i don't think netflix has ever Perceived me quite as clearly as it did today when the first thing that popped up on my screen after opening netflix was a documentary about infinity

plausible deniability

scaramouche x gn!reader

your boyfriend is nice, your boyfriend is sweet, but your boyfriend is also a serial killer. “relax, it’s just a dead body,” he tells you like he hadn’t just hit a man on the head with a brick hard enough to crack his skull. well, at least he did it to defend you? or — scaramouche kills people and you have the world’s biggest ‘i can fix him’ complex. (modern au)

crack, comedy, a few people die but who cares, scara is soft for one person and one person only and that’s you, “i would kill for you, in fact, i have killed for you.” “honey, did you take your meds today?” - scara and reader

You were never a fan of true crime documentaries, or horror movies, or gory shows, or anything that involved excessive blood spraying and lightless eyes staring into the camera.

So, it would stand to reason that at the first sign of your boyfriend being more than into those kinds of things, you would’ve turned tail and ran as far away as you can, right?

Unfortunately, you’ve always been blind to the color red.

…Figurative red, that is, because the red seeping through your couch and the ones coated on your boyfriend’s hands are definitely visible to you, bright and dripping and most definitely staining your pristine white rugs that you just bought last week. Ah, how are you going to explain that to the laundry lady?

“Scara, honey, what did I say about killing other people?” you ask, voice visibly strained.

He sneers at the face of the dead guy sitting haphazardly on your couch. “I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”

You sigh.

✧

It wasn’t always like this, with the whole blood viscera happy-murder thing.

Your boyfriend, Scaramouche, had this odd habit of being so immersed in the news, a little smile lighting up his face (which you’d thought was cute at the time and, well, you still do) whenever the reporter gets to the local murders that used to have you shaking in fear on your bed.

He was charming though. A little possessive, but that was a trait you also thought was quite endearing—and, if you’re being honest, you still do. Scaramouche had a vast collection of sharp knives, some small and practically harmless (or as harmless as a knife can be) and others… not so harmless. You didn’t question it because he often cooked for you, your brain chalking it up to him using those knives for it.

It wasn’t until you were walking home alone from university that you discovered his little hobby of, well, killing people who inconvenienced you and him. Mostly people who inconvenienced you though, which was disturbing but also flattering in a crazy sort of way.

“Relax, it’s just a dead body,” he told you like he hadn’t just hit a man on the head with a brick hard enough to crack his skull.

You were cowering on the alley’s wall, eyes wide and knees shaking as you watched your supposedly nice and caring boyfriend wipe away the blood on his hand like it’s a normal occurrence. And when he grinned down at the body, something almost satisfied in his eyes, you realized that he was the cause for all the recent murders popping up in the city.

Now, the thing about this is that you should have run away screaming bloody murder, maybe call the cops or even do the sensible thing like break up with your boyfriend who’s apparently a psycho.

And you would have done it, if he just hadn’t been so… so…

He turned to you with concern shining in his eyes, stepping over the corpse of the man who’d pointed a pocket knife at you and tried to rob you. With hands still slicked with blood, he cradled your face and pressed a kiss to your forehead. “It’s a good thing you weren’t hurt.”

…sweet.

And as he pulled you away from the crime scene, dragging you home and running a hot bath for you both, asking you what you wanted for dinner like he hadn’t just murdered someone in front of you, you finally calmed down and saw the truth of the matter.

Yes, your boyfriend is quite possibly a serial killer, yes, you might just be making the worst decision of your life, and yes, you’re well aware this is because of all the wattpad bad boy stories you consumed when you were young, but you’ll be damned if you let Scaramouche go. He was kind (at least, to you he is), he was charming (when he wanted to be), he was a great cook, he was good with kids and the elderly, he was smart, and finally, he would never cheat on you.

So, while there might be the unfortunate addition of him being a little too happy with the idea of killing someone (have, in fact, killed someone, multiple someones at that), he was also the perfect boyfriend you could ask for. He just needs a little guidance, is all.

The next day, he proudly showed you the severed hand of a man who once made you cry because he groped you.

…Okay, a lot of guidance, but you can manage, you’ve read tons of bad boy turns good after falling in love type of stories. How difficult can it be to have your murderous boyfriend change his ways?

✧

Quite difficult, as it turns out.

A quick google on why people become murderers brought up a lot of questions and concerns for you, and while you’re well aware that google isn’t exactly the most reliable place when it comes to looking for advice, it’s also the only place you can go to without getting arrested for assisted murder—even though you’ve never actually helped Scaramouche when he goes all ham crazy on the general populace.

You sit him down on your couch, which was now free of blood thanks to google’s advice and good ol’ handy-dandy hydrogen peroxide.

Like this, facing each other and holding his hands, it almost seems like an actual, legitimate therapy session, minus the whole licensed psychiatrist thing. But hey, you’ve read tons of articles on the internet, so while you may be lacking in some aspects (namely, the fact that you don’t have any idea what you’re doing and aren’t qualified at all to be your crazy boyfriend’s therapist), you’re confident you can just wing it.

“Baby,” you start. Calling him endearments was an advice you picked up from reddit. A kind user named ballz3000 said that referring to them sweetly using innocent pet names can make them softer and calm their homicidal tendencies. “You know I don’t like it when you bring home dead bodies.”

According to another user named yn-yournuts, being open and communicating your feelings is the first step to establishing a healthy relationship and, consequently, a better mental state.

“It would’ve been difficult hiding the body at daytime,” he grouches, but he still keeps a gentle hold on your hands, which is a good thing. Baby steps, you tell yourself, baby steps—even though those baby steps might as well be called snail steps, wait, snail slithers.

“Then you should’ve waited until it was dark or midnight to kill him,” comes your immediate response—wait, damn it! You’re supposed to encourage him to steer away from murder, not give him advice on how to do it better. Smiling, you attempt to salvage the situation, “But, of course, it would be better to not kill anyone at all.”

It’s too late. He’s already donning a contemplative look on his face that soon turns into a grin, leaning in and briefly slotting his lips against yours.

“Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll be more careful next time, love,” is all he says before getting up and abruptly ending your impromptu therapy session.

And admittedly, there must be something wrong with you too, because instead of being horrified at his words, you giggle to yourself.

This is the first time he called you love!

✧

Alright, so operation therapy failed, it’s now time to charge in like a boar. Straightforwardness is always good according to that one article you found in google made by Hugh G. Bawles.

The two of you were in bed, the lights already turned off, when you took a deep breath and began preparing what you were going to say to him to prevent any more innocent people being killed.

Scara, I don’t like it when you kill people.

Baby, don’t show me anymore dead body parts.

Why did you become a murderer?

Sometimes, I feel like we’re a normal couple, but then you’ll suddenly go and casually bring me a bloody finger as a gift.

But instead of saying any of those, what comes out of your mouth is,

“Darling, I think you’re just confusing your constipation for homicidal urges.”

In hindsight, maybe attempting to start a heart to heart talk in the middle of the night just before a morning class was a bad idea.

You wait a few seconds, then minutes, and when he showed no signs of responding, you turn your head only to find him with his eyes closed and sound asleep.

Fine, you’ll just have to try again tomorrow.

✧

You share exactly one class with Scaramouche and it’s philosophy. Unfortunately, it’s also the class with the worst professor known to mankind.

“Ah, I got a low grade…” you mutter to yourself, looking down at your essay forlornly.

Your boyfriend takes one peak at your paper and immediately scowls. “You spent an entire night writing that.” He turns a glare to the professor currently ignorant of the murderer sitting in his class. “That asshole should’ve given you a perfect score. Maybe I should give him a little visit.”

You calmly take his hand under the table and squeeze it, all too used to him casually alluding to killing other people. “Dear, we talked about this. What do we do when we’re having homicidal thoughts?”

He looks down the table, brows furrowed in a sulking manner. “Don’t do it.”

You beam, proud at him for remembering the one thing you keep reminding him whenever he brings a dead body back to your house.

The blonde twins seated in front of you turn their head in horror after overhearing your conversation.

“What are you looking at?” Scaramouche sneers at the same time you say, “We’re roleplaying.”

“Right…” the long haired twin you distinctly remember was named Aether mumbles before he ushers his sister to ignore the two of you.

Oh well, at least you managed to stop one person from dying today. User tojiscrustysock on twitter always says you should take whatever victories you can, so you’ll consider this a resounding success.

✧

When you open the news next morning, the face of your professor is the first thing you see along with the words, found dead near his home.

You turn to your boyfriend sitting beside you, an innocent look on his face as you look at him with disappointment.

“My hand slipped,” is the flimsy excuse he settles for.

Sighing and utterly out of options, you’re forced to resort to the one thing you didn’t want to do. The worst possible option there is. If there’s going to a therapist and potentially getting arrested kind of worst, there’s this kind of worst—the absolute worst of the worst.

“Scara, I think we need to start doing yoga.”

word count: 1.8k

1, 6, 8, 22 👀

For the 🔥choose violence 🔥 ask game!

Disclaimer: provocative name aside, I am not actually trying to be mean here, these are just my opinions offered for Entertainment Purposes™️, and I'm not mad at anyone who has a different opinion.

1. the character everyone gets wrong

Trick question, it is not possible for everyone to be wrong about anything in Dragon Age fandom because that implies that there's something everyone agrees on. 😉

jk jk that's a cop out. But seriously, for any question that says "everyone" just assume I'm making a wobbly-hand gesture next to it and we all understand hyperbole. Okay.

I think at this point I'm probably at least somewhat known for spreading the good word of Sera. 😉 And at this point I really don't think most misconceptions about her are malicious--I remember a day when Sera was much more widely hated, but she isn't anymore, which is nice! I think some of the more out-there takes on Sera (and about the Friends of Red Jenny) just come from that fact that she actively deflects personal questions until she trusts the Inquisitor, and not everyone looks past the surface-level answers she gives to realize there's more to it. My go-to example is the idea that she magically knew archery from birth and no one ever taught her anything (she didn't, and someone did). Between her dialogue, and World of Thedas, it's possible to put together a fair amount about the timeline of her childhood, when Lady Emmald died, the history of Red Jenny, etc.

But it does take some close attention and some digging and some math (ugh), and let's be real, none of us can know everything about every character! I'll just keep writing about her, because I love her.

6. which ship fans are the most annoying?

Honest to god, for me personally: no one. Maybe that'll change one day, but I hang with a lot of people who ship a lot of ships and none of them bother me. I have like one NoTP in the vast canon that is Dragon Age and you probably don't even know who it is because I don't care enough to talk about it. Hell, I have mutuals who ship it, and it doesn't bother me. You guys are cool.

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

This isn't like One Opinion, but a more overarching Thing: in general I think it would be great if there was more understanding of like, How Video Games Are Made, in general. I think it would lead to more focused and productive criticism of games better targeted at where the problems in development actually are. I feel like I see a lot of things that are almost certain attributable to Process Issues attributed instead to Active Malice. On the flip side, it's frustrating to point out something cool and have people always respond with "Well Bioware is too stupid to have done that on purpose," like there aren't writers and designers in this industry who are incredibly passionate about their work and the themes they can weave into it even at the level of chaos they're forced to work within.

idk. I think perspective is a good thing. Read Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier. Check out Mark Darrah's YouTube channel.

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

I think because they're such wonderfully complex and well-developed characters, and because romances, the companions are always the juggernauts in the fandom and they always will be. And I love those characters, too. But one of my favorite things about the Dragon Age universe is the many wonderful minor characters where we get to see just enough of their story to make me feel like they do have a whole life they're living just offscreen somewhere, and set my imagination off running. CAN I HEAR IT FOR MY BOY SLIM COULDRY AND HIS FIFTEEN COUSINS 💖

Sunday morning contemplation

The house is quiet. I’m drinking coffee and eating Lotus Biscoff biscuits. I’m ruminating on a quest I’ve been on for years. A quest no less significant than Homer’s own. Yet somehow I feel more like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill than Odysseus trying to find his way home. I feel stuck in a cosmic game of hide-and-seek with my soul.

My soul has been a fugitive for years, expertly hidden in the house of mirrors that is my subconscious. I can sense it lurking somewhere between dream and daylight, coyly peeking around the corners of consciousness like a child aware of its inherent value, aware that the game is meaningless if it’s too easily won.

I’m in search of a fuller comprehension of the universe, but it’s not just intellectual satisfaction I’m after. When I say I’m seeking a ‘lifeline,’ I mean a thread of wisdom, a trail of breadcrumbs that not only informs but transforms. I’m yearning for experiences that shift my paradigm, that turn my understanding inside out and force me to see the world differently. This is not merely about accumulating facts or philosophies; it’s about internal change, like a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. I’m hunting for those ah-ha moments where I can almost hear the audible click of a puzzle piece snapping into place, where suddenly the abstract becomes tangible, and I find myself a step closer to the spiritual wholeness I’ve been chasing.

Between language and thought falls the shadow for me, a gap where words often fail to capture the full essence of my contemplations. It’s like trying to paint the complexities of a sunset with only primary colours; the palette of human language sometimes feels insufficient. This shadow is both frustrating and fascinating. It’s frustrating because it represents the limits of my ability to articulate these vast concepts I grapple with. Yet, it’s fascinating because it’s within this shadowy realm that the inexpressible resides–emotions, realisations, and epiphanies that defy straightforward explanation. This shadow becomes a sanctuary of nuance, a space that invites me to dig deeper, to refine my understanding, and to stretch the boundaries of both thought and expression.

Each layer of complexity I unravel in the quest for my elusive soul adds a new hue to the spectrum of my understanding. This journey collapses time in a way that defies the linear constraints we often associate with life’s progressions. Each moment of search, every flicker of insight, isn’t just a point on a timeline; it’s a layer, an overlapping of past, present, and future possibilities. It’s as if every question I ask in my quest unearths memories that shape my present understanding while simultaneously casting ripples into the future, creating a complex tapestry of interconnected experiences. Time, in this sense, becomes more of a spiral than a straight line, each loop a revisitation and refinement of what has been and what is yet to come..

In the end, I’ve come to understand that the heart of this cosmic game isn’t just about finding; it’s about the ceaseless, relentless act of seeking itself. The thrill of the quest doesn’t reside in a final ‘eureka’ moment but in the myriad ‘almost-there’ instances that propel me forward. As long as the ink continues to flow from the wellspring of my soul, as long as words continue to fill the vast emptiness with echoes of meaning, the search will not just continue–it will evolve. I am forever an explorer of the mind, mapping out uncharted territories within and vast landscapes far beyond the self. The terrain may change, but the quest is eternal. And so, like Sisyphus, I take joy in the journey, in the eternal push upwards, because therein lies the essence of existence itself I believe.

Media Market Research (and why its undermining all the things you love)

Trying to understand what is dysfunctional about Hollywood is an epic task, and the answers are like the stars – arguably infinite. Hollywood is dysfunctional for literally more reasons than I could count.

But market research plays a fairly heavy role in its dysfunction (IMO) and the time has finally come for me to add my professional two cents about this issue. (This rant of mine has been building for a while, FYI. Hence why it is so...comprehensive. There is a tl;dr section towards the bottom, if you want the high level summary)

*** For the last 4+ years I’ve worked in the field of market research, almost exclusively with major media makers like Warner Bros., NBCU, AMC/BBCA, Viacom, FOX (before Disney acquired them), A+E, etc. (this past year I quit the job where I was doing this work for a variety of reasons, many of which will become clear as you keep reading, but I am still listed as a consultant on the company website):   https://www.kresnickaresearch.com/who/ (Rachel)

And just for comparison, here is a Halloween selfie I took 4 years ago and posted on my blog, so you can see I am who I say I am. 

I know a fair amount about how market research on major media franchises is conducted and how it influences production, and a lot of these choices can also be at least somewhat tied back to the massive flaws in the market research industry and its impact. *** First, at the highest level, you need to understand market research in general is not well-conducted much of the time. Even the people doing a reasonably good job at it are VERY limited in doing it well because of financial constraints (clients don’t want to spend more than they have to), time constraints (clients want everything done as fast as humanely possible) and just the inherent problems within the industry that are decades old and difficult to fix. For example, all market research ‘screens’ participants to make sure they qualify to participate (whether it is a mass survey, a focus group, a one-on-one interview, etc.). So, we screen people based on demographics like race, gender, age, household income, to get representative samples. But people are also screened based on their consumption habits. You don’t want to bring someone into a focus group about reality TV if they don’t watch reality TV. They aren’t going to have anything useful to say. 

However, a lot of the people who participate in market research have made a ‘side-gig’ out of it and they know how to finesse the process. Basically, they’ve learned how to lie to get into studies that they aren’t a good match for because most market research is paid, and they want the money. So, a lot of TV and film market research is being done on people who don’t actually (or at least don’t regularly) watch those shows or movies or whatever but have learned how to lie well enough in these screening processes to make it through. And because of the aforementioned time and money issue, clients don’t want to spend the time or money to actually find GOOD participants. They just accept that as an inevitable part of the market research process and decide not to let it bother them too much. So, a fair number of the people representing YOU as a media consumer are people who may not be watching Supernatural (for example) at all or who watch a rerun occasionally on TNT but haven’t been watching consistently or with ANY amount of investment whatsoever. You can see why that creates very skewed data. But that’s just the tip of the skewed iceberg. *** Second, media market research is conducted in line with the norms of market research more broadly, and this is a huge problem because media is a very atypical product. How people engage with media is far more complex and in depth than how they engage with a pair of jeans, a car, or a coffee maker. There are only so many things that matter to people when it comes to liking or not liking a coffee maker, for example. Is it easy/intuitive to use? How much space does it take it on my counter? How expensive is it? Does it brew the coffee well? Maybe does it match my décor/kitchen aesthetic? Can I make my preferred brand of coffee in it? The things you as a consumer are going to care about when it comes to a coffee maker are limited, fairly easy to anticipate in advance, and also easy to interpret (usually). How people mentally and emotionally approach MEDIA? Whole other universe of thing. Infinitely more complex. And yet it is studied (more or less) as if it is also a coffee maker. This is one of the many reasons I decided to leave the media market research field despite my desire to have some ability to positively influence the process. As so often seems to be the case, I fought the law and the law won. I could never make the other people I worked with in the industry understand that the questions they were asking were not all that useful a lot of the time and they weren’t getting to the heart of the matter. They were just following industry standards because they didn’t know any better and none of them want to admit they don’t REALLY know what they’re doing. Which leads me to point 3. *** Most of the people doing this research don’t have any expertise in media or storytelling specifically. They are typically trained as social scientists in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, or math/statistics. And many of them do not have any kind of specialization or education in media/storytelling beyond the English classes they took in high school and the one Media Studies course they took as an elective in college. Most of them have a very unsophisticated understanding of narrative structure, thematics, tropes, subtext, etc. They mainly think in terms of genres at the VERY broadest level. Also, not infrequently, they don’t watch or have much knowledge of the shows they are supposed to be doing research on, beyond what they’ve read on IMDb or Wikipedia or what is generally common knowledge. Unless they by chance happen to watch the shows themselves (which often they don’t) they often know very little about the shows they are crafting these questions about. Again, partly because they think it is like the coffee maker, and you don’t need to understand it in any depth to research it. (I know this must sound insane to you as avid media consumers, but that is the general attitude among those who do market research) There is such a lack of sophistication in how people in the business side of the industry understand media and storytelling. Most of them are either MBAs or social scientists and their training has not prepared them to examine fictional works with the kind of depth that people in the Humanities (who are specifically trained to study texts) have. Somehow, despite the fact that the Humanities is all about understanding texts, that is the one discipline they make almost no use of in the business side of Hollywood. And boy howdy does it show. *** Point 4 – average consumers CANNOT ARTICULATE WHY THEY LIKE THINGS. Particularly media things. I know this sounds condescending, but it is my honest observation. It is unbelievably hard to get people to have enough self-awareness to explain why they actually like things, especially things as mentally and emotionally complex as media. What typically happens when you ask people why they like a TV show or movie, for example? They will tell you what they most NOTICE about the TV show or movie, or what is distinctive to them about it (which may or may not have anything to do with what they actually LIKE about it). They will say things like “I like the genre”, “I think it’s funny”, “The car chases are exciting”, “I want to see the detective solve the puzzle.” Sometimes you can get them to talk about what they find relatable about it, if you push them a little. But often they leave it at either the level of literal identity (young black woman), basic personality traits (she’s a social butterfly and so am I) or situations they’ve personally experienced (I relate to this story of a man losing his father to cancer because I lost a close family member to cancer). But the vast, vast, vast majority of them can’t go to the deeper level of: a) Why X representation of a young black woman feels accurate/authentic/relatable and Y representation doesn’t b) Why it matters to me that X,Y,Z aspects of my personality, identity, experience get reflected in media whereas I don’t really care about seeing A,B,C aspects of my personality, identity, or experience reflected in media c) How and why they are relating to characters when they can’t see the literal connection between their identity/experience and the character’s identity/experience. (For example, many people have argued that women often relate to Dean Winchester because a lot of his struggles and past negative experiences are more stereotypical of women – being forced to raise a younger sibling on behalf of an actual parent, being seen and treated as beautiful/sexually desirable but vacuous/unintelligent, his body being treated as an instrument for a more powerful group to quite literally possess, etc. Part of the reason Supernatural has always been such a mystery/problem for the CW and Warner Bros is they could never crack the code at this level. Never.) Part of the reason they can’t crack these codes is average people CANNOT give you that kind of feedback in a survey or a focus group, or even an in-depth interview (much of the time). They just don’t have the self-awareness or the vocabulary to get it at that level. Let alone asking them to articulate why Game of Thrones is compelling to them in an era where wealth disparity is creating a ruling class that is fundamentally incompetent at maintaining a just/functional society, which is especially concerning at this particular moment, given the existential threat we face due to climate change. And the truth is, that IS part of what people – even average people – are responding to in Game of Thrones. But what they’ll tell you when you do market research on it is: they like the dragons, they like the violence, they relate to Tyrion Lannister being a smart mouth, maybe they’ll say they like the moral ambiguity of many of the conflicts (if they are more sophisticated than average). But the ‘Dean Winchester is heavily female coded despite his veneer of ultra-masculinity’ or the ‘Game of Thrones is a prescient metaphor for the current political dynamics and fissures of modern western society’ is the level you ACTUALLY need to get to. And most market research can’t get you that because the people ASKING the questions don’t know what to ask to get to this level, and most of the respondents couldn’t give you the answers even IF you were asking them the right questions (which usually you are not) And I’m not saying average people are dumb because they can’t do this. But it requires practice, it requires giving the matter a great deal of in-depth thought, and most people just don’t care enough about it to do that while taking a market research survey. (I know this is going to feel counter-intuitive to people on Tumblr. But you have to remember, you are NOT average media consumers. You are highly atypical media consumers who have far more self-awareness and a much more sophisticated engagement with media than the average person watching TV. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here talking about it in the first place) Point 4.1 – People also lie/misrepresent their own experiences to market researchers because they want to maintain certain self-narratives. You have no idea how many people would get disqualified from our surveys for saying they watched less than 5 hours of TV a week. And sure, that might actually be true for a few of them. But if you watch TV with any regularity at all (which most people in modern America do) you probably watch more than 5 hours a week. The problem is, people think it makes them sound lazy to say they watch 15-20 hours a week, even though that’s about 2-3 hours a day (which actually isn’t THAT high). People lie and misrepresent their behaviors, thoughts and feelings because it can be socially uncomfortable to admit you do what you actually do or feel how you actually feel, even in the context of an anonymous survey, let alone a focus group or a one-on-one interview. People want to make themselves look good to THEMSELVES and to the researchers asking them questions. But that makes the market research data on media (and lots of other things) very questionable. For example, one finding we saw more than once in the surveys I was involved in conducting was people would radically downplay how much the romance elements of a story mattered to them, even large portions of female respondents. When we would ask people in surveys what parts of the story they were most invested in, romances ALWAYS came out among the lowest ranked elements. And yet, any passing familiarity with fandom would tell you that finding is just WRONG. It’s wrong. People are just flat out lying about how much that matters to them because of the negative connotations we have around being invested in romance. And never mind the issue of erotic/sexual content. (I don’t mean sexual identity here, I mean sexy content). The only people who will occasionally cop to wanting the erotic fan service is young men (and even they are hesitant to do so in market research) and women frequently REFUSE to admit that stuff in market research, or they radically downplay how much it matters to them and in what ways. There is still so much stigma towards women expressing sexuality in that way. Not to mention, you have to fight tooth and nail to even include question about erotic/sexual content because oftentimes the clients don’t even want to go there at all, partly because it is awkward for everyone involved to sit around crafting market research questions to interrogate what makes people hot and bothered. That’s socially awkward for the researchers doing the research and the businesspeople who have to sit in rooms and listen to presentations about why more women find Spock sexier than Kirk. (Which was a real thing that happened with the original Star Trek, and the network couldn’t figure out why) Aside from people not have enough deeper level self-awareness to get at what they really like about media content, they also will lie or misrepresent certain things to you because they are trying to maintain certain self-narratives and are socially performing that version of themselves to researchers. *** Point 5 – Qualitative data is way more useful for understanding people’s relationships to media. However, quantitative data is way more valued and relied upon both due to larger market research industry standards and because quantitative data is just seen as harder/more factual than qualitative data. A lot of media market research involves gathering both qualitative and quantitative data and reporting jointly on both. (Sometimes you only do one or the other, depending on your objectives, but doing both is considered ‘standard’ and higher quality). However, quantitative data is heavily prioritized in reporting and when there is a conflict between what they see in qualitative versus quantitative data, the quant data is usually relied upon to be the more accurate of the two. This is understandable to an extent, because quantitative surveys usually involve responses from a couple thousand participants, whereas qualitative data involves typically a few dozen participants at most, depending on whether you did focus groups, individual interviews, or ‘diaries’/ethnography. The larger sample is considered more reliable and more reflective of ‘the audience’ as a whole. However, quantitative surveys usually have the flattest, least nuanced data, and they can only ever reflect what questions and choices people in the survey were given. In something like focus groups or individual interviews or ethnographies, you still structure what you ask people, but they can go “off script.” They can say things you never anticipated (as a researcher) and can explain themselves and their answers with more depth. In a survey, participants can only “say” what they survey lets them say based on the questions and question responses that are pre-baked for them. And as I’ve already explained, a lot of times these quantitative surveys are written by people with no expertise in media, fiction, or textual analysis, and so they often are asking very basic, not very useful questions. In sum, the data that is the most relied upon is the least informative, least nuanced data. It is also the MOST likely to reflect the responses of people who don’t actually qualify for the research but have become good at scamming the system to make extra money. With qualitative research, they are usually a little more careful screening people (poorly qualified participants still make it through, but not as often as with mass surveys, where I suspect a good 35% of participants, at least, probably do not actually qualify for the research and are just working the system). 

Most commonly, when market research gets reported to business decision-makers, it highlights the quantitative data, and uses the qualitative data to simply ‘color in’ the quantitative data. Give it a face, so to speak. Qualitative data is usually supplemental to quant data and used more to make the reports ‘fun’ and ‘warm’ because graphs and charts and stats by themselves are boring to look at in a meeting. (I’m not making this up, I can’t tell you how many times I was told to make adjustments on how things were reported on because they didn’t want to bore people in the meeting). (Sub-point – it is also worth noting that you can’t report on anything that doesn’t fit easily on a power point slide and isn’t easily digestible to any random person who might pick it up and read it. The amount of times I was told to simplify points and dumb things down so it could be made ‘digestible’ for a business audience, I can’t even tell you. It was soul crushing and another reason I stopped doing this job full time. I had to make things VERY dumb for these business audiences, which often meant losing a lot of the point I was actually trying to make) Point 5.1 – Because of the way that representative sampling works, quantitative data can be very misleading, particularly in understanding audience/fandom sentiments about media. As I’m sure most of you know, sampling is typically designed to be representative of the population, broadly speaking. So, unless a media company is specifically out to understand LGBTQ consumers or Hispanic/Latinx consumers, it will typically sample using census data as a template and represent populations that way. Roughly 50/50 male/female. Roughly even numbers in different age brackets, roughly representative samplings of the racial make-up of the country, etc. (FYI, they do often include a non-binary option in the gender category these days, but it usually ends up being like 5 people out of 2000, which is not enough of a sample to get statistical significance for them as a distinct group)   There is a good reason to do this, even when a show or movie has a disproportionately female audience, or young audience. Because they need enough sample in all of the “breaks” (gender, race, age, household income, etc.) to be able to make statistically sound statements about each subgroup. If you only have 35 African American people in your sample of 1000, you can’t make any statistically sound statements about that African American cohort. The sample is just too small. So, they force minimums/quotas in a lot of the samples, to ensure they can make statistically sound statements about all the subgroups they care about. They use ratings data to understand what their audience make up actually is. (Which also has major failings, but I’ll leave that alone for the minute) With market research, they are not usually looking to proportionately represent their audience, or their fandom; they are looking to have data they can break in the ways they want to break it and still have statistically significant subgroups represented. But that means that when you report on the data as a whole sample – which you often do – it can be very skewed towards groups who don’t make up as large a portion of the show’s actual audience, or even if they do, they don’t tend to be the most invested, loyal, active fans. Men get weighted equally to women, even when women make up 65% of the audience, and 80% of the active fandom. Granted, they DO break the data by gender, and race, and age, etc. and if there are major differences in how women versus men respond, or younger people versus older people, they want to know that...sometimes. But here’s where things get complex. So, if you are doing a sample of Supernatural viewers. And you do the standard (US census-based) sampling on a group of 2000 respondents (a pretty normal sample size in market research). ~1000 are going to be female. But with something they call “interlocking quotas” the female sample is going to be representative of the other groupings to a degree. So, the female sample will have roughly equal numbers of all the age brackets (13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.). And it will have roughly 10% non-heterosexual respondents, and so on. They do this to ensure that these breaks aren’t too conflated with each other. (For example, if your female sample is mostly younger and your male sample is mostly older, how do you know whether it is the gender or the age that is creating differences in their responses? You don’t. So, you have to make sure that all the individual breaks (gender, race, age) have a good mix of the other breaks within them, so groups aren’t getting conflated) But what that means is, Supernatural, whose core fandom is (at a conservative guess) 65% younger, queer, women, gets represented in a lot of statistical market research sampling as maybe 50-100 people, in a 2000-person survey. 50-100 people can barely move the needle on anything in a 2000-person survey. Furthermore, usually in the analysis of data like this, you don’t go beyond looking at 2 breaks simultaneously. So you may look at young female respondents as a group, or high income male respondents, or older white respondents, but you rarely do more than 2 breaks combined. And the reason for that is, by the time you get down to 3 breaks or more (young, Hispanic, women) you usually don’t have enough sample to make statistically significant claims. (It also just takes longer to do those analyses and as I explained in the beginning, they are always rushing this stuff). To do several breaks at a time you’d have to get MUCH larger samples, and that’s too expensive for them. And again, I want to stress, this type of sampling isn’t intended to sinisterly erase anyone. Kind of the opposite. It is intended to make sure most groups have enough representation in the data that you can make sound claims about them on the subgroup level. The problem is that it can create a very skewed sense of their overall audience sentiment when they take the data at ‘face value’ so to speak, and don’t weight segments based on viewership proportion, or fandom engagement, etc. Point 5.2 – Which leads me to my next point, which is that fandom activity that doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it doesn’t make you a ‘valuable’ segment in their minds. One of the breaks they ALWAYS ask for in data like this is high income people, and people who spend a lot of MONEY on their media consumption. And they do prioritize those people’s responses and data quite a bit.   And guess what – young women aren’t usually high-income earners, and although some of them are high spenders on media, high spending on media and media related merch skews toward higher income people just because they HAVE more disposable income. Older white men are usually the highest income earners (absolutely no surprise) and they are more likely in a lot of cases to report spending a lot on the media they care about. Having expendable income makes you more important in the eyes of people doing market research than if you’ve spent every day for the last 10 years blogging excessively about Supernatural. They don’t (really) care about how much you care. They care about how much money you can generate for them. And given that young audiences don’t watch TV live anymore, and they give all their (minimal) expendable income to Netflix and Hulu, you with your Supernatural blog and your 101 essays about Destiel is all but meaningless to many of them (from a business standpoint) Now, some of them kind of understand that online fandom matters to the degree that fandom spreads. Fandom creates fandom. But if the fandom you are helping to create is other young, queer women with minimal income who only watch Supernatural via Netflix, well, that’s of very limited value to them as well. I don’t want to suggest they don’t care about you at ALL. Nor do I want to suggest that the “they” we are talking about is even a cohesive “they.” Different people in the industry have different approaches to thinking about fandom, consumer engagement and strategy, market research and how it ought to be understood/used, and so on. They aren’t a monolith. BUT, they are, at the end of the day, a business trying to make money. And they are never going to place the value of your blogging ahead of the concrete income you can generate for them. (Also, highly related to my point about people lying, men are more likely to SAY they have higher incomes than they do, because it’s an ego thing for them. And women are more likely to downplay how much money they spend on ‘frivolous’ things like fandom because of the social judgement involved. Some of the money gender disparity you see in media market research is real, but some of it is being generated by the gender norms people are falsely enacting in market research– men being breadwinners, women wanting to avoid the stereotype of being frivolous with money) *** In sum/tl;dr: Point 1 – Market research in general is not well conducted because of a variety of constraints including time, money, and the historical norms of how the industry operates (e.g., there being a large subsection of almost professionalized respondents who know how to game the system for the financial incentives) Point 2 – Media is a highly atypical kind of product being studied more or less as if it were equivalent to a coffeemaker or a pair of jeans. Point 3 – Most of the people studying media consumption in the market research field have no expertise or background in media, film, narrative, storytelling, etc. They are primarily people who were trained as social scientists and statisticians, and they aren’t well equipped to research media properties and people’s deeper emotional attachment and meaning-making processes related to media properties. Point 4(etc.) – Average consumers typically don’t have enough self-awareness or the vocabulary to explain the deep, underlying reasons they like pieces of media. Furthermore, when participating in market research, people lie and misrepresent their thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses for a variety of reasons including social awkwardness and preserving certain self-narratives like “I’m above caring about dumb, low-brow things like romance.” Point 5 (etc.) – Quantitative data is treated as way more meaningful, valuable, and ‘accurate’ than qualitative data, and this is a particular problem with media market research because of how varied and complex people’s reactions to media can be. Also, the nature of statistical sampling, and how it is done, can massively misrepresent audience sentiments toward media and fail to apprehend deeper fandom sentiments and dynamics. There is also a strong bias towards the responses of high income/high spending segments, which tend to be older and male and white. Side but important point – Research reports are written to be as entertaining and digestible as possible, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it often means you lose much of the substance you are trying to communicate for the sake of not boring people or making them feel stupid/out of their depth. (Because god forbid you make some high-level corporate suit feel stupid) *** What can be done about this? Well, the most primary thing I would recommend is for you to participate in market research, particularly if you are American (there’s a lot of American bias in researching these properties, even when they have large international fanbases). However, some international market research is done and I recommend looking into local resources for participation, where ever you are. If you are American, there are now several market research apps you can download to your smart phone and participate in paid market research through (typically paid via PayPal). Things like dscout and Surveys On the Go. And I know there are more. You should also look into becoming panelists for focus groups, particularly if you live near a large metropolitan area (another bias in market research). Just Google it and you should be able to figure it out fairly easily. Again, it is PAID, and your perspective will carry a lot more weight when it is communicated via a focus group or a dscout project, versus when it is shouted on Twitter. However, that’s merely a Band-Aid on the bigger issue, which I consider to be the fact that businesspeople think the Humanities is garbage, even when they make their living off it. There is virtually no respect for the expertise of fictional textual analysis, or how it could help Hollywood make better content. And I don’t know what the fix is for that. I spent 4 years of my life trying to get these people to understand what the Humanities has to offer them, and I got shouted down and dismissed so many times I stopped banging my head against that wall. I gave up. They don’t listen, mostly because conceding to the value of deep-reading textual analysis as a way to make better content would threaten the whole system of how they do business. And I mean that literally. So many people’s jobs, from the market researchers to the corporate strategists to the marketing departments to the writers/creatives to the C-level executives, would have to radically shift both their thinking and their modes of business operation and the inertia of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ is JUST SO POWERFUL. I have no earthly idea how to stop that train, let alone shift it to an entirely different track. BTW, if you want the deeper level of analysis of why I can’t stop rewatching Moneyball now that it’s been added to Netflix, the above paragraph should give you a good hint

La Campanella

McShep + Rodney plays the piano Rodney never could resist a challenge, especially when it’s set by Sheppard.

Atlantis is a place of many wonders, but Rodney's favorite is this:

In a distant part of the northern pier is a short, squat tower which he and Sheppard investigate on a routine patrol.

And in that tower is a large, unassuming room like a lecture hall.

And in the center of the room is an object seven foot long and three feet high, elegant, delicate, and familiar.

“Is that…” Rodney practically runs over to touch it, as reckless as that urge can be in Atlantis, but he knows this isn’t a weapon or a piece of broken technology or some dangerous machine. It’s a thing of beauty.

It’s an instrument remarkably like a piano: white and black reversed, keys slightly different lengths, but the same 12-step configuration making up an octave. Keys which strike strings stretched over a wide frame with soft hammers, and this can’t be a coincidence.

“How... ” he starts, and then he answers his own question. “The Ancients must have invented this instrument and brought the concept with them to Earth. But that would overturn so much musical history they’ll have to rewrite the textbooks, can you even imagine the implications -”

John does not look as fascinated by the profound repercussions of this discovery on the history of western classical music as Rodney is.

He waves questions of history aside and sits on the low stool in front of the keyboard, blowing away the years of accumulated dust. His hands instinctively settle into arches, his wrists loose, and he plays a few simple scales. The notes sound out clear and true, but -

He frowns.

“Something wrong?” Sheppard is leaning over the instrument, studying him and it with interest.

“This is tuned half a tone lower than an Earth piano. Feels a bit weird, that’s all.”

“How do you know that?”

Rodney affects his smuggest smile. “Perfect pitch, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Sheppard says, rolling his eyes.

Rodney looks around the room furtively, keen for reasons he can’t articulate that no one else should observe them, and he starts to play.

-

It becomes a habit, a place to unwind, somewhere they visit on off hours and in quiet moments.

Today Sheppard is flicking through a golf magazine while Rodney warms up with some Bach. The music is pleasing and orderly, and the sparse, bright notes explode in fractal-like patterns, unfurling and changing and becoming more complex the closer you look.

John tilts his head to one side and says, “You know there’s a whole bunch of classical music on the Atlantis server?”

Rodney grins. He did know that, in fact. Never get between a team of scientists and their file sharing. “I may have heard.”

“I listened to some of the Chopin you like. Then some other piano stuff as well.”

“Yeah?” Rodney picks at a fingernail. Something about the idea of John listening to music just because Rodney likes it makes his heart beat a little faster. “Find anything you liked?”

“A bunch actually. Have you heard of a piece called La Campanella? By a guy named Liszt?"

"Have I…" Has he heard of the single hardest piece in the entire solo piano repertoire? The fact he could never get those double stops right haunts him to this day. "Yeah, it rings a bell."

"I like that one," John says decisively. "It's nice."

Nice??? Sheppard thinks the most epic and demanding piece of all time is nice? Of course he does.

"You should learn to play it," John says casually, like he's suggesting they watch an action movie instead of a scifi.

"I should -" he splutters. "Do you have any idea how difficult that is? It's practically impossible."

John smirks and says, "I thought practically impossible was your specialty?"

Rodney is still spluttering when John throws him a wink and walks out.

-

And then, because despite being the finest mind in two galaxies, on some level he truly is an idiot, he stretches out his fingers and starts to practice.

-

It's not like he had copious free time to start with. But he makes space whenever he can to come to the piano room, chipping away at this ludicrous piece, bit by bit, phrase by phrase, over and over and over.

People think that learning to play is artistry, and maybe it is that too, but mostly it's a grind. You keep doing it again and again until you get it right. It's as much about stubbornness as about skill.

And stubbornness is something Rodney McKay has in abundance.

-

Liszt really was a sadistic old bastard, Rodney thinks sourly as he works on the right hand jumps until his fingers turn to lead.

-

Sometimes Sheppard comes and sits with him while he practices, and on those days he plays easier pieces, things which are familiar and casual. Not that John seems to pay much attention, but Rodney has the urge to impress him all the same.

He’s always having that urge around John.

-

He spends an entire week working on his goddamn trill.

It shouldn’t matter and it’s not like anyone will really listen to it. But it seems to represent something important — a sequence of paired adjacent notes, next to each other but never quite touching, bouncing off each other time and time again, a dance of two — though he doesn’t want to examine that too closely.

-

He doesn’t tell anyone else about the piano. He tells himself that’s because it’s convenient that he doesn’t have to share and can use it whenever he wants.

But really, he likes that it’s his and Sheppard’s; their own tiny secret in this vast and sprawling city.

-

He hears the piece in his sleep, and on missions, and when he’s working in his lab. It becomes a background hum of his brain, always there, a sort of yearning for the possible, the platonic ideal, the way that things could be.

He tries not to examine that too closely either, though the weight of the realization is becoming harder to ignore.

-

Eventually the piece is as ready as it's going to be. He scribbles a quick note during a meeting, folds it into a paper airplane, and throws it at Sheppard's head. He hits him right in the temple, and he manages to avoid cheering when Elizabeth glares at him.

I have something to play for you, the note reads. Meet you at 7? You know where. - R

He jots it down without really thinking, and only once he's thrown does it occur to him how soppy it sounds.

John doesn't seem too perturbed though. He smiles down at the note and meets Rodney's eye with a little eyebrow wiggle which Rodney takes to mean, Gonna impress me?

-

By the time John arrives, Rodney is all warmed up and more nervous than he's ever been about a performance. His heart is racing, and when John gives him a fond look and says, "Hey," it trips even faster.

Once he settles in to play though, there's a certain kind of mental clarity that settles over him. His hands know how to do this, he just has to sit back and let them.

His wrists are still tense as he sounds out the first few bars and then, all at once, he relaxes into it and lets the music carry him. Hours of repetition have made every chord, every melody, every insane and unreasonable jump into something almost effortless. He even forgets John is there: there’s only him, and the piano, and the music.

The music builds and builds, each section becoming more and more ornamented, more complex, more physically demanding, all at a relentless pace that sends most players reeling. But he's got this, he can do this, it turns out all he needed was a bit of motivation.

The penultimate section is his favorite: The technical parts are done and here he can throw himself into the wild, over the top glory of the final melody. And perhaps he shows off a little bit, catching John's eye and grinning at him, but that's all part of the fun.

The piece ends with a crashing, massive finale that makes him feel like a virtuoso, and then in a last few epic chords it's done, as tight and perfect a five minutes as you could wish for.

The final chord reverberates on and on through the stillness of the room, glowing out beyond the city and into the night.

"Wow." John's eyes are wide. "That was great."

Rodney preens, because that ineloquent little comment somehow means more to him than an auditorium full of ecstatic applause. Having John look at him like that makes the months of practice worth it.

"You liked it?" He's fishing for compliments, but he figures he's earned it.

"I did," John says, staring at Rodney's hands like they hold the secrets to the universe.

He looks up and blushes at having been caught staring. Then he deflects and shrugs one shoulder. “Honestly, though, it’s not my favorite piano piece.”

Rodney narrows his eyes. He has the distinct impression he’s been played. “What was your favorite then?”

"I prefer Songs Without Words."

"Mendelssohn?" he explodes. "You wanted Mendelssohn? Jesus Christ, I learned to play that when I was eight!"

John grins. "I appreciate simplicity in music."

"Then why on earth did you make me learn Liszt?!"

John has this joyous, manic light in his eyes, like he's having the time of his life here, messing around with Rodney, of all the things he could be doing. "I like watching you do impossible things."

He sucks in a breath. "I hate you."

"No you don't." John leans in, smug and delighted, and oh, Rodney is so in love with this ridiculous, infuriating man that he could burst. "You learned La Campanella for me."

"It wasn't that hard," he says quickly, because he has a reputation to maintain here. But John laughs and gives him this soft, teasing look, one eyebrow quirked at a ridiculous angle beneath the chaotic mess of his hair, and Rodney is defenseless.

"Whatever you say, McKay," John says, and Rodney has the feeling he sees straight through him. "Now play it again."

on the qunari

I've seen the cultural clash between the Qunari and the rest of Thedas being sometimes framed as a clash of religions much alike the tensions between islamic and christian cultures in the middle ages/modern era. However, if we go beyond the ‘arab-sounding’ language and some other surface-level similarities (such as Tevinter and Minrathous possibly standing for Constantinople), things are a bit different. If an analogy is to be drawn with something existing in our world, it would actually be the clash between two political ideas that were formulated in Greece - Plato’s idea of the utopic ‘Republic’ and Aristotle’s writings in his ‘Politics’ and ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. Buuuut I’m not here to bore you with a deep dive in greek philosophy, and I’ll try to keep things simple and in layman’s terms whenever possible. But since it’s my belief that Plato was the main source for writing the Qunari (knowingly, or unknowingly, but imo almost certainly for the political part)  there’s some philosophical bits we can use to better understand this fictional population.

Please note that Qunari philosophy, the very little we know of, also bears a lot of similarities with east-easian philosophies. However: that is not something I am versed at, and since I do not speak of things I do not know, I will take the conceptual standpoint of the ancient greeks to try and make sense of it, and all of this is just for fun and not to be taken as any kind of gospel. I strongly encourage folks who are familiar with such philosophies to add their readings!) Disclaimer 1: I am a philosophy major/BA. My use of Plato here is not academical. It’s simplified and bits of it are used to play around by drawing parallels with fiction. Don’t diss me for explaining the theory of universals like a 5 years old would. Disclaimer 2: It’s incredibly long. It’s probably badly written. English isn’t my first language. But if you are not discouraged,  make yourself a cuppa and follow me in my ravings.

It’si in 4 parts, I reblogged and added each one under the _read more_ , there’s links at the end of each segment to go to the following part 1 -  but what do they believe in?

1.1  Koslun was a philosopher Let’s start with the codex basics:

“The Qun is the religion of the Qunari founded under the Ashkaari Koslun, though it is closer to a philosophy than a full-fledged religion.”

Not-so-hot take: Koslun  , while little is known about him, seems to have been by all means a philosopher rather than a prophet. In fact, Ashkaari means ‘one who seeks’ and it is said that the Qun is not something to be "believed", but something that is "understood’’. In addition to that the Qunari seem to have no transcendent deity able to provide Koslun with any sort of mission or message. They seem to be a godless people, but one with the stronger belief in….something. To understand what this belief is, then, we might have to take a look at some of their texts - and use some fun irl philosophy to play with them.

‘’Struggle is an illusion. The tide rises, the tide falls, but the sea is changeless’’ .

This bit is very clearly liberally inspired by the famous ‘’Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers’’ and “everything flows”  fragments of Heraclitus. However, the subtext here is quite different. ‘The sea remains changeless despite the rising and falling of tides’ means that there’s an entity (the sea) that 1. remains at its core unvaried despite the appearances of change and  exists beyond these changes 2. is therefore not these changes

We can’t say we know the sea - we know how it appears to us: tides and waves, its wetness, its saltiness etc. - yet none of these things seem sufficient to define what that vast mass of moving water is. This is, Plato would say, because we remain in the mires of what we see, of illusion.  But with the use of our mind, we can grasp the idea of the sea, and know that there’s something such as a sea, that causes the tides we see and yet, it is not defined by the tides. And this, friendos, is Plato’s theory of universals in a nutshell. And I’ll be stretching it a bit from here, but it’s an interesting train of thoughts. 

Plato believed that the ever-changing world of physical objects we see and experience is a world of appearances: of copies of various degrees of the unchanging, abstract world of perfect ‘forms’ from which everything that exists stems. Whether Plato thought of these forms as pure conceptual constructs or actual entities is a debate that academics still tackle. But, we don’t need these complexities here. And just like that, Plato believed that with a correct use of reason, we would end up agreeing that there must be , for example, an absolute ‘beauty’ that all beautiful things in the world partake of and yet is neither of those specific things, but something perfect and unchanging. Or an essential ‘horse’ that while no horse in particular is, all apparent horses are to some degree, and this very relation allows us to come up with the very concept of ‘horse’ itself. One could say that the ideal ‘horse’ is the truth of the horse, truth that we reach by observing and pondering physical horses and what makes them so horse-y despite one being a My Little Pony ad the other idk, Secretariat.

For the Qunari, something way less metaphysical and complicated but similar could apply: looking at the world of physical objects, the philosopher would see that there are contradictions, struggles, paradoxes.

‘’Tonight, in the desert, with emptiness all around, The sky, endless, the earth, desolate, Before my eyes the contradiction opened like a night-blooming flower. ‘’

But upon examination,  they’d end up realizing that there must be an eternal principle behind things, one that orders them and is ‘truer’ than the singular objects. What seemed multiple and contradictory is revealed as being an orderly One behind these deceiving appearances. When the mind rises above the illusion, suddenly, what looks fragmented and struggling reveals its true nature as whole:

“Emptiness is an illusion. Beneath my feet, Grains of sand beyond counting. Above my head, a sea of stars. Alone, they are small, A faint and flickering light in the darkness, A lost and fallen fragment of earth. Alone, they make the emptiness real. Together, they are the bones of the world.’’

Plato identified ‘Good’ as the highest form ( a philosophical nightmare, and not one we should tackle). If the qunari were following a plato-inspired method, they might have come up with the form of One as the superior one, which would be reflected in their texts. The reasoning might have been as follows:  

“I am one. The pebble is also one. We are the same in our one-ness, but we are also not the same. This extends to everything that exists. Then what is this ‘one’ that confers to such different things the attribute of singularity? That makes them be ‘one’? There must be a ‘one’ that is not physical, that allows me to think the ‘one’ and that is found in all things.”

This one-ness, Koslun might have concluded, is the true principle of reality that lies beyond the fragmentation.  We can catch a glimpse of this ‘one’ in reality, and even identify it in its biggest occurrence as the entirety of the cosmos, but it is still a very much abstract thing.

[addendum because of what was reminded to me in the notes to this post: the Platonic tradition was continued by Plotinus, who reintroduced a strong metaphysical component with his doctrine, and the very fitting in this very case concept of One (quoting from wiki for brevity): 

‘‘Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent "One", containing no division, multiplicity, or distinction; beyond all categories of being and non-being. His "One" "cannot be any existing thing", nor is it merely the sum of all things, but "is prior to all existents". Plotinus identified his "One" with the concept of 'Good' and the principle of 'Beauty'. (I.6.9) His "One" concept encompassed thinker and object. (...) The One is not just an intellectual concept but something that can be experienced, an experience where one goes beyond all multiplicity.

Plotinus’ writings majorly influenced Christian, Jewish and Islamic theology (and paganism and gnosticism). ]

But the tool that rationality can use to grasp and communicate these abstract truths can’t be but discourse . Here another parallel with philosophy can be made: discourse is what the Greeks called ‘logos’. It’s a term with a quantity of meanings, but in greek philosophy and onward it notably became a technical term that also identified the very principle of order and rationality in the universe.

In light of this, the qunari bit ‘To call a thing by its name is to know its reason in the world’  has a whole lot more importance: the words that must be used to define a thing should  not be merely arbitrarily chosen words, but an expression of its place in a superior, rational order that encompasses all things and that language itself, if used correctly, unveils and communicates.

click here to read part 1.2

I'm glad you reactivated the questions, here are some flowers for you: 💐 Seriously speaking I'm sorry that because of a question I asked you a few weeks ago you watched a series of videos of psychopaths 🥲It made me laugh at first but then I felt guilty 💔 it's all Muzan's fault for leaving us all with curiosity (imagine his parents' reaction once they realized there was something wrong with him even as a human)

Yay, flowers (which I shall kill with my black thumb)! And no, no, it’s fine, I had hoped it came off funny! I like listening to stuff like that while I draw anyway because I’m a nerd anyway and I found it very interesting.

Speaking of being a nerd, you have innocuously unlocked the following essay about Heian period nobility and wisteria flowers: There is nothing to state so in canon, but I find it highly reasonable to say Muzan might had been of the very powerful Fujiwara clan. Step inside my office, Anon.

Okay. So. The Heian period, simply put, was a time of cultural flourishing and beautiful pastimes, the origins of a lot of Japanese style aesthetics, and a romantic courtly like of romancing everybody else in the court. This is assuming, of course, that you were at the very, very, very, very top of society. Otherwise, the vast majority of people were poor and sick and starving and ew, in young Muzan’s world, we do not wish to associate with that. In the Heian court, Kyoto basically is the whole cultural world. Even though there were other cities that could rival Kyoto, the emperor was there, so it was essentially the cultural center of the country. The nobles who lived there got money from owning land in far-flung provinces, but actually having to live in those provinces? What a drag! Having to live away from Kyoto for work, even if it wasn’t an official banishment, often felt like a punishment to the nobles and their families who were used to the social scene at court. And, like affluent courts around the world throughout history, understanding all the intricacies of style and “Heian Rumors” was key to having social clout, and popularity was power. And yeah, nobles would be vicious to each other. While clan dynamics and history are complex and not something I’m getting into here (I don’t consider myself well-versed in it enough), the Fujiwara clan is a BIG DEAL.  Basically, in Heian times, children were typically raised in their mother’s home, thereby heavily influenced by their mother’s clan, so besides a young man’s parents, his in-laws also would had been hugely influential in his life, as they will have a long-felt influence on his progeny. The Emperors typically married Fujiwara daughters. This, in addition to other positions of influence of the Fujiwara clan members usually held with influence over the Emperor, means that politically, there was no messing with them. Now, just because I say Muzan might had been a Fujiwara clan member, I don’t necessarily mean a member of the main branch of the family. Often, due to inheritance management, different branches of various noble clans might be given different surnames. The Fujiwara clan does have different branches, some of which did go one to have close ties with the imperial family even after the fall of their power at the end of the Heian period and all the way through the Taisho, and some branches carry some impressive family legacies but otherwise live like normal or high-class common folk in modern-day. (I know one such Ojousama from a renamed Fujiwara branch; she’s a sweetheart and never brings it up herself but every time I hear other people say things about her family, I’m like, dang.) We can venture from Muzan’s likely expensive medical treatment, multiple marriages (meaning other clans sought to be connected with his family even by marrying their daughters to a sick man), and even preparation for cremation as a baby that he was of a very, very high status. 

Being the sick son of a prominent family may have warped his personality in multiple ways: first, he was probably already used to a culture of popularity equated political power. We see in Muzan’s dealings with humans in the Taisho period that he can be exceedingly charming to get what he wants (a psychopath trait, haha), so he was probably pretty aware of the complex ways of socialites in the court. But, even being aware of that, it probably frustrated him to no end that he was too sick to take part in the social pastimes where he’d gain clout. It’s also possible that he was a bit of a bargain husband for his wives’ families who were seeking to a make ties with his family, as they must not had been politically useful enough to be married off to other powerful matches. This may be some of why he was so ruthless to them, for he never saw them as useful to him in the first place. This probably got a bit worse once he became a demon. Now to be lewd, but he probably got more vigorous in his pursuit of more powerful lovers, and knew how to slay the women’s hearts as he liked (you know, popular Heian pastime, everybody had lots of lovers, it was the norm, though political marriages and legitimate children were still important). That new sense of power probably went to his head. But, ultimately, he must had been limited in clout since he couldn’t take part in any daytime activities, thereby limiting his access to more powerful spheres of influence. His reputation from having grown up sickly must had followed him too. It’s anyone’s guess how much affection his parents had for him and how happy they were about his health at first, and if and when they might had noticed his changes. He was a full-fledged adult by the time he turned into a demon, so who knows how closely they even associated with him. They likely had healthier children who they devoted more care and attention to, and invested more family resources in while assuming Muzan would probably die young.

Who knows what the final straw was in Muzan leaving court? Was it frustration at not being able to walk in daylight that made him flee to the Kanto area in pursuit of the blue spider lily (from near where the doctor lived) long before Kanto became politically affluent? Or was it the rumors at court about how he didn’t age, and that he was eating people?

Of note, a lot of the early legends of demons in Japanese culture take place in the Heian period.

In his book “Japanese History of Demon Slayers,” retired Shizuoka University professor Tetsuo Owada capitalized on the success of Kimetsu no Yaiba to dive into a lot of ties between the series and what it may pay homage to throughout Japanese history and culture. While this was published last September and a handful of his theories have been disproven by the second fanbook published last February, and while I think a lot of his theories are stretching a little too far to make strong connections, it’s still deeply, deeply interesting stuff. He goes into some specific comparisons of demons, like Minamoto-no-Raiko and his posse of four big bad warriors taking on the Tsuchigumo (giant spider demon) terrorizing the mountains north of Kyoto harkening to the case of Rui’s family (and, ding ding ding, this was the primary focus of the official Kabuki/Kimetsu crossover last November), as well as takes little questions left in canon and dives into them a bit deeper. One such question is, why were wisteria lethal to demons? According to Prof. Owada’s research, there is no historical basis for this. Some of the talk online is that: 1. Wisteria are in fact poisonous, and consuming too much of them would cause vomiting and diarrhea (though I’ve also seen people make jam out of them because of the fragrance, so, like???) 2. Beans are thrown around at Setsubun to ward off demons (like so, Feat. Muzan and Kimetsu Beans), and wisteria are of the bean family 3. Wisteria like sunlight, so perhaps like Nichirin, they soak up some of the sun’s properties that are lethal to demons 4. In the language of flowers (Hanakotoba), wisteria symbolize kindness, welcomeness, refusing to leave someone’s side, being drunk with love, being straightforward and truthful, not losing the humanity in one’s heart, thereby containing a lot of meaning contrary to the conduct of demons Interesting, but some of its kind of a stretch. While still finding it a stretch to apply it to wisteria being poisonous to demons, Prof. Owada goes on to say that since ancient times, while the wisteria has some negative connotations of how it was sometimes written with characters meaning “doesn’t heal” (不治) and growing downward with smaller and smaller flowers like symbolize the slow downfall of a family line, it conversely also carries positive connotations of longevity and flourishing family due to the fact that its vines grow upward.

Now, you might picked up at some point that the Japanese word for wisteria is “fuji.” Not to be confused with Mt. Fuji (that’s written differently), it IS the same fuji as in “Fujiwara”: 藤.

Prof. Owada goes on to explore the association with the use of Wisteria crests in Kimetsu no Yaiba, especially on the houses of supporters of the Demon Slayer Corp. His recurring thesis is that the pandemic is partly responsible for Kimetsu no Yaiba’s popularity since demon legends have long since had origins in epidemics, and he supposes the Wisteria crest has a protective effect on the houses, similar to a talisman used in a lot of real life rituals for warding off illness and then often displays in or on the entries of houses to protect the family every year (I have one such item gifted to me, it stays by my doorway, along with a couple sticks of charcoal (but the culture of charcoal is a post for some other day)). The talisman is in reference to a god of Hindu/Chinese origins being treated with hospitality by the So clan, so although other families perished in disaster/disease, he promised to always protect the So clan descendants, so the talisman says “Descendants of the So Clan” so that any household may try to claim that divine protection. The gratitude-exchange of hospitality and protection and sure sounds familiar! Prof. Owada isn’t done yet. While the crest design used in Kimetsu no Yaiba isn’t an actual family crest in in real life, there are lots and lots and lots of family crests that use a wisteria design and have the character for “wisteria” in the name. Any time you hear “—tou”, like Satou, Saitou, or even Gotou, you can typically assume it’s 藤. It’s very common nowadays, but the first family to be granted the use of this name was the Fujiwara clan, when one of the pre-Heian and very powerful emperors granted their clan head this surname, which was a major honor, and it marked the start of the Fujiwara clan’s political dominance (there was already influence leading up to this, but meh, we like clear-cut stuff to simply centuries of history, don’t we?). Furthermore, although we often think of the Fujiwara clan for their influence at court, and we might think of the Minamoto clan for warrior heroes who fought demons, Prof. Owada concludes his argument of wisteria’s protective influence by pointed out a long list of Heian period Fujiwara warriors who also were the heroes of demon slaying legends, stating that their name has also long been tied with demon slayer culture. SO!!! Let me go on with my theory here. Muzan is from the same family line as Ubuyashiki. At some point (I assume after Muzan is long gone from Kyoto), the family is told while their children keep dying, and they accept their mission to bring an end to Kibutsuji Muzan and clear this curse on their family line. My thought is that their ancestor was a full blood sibling of Muzan, one whom was more invested in than sickly Muzan. While perhaps already an off-shoot of the Fujiwara Clan and thereby not entitled to the same sorts of inheritance, they probably maintained close ties with them. But, as it was already not direct by that time, the other Fujiwara clan branches were not affected by this curse. To further spare the clan the effects of this curse, this was probably when that sickly branch took the name Ubuyashiki. (And yes, I have things to say about this name and its possible mythological origins which I find a highly, highly interesting connection. Prof. Owada supposes it is tied with Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine and that is why there are nine pillars, but as much as I love Izumo Taisha and its giant pillars I base my argument in separate Shinto (but also Izumo!) mythology and accept that there are not always supposed to be nine Pillars specifically and Gotouge simply chose that number based on the number of strokes in the kanji for ‘Hashira’ (柱) BUT I DIGRESS). So, the Ubuyashiki Clan is it’s own thing, but is sort of like a cousin to the other Fujiwara branches and thereby continues to enjoy Fujiwara support throughout the Heian period, like some of the Fujiwara warriors going out there and slaying some of Muzan’s early demon experiments, and using their influence to bring in other warriors to the demon slaying cause (pet

theory: Genpei War warrior Kumagai Naozane was a member of the proto-Corp and using Kasugai-garasu was in practice since at least late Heian period). While the Ubuyashiki Clan probably already their own inherited land (and funds that came from it), throughout their history, their cousin clans might also have provided financial support to the Ubuyashiki Clan. But, they probably distanced themselves from the clan due to the curse and not wanting to be tainted. When you bring back in the wisteria associations this puts the contrary associations with a flourishing and dying family line in a new light. Furthermore, the “not healing” way of writing “fuji” also means a lot more in the context of Muzan’s, and later the Ubuyashiki clan’s illness.

“i love you and i like you”: passion and burnout in Haikyuu!! 

tw: discussions of self harm, anxiety, burnout and breakdowns. 

spoilers for the whole manga!! 

okay this is probably gnna be jflkafjdklfj all over the place, but i’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between loving and liking something, and how haikyuu emphasises the importance of both those feelings being present when pursuing a passion. 

a quick look at google (and i KNOW my college professors are cringing away in horror victor frankenstein-style @ my use of google definitions but jflajfsdk bear with me!!) demonstrates how often the concepts of love and like are conflated, with love her being framed as a sort of deeper or more intense like: “to like or enjoy very much” to be specific. but personally i’ve always thought there’s something a bit misleading about that kind of definition, since its absolutely possible to love something or someone without necessarily liking them. to take a personal example: i love debate. i debated through middle and high school, made captain of the debate team, and was constantly travelling to and fro for different tournaments. even before i started to debate formally i’d jump at the chance to do mini-debates in class, argue with and rebut parents and friends over meals and causal conversation.... you get the idea. i loved debate, and still love it dearly, but i honestly don’t think i particularly liked it much. tournaments would always fill me with the most INSANE kind of stress, i’d barely eat or sleep in the days leading up to a meet, and i’ve had more muffled bathroom breakdowns in between rebuttals than i can count. after my final year of high school, i decided against joining the debate at university. i knew that if i were to retain ANY love for the activity going into the future, i had to force myself to take a break. 

so what does this solipsistic tangent have to do with haikyuu, you ask? well i have no doubt that a vast majority of the players in the series love volleyball. they’re dedicated and passionate about it. they hunger for the chance to be put on the court. but do they like to play? 

1. oikawa: “i forgot that volleyball can be fun” 

ofc i wouldn’t be an oikawa stan worth my salt if i didn’t start this off with the (grand) king himself!! imo one of the reasons why oikawa is such a popular and well-loved character is his constant determination to keep moving forward and playing, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable opponents and adversities (”never forget my worthless pride”, anyone?). inevitably, all the hard work and practise he put into his craft has left him with a very carefully constructed, put together playstyle-- he’s the kind of player who knows how to bring the best out of each and every teammate on the court because of the amount of time he spends observing them and playing with them. it’s an outlook and playstyle best encapsulated in his now iconic line during the second karasuno v seijoh match: 

“Talent is something you make bloom, instinct is something you polish!” 

in my opinion the word “polish” it super significant here-- it explicitly singles out the years and years of hard work that set a foundation for his talent and instinct to shine. 

but what happens when they don’t shine? there’s no denying that oikawa is an incredibly skilled and intuitive player (something that hinata’s acknowledgment of him as the “great king” to kageyama’s “king” immediately sets out) but oikawa himself is acutely aware of the fact that he can never quite measure up to his long-time rival ushijima or his immensely talented protege kageyama. oikawa’s self described strategy to deal with opponents is to: 

“Hit it until it breaks” 

but what happens when hitting something again and again with your carefully honed, “polished” skills yields no results? imo there’s a very clear binary mentality drawn here-- either you hit it and it breaks, asserting your superiority; or you hit it and it doesn’t break, enforcing your inferiority. with each perceived loss against ushijima and kageyama, oikawa’s internalized logic holds his own weakness up to his own face, shaking his faith in himself as a player. if you’ll pardon the on-the-nose-metaphor: the whole “hitting it till it breaks” strategy is a two-way street, and oikawa has been hitting himself, metaphorically speaking, for a very long time. i have no doubt that he loved volleyball, passionately, through middle and high school. but with his inferiority complex growing in the face of constantly refuted results, i think he slowly began to like it less and less. 

so how does oikawa get his groove back? to answer that, we’ll have to turn to the post-timeskip chapters, particularly the two chapters that deal with oikawa and hinata’s unexpected meeting in Rio (372 and 373 for anyone curious!). while reminiscing with hinata over dinner, oikawa finally reveals the event that made him want to play volleyball (as a setter, to be exact)-- as a child, he watched veteran setter jose blanco step into a game and

“... inconspicuously help[ed] the ace get his bearings again... and then simply left the court.” 

oikawa’s reaction to blanco’s playstyle might just be one of my favourite panels in the chapter for how it conveys so much with such little space: 

the stammer of “i-i--”, which suggests a sense of resolve and determination forming in real time, finally coalesces into the determined declaration of “i wanna be a setter too!” what i took from this is that oikawa’s admiration for-- and liking of-- blanco expresses itself in the agency with which he makes his choice, in this case, actively deciding to be a setter so that he can support players on the court like blanco did. the liking that oikawa has here is therefore inherently linked to the agency and freedom he feels here-- freedom to choose his position, and how he wants his volleyball career to develop. 

this recollection of his childhood memories, and the subsequent game of beach volleyball that oikawa and hinata play afterwards, essentially push oikawa back into the mental and physical space of a child or beginner, as the manga demonstrates with panels of oikawa being forced to ditch his usual carefully developed, polished playstyle to learn the ropes of beach volleyball: 

ultimately concluding with the beautiful panel transition of oikawa, as a child AND adult, celebrating after a successful play: 

“It reminds me that-- I forgot that-- volleyball is fun.”

in a different country, playing a familiar game by slightly different rules and led back into the mentality and freedom of a novice after years of careful development, oikawa rediscovers his liking for the game. 

2. kageyama: “when you get strong, someone stronger will rise to meet you” 

moving on to the king of the court himself!! i’d argue that kageyama’s childhood memories and experiences of volleyball function almost oppositely to oikawa’s-- while oikawa has to re-access the sensation of being a beginner again to like the game along with loving it, kageyama’s process of coming to like and love volleyball come from moving away from his early experiences and into a new phase of playing-- specifically, his partnership with hinata. 

one of kageyama’s defining features is his individualism-- he’s both skilled and solitary enough to prefer to, as he puts it, “play every single position on the court”. notably, he wants to become a setter because: 

“[it’s] the one that touches the ball the most.”

in fact, i’d argue that kageyama’s “king of the court” attitude that he was known for in middle school is an extension of this individualistic mindset: he holds himself to extremely high standards, and expects his team-mates (as extensions of himself) to meet those very same standards. the similarities between his internal monologue and his commands to kindaichi in these two panels, for example, are strikingly, visibly similar: 

there’s that near-identical intonation of “move faster, jump higher!” that implies that the way he treats his teammates is just an extension of how he treats himself-- a deeply self-critical, miserable way, as it turns out. it’s telling that for the first few chapters of a manga in which characters’ eyes literally light up when they’re happy, passionate or excited, kageyama’s eyes are drawn as pitch black, even while he’s playing. 

imo the reason why hinata’s appearance, and their later partnership, is so significant for kageyama’s personal development is because he can’t treat hinata like an extension of himself. hinata challenges him and his preconcieved notions of the sport at every turn: first with his lightning-fast reflexes and raw intuition, and then with his determination to hit kageyama’s toss no matter what. in fact, the first time that kageyama’s eyes light up in the manga is, you guessed it, when he and hinata first pull off a successful “freak quick”: 

during the post-timeskip chapters we’re introduced to kageyama’s backstory in much greater detail: the way in which his grandfather fostered his passion for volleyball and the timing with which his grandfather’s illness and later death left kageyama increasingly alienated, thus further enforcing his individualist mentality. but what the chapter also gave us was an explicit confirmation of a theme that had been built up from the very beginning of the story, when kageyama’s grandfather tells him: 

“when you get really strong, i promise someone stronger will rise to meet you”

i’ve seen translations of the line that use both “meet” and “challenge”, and personally i’d have to say that i prefer “challenge” for what it implies-- even before hinata got strong enough to actually meet kageyama halfway he challenged him to move away from his pre-established mindset of doing everything himself, and into one where he actually comes to enjoy-- and like-- volleyball. 

3. hirugami: “maybe you’ve just had your fill”

hirugami’s case is kind of a strange one-- unlike oikawa and kageyama he’s not a major character, and his relationship with volleyball only gets a single backstory chapter as opposed to a series-long arc. but i personally ADORE his mini-arc for the things it has to say about burnout, passion and moving on. 

hirugami is introduced as the youngest member of a volleyball family-- his parents, older brother and older sister all play the sport. when explaining how he began to play himself, hirugami says: 

“... naturally, i started to play too. because i was good at it, and it was fun.” 

imo there are a lot of really interesting things to pick apart with this phrasing: the “naturally” implies a foregone conclusion but also a degree of passivity, like he himself recognises that he was swept up in his family’s influence. the “it was fun” coming AFTER “because i was good for it” also implies a degree of correlation, as though if he didn’t have the aptitude, he wouldn’t enjoy the game (a mindset markedly different to both oikawa and kageyama). as hirugami gets older, this correlation of being good ----> having fun ----> being able to play begins to reverse, and therefore manifest in increasingly self destructive ways: 

the main impetus for hirugami has now become not wanting to lose, which therefore requires a degree of heightened practise and self discipline in order to achieve. notably, having fun has been reduced to an afterthought, a state that might be achieved if he wins. 

the correlation of “winning” and “being good” is a slipperly slope to go down, though, something that becomes especially apparent after hirugami’s team lose a game. the frustration of being unable to reach his goal of winning manifests itself as not being “good enough”-- acting on this, hirugami seeks to punish himself for “messing up”: 

the close up panel of hirugami’s “confession” after hoshiumi confronts him hits particularly hard because it taps into a feeling that i’m sure almost all of us have felt at one point or another-- the realisation that something you once both loved AND liked is now only bringing you misery: 

ironically, it’s actually this acknowledgement of “not really liking volleyball that much” that acts as a catalyst for hirugami’s recovery from burnout. hoshiumi’s acknowledgement of, and reply to, hirugami’s state is seemingly simple but deeply freeing: 

and honestly, why not just quit? there’s nothing tethering hirugami to volleyball, certainly nothing as serious as life or death. personally my favourite part of this panel is hoshiumi’s description of volleyball as food from which hoshiumi has “eaten his fill”-- a lovely metaphor that re-contextualizes what could be seen as “time wasted” into something productive and indeed nourishing. 

when we check up on hirugami post time-skip, we find out that he has indeed quit playing volleyball in favour of going to veterinary school, but he’s seen watching the game between the jackals and adlers on his phone with an eager, fond smile on his face, implying that it was the act of moving away from the table (so to speak) after eating his fill that let him still hold on to a love and passion for the game, even though he is now interacting with it as a spectator instead of a player. and indeed that might just be why i love hirugami’s arc so much-- with it, haikyuu tells us that sometimes passion’s don’t need to be re-ignited in the same way. while oikawa and kageyama rediscover their love for, and liking of, the game through a return to childhood and the arrival of a new partner respectively, hirugami’s journey away from burnout comes from recognizing that he can step away from the volleyball court, and that the love and like will still remain. 

Satoru Gojo NSFW Alphabet

Warning: English isn't my native language!

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*

A = Aftercare (What he likes after sex)

With slow movements, stroke your back with your large palms. Gently fingering your hair and mumbling something about your uniqueness. Then he will pause and move on to deeper caresses. Goose bumps will cover your whole body, and your heart will pound madly, which will cause an involuntary smile from Gojo. Let it be some strange mantric nonsense, a mysterious spell, with the help of which you can finally hide from everyone around you.

How rarely do you experience such a feeling of security, while the beloved man experiences an equally rare feeling - the love of the closest person, which gives him confidence for the whole day.

B = Body part (His favorite body part)

Chest.

At least because he considers her an integral part of the female body. And if you have it of impressive size - expect especially great attention to them. Namely licking, biting, scarlet sucking, spanking ... But don't think that this will only happen with big breasts. Medium or small, too, will not be left without affection. Seen from the outside, most of them may seem like feminine signs that complement orientation and are able to give relationships with a man such inner harmony that will make them extremely desirable.

The first place on your body where he will leave marks is your chest.

C = Cum (Everything about sperm)

Inside.

He loathes condoms, for which you constantly sulk at him, because you have to take birth control pills, and this, by the way, is not very pleasant. And in general, obeying the rules is not his forte. Therefore, he is firmly convinced that he possesses the mysterious art of doing what is beneficial to him alone.

D = Dirty secret

Not to say that it can be safely called a "dirty secret", but he has thoughts of selling you into sexual slavery to himself. Such thoughts first appeared in him when he realized that with your charm you were making him ill and, in a sense, making him weaker. And what an unpleasant humiliation for him, when the ideal woman of his fantasies suddenly appears out of nowhere and by her very existence spoils all his megalomania. To tell you the truth, this fact even turns him on a little. Based on this, he came to the conclusion that he will subdue you completely and completely with the help of sexual slavery.

Is it strange? Depends on how much you go crazy over him.

E = Experience

Gojo himself considers this question to be slightly incorrect. For example, if he had fucked other women before you, then you cannot say for sure that in those moments he definitely knew what to do. And if he hasn’t "shoved" anyone before you, it will always be possible to gain experience from a variety of sources of the vast networked web.

But if we talk about it, then in such cases he is helped by confidence and high self-esteem. Which gives him a considerable advantage in the field of sexual relations.

F = Favorite position

Opening.

When you swing your leg over his shoulder, and he continuously pushes, biting and licking the inner thigh. This action drives you crazy, and you are ready to beg him not to stop. When he reaches orgasm, you scream, and he squeezes you in his arms, showered you with kisses and pushes his excited flesh into your vagina, while he himself shakes with laughter. You know that this obscene act brings him such pleasure that he cannot stop. You cling to it with all your might, as if hoping that it will not stop and you will be able to reach the highest point of bliss. Therefore, it is so important for him to control the lower part of your body.

G = Goofy (Are you serious at this moment?)

Not at all.

In a sense, for him, this is nothing more than entertainment. But it also happens that he, fascinated by your alluring body, smell, look, goes crazy. And then anything can happen.

H = Hair (Is the hair ok?)

Not.

Once you asked him to put things in order at least once, after that you realized that it was useless, because instead of answering, he just laughed loudly.

I = Intimacy (Romance)

Yes, sometimes.

Even despite the fact that he does not treat women as much as, for example, Nanami, he considers his passion an exception, although, perhaps, not in all cases. He is pleased that he is considered some kind of incomprehensible male - “this is not even a man, but such a little dummy who thinks of nothing but sweets” - and this is a compliment for him. The most important thing is that you like to feel your exclusivity.

In his opinion, he considers the most romantic moment for you when he looks you in the eye. Well, of course, he is so tall and also with eyes, in which the whole universe seems to fit. Therefore, in order to impress you once again, he takes off the blindfold, looks into your eyes and says something very pleasant about you in a bewitching voice. And at the moment when you already lose the power of speech from this - bends down and kisses on the lips. He knows perfectly well that you will not resist one hundred percent before such.

J = Jack off (masturbation)

Never. Seriously, never.

He will not humiliate himself so much in front of himself, but in front of you ... there is even nothing to answer.

— I have never done this before... I will appreciate it if you teach me! — said Gojo, smiling broadly and spreading his arms to the sides.

— Quite a fool or what?..

— Oh? So can you show me how it's done? The man asked with a sad and obviously feigned expression on his face.

— Why don't you start doing it at all? What's so sexy about that?

In other words, he does not need this, because for such cases he always has you.

K = Kink (Kinks and fetishes)

Light BDSM elements such as bondage, gags, collars ... especially the black blindfold. He just goes crazy when he sees you with her. It seems that you imitate him, ready for all dirty manipulations, just to become like him. Heck.

After such a night, he will repeatedly hint that he really liked your yesterday's image. It is unlikely that you want to again fall for his next trick to trick you with various perversions. Not to mention, he'll drag you into bed anyway. You have no options, baby.

L = Location (Favorite places to have sex)

Prefers on the bed. He's not so much a fan of public places or hiding places. But if we talk about the audience ... he loves to play with your pussy with his fingers, so that you feel awkward and uncomfortable all the way home. But it's worth your wet panties.

M = Motivation

When you say how you want it at the most unexpected moment. Yes, yes, at least in the same audience. For him, this is the most exciting thing that can be with him. He had already checked everything before, no doubt. And such a mess in his thoughts, it’s just not clear why he should fight the curse when he can take you right here? Someday he will do so, believe me.

N = No (Which won't do)

Something for which you will not want to see him for a long time.

He may never show such an emotion as longing, but he certainly does. Just at such moments. When he comes to apologize to you, he will hide it again. According to many men in the world, girls do not take offense for long. True for Gojo, these words seem to be a lie, because you have been ignoring and abstracting from him for the third week. He thinks that this is natural, because he considers you not like everyone else. But it only makes my soul worse. Maybe he really was so guilty? Then it's really monstrous. Why hadn't he thought about it before? But anyone knows that it's his ego. It was then that he realizes that even the strongest make mistakes.

O = Oral (Likes to receive or to give)

Get. Do you know what his trick is? He always tries to give you as much as possible, so that in a fit of excitement you give him twice, because giving pleasure to you does not tire him at all! It's like swinging, only you don't understand that you are giving him not yourself, but your body, and you give it to him at that moment when you still don't know that you are giving him and yourself. You don't even notice it. So it gives him a huge plus. Not a bad bonus for you.

P = Pace

In this regard, variations take over. He even has his own trick - to scroll the first song that comes to mind and adjust to its rhythm. And oh God, such harmless stupidity does such amazing things... (!)

Q = Quickie

Also not unambiguous.

From the very beginning, it's kind of like very slow introductions, specifically for you to beg him to speed up. Stretching on a sense of anticipation that creeps through you. Satoru will maintain a slow pace until he moves his hips on his own to match his movements. And only then it will gradually pick up the desired speed.

R = Risk (Ready to experiment)

Anytime, just ask!

He himself does not mind trying something new, but only when you are completely sure that sex will be successful. Otherwise it will be awkward and unpleasant. While these are experiments after all, anything can go wrong. And it's one thing when you really think about the consequences, it's another thing when you have no doubt that as a result of "new" sex there will be a lot of pleasant sensations. But if you don't try, you won't know, right?

You also urge Satoru to be taken seriously and responsibly. By the way, an interesting fact — he ignores words about responsibility, but at the same time, in some magical way, everything goes perfectly. Well, in that case, you are lucky with a man, congratulations.

S = Stamina (Stamina)

Always adjusts to you.

He cannot enjoy the process if you are already exhausted just lying on the bed and trying to grab at least some notes of ecstasy. Perhaps this theory seems primitive, but Gojo believes that any sexual intercourse is nothing more than a change in posture, the purpose of which is to make intimacy pleasant. After all, it is also part of a complex whole in which body and mind harmoniously merge. Certainly not an indicator of sensitivity, as one might expect, but also not one's own narcissism.

T = Toys

Not an ardent fan, but there is some interest, and a very big one.

If he is out shopping and stumbles upon a "sex shop", prepare for the fact that he will bring everything that was there to your home and some strange enlightenment session will begin, because you did not even know about the existence of many toys.

— This one? Maybe this one? Or is it this one? Look how interesting!

— Gojo ... did you seriously empty the entire store just to show it to me?..

— The opinion of my beloved woman is much more important for me than the schedule for the import of new goods into the store.

— Why does it seem to me that you are laughing at me?

U = Unfair (Does he like to tease)

Yes! Yes! And yes again!

As mentioned earlier, he likes it when you beg him to speed up. But what if he stops altogether? Or maybe pull the cock out of your slit? There will be no limit to your charming whine! As soon as he does this, you try to put yourself on the penis on your own, while he, grinning, does not let you do it. As a reward, he sticks the head into your hole and again starts hammering like crazy into your hole.

V = Volume (How loud is it)

The only sounds he makes are short chuckles. They serve as a sign that he likes your movements, actions and moans. Sometimes he allows himself to snort. This is also a kind of signal - he experiences excitement from the same movements ... actions... moans... oh...

W = Wild card (Random headcanon)

Once you had such a case that after he finished, you immediately lost consciousness. And when she woke up, she decided that she had already died. You told about this to Sator, sitting next to you, who burst into loud laughter. He told how you passed out right at the end of sex, explaining that the blame for everything is his magnificence, just the same, leading to a swoon.

* In fact, for three minutes he could not understand what was happening and for an hour he tried to bring you to consciousness. And you lost it not because of its magnificence, but because of its multi-orgasm. As a result of this incident, the man did not do this with you for a while, as it was a little awkward. At that moment, the thought crossed his mind that he really killed you. And he still cannot forget it, although he has long ago got rid of such ridiculous thoughts associated with you and your fragile body.

X = X-ray (What's under the clothes)

19.5 cm, during erection ± 2

Y = Yearning (How high is the sex drive)

A serene magician never looks for a reason to do this with you. Only if you don't want it yourself. Sometimes it happens - completely on your initiative, and sometimes he independently makes you want it. This Devil with a bandage seems to see all your weaknesses from the most obvious, to the most secret and intimate: whispering in your ear, changing the timbre in his voice to a lower touch of his hands that slightly tickle your face ... He has a lot of ways to make you want what no matter how he spoke.

Therefore, to be honest - 7/10

Z = Zzz (How quickly falls asleep)

Are you sure he ever sleeps at all?

The most recurring case is when he watches you for a long time until he is sure that you are definitely asleep. Following, he will kiss you somewhere in the area of ​​the ear and go about his business.

But if we consider a rare case, then everything will turn out the other way around: it will wait for you to wake up to ask how you slept. The perfect moment to be alone with him without any obligation.

2020 fic year in review

I was tagged by my lovely @khorazir! Thanks, you! 

Total number of completed stories: Three, but two of them were fairly long? I wrote: 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: John/Sherlock, 50,689 words, explicit, John POV. Set in New York, because I was itching to go there and couldn’t, and setting a fic somewhere is the next best thing. Probably my most political fic to date, this one was a deliberate reversal of the fake-couple-for-a-case trope, aka I wanted to create a setting wherein John and Sherlock become a couple during a case but need to keep it a secret for the sake of the case. So I set it at a massive, anti-gay conference in the US. Naturally. :P 

Sine Nomine: John/Sherlock, 45,626 words, explicit, mostly John POV with sections of Mycroft and Sherlock POV as well. In fact, though the sections aren’t equal in length, it’s symmetrical: it goes Mycroft POV/John POV/Sherlock POV/John POV/Mycroft POV. This story has a dark premise and a particularly dark setting for one section. It’s based on the concept of Mycroft rewatching the footage of John beating Sherlock in the morgue for the hundredth time or so and revisiting the question of whether John had been the making of his brother, or made him worse than ever. He’s definitely come to the latter conclusion, but decides to give John one final chance in the form of a test. John, for his own reasons, makes what Mycroft deems the incorrect choice, and Mycroft basically sends him into a death trap. The setting of this place is officially set in Serbia with indirect hints at events similar to the Srebrenica Genocide in Bosnia, but the actual setting is Syria, which I’ve just spent the past year studying intensely. Putting a slice of that into the dark core of this story, albeit disguised as another place, was strangely cathartic for me. The title, which is Latin for “no name”, is a double reference to the village here, which Sherlock and Mycroft never name, ominously referring to it only as “the village”, both to each other and to John, as well as John’s never-named or owned feelings for Sherlock. This one is close to my heart for a lot of reasons, but most of all because of Syria. Also, the vast majority of the time in my writing, I choose a singular POV and stick to it very closely for the entire story. Choosing to rotate between these three men essentially allowed me to show how they’re all justified in their own decisions here, and to examine the relationships between all three of them. It’s a story about reckonings and eventual, hard-won reconciliations. 

The Secret of Hazel Grange. Sherlock/John, 18,181 words, explicit, Sherlock POV. I’m going to claim that the reason I only managed to swing three fics this entire year is partly that I put another project on hold in order to write this one, lol. This is the third Christmas fic I’ve written and I’m happy with how it came out. It’s also the only story I’ve written that’s explicitly set during this pandemic, and during the second London lockdown, which is eerily similar to the code red lockdown my own city is in, so it just felt right. It’s been a somewhat miserable holiday season for me (so many reasons, including unhappiness at work and an illegally high rent increase that my apartment building is putting through, on top of the pandemic and all of that isolation and all of those cancellations), so writing some happy endings for someone else was pure escapism for me. Hopeful for others, too! 

Total word count: 114,496 words of posted fic. 130,796 if we’re counting my work-in-progress that got interrupted for the Christmas fic. :)

Fandoms written in: BBC Sherlock.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? I wrote about what I thought I expected to be able to write. Right now, I have a full-time job, a part-time job, and then freelance work, all to attempt to make ends meet, so I have very little spare time to write in, unfortunately. So getting over 100k words in is actually somewhat miraculous to me. It feels like not very much when it’s just three stories, but I guess it still amounts to a fair number of words? 

What’s  your own favourite story of the year? Picking favourites is always tough, but for the Syria connection, I’d have to go with Sine Nomine. 

Did you take any writing risks this year? I suppose that going so hard on the whole Republican anti-gay groups thing could be considered “risky” in some circles, but not really hereabouts! LGBTQ+ rights is one of my areas of advocacy (in fact, I’m a founding member of the Rainbow Equity Council at my workplace and spent a crap ton of time this month drafting governance documentation for it), but genocides are the issue that are really closer to my heart, so the Syria connection, even if it wasn’t named outright, could also be seen as a “dangerously” political stance, I suppose. But compared to other writing choices (like Scars, which features actual rape, or any of my Freebatch stuff, or any of the stories where Mary is an overt terrorist (rather than “just” a freelance assassin, lol)), I don’t really think I was terribly risky this year. 

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? The first item on the agenda is to get back to work on Nocturne, my WIP. After that, we’ll see. That said, I STILL would like to get back to searching for an agent for my novel, which is strongly based on Against the Rest of the World. I would also like to write that Johnlock cookbook I keep vaguely promising (it would feature recipes from my fics), and in a quirky “other” sort of project, I also wrote a heap of haikus about Republicans this fall that I’d like to see about getting published. Want a taste? Sure you do. I give you: 

Brett Kavanaugh

Brett has a face like

a snarly little hedgehog.

He likes beer, okay?!

Mitch McConnell

Moscow Mitch is a

corrupt turtle who keeps his

balls in his neck pouch

Most popular story of the year? Well, the longer a story is posted, the more time it has to collect hits, kudos, bookmarks, and comments, obviously, so that makes The Four Horsemen the clear winner here. 

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: From this year or in general? :P I often find that my plottiest, most detailed, most researched stories that I personally think contain some of my most thoughtful writing are the ones that get the least attention. For instance, after series 3 aired, I wrote three back-to-back intensely-detailed series 3 fix-it fics (which all, to their credit, do get plenty of attention, though none so much as Vena Cava, the third of the three). Then I wrote a light-hearted, almost-crack porn fic, more as mental relaxation than any sort of literary genius, and that fic - Best of Three - remains my most wildly-popular story of anything I’ve ever written. It used to frustrate me, but now I’m just grateful to have anyone read anything of mine. But along that theme, yeah: the most complex of this year’s stories (Sine Nomine) is probably the one I feel is the least appreciated, but that’s also fine. No complaints here - I’m very lucky to have the readership I have!! 

Most fun story to write: Sine Nomine, for all the reasons I talked about above, though I’d also call this the most emotionally-invested story of mine from this past year. That said, setting any story in Manhattan is always going to be fun, and I loved researching approximately 500 holiday rental properties in various parts of England in order to finally just create my own, aka Hazel Grange, lol. 

Most unintentionally telling story: Ha, well, if you weren’t sure about my stance on gay rights, marriage equality, or Republicans in general, The Four Horsemen should clear that up pretty distinctly, lol! 

Biggest disappointment: Just that I haven’t had more time to write. 

Biggest surprise: Possibly that I felt so able to represent all three POVs in Sine Nomine as equally as I did. By that, I don’t mean being able to write in their perspectives, but rather in presenting their arguments with (I hope) equal persuasion: Mycroft thinks that John’s entire presence in Sherlock’s life has spelled nothing but disaster for Sherlock. He’s arguably not wrong. He decides that John is out of chances, and that he’s justified in being the one to make that call. Sherlock disagrees, hard, and he’s not wrong. John makes the choice he makes for his daughter, not for the choice Mycroft gives him between choosing either Mary or Sherlock once and for all, and he’s not wrong to have done that, or unjustified in wanting to go and demand some answers from Mary, who isn’t dead after all, here. But then I think that their various reasons for reconciliation are all equally justified, too. I hope! Usually when you stick to one perspective, the story naturally gears itself to persuade the reader to identify with that one character and to take their side. Here, I hope I manage to juggle the balance fairly equally. 

I don’t know who’s been tagged in this already, but I’ll tag: @totallysilvergirl, @blogstandbygo, @nade2308, @weneedtotalkaboutsherlock, @hubblegleeflower, and anyone else who writes. 

hey do you ever love a fic so much you want to draw fanart for it? but you are not very good at drawing so you decide to try out collage for the first time in your life? well, let’s just say that i quite liked the last published chapter of  @gerrydelano​​‘s fic 

[ID: the image is a collage. the background paper is pastel blue, and towards the top right corner there is a group of birds, drawn in white. they are eating and the lines of the drawing are smudged, so that the white drags out from them in vague shades. on the top left corner, there is a single window frame; the frame is green and the glass is black. there are a series of eyes taken from various paintings glued on top of the glass. from behind the frame, comes a single butterfly’s wing, which is red yellow and white. on the bottom right corner, there is a tiny, white drawing of a person helping another on a small boat. the drawing is framed into the corner by an arch. the colors of the arch are graded from dark green to dark red. a red and yellow leaf is glued on top of the arch, and there is a tiny piece of paper glued onto the leaf. the paper says: “-G”. right in the middle of the drawing, we first can see (looking at it from the bottom to the top) a picture of some kind of body of water, upon which two boats are sailing. upon that first picture, acting as shore for the water, there is a picture of outer space. it is red, green, violet and white, and it is a bit shiny. there is an old stairway glued right in the middle of outer space. at the bottom of a stairway we can see a yellow figure (maybe a kid, with long hair and a backpack) and the top of the stairs connects to a door. the door belongs to a blue room. there is a big clock glued upon the door, and there is a drawing of a man, looking tired and facing the other way, right in the middle of the room. the top and bottom right corners of the room are framed by two colored vortex, which are incidentally two of the stars from Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”. from behind the left side of the room, comes out another butterfly wing, which perfectly mirrors the one that comes out of the window. on the right side of the paper, we can see the sentence “I’d say you have at least somewhat of a chance” spelled out in different letters. at the bottom of the paper, a white piece of paper says “two ships passing”. /end ID]

under the cut I have written an explanation of the meaning behind the,, symbols? I am not going to pretend I had super strict idea to begin with, but as I started to find things I liked on random high-school books I (un)consciously  assigned them a meaning. feel free to indulge my pretentiousness and read my ramble I guess + (also under the cut) close-up pictures

okay so let me just run down a list: — the window okay, so. that’s meant to represent the background world, the things Gerry and Jon are going to have to live with whenever they step outside of their refuge. the glass is dark, because they try to protect themselves for as long as possible, but there are still various Eyes peeking in, mostly looking aggressive or extremely focused (fun fact: all of these come from paintings; i perhaps should have written down which belongs to what but i forgot) — the birds this is a reference to the ongoing “birds in jon’s stomach” metaphor. they are eating because that’s what they were drawn doing on the paper i miraculously found dsgfghk but if you want to push it you could say that they are all going “finally, some good fucking food” at Jon’s joy in meeting Gerry?? + they lines are smudged because,,,,,,, (god i am so sappy) because it gives an impression of movement? like, they are at ease but part of them is free to fly — the butterfly’s wings so, take “one dropped stone can change the way the whole ocean moves” but make it boring, and suddenly it’s the butterfly’s effect. the wings connect both to the outside world, to the window and the Eyes /and/ to the room (which I will get to later) because their meeting changes everything. it changes how they interact with the world and (at least partially) it saves them from it + it changes them as people, and gives them a space to be happy, to be with each other — the sea + outer space the sea with the two boats is quite an obvious one so i am not going to say anything about it. outer space is,,,,,,,,,, Miriam? I know she is more ocean vast that she is space vast, but I guess the contrast is nicer this way. she has been the shore to their sea, the vast, contextless freedom through which Jon and Gerry have connected, and Gerry has healed — the yellow figure in my head, that’s Gerry. i don’t know about the yellow, it came with that so i didn’t choose it and i don’t really have a meaning for it (unless you want to be really emo and decide that “Gerard just looks at him like he’s seeing the sun for the first time, and then looks away like he’s surprised by how much it hurts” is suddenly reversed in this last chapter, and Gerry is, in a way, Jon’s sudden source of light). the figure is that of a kid (I think, at least?) with a backpack. it’s Gerry as a kid, meeting Jon in that chance Miriam has made possible and relatively durable — the stairs those are a reference to the stairs in Portia’s house, but they also mark the passage of time (that’s sort of represented by the big clock on top of the door). by the time Gerry gets to the top, Miriam has left and suddenly he is in another room — the blue room + the man the blue room is where Jon is stuck now. he is facing the other way, he is adrift. the man doesn’t look like Jon but we’ll forgive that because in the original full drawing he is sitting onto a rock which is connected with some ropes to a boat. the blue room is framed by those vortexes (which are actually two starts from Van Gogh’s Starry Night) because i had made a mess with glue and i needed to cover up the corners sfgsdfg but if we want to think well and hard about this, perhaps they are the lights Jon still has but cannot, won’t see. he is not looking at either of them. wow now im sad — the door Gerry and Jon don’t meet in the universe, nor in the blue room. they meet beyond the door, in their sacred, private space. they both need to get in in order for this to work — the bottom right corner okay, in my head that’s sort of a page number. something that marks our position in the story. there’s this drawing of a man helping another on a boat (which comes from the same drawing I found the man in the blue room in!) cause, you know. it’s reunion time. the arch was originally part of a circle which was rainbow-coloured. it reminded me of that idea which I think is in the Official™ gtcmu™ lore- that thing about Jon having no specific colour, but colouring everyone else, sort of being the rainbow. it’s not obvious cause the arch isn’t a full rainbow, but I was indeed thinking about it. i guess i also wanted to somehow convey that it’s not just Gerry that is giving something to Jon. they are both sharing something meaningful with each other. Jon is still making him bright. then, there is the leaf, because this happens in Autumn, and the small “-G” which is a reference to the note Gerry leaves to Tim — “I’d say you have at least somewhat of a chance” the quote is obviously very cute and the moments in which both Gerry and Jon say it (though this is Gerry’s phrasing) are CUTE. but i chose this one because it’s superficially warm + as a standalone could mean something more. it’s simple and it’s complex. it’s “yeah im totally bi” “yeah i would indeed like to kiss you” and it’s “sometimes it feels like the entire world is against you and your life has been so so hard, but I’d say you have at least somewhat of a chance”. and this is their chance. so they take it

OKAY i made myself emotional thank you for get quite as far as you are reading this!

pictures next:

*folds my hands and patiently waits for your essay on why dune sucks*

Oh bestie I’ve been waiting for this ask you have no idea what you’ve just unleashed

Ok so first of all, let me preface with the fact that I read the first three out of the six books in the series so I’m not going into this blind with no context and this is not a just a movie review but an overview of the “duniverse” if you will. I’m also going to try to do this with the least amount of spoilers possible in case people haven’t read the books or seen the movie yet!

So, I read the first book, didn’t love it for reasons I’ll get into later, but decided to read the next book because I am an avid reader and I don’t like leaving a series unfinished, especially when I’m interested enough in the story. The second book was my favorite out of the ones I read but was still just … not very good ??? And then the third one truly was … a book. I stopped reading after that because the story was so weird and the writing was so bad that I was literally getting zero enjoyment out of reading them.

When it comes to the first book, it felt very much like the author came up with this cool universe with complex politics and theories and wanted to share that with people but then said oh shit … if I want to write a book I need a plot ???? And so kind of just threw something together that ended up becoming what the series became. I say this because the first book is like 700 pages long with about 600 of those pages JUST being exposition and world building and the remainder being the actual … story. There is so much shit just thrown at you and the way its framed, to you know relate to the plot, is that each 50 page explanation for something is paired with about 3 lines of dialogue from a character you don’t care about and will likely never see again.

There are just so many fucking WORDS in this book that just don’t matter to anyone other than the author because not only are these concepts just not worth remembering, they’re also layered under writing that becomes so dense and complex it ends up being almost illegible. It’s disappointing because, as I said before, the story is actually interesting but you don’t even get to it unless you either read the book multiple times or really spend time trying to parse out what all the words you’re reading actually mean. I think Dune falls under the myth that “complicated/dense writing is what ‘good’ or ‘more adult’ writing looks like” when in reality it really just turns off a majority of readers and does not necessarily make for a readable book. The only group of people that I can see enjoying this story are pretentious white dudebros and guess what, Dune literally invented what modern day sci-fi spaces look like where the vast majority of its participants are DING DING DING!!!

Now, the second book had a lot more plot and a more coherent story than the first book and you start to feel more connected to the characters, which is why I liked it the most. That being said, just because a plot was more evident does not necessarily mean that the plot was good 😗 The biggest problems with this book were, one, the writing style of the author that continues into the second book, and two, the plot starts getting weird and confusing and REALLY takes a nose-dive into weird and confusing in the third book.

And now that I’ve talked about my issues with the writing style, we can get into why the actual writing (ie. the plot and characters) was also terrible ☺️

First of all, it must be taken into account that Dune was written by a middle-aged white man in the 1960s and, for the time period, I have to say that the author, Frank Herbert, was pretty ahead of his time. That being said, being ahead of your time for the 60s is still a V E R Y low bar to get over and there are still a whole host of issues that make the time period of the writing very clear - the first being how gender is discussed and plays a part in the story.

I actually took notes while I was reading Dune because I read it for a book club and one of the first notes I wrote was “Wait so ……. Women are truth sayers but they somehow still need a male savior ……… interesting premise.” This same issue also crosses over to the problems with race relations prevalent in the book, where the indigenous population of Arrakis (the planet this series is set) are all strong characters in their own right, but they still somehow need a white savior. This is why I mentioned before that the author was ahead of his time in being able to write strong female and minority characters, but the bar is still in HELL. And the author gets so close too, to realizing that this story shouldn’t be about Paul being the savior of the universe because that’s not what his character wants, but just because Paul doesn’t see himself as or want to be a white male savior doesn’t mean he doesn’t end up being one. Like literally the whole plot of the book is supposed to be about the wrongs of imperialism, corruption, and false gods and that how even if you can literally see the future, you’re still trapped in a world you have no real control over, but all that gets buried under the convoluted and confusing writing, so all most people will take away from it is ‘lets do drugs in the desert’ ajdlkahsdjfklh like ???

I only really came to the conclusions of what these books are actually ABOUT when I like fully sat down to parse out what truly happened in the books - the average reader will not be doing a full fucking literary analysis of your work to even understand what it was about and THAT is 100% my biggest gripe with books like these. Where there is actually a good message hidden in there somewhere but that message is not accessible to a general audience without someone having to sit down and write a book report. A very good chunk of your general audience will not have the time or energy to do that, and if that’s the only way people can consume your story, you might as well not write the story at all.

Not even getting into other issues with the plot of the book surrounding homophobia, fat phobia, and other similar tropes that were prevalent at the time this book was written, overall I just don’t think that Dune accomplished what the story was meant to accomplish because of what I spoke about above. The movie was surprisingly good in that it takes the plot of the first half of the book and makes it digestible, but even then some of the major points and explanations were left out. I guess there’s only so much that can be shown on screen before it ends up being 30 minutes of narration explaining the universe, which is the major downfall of the book. Anyway, I’m interested to see what part two will look like although I know the actual plot gets significantly worse from here on out. I don’t have very high hopes for it.

Missed Opportunity: Yuki Sohma & Queer Representation in Fruits Basket

I typically don't write these kinds of posts, but I gotta say, as much as I've considered myself a pretty devout Fruits Basket fan throughout the years, after rewatching Fruits Basket 2019 S1 + S2 (and re-reading parts of the manga), I've definitely got some things to say about the execution of my boy Yuki's character arc...

This isn't to say I don't adore certain aspects of his arc. On the contrary - Yuki is perhaps one of the most compelling character studys in all of Fruits Basket. The way his story challenges the absurd, archaic notion that "no one will love you unless you love yourself", confirming to the viewer that you often need external affirmation and support to heal from past trauma, is so poignant, especially to those who have suffered with the debilitating lack of self worth that often accompanies PTSD.

In the end, I find my problems lie with some of the opportunities that may have been missed in failing to canonically substantiate the queer coding inherent to Yuki's teenage experience and relationship with Tohru Honda. While I certainly have nothing against the Yuchi ship - in fact, I think his relationship with Machi serves as an opportunity for Yuki to impart the same affirmation, love and compassion Tohru afforded him - having him end up in a heterosexual relationship (of which there is already a needless glut within the Fruits Basket universe) just leaves me feeling bereft and somewhat...shortchanged. It's as if, in this piece of narrative fiction so fixated on conveying the complexities and nuances of human connection, there is a whole swath of relationships deemed tangential to this deep-dive into the human experience. Yes, I acknowledge the existence of fleeting representations of the queer experience, such as Hatsuharu's love for Yuki - however, this is always represented as a character's past state - a secondary setting, not their default. The inevitable, seemingly inescapable curse for all the characters of Fruits Basket is not remaining by Akito's side forever - frankly, it's heteronormativity. Every single character, even those that are heavily queer coded (ex. Ayame, Hatsuharu, Uotani, and yes, our boy Yuki), end up in heterosexual relationships by the end of the manga. Now, it is important to state, emphatically, that this post is not meant to undermine or erase their possible characterization as bi or pansexual - rather, the sheer volume of characters exhibiting this trajectory of inevitable heterosexuality seems to portray the queer experience as ephemeral - incapable of being brought to fruition within this universe.

And Yuki is perhaps one of the most egregious examples of missed opportunity for LGBTQ representation. The whole notion of Yuki subconsciously adhering to heteronormative expectation, initially contextualizing his feelings towards Tohru as romantic, rather than familial, is so emblematic of what many queer people, particularly men, face as teenagers and young adults. Yuki, once aware of the nature of his feelings, admits to feeling somewhat embarrassed by the revelation - a revelation that seems in line with ego-dystonic sexual orientation, wherein the individual's sexual or romantic preferences are dichotomous to the idealized (often heteronormative) image they aspire to. Yuki's queer coded experience is further corroborated by Yuki's discomfort with his position as the subject of romantic fantasy for the vast majority of the female school population.

All this being said, I have no particular stance on who he should have ended up with in the end (though I do feel, narratively, that Kakeru would have been a natural choice - but again, I'm not particularly concerned with the endgame ship). In fact, I feel having him single, with a new, chosen family, that accepts him for who he is, would be equally poignant, given the weight Fruits Basket consistently places on acceptance, it's role in overcoming trauma and, consequently, achieving happiness and fulfillment in life. It also would have been nice to have one character achieve happiness solely through this form of human connection, since I also feel Fruits Basket places far too much emphasis on romantic relationships by the end of the series.

Again, I want to mention that this post isn't meant to throw shade at any specific ships - particularly Yuchi. On the contrary, as mentioned earlier, it's good story telling to have Yuki become an emotional pillar for someone who has also struggled with family trauma. There are also many other endgame heterosexual relationships in the series that make absolute narrative sense (lookin' at you, Kyoru). However, given the sheer volume of characters who showed some degree of queer coding that inevitably ended up in heterosexual relationships, I feel that having Yuki's arc embody the true queer experience, canonically, would have ameliorated this lack of LGBTQ representation, while also working seamlessly with his entire character progression throughout the story.

Then again, I'm an obscure weirdo with like, two reblogs on my Fruits Basket blog, who simply wanted a moment to yell my grievances about a fictional character into the ether, so take all of this with a grain of salt.

Ship your ships, everyone. I just wish Fruits Basket had been a little better about saying #lgbtqrights, especially for my boy Yuki.

{A} Creation — Examining Myth

As mentioned earlier, much of what will be posted here — especially in the beginning — will be borrowed from a treatise I was working on before the creation of this blog. What follows is an example of such excerpt written some time ago and which any additions or clarifications are made will be made in the same style as this foreword.

To position this analysis, it follows {A} Creation as presented in {A} Creation — Revisited, comprising its own "chapter" or section. The introduction reminds the reader that Truth is not what is being conveyed, but rather truth as medium for understanding and situating these figures in "their Universe." Remember, the relation of these Forces is the focus, not the act itself. This story is not meant to be a Genesis or a Big Bang, it is a creation, not the Creation.

In the Time-Before-Time, there was Nothing: no light, no warmth, no substance, no energy, no order, no chaos.

And then there was.

From Nothing — quite spectacularly and without explanation — borne was Everything... but not as we know it now. All was One — each State, each thought, each possibility — and her name was MĀ.

In coming to Be, MĀ had distinguished herself from the Nothing that surrounded her and thus defined herself in relation to it. To the Nothing, She gave the name: OMĀ, the First Mother, who is only in that she is not.

Here, we are introduced to two Forces — or rather, one Force as it relates to its negative/complement. This is the “birth” or conception of MĀ from Nothing, or OMĀ. Existence born from non-existence both “spectacularly” (or perhaps “miraculously”) and “without explanation.” This is the introduction to a binary that later in this work will become more complex: the relation between Existence and Non-Existence. What can be said here is that from one is born the other and the limit separating each is not as defined as what might be expected.

A mention was made in "Some exposition" of Daoism. While not a direct correspondence, one could conceive of the distinction of MĀ from OMĀ as yang from yin. Of course, according to Laotzi, the Dao comes to us as and from darkness, not light. Here, the second stanza suggests that MĀ might be thought of as light in response to no-light, but such I think is too literal an interpretation. It is not a matter of MĀ being conceived of as light or as dark, only that her "birth" distinguished one from the other. OMĀ, then, could be said to represent a state with no distinction. Where all things co-exist and equally co-nonexist at once, a truly equal but null state.

A further qualifier present in stanza three states that the initial phase of Existence is/was different from the Existence we know now: a Being defined by separation, distinction, where things exist in regards to and in combination with other things. In this “time,” the singular distinction was between existence and non-existence: the former possessing all that “was, is or could-ever-be.” Every possibility. Every eventuality. All was One, All is One: a concept that will be discussed later in this analysis.

This was how Existence came to be. And for an undetermined amount of “time,” MĀ stayed in the company of OMĀ, speaking without being heard, being without being seen. This sort of being did not bother MĀ, however, for she contained within her every eventuality. When one is Whole, there cannot exist loneliness and so she was content with existing as she did for she did not yet know differentiation.

This, however, would not last.

Though she contained all that was, is, and could-ever-be, MĀ had not yet considered applying this Wisdom. Existence up until then was Blissful, Tranquil, All-Potential. It was enough simply to Be — Unconsciously. But eventually, what was “enough” was no longer. MĀ had a Thought/Dream and that Thought/Dream was action instantaneous. With the swing of Her blade, MARAKALA beheaded MĀ to bear Herself.

Several concepts are introduced here: the notions of Perception, Wholeness, Wisdom, and, most importantly, Consciousness vs. Unconsciousness.

Perception — or the lack thereof — is applied to OMĀ as MĀ is “speaking without being heard, being without being seen.” This, too, defines the Time-Before-Time as a state where Perception cannot exist and whereby MĀ has not yet developed the concept of Self outside of her relation to OMĀ. MĀ exists, but she is an existence without Consciousness, an existence that cannot be Perceived as Perception is reliant upon differentiation: differentiation of Self from Other; sense from sense; distinctions which exist within MĀ, but are not yet understood to her. This state is described as being one of “bliss,” “tranquility,” “all-potential” — it is a state of Ignorance (v. Wisdom), yes, but brimming with potential. It is the Unconscious state which will only be defined by that which comes after it: the violent birth of Consciousness, MARAKALA.

And so begins the process of differentiation. At this stage we begin to see new concepts introduced which come to define themselves in relation to their “opposites:” consciousness vs. unconsciousness; ignorance vs. wisdom; self vs. other; peace vs. violence.

Though I used "'opposites'" here, a better word might be "complements."

MĀ suffers a Thought/Dream and this period — defined by “bliss” and by ignorance — ends with violent dismemberment: Consciousness distinguishes itself and so distinguishes everything from everything. MARAKALA is born instantaneously: she is the Thought/Dream, she is the Head of MĀ severed from its body; she is the All-Potential now aware, now discerning and now possessing the tools by which to transform the potential into the kinetic. She is MĀ when MĀ becomes aware of herself, aware of every eventuality expanding infinitely inward and — soon — outward from the Source, her body.

In birthing herself from the Head of MĀ, Consciousness was born, was preserved, and MARAKALA Knew what she was meant to do. She took up her blade again, hacking at the headless MĀ: she cut Her just under the ribs, then just below the knee.

These three pieces took new shape: from MĀ’s feet formed was AAXASA, who is and rules over all which is Solid; from MĀ’s midsection formed was LUDIŽA, who is and rules over all which is Liquid; and from MĀ’s arms and chest formed was HEHENA, who is and rules over all which is Gaseous.

This was what had been ordained.

In this section, we are introduced to three new Forces: AAXASA, LUDIŽA and HEHENA — hereafter referred to collectively as the Three Sisters. The states of matter are divided between them, representing their “physical” dominions. These ownerships — along with the sections of MĀ’s body which produces them — are the first correspondences for the Three Sisters we have available: AAXASA is composed of MĀ’s feet and given ownership of that which is solid; LUDIŽA is made of MĀ’s midsection and given dominion over the liquid state of matter; and, finally, the HEHENA is portioned from MĀ’s arms and chest, ruling over the gaseous state. Though not said explicitly, these “ownerships” are a testament to each Sister’s character. Following in “birth” order and as they approach the realm of humanity, they take on further characteristics:

AAXASA is stubborn, unyielding, firmly planted; she is the eldest (after MARAKALA) and is quick to take leadership over her Sisters.

LUDIŽA is second-eldest, though is not one to commandeer as might her elder Sister; akin to the state over which she is assigned ownership, LUDIŽA is fluid, malleable, but typically of a reserved humor. She is comprised of MĀ’s midsection and deals in — where humanity is concerned — emotionality and appetites of varying sorts.

HEHENA is the second-youngest and the most “liberated” of the Three Sisters; she is unbound, the most easy-going and so, too, the most flighty; she can be difficult to pin down and bucks imposition.

Those familiar with the classical elements and their characterizations will surely recognize a congruence here whereby the Three Sisters represent Earth, Water and Air respectively. These interpretations can be useful in grappling for a fundamental understanding of their character, but should be considered neither wholly representative nor perfectly analogous. In fact, even their ownership of their respective states only hints at their character and does not and could not capture the vastness and contradictions that exist within each Sister, much less between each.

[A reminder: these Forces, though referred to by name, in the singular and in the feminine, exist far beyond comprehension. They exist beyond elements, beyond states, beyond character and correspondence. These are things that must be applied to them for our collective understanding. These are things we will explore in greater detail later in this work, but it bears repeating here at their introduction.]

A final concern for this passage is the ultimate line: “This was what had been ordained.” We are witness to MARAKALA’s dismemberment of the body-MĀ. She is shown hacking, severing, creating Many from the One, which we will see repeated later. At this juncture, the Sisters are the most Whole, divided only into three (and four, if counting MARAKALA). But this final line tells of a plan, a Fate or Destiny for All that has been created. There is Reason, even if we — reader and writer alike — are not privy to it. There is method to madness, order to chaos, creation from destruction: all made real by MARAKALA’s mind and blade.

But MARAKALA was not finished. It was with MĀ’s hands that MARAKALA had dismembered Her, and, as such, they belonged to MĀ and MARAKALA in equal measure. MARAKALA used the blade first to sever the left hand and borne was RAKALA, who is and rules over Change and Transformation. Understanding Her Purpose right away, RAKALA stole the blade from MARAKALA’s right hand and severed it at the wrist. This hand, too, RAKALA claimed for Herself.

Finally, what parts remained of MĀ — her shed Blood, the Mysteries — MARAKALA devoured for fear that those Great Secrets might escape into the Nothing. To ensure this would never happen and that MĀ could not be Reunited ahead of the Thought/Dream’s conclusion, MARAKALA sealed up Her mouth never to Speak again. Thus, MARAKALA is the Keeper of the Mysteries and the one who ensures that their powers are kept in check by wielding them with Omniscience.

There is much to unpack in this passage, as both stanzas explore the multi-faceted nature and unknowable knowledge possessed by MARAKALA:

Firstly, born is the “first” and final Sister: RAKALA, given dominion over “change and transformation.” She is the Hands of MĀ which MARAKALA uses to “birth” the Three Sisters and all differentiation following her own. RAKALA is born equally of MĀ and MARAKALA, for her “true” birth was at the conception of Consciousness when MARAKALA took ownership of MĀ’s hands. She was only made distinct, however, when MARAKALA severed the Left Hand which then took for itself the Right. Her birth is testament to her nature as disciple of Consciousness, the Intercessor. She and MARAKALA are inextricably linked, whereby MARAKALA is the All-Potential and RAKALA the All-Kinetic. RAKALA is the Hand and MARAKALA its phantom-mover. It is due to RAKALA’s connection to MARAKALA that she is often "despised" by her Sisters and which informs her nature as Trickster — a topic that will, of course, be discussed in greater detail later.

In the second stanza, we are introduced to the Mysteries — or those things which defy categorization at the time of Creation. They are represented as MĀ’s “blood” and devoured by MARAKALA so as to prevent the disparate elements now-created from reuniting and returning Existence to Oneness. This implies — and it is shown later in the myth — that despite their forced separation, the pieces of MĀ by their very nature long to return to Oneness, to be Whole. If allowed to do so, though, the Thought/Dream would not reach its “conclusion.” The nature of that conclusion is unknown and unknowable, but as already established, there exists Reason for separation: even if that separation is more imagined than real.

Given their respective functions, MARAKALA and RAKALA exist omnipresently: the former being the Laws which govern existence and the latter the one who executes those same Laws. Even the smallest particles could not move without RAKALA’s intercession; without her all is Static; she is energy and all is energy. She and MARAKALA underlie all of existence and are thusly blind to the Illusion of separation, if even it is their role to maintain it.

Lastly, MARAKALA is assigned (or assigns herself) the “Keeper of the Mysteries.” The first mention is made regarding her Omniscience, but such follows directly the act of MARAKALA sealing her mouth so as never to “Speak again.” This is another testament to MARAKALA’s nature: she is the God-Conscious, “Keeper of the Mysteries,” who presides over and comprises the laws which govern the Thought/Dream/Illusion — and she is Silent. Again, this frames RAKALA’s function as Intercessor. Though not omniscient like MARAKALA, RAKALA is most closely aligned (and even entangled) with MARAKALA. While none might commune (directly) with MARAKALA, by nature of her station, RAKALA is closest of all forces to Omniscience due to her proximity to and interconnectedness with MARAKALA. As stated earlier, “RAKALA is the hand and MARAKALA its phantom-mover.” But the hand is a curious thing, is it not? In working, it is never long before the Hand learns to move without Conscious-instruction, to complete what-is-to-be-completed without Thought.

The Three Sisters, newly born yet fully formed, were filled with anguish and terror: they had never been apart and the space between them felt untenable. Each reached out a Hand for Her Sister, but when they touched, MARAKALA spoke through RAKALA and the cacophonous force shook their every fiber. Each was broken into innumerable pieces, all of which were sent careening into the arms of OMĀ.

In the Nothing, those pieces clung to one another, taking on new, collective shapes. In time, the Sisters forgot they had been thrown apart, for they found elements of one another and began to feel Whole again. But neither MARAKALA or RAKALA felt detached like the others, for they are One and they exist in the interstices of All.

And concerning the Sisters, their pieces made so many beautiful and terrible things.

Again, the desire of disparate Forces to return to Oneness is on display: the Three Sisters reach for one another and are met with violence. Each of them is shattered and sent “careening into the arms of OMĀ” by MARAKALA who “spoke through RAKALA.” This touches again on the dynamic entanglement of RAKALA and MARAKALA, but such has been suitably explored already in this introduction.

What is more interesting here is the violence with which the Sisters are dispatched. Conscious-creation (as opposed to the Unconscious-creation of MĀ from the Nothing) is framed as a destructive force. MARAKALA’s inception was the Thought/Dream and instantaneous action of beheading MĀ/herself, followed by the swift dismemberment of what remained. Thus far, Creation has meant division, but this begins to change in the second stanza:

The Sisters — “shattered into innumerable pieces” — are at last given the opportunity to reunite. They cling to one another, group, create new things all in accordance with the Laws of MARAKALA and by the Hand of RAKALA. This is a more familiar type of Creation: one which is additive and where things we might begin to recognize can and do take shape. The Sister-pieces join to create “many beautiful and terrible things” and so the Universe-of-Substance is born.

It is of them We are made. And the Earth, the Sun, the Moon: They are All things and MARAKALA unites them as Head of MĀ. This is how Everything came to be not as a singular One, but One divided — interconnected by Dream, by Thought, by Fate, but such is a reality often forgotten by those and that so far removed from Creation.

The final stanza builds upon what was established in the earlier selection:

By way of joining pieces, the Three Sisters, RAKALA and the Mysteries (though such is not expressed directly) compose our Universe-of-Substance: atoms, elements, etc. All is MĀ: divided, yet ever-interconnected: a concept which will be explored later in this work upon a closer examination of the figures/Forces introduced here. Even still, I am sure it will fail to capture the complexity and mystery of this concept. I cannot provide all the answers because I have not been given them, I have not been shown them: such is why I am writing this, to pique the interest of fellow-seekers who might explore further or in ways I neither could nor would.

It’s been a while, what with me being being more active on Twitter these days, but I had some thoughts churning around in my brain and this felt like a better place to post them rather than threading them over there.

This is a post about Persona 5 and restorative justice. Before I go any further, though, a note: this is meta about restorative justice and prison abolition as ethical philosophies only, how it can be expressed/structured in works of fiction, i.e., Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, and what the importance of doing so is.

I should also note that I am not a philosopher, a legal scholar, or an activist, I just like to read, and I strongly encourage you to look into the topics I’m discussing in this essay. If you want specific recommendations you can DM me; again, this being meta about a video game, I think linking those titles here would diminish their importance regarding what they’re actually about.

Ready? Okay. Let’s get started.

what is restorative justice?

‘Restorative justice’ is a concept in ethical and legal philosophy that holds itself in contrast to two other kinds of justice: punitive and carceral. Punitive justice is justice as punishment, i.e., an eye for an eye, while carceral justice involves justice as the confinement of criminal offenders. While both have heavy overlaps with one another, they’re distinct in the generality vs the specificity of their outcome: punitive justice can involve the death penalty, property seizure, permanent loss of rights, etc., carceral justice refers strictly just to the incarceration of criminal offenders in institutional facilities (jails, prisons, etc.).

Restorative justice, in contrast, roots itself in the understanding of closing a circle: the best and most holistic way to heal harm one person inflicts on another is to have the person who inflicted the harm make reparations to the person they hurt in a tangible and meaningful way. This can take many forms, and if you’re passingly familiar with restorative justice already, you may have heard about it involving the offender and the victim meeting face-to-face. This does happen sometimes. Personal acknowledgement of the harm you’ve inflicted on someone is important, and direct apologies are important, but these need to also be coupled with actions. The person behind a drunk hit-and-run of a parent could help put their orphaned child through school, or a domestic abuser could be made to take counseling and go on to help deter domestic violence in other households, and so on. 

The vast majority of states across the world use punitive/carceral models, though small-scale community trials of restorative justice have been attempted, to varying degrees of success. No one is going to argue that it would be easy to implement, but it is important. Restorative justice is about recognizing that crime, specifically crimes against other people, are fundamentally still about two people: the perpetrator and the victim. And we have to look beyond the words perpetrator and victim to recognize that they are both human beings and challenge ourselves to build a society where our concept of justice means healing hurts instead of retaliation.

It’s not easy, but it is possible. It requires changing your own perceptions of justice and humanity and society and the big wide entire world to have the kind of mindset that allows it to be possible. But it is possible, and I know that from personal experience, because it’s my own mindset and I’ve been through trauma too.

prison abolition and the god of control

Persona 5 has an authority problem. By which I mean, Persona 5 has a problem challenging authority in any way that functionally matters.

The game is drenched in heavy-handed prison imagery, from jail cells to wardens to striped jumpsuits to cuffs and chains to an electric chair. Throughout the long build-up of the main storyline we’re treated to a confectionery delight of punitive justice, stick-it-to-the-man justice: the Thieves find a bad guy who coincidentally has personally hurt or is actively hurting one of their members, and they take it upon themselves to make the bad guy miserable and then send him off to jail. By the end of the arc you’re meant to feel like you accomplished something heroic, that by locking someone up you’re balancing the scales of justice. In the Kamoshida arc Ann even frames this in restorative justice terms, telling him he doesn’t deserve the easy way out of ending his own life and needs to live with his mistakes and repent, but he’s still sent off to jail regardless and Ann and Shiho are left to struggle through the trauma he put them through without anyone to really support them. This repeats itself, over and over: Madarame, Kaneshiro, Okumura, Shido--expose the bad guy, bring him low, publicly shame him, and then send him away (or, in Okumura’s case, watch him die on live TV to riotous cheers from the public).

And what does this all accomplish, in the end? You get to the Depths of Mementos on Christmas Eve to find the souls of humanity locked away in apathy, surrendered willingly to the control of the state, and your targets right there with them, thanking you for helping them return to a place where they don’t have to think of other people as people any more than they did before. In prison, they can forget that they are human beings and that all of the rest of the people in the world are too. The Phantom Thieves march upstairs and defeat the Gnostic manifestation of social control, that being that masquerades itself with lies as the true Biblical god. And then you go back home and the adults tell you that everything is okay now, the system itself isn’t rotten, and you just have to sit back, stop actively participating in the world, and let them take the reins.

It’s one of Persona 5′s most ironic conceits. “Prison abolition....good?” the player asks, and Atlus swats you on the hand and says, “Silly kids, prison abolition completely unnecessary because you can trust the state to not fuck up anyone’s lives anymore ever.” All while using prison imagery to present prisons as institutions inherently divorced from what might constitute actual justice.

Prisons exist because hierarchies exist, and so long as hierarchies exist, inequality will exist and people will commit harm who otherwise likely would not. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too, Atlus. You can’t frame prisons as an inherently unjust institution used to control people because you didn’t do anything to get rid of the hierarchy. You just gave the hydra a few new heads.

restorative justice and rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is Persona 5′s favorite buzz word, and for all that it’s used the game never really clearly defines what it’s supposed to mean. Yaldabaoth uses it as a euphemism to describe the process by which he creates his ideal puppet, but Yaldabaoth bad, and by the end of the game, Yaldabaoth dead. We get barely any time with Igor after that for Igor to define rehabilitation properly on his terms, which is notable in that Igor is the one who’s supposed to be the spiritual mentor of the wild card within the Persona universe. 

We can only infer from that that it’s the player who’s meant to define what rehabilitation is by the end of the game, but because the game fails to take any concrete stance on its themes that could in any way undermine the idea that society isn’t functionally broken, it’s hard to figure out what conclusion we’re supposed to draw. As I stated above, the game immediately walks back any insinuations that it’s the institutions themselves that are rotten by having Sae and Sojiro step in and assume responsibility for making the world just by continuing to operate within the rules society itself has created. If you can’t beat them....join them?

If anything the closest we can get to coming up with a definitive understanding of what the game wants us to understand rehabilitation as is when the protagonist is in juvie. During those months we’re treated to an extended cutscene of all of your maxed out confidants taking action to get you out of jail, but because you can trigger this scene even if you haven’t maxed out all of your confidants, and because the outcome (getting out of juvie) is the same even if you haven’t maxed out any besides Sae, then we’re right back where we started.

But that cutscene still has a sliver of meaning to it despite it being largely window-dressing, because the game does push, over and over, the argument that it’s through your bonds with others, through building a community, that you’ll rehabilitate yourself and find true justice.

And that’s what restorative justice is about: community.

the truth: uncovering it vs deciding it

I can’t find enough words to convey how infuriating it is that Atlus comes so close to telling a restorative justice narrative and then completely drops the ball on displaying it at all in Goro’s character arc.

Goro’s concept of justice is fundamentally punitive, the textbook “you hurt me so I’m going to hurt you back.” In doing so he goes on to hurt a whole bunch of other people: orphaning Futaba, orphaning Haru, triggering a mental shutdown in Ohya’s partner Kayo, and also killing countless millions other instances of mental shutdowns, psychotic breakdowns, bribery, and scandal that caused people material harm and, in a handful of cases, killed them.

Yes, Shido gave him the gun, but Goro pulled the trigger. And in a restorative justice framework, you don’t bypass that fact: you actively interrogate it.

There’s been a lot of really great meta about what the circumstances of Goro’s life were like, including the Japanese foster care system, the social stigma of bastardy in Japan and the impact it has on an illegitimate child’s outcomes, and the ways in which Shido groomed and manipulated Goro into being the tool of violence he made him into. These things aren’t excuses for what Goro does, however: they’re explanations for it. They are the complex social issues that create a situation where a child feels his best choice, indeed maybe his only choice, is to take the gun being offered to him and use it on other people. If you want to prevent more kids from slipping through cracks into those kinds of situations, you need to understand the social ills that made those cracks appear in the first place and you need to fix them. Otherwise there will always be another kid, and another recruiter, and another bad choice, and another gun. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.

Even so, none of that bypasses the fact that it was Goro’s hand on that gun, that it was Goro who performed the physical action of killing Wakaba’s and Okumura’s shadows, and that, as a result of Goro’s direct actions, Wakaba and Okumura died. You can say Okumura deserved it all you like, but Haru doesn’t deserve to be an orphan. Haru deserved to repair her relationship with her father. Okumura deserved the chance to learn and make direct, material amends to the employees he hurt and the families of those who died on his watch, and they deserved to have him give them a better way to heal.

But this isn’t about the loss of Okumura making amends to his family or his victims: this is about Goro Akechi, and the fact that even in Royal his fraught relationship with Haru and Futaba is never explored, barely even addressed. There’s not even any personal, direct acknowledgement from him of the pain he put them through.

You can say he doesn’t care, and that’s fine that he doesn’t care. And it is. He’s a fictional character, this is a video game, they are anime characters.

But Persona 5 flirts with the idea of restorative justice and never fully explores it, and it’s a weaker game for that.

the thin place, the veil between worlds, the line in the sand

This is the last part, I promise, and I’ll be short and brief here, because the truth is that none of this matters, at least not in the way that you think. Persona 5 is a story. It’s a lie that we buy. It’s all zeroes and ones and electrical signals and optical images on a blank black screen.

But art can be powerful. Art is like magic, the deepest magic, the oldest kind. We human beings are creatures of art and poetry, of images and patterns, of music and words. Good art, really good art, can allow us to explore new ideas and critique our internal assumptions about how the world works.

No, fiction doesn’t affect reality, not the way that you think it does.

But if you’ve gotten this far, I just got you to read an essay on restorative justice and prison abolition in regards to a Japanese role-playing game, and that is something to think about.

How do you define rehabilitation? What kind of justice do you believe in? Is the way you conceive those things really the best way?

And how much more interesting could a story that challenges those concepts be?