWII to Scott and Stiles in Amplification (5x15), persuades Malia to let him help her in The Sword and the Spirit (5x14), negotiates with Deucalion or betrays Tracy in Apotheosis (5x20).

But he really isn't. In my conception, a pessimistic fatalist is an individual who assumes that the outcome of any event or scenario will be the most negative possible unless measures are taken to prevent it. It's very popular among villains and antagonists because it can cloak wicked actions as moral rectitude: "we have to do what's necessary." For example, individuals who think this way always go for the kill, because that's the only way for them to assure a positive outcome. To them, any consideration of ethics is suicidal foolishness; ruthlessness is required for survival.

This isn't realism. A realist won't assume that all possibilities that cannot be controlled will tend toward the worst result, and thus does not include that perception in their evaluation of events. A realist doesn't dismiss the possibility or effectiveness of, for example, negotiation if it conforms to other measurable factors.

Theo believes that things will always end badly unless he makes them end well. That's how Deucalion is able to deceive him into disregarding the usefulness of Belasko's talons, because there is a possibility that the talons wouldn't work, and so Theo assumed that they wouldn't. That's why he kills Tracy after she suggests that they take a few days to recover, because throughout the range of possible actions he could take, killing her for her power and to restore himself is the most ruthless. He can't consider that he might get another chance with Tracy's help because he is not thinking realistically, he's acting on the idea that he's already lost control and thus the worst possible result is destined to occur.

Theo's story isn't the first time that pessimistic fatalists have become villains on Teen Wolf. Derek's villain arc in Season 2 is entirely fueled by this perspective, look at the exchange with Scott on the lacrosse pitch in Venomous (2x05). Scott was wrong in his analysis of why both Lydia and Jackson survived and didn't turn, but the facts remain the facts. Derek doesn't know why this happened, and one of them may be the kanima, and a realist wouldn't plan strategy on what they don't know. But Derek is motivated by fear, not reason, and when he ends up shouting "I can't let her live!" even though he has no rational basis for that decision, he's exhibiting pessimistic fatalism.

Scott McCall, on the other hand, isn't a realist either. He's what I like to call an optimistic pragmatist. He does allow concepts of right and wrong to influence his decision making, but he does it without denying objective reality. That's why he's willing to replace Gerard's medication with mountain ash as a fail safe in case he can't stop Gerard from forcing Derek to bite him. It's why he's willing to work with the Alpha Pack to stop Jennifer, because "I don't think I can stop her without them." It's why he plants Deucalion in Theo's camp, and why he uses the dead bodies of the deputies in an attempt to save Jiang and Tierney. There were more practical decisions in each of those scenarios, decisions a realist would have taken, but Scott will not reject his core principle that all life has value.

It is this optimistic pragmatism that makes Scott less popular than he should be with the fandom, because pessimistic fatalism tends to be a very popular point of view, especially in power fantasies. When confronted by enemies, many can only see the worst possible result, and so, to them, the only rational response to a threat is war-to-the-knife, lethal and final force. That's why it often appears in fan-fiction that the author has their mouthpiece despise Scott for giving "second and third" chances to their enemies, even though these are enemies that Scott has beaten repeatedly. For example, a realist would see that is Scott has out-thought and out-fought Gerard repeatedly, then there is a chance that he will out-think and out-fight him again. They would not automatically jump to the idea that it's only a matter of time before the threat of Gerard destroys them all.

I hope this answers your questions. Feel free to ask follow ups.

tbfh, i can't stand loa twitter 😭

like so many are discussing on how to manifest and also bullshit on neville. I don't like it 😇

it makes me upset that they talk down states and how its unimportant, i mean ofc u affirming mindlessly 24/7 is gonna work, but u may ask why?? bc everyone told u and u built that assumption that affirming mindlessly will still get ur desires!

also I don't like how ppl on there make everything abt affirming..... atp idek if they're aware that it's only a method and affirming is supposed to get u into that state which then manifests. see states again, everything is a state. I feel like the reason ppl/beginner struggle to manifest is bc they don't understand the concept of manifesting. the moment u understand that methods are supposed to get u into the wish fulfilled, which makes it real in ur 4d and then THAT STATE is what produces ur desire in the 3d, ur manifesting self concept is perfect.

also the only affirmations I see on Twitter everyday are sp affirmations, it's just..... funny?😭 like man everyone there on my timeline spirals abt sp's and reposts tumblr posts without credit but loa tumblr is supposed to be bad..... chile anyway

I'm honestly glad that I started with loa here on tumblr and not Twitter, the character limits make my blood boil as well if im being fr

it's funny i got this ask today bc i just noticed last night that people are finally beginning to discuss states on loatwt and how important it is in manifesting! so, progress!!

also i believe mindless affirming works the same way subliminals do. even if your conscious mind isn't paying attention to your affirmations, your subconscious mind can still hear it and picks up on it. but i think that actually paying attention to your affirmations can be a good tool for shifting your state and getting your conscious mind acquainted with the idea of having your desire. if you're mindlessly affirming 24/7 and have a shitty mental diet the rest of the time, you might not see success. this was actually my problem a few years ago, so i speak from experience.

i do agree with you abt the affirming thing. it really irks me when people on there say affirming isn't a technique/a method. their argument is that all of your thoughts are affirmations and you're thinking all day long and therefore can never stop affirming--which is true--but i definitely think they're getting a little confused. when we say "affirming" in the community, we clearly are referring to the act of repeating affirmations. like saying "i am rich i am rich i am rich" over and over again on a loop. that is not natural (for most people). Before you knew about the law, you were still able to manifest using your thoughts, but they were your natural thoughts, not ones that you manufactured with the purpose of either manifesting your desire/getting you in the feeling of the wish fulfilled. so i definitely think that affirming is a technique.

however, we are thinking thoughts all day long, and those thoughts have the same effect as affirmations. that's why we tell you to go on a mental diet. as long as you're keeping up a mental diet, you don't have to repeat affirmations if you don't want to. and a lot of people on loatwt seem unable to differentiate the two.

someone replied to one of my tweets saying that it was impossible to manifest without affirming and whoever suggested you should do that probably hasn't been able to manifest shit. which is just so.....

first of all it was a weird thing for them to comment bc my post never said not to affirm or that affirming didn't work, and we all know (over here at least) that i recommend affirming all the time and never say it doesn't work, bc it does! but second of all, i have also shared multiple times on my page that whenever i finally started consciously manifesting it's because i stopped affirming. i still kept up a strict mental diet, but i was no longer repeating affirmations. so yeah, it's 100% possible. i mean, some people manifest just by visualizing or scripting. affirming is not necessary to manifest, and it's definitely a limiting belief to assume that you have to affirm 5 million times a day in order to manifest. (which is essentially what i tweeted and everyone got mad at me lol)

as for the focus on manifesting sps on loatwt, tbh i'm kinda glad to see it. i'm not currently manifesting an sp, but i learned about loa in 2019, and my main goal for 2019-2020 was manifesting an sp. and nooo one talked about it in the communities i was in. loatwt and loa tumblr didn't exist at the time, so i was on the loa reddit and neville goddard reddit and omg. it was mainly just a bunch of middle aged women and men who were SO mean. they were mainly manifesting money and health and jobs, which is all good! we've all been there! but if you were manifesting an sp or appearance changes they were soooo mean to you. especially since at the time i was an 18/19 year old girl, and they looked down on me sooo heavy for that. they would always tell me to move on from manifesting my sp bc "i was too young" and "i'd find someone new" etc. and if you were manifesting appearance changes, they'd tell you you just needed to manifest confidence instead and accuse you of wanting to change your face/body to appeal to the male gaze and make boys like you. and it was just so???? it was so disgusting.

so all that to say that i'm glad that there is a community on loatwt for people who are manifesting sp's without judgement. since i feel like 80% of them are young girls manifesting sps. and other parts of the internet definitely have misogynistic takes on young girls wanting love and relationships, which is gross imo.

the posting of tumblr posts without credit pisses me tf off. someone with like 2000 followers posted one of my posts with my username cropped out and i quote-retweeted it saying it was by remcycl333 on tumblr and she just ignored me and never gave me credit or acknowledged me at all. just such odd behavior. i've called it out many times but i still see people doing it.

i love my loatwt tl bc i've made lots of friends i adore on there, and i loveee twitter circle its so much fun, but every now and then i see shit that pisses me off. another thing that i've noticed with loatwt is that a lot of them have not been able to grasp the fact that everyone manifests in a different way. and that our assumptions about manifesting affect the way we manifest. for example the person i said earlier who said it was impossible to manifest without affirming. like they said that to ME of all people hahahaha it made me laugh

anyway! i still enjoy it there but i'm hoping they can have some discourse on there that we've had on here like, a year ago. such as the importance of states and how affirming isn't the only way to manifest. cuz i do see a lot of petty and useless arguments on there simply bc two people manifest in different ways. and they're always subtweeting each other it gets on my damn nerves

sorry for typing so much i just wanted to share my thoughts! <3

for real billions being like "oh axe can't change enough....wendy can though....let's think about why that is?" like okay i'm questioning and i'm thinking. i'm shrugging to maggie siff as she talks about "well how much can you [my character...] have changed in a way that matters if you're still choosing the same things, doing the same things, you know?" like yeah i do know. oh so wendy isn't married to chuck anymore or working with axe. she's just having Nuclear Family Dinners with chuck and inviting axe to still perhaps formally have business ties with her again. she doesn't change enough either. but billions Says she does, because billions keeps choosing the same thing, which is that wendy, because she is so Epic (and because she is a woman? thinking about feelings, and managing and mitigating the shitty men around her as her responsibility and movingly meaningful role in this Life as her destiny?) she must win and get the best ending, and to make it better than even these central men's endings, it's like, well, gotta believe she was better at changing!

like, around here on billions, in many more cases than not it matters so so much less what any of these roles Do and more that they were simply Born Epic.

rian does so little of any meaning that you could excise the role entirely and, if you really want to replace some unimportant affect there, very very easily do so with other roles. this is just all the more obvious in s7. she didn't do anything. she sure didn't change. she was as much or more of a bully than dollar bill, despite billions supposedly countering this by just having rian call bill a bully, and, b/c she's Epic, she can't be factually incorrect. she's not simply Too Kind for all this b/c of anything she's ever done, which contradicts this. she gets to leave and pursue a generically epic winner goal and state further aspirations for another (romance!! b/c what else could a winner want? why wouldn't a winner obtain this? billions asks rhetorically but i'm grabbing it by the scruff of the neck wielding a knife like okay you've invoked this with words, Let's Devote Words to talking about what your precious little Romance is lmao. and then to why people would want it. and then to why they wouldn't get it. and then what) and it doesn't matter when she says things completely contradictory to prior said things, which billions doesn't have her do due to this being an approach or tendency of the character's, but because anything she says at any moment Is True, b/c she's epic, so she's factually correct, and she's just made to say shit so that it's explained to us why they wrote material for her in that moment, b/c she's sure not a character nor doing anything important nor driving her own plots whether it ties in to more prominent characters or not. well of course taylor Must show up to be our ticket to bearing witness to rian's deserving exit, not b/c of anything she did, in spite of many things she did, b/c she's epic. check out all these great things rian has to say to them. file not found. i'm sorry they didn't write a character here instead.

what does wags do? virtually nothing, besides hinder things, like most of what wendy does except even worse. why is he here. why is he even motivated to be here, so allegedly important to this group effort. he doesn't change. billions gives him the episode winston, who wasn't born epic, was never gonna get, b/c epic wags deserves as much. billions laughs and goes haha yes yeah that was mean, right. that was shitty and immoral and cruel. but it was good! because wags is epic. so we had fun. winston is not us, anyways. did we think it Meant Anything for winston to decide to quit, despite how much he wants and hopes for from taylor, or rian, or anyone else around here? if there Was any reflection thusly, it was more than winston Deserves, b/c he's not epic, so he deserves bad things, including to be ignored / disposed of / forgotten, b/c we recognize he doesn't have worth or quality, even as billions also always informs us that winston's correct about how good he is and how valuable that is. that alignment can't be Right, b/c he's not epic. some call it confidence, billions calls it arrogance, and what are the odds they don't just consider this to be first and foremost finally, inevitably, crumpling him up and throwing him away while everyone admires wags' sunk shot in doing so? he's an object being set up, wags is the Star Player spiking him into the ground, b/c winston's not epic, and wags is. winston's always been written as the ignorantly ableist perspective on all the autistic people around who are inevitably encountered & turned into the Insistently Annoying Charmless Weird Nerd archetype or what all, diagnosed as Offputting, as Rude, as Arrogant, whatever projections made about someone who must surely be so inconsiderate and hostile. and then they Just Never Change, while the perspective on people who are "recognized" as autistic is that what's best for them is to exorcise as much of that autism as possible, which is "any," by trying to abuse someone into compliance. which is how all the epic people around winston treat him, at "best." never any conflict for rian over treating him just like that, and writing him off from her ambitions for her life b/c she, like us, recognizes someone who's below her station, and Not Epic, thus bad. and there could never be any conflict there, b/c she's epic, so of course she can exit on her own terms b/c she's just too kind and deserves too much, or for taylor ignoring and disposing of this asset in winston if not also this alliance, b/c they're epic, so of course they can take anything from winston and we have no further questions about this, no consequences for wags doing this to someone, doing nothing for anyone, b/c he's epic, and we relate to and value the epic people. and we laugh at winston b/c he's not epic, and can't be, with his being autistic, his having his body, and we are satisfied in knowing that dooms him forever and we are now forgetting he exists after we take what can be used from him because how could we care? we're too epic for that.

meanwhile taylor Must praise wendy's role in their life, despite that all wendy's Done is be their intermittent saboteur much more reliably than she's sometimes decided to indeed try to help them, because hello? wendy's epic. she deserves to have fellow epic people say positive things about her no matter what, which is the extent of a Valuable Relationship. preceding the "you really live like this" farce that was ostensible peak heartwarming romantic moments with axe b/c of his stalking and sabotage and, truly the heart of romance, possessiveness; it was that s4 farce that axe was being heartwarmingly supportive by throwing some money at a problem of hers to direct her life without asking after having used her as a pawn to get revenge on his gf, but also that before this his input and moral support about the professional ethics issue was to dismissively say to wendy that, well, she's epic. and wags eventually incredibly doing the same thing but with all the herculean effort of taking her for drinks or whatever. And That Is Relationships. epic recognizing epic.

and that was also all of Billions(tm)

I have to say this, you're going a long way to justify an abuser... I get that you like him but to say he is not a villain... got it

but i am not justifying it. i did not say it wasn't morally reprehensible. i did not say it was not horrible. i said it didn't automatically turn a character into a villain; if that's your premise, there are only villains in asoiaf - that was my point.

(and since we are mixing fiction and real life, isn't that how it is in real life? people who commit rape are not completely ruined unredeemable villains. they're not strange men in dark alleys. they're people. they'll be at my table at christmas. they're part of our circle of friends, of family. they're part of ours. i even love one of them.)

but because i am tired of this, let's be real and clear: yes, i like the bad fictional man. he is my favorite character ever. if it makes you so upset to see people liking tyrion, don't follow this account. it is that simple.

and i am trying not to be rude here. i am sorry for what happened to you, whatever it was. you're a real person behind this gray anon icon and your life will always be more important than fictional people. so i am sorry. truly.

and i understand that you cannot hold tyrion accountable because he is not real; so you're holding me accountable, the real person who likes him.

but. the thing is. random people on god's internet who like fictional characters - regardless of the character, yes, even undisputable villains - are not, in fact, abusing me. no real harm is done to me by these people. i know my abuser. he is the only person responsible for what happened. there are a dozen characters in literature and media that are just like him, and the people around here who like these characters - it's all they are doing; reading things, enjoying them. they are not out to get me. they are not enabling my abuse or covering for my abuser or silencing me or hurting me in any meaningful way. they don't know me any more than i know them. they are not secretly telling me my trauma doesn't matter, they are not implying my pain is unimportant. i can't live in a world in which every person is a potential mirror of my trauma. part of healing is breaking the mirrors and seeing things as they are, opaque and all. does that make sense to you? i can feel like people are reflecting my pain back at me, but they are just existing. and i can't blame them for existing. they literally have no idea. it's how life works. and it's hard, and i am sorry for this too.

so. my suggestion is: hold your actual abuser accountable. leave people liking their fiction out of it. and if you're halfway there, if you just have to hate the fictional bad man to cope: by all means, anon, hate tyrion.

but i am not your abuser. and i am, again, sorry for what happened, it shouldn't have happened, and i am sorry, i am sorry. but i am a real person too, with my share of real problems and traumas, and i spend my days dealing with people in pain projecting their issues on me because they are in pain? and these are real problems. these, i'll bear gladly because it's my job. but liking fictional characters is not a real problem. i don't know what you want me to do here. i've said all i had to say about this, and i think i can't really help you.

this is the last ask i'm answering about this. i am turning off anon again, forever this time, alright? you please take care, be well. <3

how is it to have DID? sorry if its rude to ask, feel free to ignore this if you dont feel comfortable replying!! im just genuinely curious

It's not rude to ask (considering we like answering questions like this) but uhhh trigger warning I suppose because im not getting into the "good side" of this disorder by much

But it's. well. to put it shortly its a real shitty experience and i wouldn't even have my most meaniest enemy have this shit

to put it long story?? check under the cut ong because...yeah

long story?:

For our own experience and with how many alters we have it's basically just pain everyday, from not remembering where or who we are, getting random memories of our trauma (as a trauma holder) from a trigger we didnt even know we had and without a trigger exactly too, dissociating to the point we cant tell what from what, getting blurry at the most inconvenient times ever, getting real bad breakdowns, extreme memory issues (I will not be able to tell who you are for hours unless I just normally call you by your user.), etc

There's a lot more downs with this disorder than ups and since we're still in a bad environment it just keeps getting worse, and because of how ours seem so over the top i feel like I'm faking over and over again.

not to mention the fact we have alters who are Introjects/take the personality of our abusers/groomers because of the fact they ARE them or we associated them with that person

Let's also not mention the fact that there are alters who can't handle something that try to kill the body in ways you wouldn't think they would. Or the ones who try to encourage intrusive thoughts and make them into intrusive actions.

Back to the memory thing, we will (the ones in front most of the time) will forget who's skin we're in, who's face we're seeing, whos name we're hearing, who's house we're in, what state we're in, what planet we're on, what our birthday is, what our age is, what our race is, what we can and cant do, what a blanket is, etc. We'll go for days not remembering this one specific thing that's really important to remember and when we do remember it's already unimportant.

We'll get the most headsplitting painful headaches and will never pinpoint why or how because at this point we cant care enough for the details we just want it to STOP. Especially since after the headaches we feel so weak from how painful it is and we STILL have to push through

We'll forget about time and stay awake for days on end until one of our sleep alters hear word of this and force us to sleep

I'm personally more effected from our trauma and deeper into our depression, anxiety, etc. So everyday I front I genuinely need other people fronting with me so nothing bad happens and if something bad DOES happen we can quickly switch to calm me down and keep the body safe

Being a system isn't a fun experience and it never will be, I hate being a system personally because of everything that happens that i didnt even put here, I hate being a system and I wouldn't want anyone else to be one either

Hi first time sending an ask, kinda nervous...

I've wanted to say I adore your fic The Stars and Their Children! The world building is nothing short of amazing and the story and the characters are incredible. It is very entertaining to read and seeing you upload always makes my day.

I do however have a theory I want to ask about! If I am right please feel free to ignore this message completely so it is not spoiled for anyone else, but it I'm wrong please tell me why this theory sucks and how wrong I am! So I've been wondering about Wilbur's father a little bit. We don't know much about him and it's not even directly about him. We know that he and the boys' mom met when she ran away (? Hope i remember that correctly) to an outer sector planet, before she was quickly taken back to Themis. We also know that Emperor Phil grew up in the outer sector planets. He is also suspiciously protective of/obsessed with Prince Wilbur. So! I have a sneaking suspicion than Philza is actually Dadza. We don't know the Queen's name either so maybe she is Kristen! And that could also be the reason he calls Will a little bird!

It's mostly started as a gut feeling and then i was just looking at anything and maybe I'm basically just a delusional fool grasping at straws haha

Hope any of my written ramblings make sense I have big thoughts and not many words i know to describe them

Have a lovely day!

hi i'm so glad you're enjoying!! that means so much to me to hear that my uploads make your day :D

so while I totally understand where your theory comes from, because let's be real if stars was a traditional tv show/movie they probably would go for that twist of phil being wilbur's biological father, I just wanna say outright that's not the case here. the reason I didn't make that the case was primarily because a lot of stars!wilbur's insecurity comes from the fact that he's a bastard. his father was a nobody. he's unimportant compared to his little brother, who is in line for the throne. and phil sees this bastard boy who has been written off and dismissed by everyone else, and sees potential in him just because of who he is. wilbur's importance to phil isn't defined by his blood relations, it's because of who he is as person. his intelligence, his cunning, his stubbornness—this is what endears wilbur to phil. and i feel like if I made the twist that oh wow they were related all along that would really just take away that message of phil valuing wilbur because of who he is and not because of his blood.

also, if wilbur was biologically phil's child you would be able to tell. avians as a species are the result of elytrians intermingling with any other species in the galaxy. elytrian genes are not subtle—if wilbur was half-elytrian, he'd almost 100% certainly have wings, and if by some weird genetic happenstance he didn't, he'd definitely have feathers on his face and arms at least like phil does.

(also, wilbur and tommy's mom was not kristin either. she's just a random oc I made, I guess you could think of her as a humanized samsung fridge lmao)

51

10/16/23

Time moves very fast so I guess I am going home soon. Congratulations to me for seeing through the memory of the present tense and for being a clever boy in a private corner. I fear death and am sharp. My award is the deepest eyes on the block.

I am tired of my individualism complex, as Alanna put it, but I respect the ego I defend. Looking back at the previous entry, I feel glad to told Miquel no. A part of him does not care about my long silence. I am at least half dead anyways. What is one voice when someone beautiful loves you? I mean, I know about man's hands and his eyes delving into Miquel's. I am a dead boy a few countries away. I am important like a storm that destroys a basement. I am important like local news. I am every pumpkin pie in Costco. I am important like rising gas prices, and have my edge of being clever, and I know and I know and I know and I know I mostly won't ever do anything "great." Seriously - what does that mean? A magnum opus, a great poetic or musical work? I don't know if I have it in me. And I don't think my reasons for wanting it are right. But if I'm not going to make money, I might as well make a beautiful thing and have others wonder about my beautiful thing and feed me their envy. Some stimulating envy.

I texted Ananya I am hurt that Fernando hooked up with someone Friday. Actually: someone fucked him and came in him. And he told me. He said he was an open book so I opened the book. If I knew I couldn't handle the answer, why did I ask? And why am I so jealous and upset about that, despite the fact that we are not in a relationship?

I think this has happened to many times to me. To be chosen and not chosen. Miquel if you lose me, it will be forever! Our souls are not interconnected. My back aches and neck aches and the soft crab belly under my sternum warbles with sadness. You genuinely don't care about that! I know this. Miquel you don't and have not loved me in a way I have loved you. This is your mistake. I do not forgive you. I am saying goodbye to that love! Goodbye, dead Will from other warmer months. I hold onto this because at least it makes me feel important. If I could commit to being a dead thing and fill up my schedule, this could maybe cure me.

I chose wrong. I won't make the money and won't prove that it was the wrong choice. My German isn't even that good. I don't really have discernible skills besides decent social skills but that is not a hard skill. I am not in a PhD program. Though I may run a half marathon, and have joined an orchestra, and will audition for a choir. I choose to represent everything like a senate. The hope and despair need seats.

To inherit myself. Dear Miquel I do not forgive you for the festering space you've created in the shadow of unrequited love. It comes back to me rotting. I get all of it. Even carving this paragraph of you into this anonymous little slice of consciousness is to build a house that I literally must burn. I feel unchosen a lot and it vexes me.

How are the choices I make informed by not feeling chosen? I spent most of the day off of Grindr and felt better. I went on and jerked off for 45 minutes and felt far away away away away. So tomorrow I will try to use Grindr less again, because it saved me. I have decided I will buy a clock too.

I am just angry with Fernando. That is the first reaction. I just feel useless and unimportant. I am kind of already a half dead thing and people hold me and I guess it is less true. My friend Charlie says things to me I don't understand and I take a long time in the supermarket and I feel too bad for myself in a not shareable way. Maybe. Even though I hurt rather hurt and be real than that other stuff that I've been before. I've tucked myself away into pleasure a lot of times I fit this body into poems and men and whatever and whatever and city streets in this city I do not know. What if I lose my gratitude and see what texts it place? If a poem stops being gratitude, then the language feels like a flood.

I tell my classes "poetry is asking yourself what you already know and changing the way you understand it." I am going to follow the power of transformation and put myself between a verb and a preposition. Or the seeing becomes breath, or you turn metaphors into wheels and drive a stanza into the distance.

I sometimes convince myself that my best friend will abandon me one day because I will not be a great poet or musician and I find myself at times with very little to say. If this is my greatness, let my life be relatively painless God. Or because this is too much to ask.

At least I feel thin right now.

Isn't he really...not actually confirmed to be legitimately religious, though...? It's kinda a plot point that what SEES reads in a newspaper is just outright not true and the first confirmed example of Takaya consciously lying about something (he knows SEES isn't at fault for the apathy syndrome, nor the murders and he does not actually considers himself to be Nyx's prophet, either. Plus Aki says that Takaya isn't being truthful and the general narrative framing of this game is a really obnoxious "main characters say so = it's objectively true").

Jin then claims that Strega literally only learned about Nyx after Ikutsuki's death, which implies that, up this point, they only vaguely recognized Tartarus as having some sort of role in bringing the end of the world (hence the "Tower of Demise"), at best (although, imo, they didn't know that either, since Takaya was clearly puzzled by what the twelve shadows even had to with it and seemed more concerned about the potential disappearance of the Dark Hour itself, rather than the tower). And, I mean, sure, he absolutely does genuinely recognize Nyx as a god, but also that's what she just objectively is (and Adachi felt similarly about Ameno-sagiri, if I remember correctly).

And where I agree that, outside of being a mercenary, his biggest sin within the narrative is literally just having a different life ideology than the main characters (which is actually more ableist of Atlus, than it is antagonistic of Takaya, for that matter, because unironically calling out who is functionally a palliative patient for passive suicidal ideation is just so absurd it's hilarious), but...isn't his actual religiousness literally just...fanon? Unless we are simply finding it interchangeable with fatalism (which he definitely is).

Unless-unless I am totally just missing some crucial piece of information, which is honestly kinda why I am even sending this in the first place, taking advantage of the guy's obvious understander saying something on the topic I've been curious about for some time. Sorry if it reads like I'm trying to um-actually you up, I promise it's not the intent, haha. Thank you in advance with how stupidly long this message is 🤍

(( Ok, forgive me, it is very late at night, so I apologize ahead of time if I'm not reading this great but if I don't answer now I will almost definitely forget to later--

First, I do want to clarify, everything I say about Takaya I am referring to my canon divergent take on him that i've written for 3 years, he's had a few adjustments made to him to make him a more coherent character, that's also why I emphasized "potentially a good antagonist" in that rambly post and my wording of I love the "idea" of a religious person in persona-- that is to say I don't think they actually depicted that completely in the canon series

Though honestly! I swear to god, I couldn't really give you a provable quote off the top of my head, but I've seen the novel, the stage play, the in-character AMA replies, and I could have sworn... I saw Takaya imply real reverence for Nyx. Because I remember making a post freaking out about it? Besides... I just find it hard to believe he didn't intuitively understand his persona and ability to see the dark hour were something from a higher power when he consistently refers to them as "blessings" and as the lab children as "chosen ones". You could argue he's referring to the scientists that tested on them but that's very unlikely considering he talks very resentfully about how they used him in his final fight speech and he seems to disregard Ikutsuki a unimportant. Its like he's... referring to something else blessing them.

This is the thing with Takaya-- I cannot give you... a single, easy, quick refuting explanation. I can only point to what little canon characterization he has and hope it makes intuitive sense lmao.

So.... What I think is most likely here, even by the main game's logic, disregarding my own canon-divergences... is that Takaya does indeed have a religion of a kind, but much like how the game takes the time to explain that Strega calls the tower something else, " The Tower of Demise"... They just didn't know the name of the god that was going to kill them. But surely they knew a god was going to kill them, why else would they call the tower the tower of demise, how else would they deduce that the tower was leading to anything of the sort without some higher knowledge of what's going on? And then that leads you to wonder where they got that knowledge, etc, and that's where headcanon has to fill in the blanks because its very unclear.

( though I admit i might just be forgetting something- )

Now one thing I do think, in my experience of having to depict this guy, is that it would be near impossible to not depict Takaya as a religious zealot-- as in a person with intense ideological drive based in spiritual beliefs-- and still keep him acting and speaking as he's only ever shown to speak in canon. To me, its very much a... "all but said" situation? Yes, he is a dishonest and manipulative man but... that passionate sermon in his final fight was entirely him showing his real zealotry. Its so evident in his archetype of character, his design, his way of speaking, that it naturally lends itself to depicting a man that is very religious in his thought process. Not merely a fatalist, but someone who holds visible reverence and manic exuberance for that which can end the world. To the point where I think it is fair to assume that in the event of say, my future-verse where he lives to see other gods attempt to end or change the world, Takaya would choose to side with the gods basically every time-- not simply because he wants the world to die, but because he holds their power in higher regard than humanity's obsession with trivially living on, unchanged and unimpeded. Its hard to explain-- but to me Takaya has a personality that is so fundamentally anti-mundane humanity that it necessitates a reverence for the supernatural and the divine-- if only because he seems to find the grand and cataclysmic to be outright awe inspiring in a very religious way, if not ideologically necessary.

Something of which is evident in how he seems to find such beauty in the dark hour itself! Such as in the novel, where he not only marvels at the sight of it but he's described as seeming to be revitalized by the atmosphere, as if coming alive. There's no magical explanation for this-- its just his mental state. He has some sort of worship-like fascination with all this supernatural stuff.

There's even an element of faith in his behavior! Notice how Takaya, despite his passion and frustration with the main party, will take a deep breath... and say... very well. "fate" will decide who is right. Why would he say that without some kind of belief in a destiny, that something will guide the outcome in his favor? Notice how he puts on the illusion of calm only right up until its evident that fate isn't on his side, then he seems to claim an unfairness. He's not merely indifferent, he has faith that things will go in his favor, because it rightfully ought to.

And the idea that he doesn't believe himself to be a prophet-- I don't believe that for a second. Perhaps logically he knows that not to be literally true, its not like he hears Nyx's voice giving him advice, but there is very much something about his personality that feels he deserves that title to some extent, he almost certainly believes he is some sort of " truth bestower " as entirely evident by just how he presents himself and how he speaks. I mean.... " It appears even I am fallible " is a battle quote of his.

Though full disclosure.......... I appreciate you thinking I'm the expert on this guy, but I'm... just some nerd fascinated by him more than anything! And even if the above is me trying to describe a more objective look at canon Takaya... My headcanon take, the one I write, has been shifted by dozens of interactions and years of headcanons-- I wouldn't be surprised if I'm just misremembering details.

If the new game comes out and... it turns out his entire behavior and mannerism is just an act he does for fun purely because it tricks the weak minded, I mean valid and I'll take that L, but I have to admit I can't blame fanon for taking this as his personality if its consistently his behavior whenever he's on screen. ))

It All Began With the Backwards Hat

The day started like any day I've had recently. I didn't sleep well, I was asleep but my mind wandered all night to different timelines and different realities and yet none that were memorable. The only memorable aspect was feeling how complicated those worlds actually were, complicated for no other reason than the fact that *I* made them complicated. I woke up later than I really needed and I decided I would just throw a hat on. Normally when I throw my hat on at work it is for the sole purpose of remaining incognito; however, this was solely because I didn't wash my hair and it was looking oily. I left the house, ate my captain crunch while driving to work, and began my work day.

Work is very slow right now. There is no freight, and when there is no freight, it means overstaff. When we send the kids (associates, but I refer to them as my kids) to overstaff, it costs the building anyways, so there isn't a real need to care about hours, volume, nothing. They make us do pointless tasks that don't matter but it keeps them occupied. Now that I think about it, if you let the busy bees *think* long enough, they might realize they're NPCs. ANYWHO, so the day was already expected to be slow, and on these days I try to keep myself occupied so as to avoid thinking about how long my day actually is. Luckily for me I had to take an HR call regarding my sweet assistant manager, Kirstin. She has been bullied by several people for over a year now and finally took it upon herself to go to HR and make SHIT happen. They called to ask for my input as a witness and I shared the whole truth about her misfortune. Without a doubt he will be getting fired. Having such a birds eye view of the situation, I can see this is God's way of forcing him out, because I know he has settled, given up on life, and made Amazon his forever. And that is not where his story ends. He will think it's a bad thing, as we all do, but hopefully he sees it is for his benefit.

Right before this I got an email that I had won a scholarship to go to Washington D.C. for Latino Advocacy Week. I had applied a few weeks back not giving it much thought and would you look at God! It's an all expense paid trip, and fingers crossed this is the door into my new career.

After the first hour and a half of my day, my hat started to bother me. It often does because it makes my forehead itchy, but I can generally get through 3/4 of my day before this starts to really bother me. It started at 9:00am and I really was not about it. I couldn't see everything, my forehead itched, and I just wanted to cover my oily hair, so I did something I have never done at work, I put my hat backwards. I am not sure what this did or even why it did but it feels as though I entered a different reality.

Brandon came up to me and I believe we were continuing the conversation about NPCs and who they are and what they do. Brandon talked about the different layers of characters: main character, main side character, side character, non-killable NPCs, and NPCs. As we started talking, it became very apparent how much of a simulation we are actually in. It seemed as though I was on the verge of exiting the matrix. But what is on the other side? Is there another side?

Our conversation was interrupted and I went up to the front of the building for unimportant work stuff, when my sister called me. I went into the new 2 person zen booth my building had installed and took her call. She told me about the dream she had of a woman who was brutally killing everything and everyone after she had been sexually abused. We talked for about an hour and basically came to the realization Alyssa had traveled through the timelines and came to the source of her trauma in a dream. We discovered that she is the creator of her own trauma, but aren't we all? I could go into detail of how that realization came to be but that is a story for another time. I talked to her for about an hour, bouncing from her, to my dad, to my mom, to my papa and then to me and back to her. After my conversation with my sister, I walked back to the floor and continued my conversation about the hierarchy of characters with Brandon and suprisingly Joe.

As Brandon and I started talking again, Joe also happened to be there. I have always been the type to only discuss in deep conversations with those I've felt comfortable with. And by comfortable I mean allowing my intuition to decide who's drinking the spiritual juice and who isn't. However, Joe has always been a special one. I knew when he first got to my job, I would have to be his friend. He desperately craved companionship and yet the desperation completely turned me off from him. And yet, there was something special about him. I did not know what, but there were moments I found myself thinking about him differently.

As the conversation developed, Joe talked about how he was a side character, but a side character that knew exactly who he was. He lived out of the matrix in a way that allowed him to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He lived in such a way that allowed him to fly under the radar and yet also exist in a brilliant way. So to the world he was just Joe, and yet all of a sudden i could see Joe. I kid you not, I saw exactly what I knew always existed, this confidence, this authenticity, this knowing of self. And THAT right there people is what lights me up. Joe talked about life as a side character and how it allowed him to exist so freely. We talked about how his life is better that he is not the main character because he is able to get so much more done. We talked about how he is everywhere and he is nowhere and how he can enjoy life without having to be so involved. He said he doesn't mind being a side character because he finds other things to keep him busy. But the moral of the story is he is aware but not disconnected. So basically, Joe is Joe.

The day continues and by this point 2 people have said, Alexa I didn't recognize you, I thought we got a new manager. This made me question how this was possible but it made me wonder, if I challenge the perception people have of me just enough, does this allow me to challenge the matrix and see people differently and reach those I wouldn't normally have these discussions with? Or could it just be something in the air the Universe was carrying throughout the collective?

I found myself everywhere and nowhere all day but it wasn't until I entered back into the 2 person zen booth for my 1:1 with Mona that I finally entered back into the matrix. I took care of some more work stuff and was brought back to reality. As much as I tried to go back in, it was as though God had said that is enough for one day. I challenged it time and time again, but the conversation continued to be interrupted for anything other than work talk. LOL I guess if you spend your day high you have to come back down at some point. For the record I was high on life. :)

By the time my day was complete 5 people had no clue who I was with my backwards hat and it was the most fun I had had at work in a while. I think what this is trying to teach me is that in my next career journey, the matrix will be even stronger but it is up to me to live within the timelines and recognize where I end and where the work begins. I don't share this depth with many people, mostly out of fear of looking strange, but that is what I am here for: to sound strange, to challenge the collective, and help them see the world as it is for me, and how it could be for you. Until next time.