Just 2 AM thoughts: Theory crafting is just another form of writing fanfiction, you cannot change my mind.

Can I ask why you don't like RHaTO 2016? I started it solely because the scene of Jason and Bizarro talking on the floor on the first issues did things to my heart the one time I saw a panel of it, but I didn't get much farther. And I like how you talk bout issues

Oh, thank you for the compliment! Apologies for this taking so long. I had to reflect a bit. (For what it's worth, the scene you're referring to is one of my favorite scenes in RHatO and some of the best writing in the entire run).

Some caveats:

I like reading serialized comics, but I'm unpracticed in the art of reading serialized comics, so my structural analyses come largely from analyzing other forms of writing (mostly novels, some TV & film). This means that I might be expressing critiques that are not entirely fair given the nature of the medium.

I read the entire run in a couple sittings last September, so these are generally remembered vibes and not nuanced analysis. I'm open to correction if I've misremembered something.

I actually don't dislike all of RHatO 2016, even though I do strongly dislike some of the canon introduced (this canon is discussed in points 5-6, and thus contains spoilers)

Also, for brevity's sake (ha!), "RHatO" refers to the 2016 version; if I mean RHatO 2011 I'll indicate that.

Anyway, my problems with the run (cut for length):

RHatO doesn't know who Jason is. This is not a "RHatO!Jason isn't who I think Jason should be" critique (though I certainly feel some element of that as well) but rather a "Lobdell cannot decide the basics of who his version of Jason Todd is as a character." In a different run that went through the hands of multiple writers, I'd find this far more forgivable, but barring the tail end of the run, Lobdell is the sole author. Jason is by turns incredibly clever and incredibly stupid in ways that felt contradictory. I had very little sense of what he valued or cared about. Sometimes he expresses great empathy and sometimes he's bafflingly self-absorbed and the only thing that seems to determine these behaviors is what's most convenient for the plot. Don't get me wrong: there are Jason moments in RHatO that I absolutely love, but they're balanced by Jason moments that utterly confound me because I don't understand how this is the same person.

It's not an ensemble book but it's pretending to be an ensemble book. This is a fundamental issue with every iteration of RHatO (including the webtoon) because no iteration of RHatO is written as an ensemble book--Jason is always the main character. RHatO also sort of sets itself up for failure in that regard--Artemis and Bizarro are far less well-known characters with less history than Jason and would require more investment and buildup on Lobdell's part to make them more than just props, but Lobdell doesn't put in the work. Even arcs that ostensibly center Artemis or Bizarro end up feeling flat, especially because so often they operate in service to Jason, The Main Character. (Incidentally, the point when I found Artemis & Bizarro most compelling was when they were separated from Jason and allowed room to breathe and exist).

The emotional core of the story, insomuch as there is one, is between Bruce and Jason and it really, really shouldn't be. Don't get me wrong, I would read a million issues of Jason and Bruce being completely, wretchedly awful to each other, but because the emotional core lies between Bruce and Jason, and also because RHatO is trying to be an ensemble book, and also because Lobdell is very uninterested in crafting a story around an alternate emotional core, whenever the story isn't about Bruce and Jason (which is most of the time) it flounders. I'd say that's fine if Lobdell just wanted to write a fun, dumb adventure book, but the Bruce and Jason bits are too present to ignore, making the whole thing feel very off-kilter.

From a team perspective, I don't understand what Jason adds. The whole run is sold as a "dark trinity," but the role Batman plays in the Wonder Woman-Superman-Batman trinity and the role Jason plays in the Artemis-Bizarro-Red Hood trinity isn't really the same? I feel like I'm supposed think Jason deserves his place on the team because he's The Main Character, but even from a very mechanical powers and abilities perspective I don't get what he's doing there. He's not particularly clever or strategic. He doesn't have the resources Batman does. He's not the brains, especially because later arcs give that role to someone else. If I had to assign him a role I'd say he's the "heart," whatever that means, but I also fundamentally don't buy Artemis and Jason as a team or companions and would argue that Bizarro serves as the "heart" (as well as the brawn) most of the time.

(This section contains spoilers) RHatO introduces the stupidest plot threads and then proceeds to do nothing with them. Willis Todd is alive, for reasons. He's Wingman, who's just randomly part of Batwoman's Bat-Team, for reasons. He's Faye Gunn's son, making Jason Faye Gunn's grandson, for reasons. None of this has any real bearing on the plot but it does create a lot of problems for Jason's canon backstory, whatever it is at this point in time.

(This section contains spoilers) Which also, the fact that it opens with conflict with Black Mask, one of the few rogues Jason has had extensive conflict with as Red Hood, creates a nightmare of what's in continuity and what isn't. My understanding is that UtRH is in continuity, which makes literally everything about the opening act not only nonsensical, but actively confusing.

This is less a critique of the series itself, but worth noting: I generally disagree with how people rec the first half of the run (i.e. the run with Bizarro and Artemis) and not the last half of the run (the Red Hood: Outlaw part). I read the series in trade format so I don't have the issues on hand, but I think RH:O vol. 2 is way more enjoyable (at least when it comes to Jason content) than the middle sections of RHatO.

So I guess I have problems with consistency, character work, storytelling choices, and ensemble writing. I don't with it's a worthless run per se; it's certainly better than other Jason-centric stories, and I love Dexter Soy's art about as much as I dislike Kenneth Rocafort's, so that's definitely a bonus for (early) RHatO 2016. I also don't think Lobdell is a completely incompetent writer, necessarily; he's just lazy, and incurious, and generally kind of a hack, which in some ways makes it worse.

I also don't think anyone is wrong to like either version of RHatO. I am a very brittle reader with specific wants & desires from comics that are usually only ever met by accident. So, obviously, take all this with an amount of salt anywhere between a shaker and a mine.

Your tags on the "Jess and Lorelai are alike" post reminds me of something that occurred to me a while back, and that is: Jess is a combination of all the people Rory loves most, in one person. He's like Lorelai, but he's also like Luke. And she can share music with him the way she does with Lane, and argue with him like Paris, and share her love of literature with him like Richard... I mean, I know I'm biased, but clearly that means he's her perfect person! 😉 (Once they're both mature and ready, of course. Which is the thing, isn't it?)

Believe it or not, this actually crossed my mind a couple of times too, I'm just incapable of articulating my thoughts sometimes, mind gets overcrowded with ideas and the ideas obviously like hanging out together, but they also fight and I'm pretty sure there's some popcorn involved too (woah, previous sentence, Lorelai much?). Okay, hear me out (for the 2627627372 time, how do people still put up with me, where's the Lorelai quote???

yeah, that's the one!!!!!😌)

Anyhow, here are the 🎇thoughts🎇 (heads up: the following text is messy and probably makes zero sense, sorry in advance):

It's already been established that Jess is kind of an anomaly to the Gilmore Girls universe given how he has storylines that are entirely separated from the lives of the girls. If any of the characters was going to be shown as (shown as, it's all about perception) a collection of different personalities, it was him (besides the Gilmores, but they are the protagonists, it makes sense that they are the ones with the most layer). And people tend to be contradictory personality-wise in real life, but for writing, choosing to put the main focus on particular character(s) and showing the story from their point of view implies that you have to approach everybody else's story with a rather subjective lens. And that means how every person in the life of the main character gets a set of traits that resonate with said main character the most. Those are the traits that are going to be highlighted. Example (everything turns into a science experiment with me apparently): if Paris were to be the main character, the show would have naturally explored more of her journey and given us more information about her experiences (note how we already have more than enough material to analyse when it comes to her, but the things we have are heavily intertwined with the way Rory perceives her), but would have cut a bunch of Rory-related storylines. Maybe Paris wouldn't be as beloved because there would be more of her to see and Rory would have been a very different character from the Rory that we know (in what way different, I don't know, but it's not that relevant to my point). What I'm trying to put an accent on here is that Jess obviously has a lot of traits that resonate with Rory considering the manner in which his story is handled. It all links directly to that conversation we had a while back, the "they see each other with absolutely no filter" one. Rory understands and knows Jess (and vice versa, but the important puzzle piece here is that the show is told through Rory's pov) to that great of an extent to make him worth the risk of challenging the way this entire creative universe works (this can be applied to Luke in relation to Lorelai too). Even with Lane, the aspects of her life we are allowed to witness are the aspects of her life that Rory's been introduced to in detail (and if Rory knows about it, it's automatically a part of her universe). On the other hand, there's a bunch of stuff that Jess goes through that Rory has absolutely no knowledge of (and doesn't get to discover in the eternity of the show either, the swan incident for example), but still, the creators chose to show us that regardless. I think it says a lot about the importance of Jess in Rory's life. I totally followed the train of thought too far into the forest here, I'm a big time geek when it comes to the writing process and the way that things work😅. I just think it's not a coincidence that Jess is shown to share/shares that many personality traits with people important to Rory. And yes, I'm referring to him and Rory as life mates (let's just hope I get the copyright from Anne Shirley in court) from now on, I think it fits perfectly. They're each other's person, you know? And I am in no way dissatisfied with their ending in AYTL (open endings my beloved <3). Literati just give me that "best friends first, soul connection" vibe (and I kind of have a reputation for being a platonic soulmates queen around here so I suppose my take is somewhat valid, friendship is the solid ground of their dynamic, that's why they keep coming back to each other, there's no magical destiny stuff involved, I need to write a detailed post on that). I do believe Jess is Rory's 🎇perfectly imperfect geek🎇. And now I shall add Grey's Anatomy quotes because that's from where I get the my person obsession:

I think I might be a Gilmore myself, I managed to talk about a thousand things in one post and who knows what will happen in the tags...

ugh what you said about jon just helplessly missing deisha and despite being able to connect, still ultimately grieves alone forced me to think about this one book that said something like “grief is a room you enter alone” and I just ;_; something I love about your metas so much is that you rlly pick apart how it can be true that multiple things can be happening at once - he’s being understood, but he can’t be understood, he’s monstrous, but he’s human etc. basically I adore these essays and just reading how you build and present flaws in characters I think is genuinely making me a better writer

THANK YOU...I think we all grieve alone, just a little bit. With people, and maybe especially with more intangible things - when we move to another city or country, when we live alienated from our home cultures, when our bodies fail us, or when relationships fail. It’s inherently such a solitary thing.

And yeah, so often in life we’re feeling so many contradictory things!! Maybe even ALL THE TIME! I’ve loved and hated simultaneously, I’ve never wanted to see someone again and found myself constantly seeking out contact. You ever never want someone to text you, but you’re sad that they don’t text? I want to go back to my workplace but also I want to keep working from home forever. So it’s a real, legitimate feeling, I think.

But that’s also not why I write it that way. Stories inherently kind of have to work on both a literal and symbolic/metaphorical level. You said that you were interested in the writing bits, so I’ll get specific - I determine what happens in layers. Some things are the most essential aspects of the story, and everything else has to warp around that. Hope Etc is a very weird and bad example because a) I put no thought in this story and b) the nature of daemons is that they literalize the metaphorical. So basically every physical thing that Jon does is metaphorical for something. 

So what a story is ‘about’ is the most important thing, and this can change and shift throughout the story as you realize what keeps cropping up time again and again (which is kind of oxymoronic). I use monster vs human a lot for this specific fandom, because monsters can have whatever metaphorical significance you fucking want them to, but other stories such as hope vs desolation, optimism vs pessimism, wanting to die vs choosing to live, etc, work too. The second thing is tone - which determines the message of the story dramatically. What a story is ‘about’ can’t be pessimism when you have a light-hearted and comedic tone. Unless you’re getting REALLY creative. You can add a lot of additional themes to that, but a bunch of themes together make is what something is about. Also very important is that for me what something is ‘about’ includes genre. 

Then what’s kind of wrapped around that is the metaphor. Literal things happen, which have metaphorical meaning, which advance what a story is ‘about’. Not everything that happens is metaphorical - sometimes things have to happen to advance the plot - but things that happen need to advance something. Either plot, or a character arc, or they need to have metaphorical significance. In my opinion the most deft writing is when everything that happens has all three. 

I think over metaphor is character arc and character. When something happens in a story it has to advance the plot and advance the character’s arc. The character’s arc forms a trajectory that spells out the theme. A character arc for me frequently means the relationship between two characters, which often really really work to highlight theme. I think people push each other to change and grow a lot. If it’s a romantic relationship I push that ‘growth instigated by the other’ hard. Also, foils. I think the best romantic relationships are foils. I love foils. I always write foils. Just adore them, they’re so easy to write. Just make someone the opposite of someone else but give them the same theme. It’s great. This is also why I’m always saying that I don’t really sit down and ‘make characters’, characters just happen based on what needs to happen. I don’t decide anything about a character when I start out besides “haha exact opposite of canon character” or “haha amnesiac PI” or “haha roleswap”. And that’s coming from someone who rarely uses canon characterizations and who writes everybody as a thinly veiled OC...and maybe that’s why everybody kind of ends up a thinly veiled OC...

Over that is plot. Plot is what has to happen to make all of these other things happen. I can’t plot. I think I can’t plot because I’m too worried about these other things and I forget ‘oh yeah, Things Have To Happen’. Maybe there’s other people who plot first and then figure out these other things based on what happens in the plot? ....why...

So I kind of made that a gumball, layered thing, because that’s how I build the story. And I shouldn’t have, because these things all feed each other. What a story is ‘about’ is highly dictated by what you’ve decided the character arc to be - highly - and it creates a feedback loop as both of these things get changed and twisted and tangled during writing. A story never ends how I intended, because different things crop up. But there is a ‘priority list’ for me, and that’s kind of the layers - these characters have to act in X way because that’s one of the cornerstones I need to hit for the genre, so I have to have their character arcs match this. Characters can’t act in a certain way just because the plot makes them - granted, sometimes they do, but that means that you have to go back and tweak their character arc to match. You cannot have something metaphorically happen that goes completely against the theme, unless that has repercussions. Plot isn’t the story for me, the about is the story. None of this is hard and fast, and there is nothing that you can’t do, you just really have to view all of these things in a complex interplay that constantly affect each other.

I think of it like gears? They all work together and churn together to make the story work. But if you twist one gear, the others move too. You first imagine it this one way, but then you keep on tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, and then everything else has to change too, so then you’re like why did I even bother to outline, outlining is stupid, and also I have this funny joke so I have to go back and change everything, and...

Wow, maybe that’s why I’m so bad at planning shit..

My...goal? Is to make it so that Everything works on every level. You should be able to read a story completely literally and completely miss the metaphorical meaning and still vibe. But unfortunately the way it turns out for me sometimes is that the symbolism outweighs the literal. When I write absurdist/surrealist stuff it’s just me being lazy and not having to have things be literal, lol. What you get when something only works on a symbolic level and not on a literal level at all is Utena. And I’m writing trashy fanfic so I can’t do that. What normally happens in practice is that things happen literally for a bit, and then I’m like ‘oh I’m Sensing a Theme’ and then I start playing into the theme, and then things happen because it’s thematic. Plot is...plot should be more important to me...

And then of course there’s grounding all of this in human emotion and making sure there’s a climax (me, shaking hope etc: THERE’S NO FUCKING CLIMAX), and dealing with all of that stuff that makes it actually emotional and impactful instead of just abstract and dumb. 

I chose not to use examples for all of that because I wanted it to just be broad writing advice? I can kind of point out there examples of that line of thinking in my writing, and I probably can for Hope, Etc, but it would be a bad example - both because the NATURE of that story is that the literal is INHERENTLY a metaphor so you really cannot view anything in that story as literal, nothing in it is literal - also because I put no thought into it. 

Of course that’s not my process. That’s not my process at all. I don’t sit down and figure this shit out. I didn’t read any of that anywhere, it’s just me bullshitting, that entire thing was just me bullshitting relentlessly I am so fucking sorry. My process is that I joke about ideas with friends, I sit down at a computer and I kind of thump a keyboard for a few hours, I live my life and daydream stuff and kinda make little movies in my heads, I go home and slam the keyboard some more, halfway through I walk up to my beta and go “hey what’s the plot of this?” she helps me figure it out by giving me very bad ideas, I kind of slam my keyboard some more, and then it’s done. And then I kinda edit it a little maybe whatever and then I post it. 

There’s not a lot of thought involved. I really can’t stress enough how I don’t think about all of this when I write. I’m really brain empty. When I do these analyses what I’m doing is that I’m looking back over my story and then I’m like...Oh That’s What I Was Doing! Huh! Neat!

Haha that got long. I’m not a good writer. Thanks for the ask!

Challenges in Introducing Value Education at Higher Education in India

Valuation Education is the much debated and discussed subject in the plethora of education in India. Of course it can be true that the main purpose of any education will go with Value orientation. More concentration on Value education may be given at the primary and secondary level of school education than in higher education in India. Values may be effectively imparted to the young minds rather than to the matured ones. It may be the important reason for this prime relevance given at the school level. There are so many modules designed with the help of agencies like NCERT and others for properly imparting the value education to the school students. In this context, many innovative educational practices are being identified by way of the experts. Good number of experiments and studies are being conducted in the recent days on the effectiveness of showing value education at school level. Some schools have very innovative and radical course designs to help you impart the values. Effective teaching practices in imparting value education ranges from story telling, displays, skits, one act play and group discussions to various other formats. New methods have been evolved just by educationists to create an effective learning sphere. The usage of electronic gadgets also gains importance in the teaching-learning practices about value education. But at the higher education level, due to various reasons, the importance given to value education is not even though it is given at the school level. The curriculum and the teaching methods also could be subjected to scrutiny. It can be true that colleges are meant for a kind of specialization in some field of education. But in the Indian societal context, the youth require direction and counseling at this stage. They have been exposed to various challenges at this stage which necessitates the intervention of educationists for his/her betterment. His/her character building also strengthens at this juncture. Students' perception on various life factors and events are getting shaped at this stage. On the whole they evolve their own approach of life. Their sensitivity and knowledge are getting direction at this stage. Hence, an effective value orientation becomes certain to the students of colleges. Keeping this requirement in mind, States like Tamilnadu introduced a compulsory paper/course on value education to undergraduate students of all colleges in the State under the choice based credit program. Though this kind of effort is made with the good intention of imparting values to the youth, many limitations around bringing out the expected outcome could be identified. The problem mainly begins with the definition of values. Defining the concept 'value' poses a challenge to all scholars. The term value is loaded with varieties of meaning. Each meaning reflects its very own philosophical position. Generally the term value is spontaneously associated with religious values. It is believed by many Indians that values are nothing but the religious and spiritual guiding principles of life. Hence, it is thought that the path is already been laid for the life journey. But in the context of modernity and modernism there rises a fundamental question of whether value education is required at all in a modern state. There are people argue that modern life is based on science and technology, and both are value neutral. They see that the values are bugbear held out by people living in the past, glued to outdated religious basics that have no relevance to the 21st century. At this point, there is also another group of modernist who propagate the necessity connected with value education at learning centres in order to safe guard the democratic state and its values. The beliefs they wish to cultivate are modern secular values such as honesty, respect to other, equality, collectivity, democracy, improving the human rights, sharing equal space in the public sphere and so on. These values are considered as the solutions of enlightenment period. Hence, four positions could be arrived at on the basis of the above understanding. The are: 1 . There are actually religious values which are very much essential for every one and must be included in the curriculum. 2 . The religious values should never find place in the educational system. They may operate at the private sphere. 3. There are nonreligious secular figures and they must find space in the education. 4. There is no need for teaching value education in the academics as they cannot be cultivated through formal learning and such value cultivation will make the individual biased. In consequence so that you can these positions, following questions arouse. 1 . Whether value education should find place in the educational product? 2 . If it is required, then what sort of values should be given preference in the curriculum? 3. What is the importance being given to the religious values which are primarily developed on the basis of scriptures? 4. Can modern values alone are generally sufficient enough or is there any possibility of blending the values of modernity with religious values? 5. If religious values are to be given importance in the curriculum, which religion will find prime place? If there are actually contradictory propagation on a single virtue by two religions, then how are they to be handled? 6. Equally religions differ on the practices also. Right from eating patterns, dress mode, marriage systems, war tactics, destroying, punishments to various other aspects, religions differ on their outlook. In this situation, what sort of perceptions need to be taught? Furthermore these questions, another billion dollar question would be raised on the methodology of effectively imparting those worth. Then again as it is mentioned earlier, the school education can very well include this education easily because the model itself is advantageous for it to accommodate. But at the college level, the system finds it very difficult to work out. Which means this study could analyse the theoretical problems relating to the identification of values to be included in the curriculum with the one side and the problem of effective designing of the curriculum and imparting those values on the other side. II The necessity for imparting values to the students of all levels has been felt by everyone. The world today is usually facing unprecedented socio-political and economic challenges. Problems of life are becoming increasingly intense and complex. Standard values are decentered. 'An environment of strife pervades all countries and broken homes have become well-known. An insatiable hunger for money and power, leads most of people to tension and absence of peace of mind and a myriad of physical and mental ailments have become common place" 1 . In the present day context of frequent and often chaotic social upheavals, we have to look at the problem of restlessness of the youth, their frustration born out of futility health of their search for meaning of life and the purpose for which they are living, often leading to evil and wickedness. The following calls for a new approach to, and a new vision of education. It is obviously felt that the present educational procedure promotes rat race and keep the student community in a sense of insecurity. Educational institutions have become the pressure cookers building pressures in the minds of youth. Also a loft sided educational pattern which insists with instrumental and technical rationality for the successful life in terms of gaining money and power has invaded this educational system of India. The person who is deemed to be unfit for this survival race becomes disqualified along with ineligible to live in this market economy based life. The spate of industrialization and economic growth inside developed nations has brought about a perceptible change in this scenario. And developing countries including India are experiencing the ripple effects of this development. Values earlier considered essential by all societies have been eroded and get given way to unethical practices around the globe. Where honesty and integrity were loved and appreciated, greed, problem and red tapism have come in, bringing in their wake, unethical responses which have pervaded all walks for life and are thwarting efforts of a few enlightened individuals to promote value based society. 2 Hence, guidelines of well structured education is the only solution available with all states. With growing divisive energies, narrow parochialism, separatist tendencies on the one hand and considerable fall in moral, social, ethical and even national values both in personal and public life on the other, the need for promoting effective workshops of value orientation in education has assumed great urgency. Development of human values through knowledge is now routinely seen as a task of national importance. Value education though supposes to be the part not to mention parcel of the regular education, due to the market influences, it could not be so. Hence, it has become a particular inevitable need to include an exclusive curriculum for value education at all levels. Now the next question would be concerning nature of value education. What sort of values should be given preference in the curriculum is the prime problem inside introduction of value education. This problem surfaces because we can find varieties of values prescribed on the basis of various scriptures and theories. Sometimes they are contradictory to each other. This issue has been thoroughly discussed earlier. But the solution to the problem in the nature of value education is primarily dependent on the social conditions that prevail in the state. Truth be told there need not be an imported value educational pattern to be prescribed in India. The burning social factors would demand the required value education. Though India is considered to be the land of divinity and perception, the modern value system throws challenges to the ancient value pattern. Right from the Gurkula pattern to the varna ashrama values, all values are under scrutiny by modern rationality. Hence, the relevance of the senior values prescribed by the then society is questionable in the present situation. On the other hand, the so called modern character which have been listed earlier also subjected to criticism by philosophers like post modernists. They question the very dynamics of the rationality of the enlightenment period. Because critics of modernity strongly declare that the modern rationality 's the reason for the deterioration of human concern in the world and they paved the way for inhuman killing and escalation in values. The reason of the modernism is considered as the root of power politics which leads to inhuman behaviour of the electrical power system, according to them. Hence the modern values like democracy, civil rights, environmental ethics, professional ethics, concentration and all such values are found useless in bringing harmony in the society. The values like control, tolerance, peace bears the negative connotation in this context. Hence, what sort of modern values are to be included in the resume is a challenge thrown towards the educationists. At one side the fanatic and fundamentalist features of religious values and on the other side the modern values based on the market economy and other factors are to be excluded and a well balanced curriculum using genuine worthy values suitable to the society has to be identified and included in the educational system. In this context, the idea becomes obvious that there cannot be any universal pattern of values to be prescribed in the system. Each time a suitable blend of religious and modern values is to be done, the designing of such course demands some sort of unbiased, scrupulous, intelligent approach on the part of the academician who designs such course. Thus the spiritual principles of sensitizing the youth for happy world and rational values for a just world are very considerably required. Religious values can be taken but not with the label of any particular religion, democratic values need to be included but not with its dogmatic inhuman approach. Thus there need a perfect blend of both. This is the real test thrown to the Indian academicians. After the identification of these values, they need to be inculcated not to be informed to your students. Mostly listing the values is done very easily, but imparting them effectively requires genuine spirit and also innovative educational practices. In the Vedic period, the gurukula system prevailed in which the student has to thoroughly undertake a pattern life with the guru shishya hierarchy. Whatever the guru declares are the values of life. , in the modern context, which is supposed to be the democratic sphere, a sense of equality and freedom has to prevail the training situation. Also the values identified cannot be preached on the basis of the religious faiths. So the teacher has to see effective working module to internalize the values in the minds of the youth. The teachers' understanding for the values prescribed and his/her commitment in imparting them also play a crucial role here. How to sensitize the teacher before carrying the values to the students is also a challenge to the educationists. The value education category room, if it is dealt with full seriousness and sincerity would be very interesting and challenging sphere for scholars and teachers. At times they need to sail at the same level with the students. The hierarchy may get disappeared. Price education demands a total responsibility from the teachers. They become more accountable. On the other side, a teacher who is committed to a few values would always like to preach and impose them on the young minds. That extreme should also to become avoided with a balance of mind. Value education cannot be done by just delivering lectures and screening flicks. It requires a strong interaction between the students and the society. A lot could be experimented at this sphere. For which the better value 'integrity' is expected from the educator. It is observed that many modules of teaching values have been engineered and tested. Some are seemed to be very effective. In Tamilnadu, especially in aided colleges, with just about all good intention the government has introduced the value education as a compulsory scheme at the undergraduate level. But just about every university has its own syllabus for the same. The scrutiny of those syllabi also reveals a lot of variations for conceiving the value education. In some universities, some religion based institutions are given the responsibility of designing and even conducting the course. Similarly the teachers who have not been exposed to any such type of training in value education get the responsibility of teaching values. The introduction of value education for all under graduate courses is done for the cost of a core paper of that course. The teachers who have been handling their hardcore subject papers must meet the shortage of workload due to this programme and to solve this problem, they have been entrusted with the job of illustrating value education paper. This is done with the aim of avoiding the workload problem of existing teachers. The most vital and sensitive part of education has been made like a mechanical dogmatic part. At this juncture, the fate regarding value education at the college level could be imagined. How to solve this issue is again a challenge to the educationists of Tamilnadu. The same fate could be observed in many other states of India. Hence, two important problems floors here, one at the syllabus level and the other at the teaching level. As it is discussed earlier your syllabus could be designed by way of paying attention to all aspects but imparting the same requires not only innovative teaching options, but also innovative training method of the educators. It is as good as training the driver to drive the car; the educator needs to be trained in imparting the values. The technical education employs teachers with sound knowledge in the issue, similarly it is essential to have teachers with sound mind and creative teaching skill to teach value education. Significance education is definitely not to be dealt with compartmentalization but it should be taken as a part of the whole educational system. As Nietzsche puts it, the society requires masters to create and impart values, not the slaves who take all the values imposed on them without any critical understanding.

Bloody Oath: Different Approaches to Roleplaying a Paladin

In episode 2 of the podcast I mentioned that new players often run into difficulties when role playing paladins, due to the paladin oath feature. This is because the paladin oath feature is one of the game’s only roleplaying guidelines that also comes with mechanical features. Strict adherence to the oath can cause players to feel unconnected to their roleplay decisions, feel restricted in their ability to develop their character, or even just make poor decisions because “it’s what their character would do!” Now, it’s not my job to tell people how to roleplay, that would be presumptuous of me. However, I do wish that both players and DM’s rethought of the way they think about the paladin oath. Instead of being a restrictive hindrance, I believe it can be one of the most rewarding roleplay experiences in the game, if only people understood it better.

First of all, let’s go through what a paladin oath actually is. In-game, the paladin’s oath is their final confirmation of their principles. It is how they channel divine energy into their spells and attacks, and paladins strive to uphold the “tenets” of their oath; the set of principles that they must adhere to, or risk breaking their oath. These tenets can vary in their tone and specificity depending on the oath, but in general, they describe things like “don’t lie” or “show the wicked no mercy.” In mechanical terms, the paladin oath acts as the paladin’s subclass system and grants different abilities and spells depending on which one they pick. This oath forms the bedrock for who the paladin is as a person, and shapes most, if not all of their major decisions.

This is what leads to the problem that players sometimes face when roleplaying a paladin. No other class has such a strict restriction on their roleplay decisions. Warlocks are bound to their patron, but the Player’s Handbook makes no explicit mention of what Warlocks need to do to please their patron, or even what happens if they oppose them. Even clerics don’t have as many restrictions on them as the paladin does. While clerics are also in service to a god, nothing specifies they actually have to do anything except worship their god. Paladins are unique however in that their roleplay feature has an explicit effect on game mechanics; if a paladin breaks the tenets of their oath, they lose their powers (which is known as becoming an Oathbreaker).

Because of such explicit and consequential instructions on the paladin class, a lot of players (and even DMs) can feel like a lot of their roleplay choice is taken away from them. It’s as if they’re on autopilot and simply have a flowchart that reads:

However, paladins don’t need to be so simplistic. Paladins can be much more than a simple Yes/No machine, despite of, and even because of, their oaths. In order to understand how, we’re going to look at different ways to interact with your oath, along with examples of it from famous media.

 Reluctant Adherence

First up, let’s look at what will probably be the most common occurrence for a paladin that chafes against the restrictions of their oath: the Reluctant Adherence. Just because you swore to keep the principles of the oath, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t weigh on you, or that you even enjoy doing it. You can fully acknowledge that blindly following your oath has had many negative consequences in the past. Indeed, you may be tempted many times to break your oath, either out of a need to serve a greater good, or just the sheer convenience of it. However, in the end, you acknowledge that there was a reason you believed in and swore that oath in the first place and you manage to adhere to it regardless of what fate throws at you.

To showcase, let’s look at an example: Batman. Batman has a quintessential paladin setup: he has a simple oath (enact justice, but never kill), and he draws strength from that oath (often believing that his no-kill policy is the only thing that keeps him from being as insane as those he fights). Now if this were the end of Batman’s personality, he would be a very boring character (essentially, he would be what everyone thinks Superman is like*).

However, good writers understand how to portray Batman’s oath as a method for character development. Like many paladins, his oath gets him into a lot of trouble; no matter how many times he takes down his villains, they keep coming back, and hurting other people. Due to this, Batman often agonises over his strict no-kill policy. He questions it regularly, re-examines why he took the oath, and the consequences of keeping to it. He (and those around him) ponders what keeping the oath says about him. These create fantastic moments of drama and character development, as Batman’s complex personality shines through. Instead of being the core of his personality, the oath becomes a lens to analyse Batman’s character, and this makes him a much deeper character with a much higher potential for development (and character interaction).  

The lesson here is that the oath does not necessarily need to be the central component of your personality, nor does it need to trump every other facet of your character. People are contradictory by nature, and other beliefs your character holds can easily conflict or contradict your oath. Playing into these can make your paladin much more interesting and three-dimensional.

 Adapted Understanding

Next, we’re going to look at my favourite type of paladin oath interaction: The Adapted Understanding. I’m sure that if you examined your own beliefs, you would find that you have refined some of them over the years. Whereas before you held very broad ideas and principles, over the years you’ve reflected on them, re-examined them, cut away anything unnecessary, and what you are left with are ideas that are much stronger and that you hold with much more conviction. Well, paladins can do the same. In fact, I would dare say that the best paladins do this.

 Now especially if you look at the oaths supplied in the core material, a lot of them are quite open for interpretation. Yes, some of them are very explicit, like the honesty tenet from the Oath of Devotion (“Don’t lie or cheat”). But then you get tenets like duty which reads “obey those who have just authority over you.” Now a fresh-faced, naïve paladin fresh from paladin school may read this tenet and believe it means they have to follow the orders of any lord, duke, or king, regardless of their motivation. However, a paladin with Adapted Understanding would question what “just authority” actually means. If the paladin is just passing through, does the local lord have “just authority” over them? If the paladin does not consider the king to be morally just, do they have “just authority” over them? Maybe your paladin considers the ‘will of the people’ to be the reigning authority. Now while this may just sound reminiscent of a teenager pointing to select verses in the bible to prove why they don’t need to go to church every Sunday, a paladin that learns to question their oath, and the true intention of their oath, can end up having a stronger loyalty to it.

 As an example, let’s look at Captain America. Captain America acts very much like a traditional paladin. He is a strict adherer to justice and a code of ethics and swore an oath to the United States of America. In the 1960’s however, a storyline saw Captain America became disillusioned with the American government due to the comic version of the Watergate scandal. This caused Steve Rogers to reject his oath and discard his identity as Captain America, adopting the new codename: “Nomad.” I won’t bore you with all the details of the story (being the 60’s, it got pretty weird), but Rogers re-adopts the mantle of Captain America after a long period of soul searching and self realisation. He realises that his oath doesn’t necessarily mean he swore an oath to the American government, rather he swore an oath to America itself, or as he puts it:

  And Captain America ends up stronger in his convictions after this moment. Rather than becoming a fallen paladin, Captain America never again questions his oath**. His momentary uncertainty becomes a crucible that refines his character.

So, if your paladin is facing a difficult moral decision, they don’t necessarily need to be a robot that blindly follows their oath. Instead, it can be a great moment of character development and can really give them a great moment (I mean come on, look how cool that panel is).

Redeemed Paladin

Now we get to paladins that have…uneasy relations with their oaths. This is the Redeemed Paladin. Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones is famous for breaking his oath to protect King Aerys, slaying him in order to save the innocent civilians of King’s Landing. Because of this, Jaime ends up having one of the deepest and intense character arcs in the whole Song of Ice and Fire series. Even though we are introduced to him as an oathbreaker, kingslayer, child pusher, and incest enthusiast, we see Jaime struggle with his choices and grow stronger as a character. He stands up for Brienne of Tarth, shows kindness to his brother, and even leaves Cersei to go fight with Jon. Similarly, to the Adapted Understanding paladin, a Redeemed paladin can end up with a greater sense of purpose and with stronger convictions than before.

 This is because putting your character in uncomfortable situations can force them to discover new aspects of themselves. Of course, I don’t expect your paladin to go though as long a period of redemption as Jaime did. But it’s not the end of your paladin if they break their oath. In fact, the class description gives explicit instructions on how to redeem your paladin should they break their oath. So, feel free to explore the uncomfortable choice with your paladin. Chances are, you’ll like them more than when they were an unfeeling automaton.

 Conclusion and Final Notes

I hope that after reading this, you’ve gained a little inspiration on ways your paladin can interact with their oath. You can have paladins resent their oaths, you can have them question their oaths, and yes, you can even have them break their oaths. If you make a paladin that ardently refuses to break or bend, you’ll end up with paladins like Rorschach from Watchmen, or Javert from Les Miserables. While entertaining, both of them are more like plot devices than actual characters, and neither of them get a happy ending. Remember, people are naturally full of contradictions, and there’s no shame in your paladin being the same. It doesn’t make them a bad paladin, it makes them a good character.

 * I enjoy Superman stories, but his good stories usually have nothing to do with his reluctance to use lethal force. I could go on an entirely different rant on why Superman is a good character, but that would be for a different blog.

 **Until the travesty that was Secret War

how do i stop romanticizing people in my head? it's painful as hell when that romanticization is shattered and i really want to stop doing it but i don't know how. i wish i loved no one honestly, that would be so freeing.

hmm honestly i'm not a hundred percent sure but i think actively reminding yourself that others have complex and contradictory inner worlds, just like you do, and so projecting any sort of one dimensional concept onto them will always end in disappointment, is a good place to start. they dont exist solely for you and your consumption of them, just as you don't exist purely for the approval of other people. everyone's learning how to be the person they'll eventually come, and with that comes inevitable flaws and setbacks. it hurts and it's frustrating but it's not always a bad thing. helping each other through hardships strengthens the bond between you. sometimes it's a blessing in disguise, allows you to find true connection. robbing yourself of that based on a fantasy is sort of self destructive. if you go into every relationship (romantic or otherwise) with that mentality then it'll be easier for you to accept their humanity/shortcomings, especially if they do the same for you (which they should, in the right context.) it may not feel natural at first but as long as you're using your strong sense of self awareness to break the whole rose tinted glasses thing, then you're doing fine. growth takes time, and so does learning how to accept people for who they genuinely are on a multidimensional level. allow yourself that. of course, i'm not saying you should always expect heartache or pain, but you should prepare yourself for all outcomes and try to hold onto a realistic perspective even if your heads in the clouds sometimes. it could also be a good idea to do some self reflection, to openly analyse why you feel the need to romanticise others to such an extent, what you're avoiding in reality that makes you do that. take a while to mull it over. if you can identify a certain pattern or insecurity, you could begin to work on it. perhaps talking it through with someone you trust, or even just writing about it, could offer some clarity? i think a lot of people are in the same boat. we all want a perfect world, something easy, and you're not a bad person for it. it's good that you recognise the habit you've formed cause that's the first step to overcoming it. the love you have in your heart is very pure and warm and healing, and just cause it's awful to feel things so intensely and to have so much to give, doesn't mean you won't one day be glad for it. don't grow too cold, the world needs more people who are willing to believe ok!! you just gotta strike the balance. i'll be rooting for you :)

Obstacles in Introducing Value Education at Higher Education in Asia

Value Education is the much debated and discussed topic area in the plethora of PTET 2020 in India. Of course it will be true that the main purpose of any education will go utilizing Value orientation. More concentration on Value education has been supplied at the primary and secondary level of school education compared with in higher education in India. Values could be effectively imparted to the young minds rather than to the matured ones. It will be the important reason for this prime importance given at the college level. There are so many modules designed with the help of agencies including NCERT and others for effectively imparting the value education for the school students. In this context, many innovative educational strategies are being identified by the experts. Good number of experiments in addition to studies are being conducted in the recent days on the advantages of teaching value education at school level. Numerous schools have very innovative and radical course creations to impart the values. Effective teaching practices on imparting value education ranges from story telling, exhibitions, skits, one act play and group discussions for you to various other formats. New methods have been evolved by educationists to create an effective learning sphere. The usage of electronic gadgets in addition gains importance in the teaching-learning practices of value degree. But at the higher education level, due to various reasons, the importance given to value education is not as much as it is given along at the school level. The curriculum and the teaching methods equally could be subjected to scrutiny. It is true that colleges are usually meant for a kind of specialization in some field of education. Employing the Indian social context, the youth require path and counseling at this stage. They have been exposed to various challenges at this time which demands the intervention of educationists for his/her betterment. His/her character building also strengthens at this point. Students' perception on various life factors and occurrences are getting shaped at this stage. On the whole they evolve their own vision of life. Their sensitivity and knowledge are getting place at this stage. Hence, an effective value orientation becomes inevitable towards students of colleges. Keeping this requirement in mind, Expresses like Tamilnadu introduced a compulsory paper/course on appeal education to undergraduate students of all colleges in the Talk about under the choice based credit system. Though this kind of hard work is made with the good intention of imparting values into the youth, many limitations in bringing out the expected result could be identified. The problem mainly begins with the definition connected with values. Defining the term 'value' poses a challenge to all pupils. The term value is loaded with varieties of meaning. Each that means reflects its own philosophical position. Generally the term value is without a doubt spontaneously associated with religious values. It is believed by a large number of Indians that values are nothing but the religious along with spiritual guiding principles of life. Hence, it is expected that the path is already been laid for the life path. But in the context of modernity and modernism right now there rises a fundamental question of whether value education should be used at all in a modern state. There are those who argue who modern life is based on science and technology, and equally are value neutral. They view that the values really are bugbear held out by people living in the past, glued to outdated religious principles that have no relevance in the 21st century. At this point, there is also another group of modernist what individuals propagate the necessity of value education at learning revolves in order to safe guard the democratic state and its prices. The values they wish to cultivate are modern secular attitudes such as honesty, respect to other, equality, collectivity, democracy, respecting the human rights, sharing equal space in your public sphere and so on. These values are considered as the goods of enlightenment period. Hence, four positions could be found on the basis of the above understanding. The are:

1 . There are religious values which are very much essential for every one and must be as part of the curriculum. 2 . The religious values should not find invest the educational system. They may operate at the private ball. 3. There are nonreligious secular values and they must come across space in the education. 4. There is no need for teaching importance education in the academics because they cannot be cultivated through formalized learning and such value cultivation will make the individual biased. In consequence to these positions, following questions excite. 1 . Whether values education should find place in your educational system? 2 . If it is required, then what sort of beliefs should be given preference in the curriculum? 3. What is the benefit to be given to the religious values which are primarily designed on the basis of scriptures? 4. Can modern values alone happen to be sufficient enough or is there any possibility of blending a values of modernity with religious values? 5. Should religious values are to be given importance in the curriculum, which will religion will find prime place? If there are contradictory distribution on a single virtue by two religions, then how are actually they to be handled? 6. Similarly religions differ about the practices also. Right from eating patterns, dress mode, union systems, war tactics, killing, punishments to various other features, religions differ on their outlook. In this situation, what sort of perceptions need to be taught? Besides these questions, another billion greenback question would be raised on the methodology of effectively providing those values. Then again as it is mentioned earlier, the college education can very well include this education easily because system itself is advantageous for it to accommodate. But on the college level, the system finds it very difficult to work out. So this study could analyse the theoretical problems relating to all the identification of values to be included in the curriculum at the one particular side and the problem of effective designing of the program and imparting those values on the other side. The necessity just for imparting values to the students of all levels has been thought by everyone. The world today is facing unprecedented socio-political and economic challenges. Problems of life are becoming progressively more intense and complex. Traditional values are decentered. 'An environment of strife pervades all countries and shattered homes have become common. An insatiable hunger for money and even power, leads most of people to tension and absence of satisfaction and all kinds of physical and mental ailments have become widespread place" 1 . In the present day context of frequent and they sometimes violent social upheavals, we have to look at the problem of restlessness of the youth, their frustration born out of futility in their search for meaning of life and the purpose for which there're living, often leading to evil and wickedness. This entails a new approach to, and a new vision of education. It will be obviously felt that the present educational system promotes rat race and keep the student community in a sense of insecurity. Instructive institutions have become the pressure cookers building pressures from the minds of youth. Also a loft sided instructive pattern which insists on instrumental and technical rationality for the successful life in terms of gaining money and ability has invaded the educational system of India. The one who is deemed to be unfit for this survival race has become disqualified and ineligible to live in this market economy structured life. The spate of industrialization and economic development in developed nations has brought about a perceptible change through this scenario. And developing countries including India are experience the ripple effects of this development. Values earlier regarded essential by all societies have been eroded and have assigned way to unethical practices around the globe. Where honesty and consistency were loved and appreciated, greed, corruption and reddish colored tapism have come in, bringing in their wake, unethical responses which have pervaded all walks of life and are thwarting efforts of a few enlightened individuals to promote value based upon society. 2 Hence, implementation of well structured certification is the only solution available with all states. Through growing divisive forces, narrow parochialism, separatist tendencies within the one hand and considerable fall in moral, friendly, ethical and national values both in personal not to mention public life on the other, the need for promoting reliable programmes of value orientation in education has regarded great urgency. Development of human values through training is now routinely seen as a task of national importance. Worth education though supposes to be the part and package of the regular education, due to the market influences, it could not even be so. Hence, it has become an inevitable really need to include an exclusive curriculum for value education at all tiers. Now the next question would be about the nature of worth education. What sort of values should be given preference in the course is the prime problem in the introduction of value instruction. This problem surfaces because we can find varieties of values given by doctors on the basis of various scriptures and theories. Sometimes they are contradictory to each other. This issue has been thoroughly discussed earlier. But the resolution to the problem of the nature of value education is largely dependent on the social conditions that prevail in the talk about. There need not be an imported value educational style to be prescribed in India. The burning social matters would demand the required value education. Though India is viewed to be the land of divinity and wisdom, the current value system throws challenges to the ancient value structure. Right from the Gurkula pattern to the varna ashrama figures, all values are under scrutiny by modern rationality. Hence, the relevance of the golden values prescribed by your then society is questionable in the present situation. On the other hand, the actual so called modern values which have been listed earlier even subjected to criticism by philosophers like post modernists. Many people question the very nature of the rationality of the enlightenment time. Because critics of modernity strongly declare that the fashionable rationality is the reason for the deterioration of human concern on this planet and they paved the way for inhuman killing and escalation of values. The reason of the modernism is considered as the reason behind power politics which leads to inhuman behaviour of the energy system, according to them. Hence the modern values like democracy, civil rights, environmental ethics, professional ethics, discipline and also all such values are found useless in bringing a happy relationship in the society. The values like discipline, tolerance, piece bears the negative connotation in this context. Hence, what sort of modern values are to be included in the curriculum is a challenge placed towards the educationists. At one side the fanatic plus fundamentalist features of religious values and on the other side the modern worth based on the market economy and other factors are to be excluded along with a well balanced curriculum with genuine worthy values suitable to society has to be identified and included in the educational system. Through this context, it becomes obvious that there cannot be virtually any universal pattern of values to be prescribed in the structure. When a suitable blend of religious and modern values has been to be done, the designing of such course demands the unbiased, scrupulous, intelligent approach on the part of the academician so, who designs such course. Thus the spiritual values for sensitizing the youth for happy world and realistic values for a just world are very much required. Religious values can be taken but not with the label of any specific particular religion, democratic values are to be included but not featuring dogmatic inhuman approach. Thus there need a perfect mixture of both. This is the real challenge thrown to the Indian academicians. After the identification of these values, they need to be inculcated will not be informed to the students. Mostly listing the character is done very easily, but imparting them effectively requires authentic spirit and innovative educational practices. In the Vedic stage, the gurukula system prevailed in which the student has to adequately undergo a pattern life with the guru shishya structure. Whatever the guru declares are the values of life. But also in the modern context, which is supposed to be the democratic sphere, an awareness of equality and freedom has to prevail the learning issue. Also the values identified cannot be preached on the basis of any religious faiths. So the teacher has to find effective doing the job module to internalize the values in the minds of your youth. The teachers' understanding about the values prescribed as well as his/her commitment in imparting them also play a crucial role here. How to sensitize the teacher before lugging the values to the students is also a challenge to the educationists. The value education class room, if it is dealt with full seriousness and sincerity would be very interesting and challenging field for students and teachers. At times they need to sail from the same level with the students. The hierarchy may get gone away. Value education demands a total responsibility from the teachers. Individuals become more accountable. On the other side, a teacher who is committed to a set of values would always like to preach and impose individuals on the young minds. That extreme should also to be definitely avoided with a balance of mind. Value education cannot be completed by just delivering lectures and screening films. It requires a substantial interaction between the students and the society. A lot could be played around with at this sphere. For which the supreme value 'integrity' will be expected from the educator. It is observed that many modules in teaching values have been designed and tested. Some will be seemed to be very effective. In Tamilnadu, especially in made it easier for colleges, with all good intention the government has invented the value education as a compulsory scheme at the undergraduate place. But each university has its own syllabus for the very same. The scrutiny of those syllabi also reveals a lot of changes in conceiving the value education. In some universities, some religion based institutions are given the responsibility of designing and even implementing the course. Similarly the teachers who have not long been exposed to any such type of training in value education are given the responsibility of teaching values. The introduction of value coaching for all under graduate courses is done at the cost of any core paper of that course. The teachers who have been managing their hardcore subject papers had to meet the shortage regarding workload due to this programme and to solve this problem, they have been vested with the job of teaching value education paper. It is done with the aim of avoiding the workload problem of pre-existing teachers. The most valuable and sensitive part of education has long been made like a mechanical dogmatic part. At this juncture, the particular fate of value education at the college level could possibly be imagined. How to solve this issue is again a challenge towards the educationists of Tamilnadu. The same fate could be observed in various other states of India. Hence, two important problems floors and walls here, one at the syllabus level and the other around the teaching level. As it is discussed earlier the syllabus could be designed by way of paying attention to all aspects but imparting the same requires not only innovative teaching methods, but also imaginative training method of the educators. It is as good as training typically the driver to drive the car; the teacher needs to be trained in providing the values. The technical education employs teachers through sound knowledge in the subject, similarly it is essential to have educators with sound mind and creative teaching skill to instruct value education. Value education is definitely not to be resolved compartmentalization but it should be taken as a part of the whole educational technique. As Nietzsche puts it, the society requires experts to create and impart values, not the slaves what person accept all the values imposed on them without any critical becoming familiar with. If education fails to impart necessary values to the citizens, it will definitely have a telling effect on the contemporary society. All efforts to bring just and peace in the world results in being futile if proper value education is not imparted.

3.11.20

If you could tell them anything, with no filter or worry that they would be hurt in any way, what would you say?

I don't want to keep kissing and going against walls. That's an area I'm unfamiliar with and that I'd rather keep for someone I'm actually dating. To me, those actions and "friends" don't overlap. I'd still be comfortable cuddling, but the rest I don't want to do.

It's not that I don't enjoy it. As mentioned, I definitely do. But just because I enjoy it doesn't mean I want to indulge in it so frequently. That's an area I'd rather leave reserved. Something I'd rather be off the table except for the person I'm dating.

I like the emotional closeness. But the physical closeness means something different. I don't think I'd like that as a friend.

To me, just because I find something enjoyable doesn't mean it's okay to pursue. It ties into the idea of temptation - temptation is there because it's appealing. That's the point. That's why resisting it is a hurdle.

I want to keep you around, but I feel like this odd limbo between friends and physical is not a model that can last. It feels temporary. There are too many feelings involved, and we know it's going to end someday anyway. Although I understand the desire, I don't see how continuing when there's a known end is at all helpful, logical, or wise.

I enjoy having this safe space with you guys. I genuinely do. It's been fun to figure out some of these things. But the friendship runs separate from the physical, and I want to focus on the friendship and not the physical.

I recognize this makes me seem very two-faced, as I'm the one who doesn't leave. There have been times when I actively led into/during certain activities. And although that's evidently, yes, a side of myself, it's not a side of myself I'm particularly comfortable with. At least not with people who I know I'm not dating, and do not intend to date.

To follow through on my decision means I can't stay in this limbo. It's unfair to my call and it's unfair to you. I need to be clear and follow through on my decision.

There's a difference between who I am - someone who enjoys trying out those activities and learning a new dance - and the person I wish to grow to be. I don't want to be someone who is regularly physically affectionate with someone I'm not in a relationship with. Cuddling is fine - cuddling is comfortable and close and can still be platonic. But platonic making out, for me, is an oxymoron. And what makes it harder is I know you both love me very much, so you have no problem with it. The feeling I get - and I very much know I can be wrong - is "taking what you can get." Not in an objectifying way, but in a "I love this girl very much and want to be as close to her as she'll allow."

You both have been very understanding through my handling this. I'm definitely still learning and have certainly handled things poorly. For that I'm sincerely sorry, as I would hope you guys know by now. I don't want to be another terrible breakup. I still want you guys in my life. I still love you guys very much. I just want to adjust my cuddle position, and need to be strong enough to actually follow through on that instead of sending mixed signals and going back and forth.

Taco, you said that if you separate yourself from ownership of your own actions, you can get out of anything. You're right. So this is my stepping up to the plate, and admitting poorly handled, contradictory behavior. Just because I was handling everything as best I thought I could at the time does not mean it was handled well. I don't regret our sessions, but... Now here's a thought.. though I'm comfortable with you within them, I'm not comfortable with myself continuing them. (EDIT: From "I don't regret.." to "... continuing them" is applicable to both Taco and Bandana.)

You're right. It is more than the ace thing. It's a spiritual choice and a core motivation thing. Starting with the spiritual choice: It's not me trying to be self-righteous, and although there is influence from years of being surrounded by more conservative folk, this is legitimately independent of that. This is the part of me that chose to be confirmed at age 18. This is the part of me that questioned my conservative teachings to find and pursue my own faith and my own relationship with God. This is the part of me that actively chooses to be Christian.

It's funny on that note: I don't normally share that side of me. I try to live by "preach the Lord at all times, and only use words if necessary." I've grown up with so many people to whom proclaiming their faith is important to them, and I never aspired to be that. To me, faith is personal - it guides you, but isn't something that I want to shout on the streets. I've even been self-conscious about wearing my cross necklace. (Part of it being concerned with getting grouped in with "*that* kind of Christian", which is not something I'm proud of. But when Christians are known in society more for their exclusion, rules, and self-righteousness, that's a worldview I don't want associated with me. I may have personal rules but my goal is to love purely, not to exclude others or put myself higher than another. My personal rules are to help me serve better, not to raise myself above others.) But I think that's something I need to get stronger in - I've hidden my Christian self so much that I don't let myself identify with it, because of said views and because I also am a part of a community that's been greatly hurt by the Christian community. (Hello queer Christian.) But the two communities are not contradictory, and I need to identify more with my being Christian - not the label, but the purpose, and the reason I confirmed in the first place.

The second bit, core motivation, is an internal, independent, rooted part of who I am. The best way I've been able to describe it is with a tool called the Enneagram. (Again, not to use more labels but as a means of communication.)

The Enneagram is a human psyche model that focuses on particular "types" - of course no one falls perfectly into any category, but I've found it very handy for understanding myself and other people around me.

Oddly enough when I first took the test I didn't like it much. The type it gave me kinda fit but not really. It wasn't until I was looking through other types that I read the top portion and felt their descriptions resonate.

Each type has a core fear and desire, very much linked. My type's - Type 1's - core desire is to be good, and core fear is to be corrupt/bad. So the inner critic is strong and analyses everything I do. That's part of the contradictory behavior: I try a thing on a whim, and legitimately the rest of me - even unrelated to other people and my faith, but just my own self and head - take what I've done and measure it against my morals and who I want to be. (EDIT: Here, "my morals" and "who I want to be" refer to the compass to be discussed further on, not just me making my own calls.) The inner critic is not something I can let go of; it's part of how I am, and how I process. Even if there are influences, that guide is independent of others' views (recall the questioning of my conservative teachers and having very different views from my mom), and it is an integral part of me. Not separate, but part of my natural self. (Not fun to be in my own head many times, but I've been learning to give myself grace.)

That part of myself is why I had a physical reaction that first week when things weren't lining up right. Even though logically I don't have a problem with loving poly relationships, the rest of me was banging at my insides to tell me it wasn't lined up with my compass.

That's the annoying part too. Is I don't decide my compass. I don't know what does but it defies logic. That's the one part I can't take ownership of because I've tried very hard to change it and it doesn't work. Learning to give myself grace keeps it from jabbing so hard and painfully, but it doesn't change its constant tug and pull. That's why I'm working all the time. And why little things get turned into molehills. Because what might not seem like a moral issue to you gets tested and criticized in my head, sometimes with more weight than you - and even I! - think is necessary. (EDIT: This refers not just to our things, but daily thoughts and actions. I'll feel morally bad for goofy things like not going out of my way to pick up trash, not giving a kind enough greeting to a server (when I was already my regular smiley self), or for eating at one place over another. I recognize how illogical it is many times and so have been working with it for awhile.)

It has nothing to do with how much I love you guys. I still very much want to be close to you. I'm not trying to push you away. I want to be friends forever and I want you in my life. On my end I feel like it could work, because my compass says it could. But I know you guys don't work like I do. I know when I back off certain alleys it seems like I'm closing off emotionally/closeness-wise. Know that legitimately, that is NOT the case.

You were right. I leave and my head catches up to me. Uncalculated things scare me. But that's how I am. That's not leaving anytime soon. I've been pushing against it with you guys for awhile now because I wanted it to work, but if there's one thing I've learned over the years: the pieces that don't align with that compass never stay long.

You guys align with my compass. Just continuing more intense physical affection as friends doesn't match up. From what I've gathered you both see such activities as just an extension of closeness and safety. I feel that closeness and safety, and would not have gotten this far without it. Just on my end, those specific actions have more weight and consequence than in the moment, unrelated to the closeness and safety. That weight and consequence is what I've been working through. (And the grey ace stuff just amplifies the confusion, which definitely doesn't help, hahaha. It's been great to figure that side out, and I feel much more confident in that side of me. It's good to know I'm not broken. Still, I wish that attraction would be a little more consistent.. Again, be allo or ace, but don't do both. I don't recommend it. Not a fun combo.)

To summarize: You both are aligned for me. You wouldn't be so seemlessly adopted into my physics if you weren't. (Some faster than others (Hello Bandana! 😉💕)) I want to keep that alignment. But my compass says I don't want to be a person who is regularly physically affectionate with someone I'm not in a relationship with. (And by physically affectionate, I mean deep kisses and walls.) It's a goal that is independent of you but that affects you both.

I wish you wouldn't take it personally.

But feelings are involved.

So I think you would.

Character Analysis: Lance

[ Shiro ] [ Hunk ] [ Pidge ] [ Keith ] [ Allura ] [ Coran ]

Next up on character analyses: Lance, a pretty cool guy figuratively and literally. Let’s check this hotshot out.

We actually have a fair amount of information on Lance’s background, but, specific details are something that needs to be intuited. When he’s missing Earth, he names Varadero Beach, in Cuba, specifically- and, as we see in the mind-melding exercise in s1e2 we see that he has a large family. Considering the presence of very young children, it’s likely that he’s a middle child in his family, though he could be the eldest or youngest (with the children being cousins, or possibly even nieces/nephews)

Lance’s recollection of his family is also very warm. He talks about his mom’s hugs, and seems to worry or think about them a lot. This suggests that his family is very close-knit and loving, and that Lance’s childhood has overwhelmingly, been kind. It established a precedent of closeness that he seeks to repeat with the teams he finds himself part of. 

As the Garrison is in the US, this would suggest that either Lance’s family immigrated, or Lance attended the Garrison with a student visa. (Also possible in Voltron’s hypothetical future, political lines have shifted).

We also see that Lance, at the beginning of the show, is in a very small class. There are not many simulator teams at all. This suggests, even though Lance seems to struggle (he mentions always crashing the simulator) he’s in rather prestigious company- even if Keith wasn’t aware of him, Lance wasn’t kidding when he claimed to be neck-and-neck with Keith. The fact that Lance was bumped to the fighter class in Keith’s absence would tell us that Lance was, possibly by an impressive margin, the best pilot in the cargo class. 

And seemingly, without much outstanding “natural” talent.

Overshadowed

The scene in s2e10 where Lance frets that he’s a fifth wheel for team Voltron shook up a lot of people but it’s not really out of left field. As early as s1e1, a lot of what’s presented to us on Lance is how, for all his achievement- the class he’s in- it’s still held over his head that he can’t be Keith. Iverson’s harsh comments suggests he doesn’t want to lose Lance to a discipline issue- but it also suggests, in effect, that he’s bothering with Lance because Keith is inaccessible. Lance is just a replacement.

It feels like Lance has spent a lot of his life being outshined by other people. Lance interacts closely with people who are considered prodigies one way or another- Shiro is his idol, and he butts heads with Keith in a way that tells us more than anger, Lance is envious of Keith, big time- but he’s not a prodigy himself, and that stings a lot.

Because Lance is good. Lance is very good- but he gets there by effort. He doesn’t have the instinctual talent Keith does, and that’s not something that can be developed. His obvious accomplishment- making fighter class- is framed as replacing Keith.

I think this is the significance of Allura not mentioning the Blue Paladin’s virtues. Because Lance’s biggest problem is, he’s struggling to define his own unique talents, separate from what others contribute. And at least where he starts out- at his core, he’s afraid that his contributions are actually worthless, and around that he’s built up a layer of defensive hostility and jealousy that tends to stab outwards when he feels threatened. 

It seems the main thing that really sets off his temper tends to be feeling like people are mocking him, but he can also get angry at situations or decisions seem unfair. His particular hostility towards Keith seems to be an intersection of a person he’s already envious of, who is on his level and thus more “accessible” to argue against, and exacerbated by how Keith was used as kind of a symbol of everything he couldn’t be. We see this hostility start to deteriorate as Lance gets a better sense of Keith outside of his reputation as the Garrison’s golden boy.

As the show progresses, we see that Lance is starting to actively work on this on his own. Trying to define marksmanship as “his thing”- and he’s quite likely onto something there, considering one has to be pretty familiar with a gun to stop their hands from shaking. It’s very likely that Lance has been practicing with his bayard on his own time, if he didn’t have any familiarity with firearms before leaving Earth. 

But it’s rather significant that Lance’s overtures are tentative, and more or less isolated, as quickly as Shiro picks up on it. Because it tells us that a lot of this is more or less a game of cognitive solitaire.

Sincerity and misdirection

A very interesting and somewhat contradictory facet of Lance’s character is that Lance is a very good actor. As insecure as he is, he can very easily come across as cocky- though part of this is another element of his personality entirely.

Lance is very attentive of other people, and very good at reading them. He’s also very motivated by understanding people. This is something we see big time in Lance’s initial interactions with Pidge at the Garrison- Pidge puts up a very cold shoulder, but Lance is basically undeterred, and more interested in what it is that’s eating Pidge and making her snap that much.

And part of this attentiveness is that Lance tends to choose what he lets people see.

In contrast to many characters who are a little deceptive, Lance’s dial is tipped very heavily towards sincerity. It’s his general inclination to open up to people- even when this potentially leaves him hurt, as it does in his interactions with Nyma. Lance actively wants to believe the best in people, to connect with them. It takes relatively little concern or prompting from other people to get Lance to open his heart, even about his insecurities or loneliness.

This ties back to what Lance is used to- a big, loving family. Considering some of the defensive or even fearful ways Lance responds sometimes (“Is this a game? I hate games!”) and how quickly he accepts that Nyma tricked him and calls for help, it suggests that Lance’s sincerity has gotten him burned more than a few times before- but the majority of his experiences, or at least those that were the most formative on him, have been positive, and that drives Lance to keep putting himself out there.

While Lance can seem fearless or even a little gullible with people- this is contrasted by how terrifyingly perceptive he can be, as he noticed the bomb drone in a matter of seconds. It suggests that rather than someone who doesn’t see warning flags, Lance is someone who acknowledges them- but wants to try and believe the best because hopefully it’ll work out.

And a surprising amount of the time, it really does.

Go with the flow

I think there’s something very meaningful to the fact that Lance was the one to get his Lion first. Because the Lions are large, daunting mechanical creatures- they’re alien war machines, as Keith points out. Furthermore, unlike any craft the team would be used to, the Lions have a will of their own, and one of the first things Blue does is waltz right into Lance’s mind and then take them all on a wild, breakneck joyride.

Lance’s response? Is to hold on for dear life and see where Blue is going with this. If Blue says she’s “going home”, Lance doesn’t really ask where that is- he trusts Blue, trusts that it’s important, and relays that information to the team.

This is a bit of the metaphor present in Lance’s role as a leg. The legs of the body have a twofold purpose- they hold the body up, but they also carry the body forwards. Lance, I think, leans heavily on the latter purpose- he is not simply an open person himself, but someone who opens the whole team to new possibilities.

And part of that is, Lance is the best suited to jarring and unorthodox developments. This is something we can see in the aftermath of s2e8- when the addition of the Marmorans and their plan to take down Zarkon, and the simultaneous reveal of Keith’s heritage, shakes the foundation of the group, Lance is the one who is actually excited by this situation, explaining the plan to Hunk and talking up a storm about how this is the “best plan ever!”

We can actually see this factoring into how Lance fights a brainwashed Hunk in s2e2- Lance can’t overpower Hunk or outrun him, nor does he really want to hurt him- so he ends up hooking the antidote fish with his foot and kicking it backwards into Hunk’s air bubble.

This also touches a bit on the fact that Lance is a support role in the team. While Lance can strategize on his own, he also fits rather easily into following someone else’s lead. He’s the first one to defer to Shiro, and this seems to suggest he has a bit of discomfort making big decisions for a group- he didn’t want to just toss Blue into the wormhole on his own faith without knowing if everyone else on board the Lion was okay with it.

Inter-connectivity and curiosity

So why is Lance so heavily motivated to figure people out? After all, his general defensiveness would suggest that he’s had a fair amount of people just go throw it right back in his face, to the point that Pidge being hostile towards him doesn’t even really faze him.

Lance is more or less intrinsically motivated to understand people along two avenues- the pursuit of understanding, and the pursuit of closeness. He actively seeks, and creates, situations to get people to open up and show themselves more (“Oops, sorry Shiro, I was trying to hit Keith,” says Lance, who is an excellent shot and Shiro was nowhere near Keith) and while part of it is a kind of detached desire to know- this is actively tangled together with a desire to feel close to people.

As seen with Laika, it’s more important for Lance to feel connected with people than it is for him to practically know things about them. Combined with his tendency to go with the flow and hope for the best of a situation, we see how his first response towards Klaizap the Arusian was that he wanted to make Klaizap a sweater.

Lance is something of a diplomat, but an unorthodox one- he’s the type of person who can more or less waltz into situations and make friends easily.

Of course, Lance also has the capacity to raise some hell when he wants to. New experiences and people are a much stronger motivation to him than the letter of the law, and especially in the presence of authority that seems unyielding (Iverson and the Garrison, mostly) a lot of how Lance copes by feeling trapped is to push out and do something on his own, and his ability to read people and adapt to situations makes him quite inventive at breaking rules (how many people can attest to sneaking out of their military-run astronaut school?) or subverting them (distracting Iverson’s attention off of Pidge).

Ironically I would say that it’s a measure of respect that when Lance disagrees with Shiro, he confronts him directly on it- it suggests that unlike with Iverson, Lance trusts Shiro as someone who will actually hear him out. 

Desire to help

There is an inherent motivation that holds Lance to Voltron, even as much as Earth and his family means to him. While Shiro operates more according to justice and responsibility, I think that Lance’s motivation has more to do with his sense of compassion.

Lance doesn’t want people to suffer. As seen with the mermaid civilization, even if Lance may not have a lot of faith in his abilities alone, he’s committed to try if he feels like he can help. His desire to connect with people does lead him to sympathize with their problems.

It is, in some ways, a very pure and simple motivation. Pain is bad, loneliness is bad- if there’s something he can do he wants to try and he’ll see where that takes him. It takes very little time for him to think of someone as a friend, and once they are- he wants to protect them. Sometimes this can come out as endearing, heartfelt statements, and sometimes it’s more things like the way he snaps at Pidge to buckle her seatbelt when she falls out of her chair. 

In the mermaid civilization he talks about people being grateful and thanking him- but that’s not something he actually demands to happen and is actually caught off guard when Plaxum does kiss him. It suggests Lance does fantasize of himself as someone widely adored, but it isn’t a driving motivation that he actually demands of people.

Flirting

So the thing about Lance and flirting with people seems to be a joint function of his insecurity and desire for validation, and his natural curiosity for people. What we see is interesting is when it seems to be reciprocated positively, Lance doesn’t really try to leap on it and turn it into a longstanding relationship.

It feels basically like Lance wants people to find him charming and likable, and also wants to use it as an avenue to connect casually with the person.

In Summary

Lance is a somewhat insecure and defensive person stemming from self-worth issues, but also someone who is highly motivated to connect with people. He is very interpersonally perceptive, good at adapting to unorthodox situations and driven by a basic desire to help. He hides his issues to a degree, but can be motivated to open up fairly quickly as long as it seems like someone cares.

Overwhelmingly, though, Lance is optimistic and has faith that things will work out, though he is very aware of, and has probably in the past had that faith exploited by others. 

So I saw that gifset of Kripke's commentary on that season 3 episode (I'm a newbie watcher but I started the new season and and slowly working my way through!) and I guess I'm a little confused? Kripke is basically saying "yeah Dean really wants that apple pie life" and when I've been going through and reading people's meta, I've seen a lot of people's opinion (especially season 6 metas) that kind of disagree and that Dean really doesn't want that suburban life. Any opinions? Thanks much :-)

Heya!

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/162713109665/sensitivehandsomeactionman-eric-kripke-on

Oh! Yeah, I reblogged this with the sense of irony about what Kripke was saying in place that you get from being a long-time watcher or deeply embedded in the meta community :P (I should have a /irony tag I use for the benefit of people knowing I’m thinking deep dark shade at whatever I’m reblogging but you know not in a mean way just in a this goes way deeper than what it looks like to me but maybe I just don’t feel like commenting right now :P)

I can’t remember if I have a Dean x Lisa tag that’s actually well-kept except for cute gifsets but 3x02 and 3x10 probably have a fair amount of discussion about it if you want to dig deeper… But I have literally just watched Dean’s conversation with Rufus in 3x15 which reminds me that this was a season-long arc, and 3x10 was a weird little part of it… 3x02 sets up that Dean has a sort of wistfulness for what he COULD have had, and 3x10 and 3x12 (and all these are Gamble-related episodes) have stuff about Dean yearning - this bit and the conversation with Victor where he makes it blatantly obvious that even with Sam he has a sense that he might want more from life and he is not currently getting it - Victor’s comparison of ex-wives and empty apartments is paralleled to Dean’s feelings. And in 3x15 Rufus warns him that this is what he has to look forward to becoming if he survives. (In 12x14 we had a parallel where Ketch buys his way in the door the same way Dean buys his way in the door with Rufus & scotch, but it was subverted in so many ways, it just seemed like the BMoL had sketchy intel you might be able to buy Dean this way.)

Anyway, by the end of the season the message is quite clear that Dean sort of years for it but can’t have it and in many ways has chosen this life of saving people over it. Though he’s dying for Sam, and never un-wishes that or can even think of it, from about the midpoint of the season he wants to find a way to break the deal but I think a lot of that is driven by not wanting to be a demon rather than wanting to grow old, since becoming a demon will pretty quickly undo all the good work Dean did saving people, he’d have to assume. 3x09 gives him any motivation to fight rather than cheerfully stroll off to Hell because Sam’s alive and that’s all that matters, you know?

I think in the context of season 3 the Lisa stuff was pretty interesting because I think Dean can have a contradictory yearning but Lisa is a ghost of an idea, literally where she fizzles out of the dream in the same way ghosts disappear, and to feel wedded to the hunter lifestyle and in many ways he’s been rejecting it from the start… In 1x08 (Bugs) especially he’s making a point about beeing skeeved out by suburbia and the idea of living SUCH a normal life. In 2x20 we see him as a civilian and he enjoys it for a day or two to hang out with Mary and Sam and Jess, and I’ve written a LOT on the over-lap of Carmen in that episode and Lisa in 6x01 since they’re connected by djinn dreams and I feel like the message is his year with Lisa was emotionally/functionally practically the same to Dean as if he’d been strung up in a warehouse the whole time. (That’s something in my 6x01 tag or 2x20 depending which you feel like scrolling through :P Sorry, I’m kind of in advanced brain bleeh from sitting in a noisy room so you can get surface brain rambling to answer this but no research or links in this state >.>) 

Anyway in 2x20 he unequivocally rejects the civilian life because people died without him doing his job, even though he called Carmen “the One” and everything else seemed fixable or exciting to him, including his relationship with Sam. It was after discovering he’d “un-wished” all their work as hunters he angrily appealed to John about why it was his job, before stomping off to find and kill the djinn, and un-make his wish, assuming at this point it was a wish and not a dream. (I still call it a wish-verse sometimes because of how DEAN analysed it and I find it FASCINATING to look at that way when it comes to these decisions, while I’d just call it the djinn dream when looking at it from another angle). 

I suppose Lisa comes not long after but he goes to see her as part of a farewell tour revisiting the best hookup of his life, and ends up smacked with the potential he’s mission out on of raising a kid and all that - a long-term investment he can’t get involved in for one year (do you feel the knife turning :P) because that’s not fair on them and offers them no long-term stability. He CAN’T make a home when he has a 1 year demon deal weighing on him, so the episode is just there to psychologically torture him. I think he never dreamed of suburbia before Lisa in 3x02 but by 3x10 we can see he took some unexpected emotionally scarring just from being told he CAN’T have something. Because posing the question opens up “what if”s (this incidentally is my entire rationale when you boil it down for why the male siren proves Dean’s bi :P). Dean had a moment to seriously imagine a NICE life where he would be with Lisa and have Ben as a son and it’s impossible for he can even start to have it. And in 3x15 Rufus confirms that even if Dean survives (or comes back from Hell as it turns out), being a crotchety old hunter who only opens his door to people if they show up with nice Scotch is about as much as he can hope to look forward to.

I think that’s a bad message too but it gels more with Dean’s outlook and experiences and I think helps him shut away the feelings he could ever have had more or that he was being unfairly denied, in a combination of personal choices to hunt/seeing the benefits of doing it over a normal life, and pessimism about his lifespan or what they can reasonably expect from their lives. In 5x18 he tells Lisa that when he thinks of himself being happy it’s with her, because of the scarring I mentioned that 3x02 specifically denies him this endgame and leaves an impression of it in his psyche as the Thing Dean Can’t Have, but DOES turn into a nice thought to hold onto as a what if. And Sam tells him to go for it and he does, and by the end of season 6 it’s a “never mention this again or I’ll kill you” situation and Dean doesn’t think about endgame out loud for like 5 more years until season 10, and the question is slooowly reintroduced through hesitant confessions and car conversations and meeting a pair of married hunters at a bar one day, to finally get the idea that while Dean’s unequivocally written off suburbia, wife & kids, there’s other things he could get out of life to make him happy and feel less like Victor or Rufus, dark mirrors of his present and future, like the ghosts of endgame visiting a long-term-relationship Scrooge :P 

But yeah Kripke saying that Dean secretly has a romantic soft spot for the normal life and fluffy romance, personified in this case by Lisa, is really because he’s talking compare and contrast to Sam. He says Sam isn’t interested in Bela that way really, he’s just horny and they know no women really so… that happened. (I side-eye but whatever, different discussion :P) and that’s in contrast to Sam’s supposed sweet and nerdy surface layer, while Dean’s got the macho horndog outer layer so Kripke’s explaining in 1 go performing!Dean (and Sam) and that Sam n Dean are yin and yang to each other (which, again, in Baby, we have that great shot of them in red and blue contrasting colours, sleeping top & tail in the Impala from above that demonstrates this… Can’t tell if you’ve seen season 11 actually or joined in season 12 (oops apologies for those spoilers too, I tried to keep them super vague and if you’ve seen season 12 you sort of know where it led to >.>) but this is what it looked like:

from a meta POV it’s absolutely one of my favourite shots of Sam and Dean in the entire show. Anyway it’s visually demonstrating the same thing Kripke is saying in that commentary. Sam presents one way so they write Dean presenting in the absolute opposite way, and then choose to subvert both presented faces with an image each to absolutely destroy that image and show something deep underneath. From the way he was talking it sounded like they thought the Bela thing first so the Lisa thing might literally just have been a part of it because it was amusing to them to do that with Sam, and the rule is absolutely probably 1st thing in their character bible to always make Sam and Dean at odds with each other even if it’s in some innocent visual/character demonstration.

(This is why I hate Buckleming writing btw - they’ve been increasingly writing Sam and Dean as an utterly unified unit who think and breathe on the same wavelength and it drives me nuts because that is not their dynamic at all no matter how fan favourite “winsync” is (which is of course a totally different thing to do with them working well together meta-textually as actors and in the text as kids raised closely together, and who also have worked together for most of/their entire adult lives so of course they naturally move and talk together sometimes - I can be in sync with my twin and we have core personality overlap but we’re also utterly different people in extremely obvious ways e.g. quiet vs chatty - guess which :P)… In Buckleming’s hands it just means they can use Sam and Dean to alternately deliver exposition in lengthy talking scenes as if they’re one character, and that exposition to Mick in 12x17 when he “Hello boys” them in the Bunker was one of their worst incidents so far >.>)

Anyway, I don’t think that makes the Lisa thing insincere especially as it sounds like 3x10 more than 3x02 actually cemented her as Dean’s imaginary choice of perfect dream girl to fill the space Carmen the El Sol ad lady previously held, when it came to the writing. 3x02 stand alone is good to torment Dean as a “Hahahaha you will never have this” but 3x10 builds on it and shows them being intuitive to the character and things that make sense to write him… And I think from the very start they were aware of the contradiction and that Dean might sort of have a soft spot/dream of the normal apple pie life but that he was also at the same time profoundly aware of all the ways in which he hadn’t chosen it, it wasn’t his life, and there were abundant reasons he wasn’t having it and even in the same core places this dream resides, didn’t want it. If you go deep in my 3x02/2x20/6x01 Lisa x Dean metas (again, sorry, I’ll add tags to this post at least :P) you’ll probably find the post I made collecting my rewatch notes as I discovered this subtextual story through the season, realised where it all came from later, and by the end of the season realised that they knew and had talked themselves out of it being something Dean could have because the subtext took the same route as the actual Dean and Lisa arc in season 6, probably because Gamble helped craft the entire thing in season 3 and then brought Lisa back for season 6 and had a whole season to play the entire thing over again. So I feel like that suggests Dean talked himself out of it too with Rufus and Victor’s help, and fundamentally never changed track even with season 5 & 6′s Lisa stuff, because that closed the book on it so hard we have this parallel to Dean and Rufus in 12x14 and the idea he can have something more with a hunter maybe or ~someone in the life~ is now the subtext under that in the same way Kripke talked about him having this squishy interior to do with Lisa back in season 3.

The Book Ramblings of June and July 2019

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis. Well, not really monthly, but you know what I mean.

The Late Mr Shakespeare - Robert Nye I felt a further hankering for this sort of content after finishing Falstaff, and I had relative faith that this book would deliver. My feelings, however, were slightly mixed when considering what was different than Nye’s first book. Unlike Falstaff, this text isn’t written from the perspective of the text’s focus; we instead get a mediator in the form of Pickleherring, who gives us a retrospective and mythologised account of Shakespeare as told through anecdotes and spurious half-remembered tales. Without wanting to just quote huge chunks of the text’s postulating on the subject of men being shaped by the stories that are told about them, I’ll simply say that it’s all fucking great stuff, for while the book does come across as something of a cock-and-bull story with the amount of backtracking and reiterating and rewording of the same points, all of the reiterating and rewording is fantastically eloquent. What I enjoyed about Falstaff is still here, in that a fun larger-than-life world is evoked through a multitude of story snippets and accounts of events that border on folk tales, all, within the context of this book, meticulously stored away in a hundred black boxes over the years, and now shared with us as a testament to the multitude of stories told (in the context of the story) about the famous playwright, and as a big satisfied middle finger towards historical accuracy and the accounts of fuddy-duddies. This is in many ways a book for Shakespeare scholars; there’s a lot of the sort of shit in here that you’d learn as a Shakespeare academic, from attribution studies to dogmatic arguments about Shakespeare’s life and play participation (given undeserved credence here by the authoritative voice of one who knew him personally), and I’m not sure if this at all contributes to making the book good, given both my preexisting dislike for such nonsense (compared to the actual content of Shakespeare’s work) and the fact that not much is done with the information within this book. Nye seems to be reciting facts, slotting them in wherever he can, just to prove that he knows them, and in many cases his statements about Shakespeare’s life seem to all be along the lines of ’this thing was fleetingly referenced in one of his plays, and thereby it must have been contributory to one of his formative experiences'. (Plus, Shakespeare studies is, surprisingly, still a burgeoning field and a victim to changing times, and thus some of the assertions about Shakespeare and his works in this book are undermined by more recent contradictory research). No, this book’s compelling content lies elsewhere. When I first started reading I was concerned as to how compelling our narrator Pickleherring would be; he’s not so old as to be a doddering fool (which would have least given his narration some spice), and not so interesting a character archetype to be able to stand alongside Shakespeare and friends, and despite his assertions that he is a merry prankster full of mirth, this tends to only surface in the occasional moments of weird, sometimes crass erotica. This shit came up in Falstaff as well, again missing the point of sex within the context of farce or country peasant comedy by playing it entirely straight, and thus I am left with no choice but to assume that Nye has got a thing for such shite. Like Falstaff, this book’s blurb purports to answer a number of as-yet-unanswered questions about its titular character, and just fucking like Falstaff, what is revealed is not even that interesting. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY, YEAH, BUT ONLY IF YOU’RE LIKE, REALLY INTO SHAKESPEARE

My Papa and the Maid of Orleans and The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques - Mynona I was fully geared up to return to the topic of over-intellectualising, a topic I haven’t touched since Kharms, when I caught a glimpse at the introduction to the first of these books that I read. My introduction to Mynona was the two of his stories featured in Tales of the German Imagination, little snippets of madness that seemed right up my alley, and yet, like Kharms, I’d be hard-pressed to state in scholarly terms exactly what it is that makes these stories work, or indeed if their success even has a scholarly explanation. I skimmed over the introductions in each of my tiny (and stupidly overpriced) books, and concluded that I would probably be alright for the most part. The tentative swipes that the introductory passages make in the direction of academia seem to just be quantifying what a grotesque is in terms of Mynona’s writings, which is all interesting shit. At its worst, the nonsense that the introductions spout about the inherent messages of Mynona’s own ‘creative indifference’ philosophies can be happily ignored in favour of simply enjoying the stories as odd and occasionally morbid little tales. Truthfully there really isn’t too much to say about these stories; the two collections that I have are the third and fourth of such that Mynona produced, meaning they’re not exactly his collected best works and the stories can be a tad hit or miss, but overall they’re very enjoyable quick reads. Both the blurb(s) and the attempts made to describe the events of the stories make them seem a lot darker than they actually are, for they often deal with bizarre or taboo themes, but this seems to me like false advertising, for when you’re reading said stories you don’t stop for a second to consider the fucked-up nature of some of the stories’ content. The tone carries it in such a way as to negate critical study, and thus I beseech anyone who tries. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES, IF YOU’VE GOT A DAY TO KILL AND CAN FIND THE STORIES FOR CHEAPER THAN THE NINE FUCKING QUID I PAID FOR EACH OF THEM

The Moving Toyshop - Edmund Crispin Many a time have I walked into Waterstone’s and spared a fleeting glance at the frankly ridiculous quantity of crime books there, stopping only to briefly laugh at some of the more on-the-nose titles (my favourite of which will always be Fielden’s A Quarter Past Dead). Golden Age crime fiction has always been a possibility of a genre I might want to delve into, but never an especially pressing one. My purchase of this book was something of an impulse buy in the Folio Society summer sale, and indeed my decision to purchase this book was dependant mostly on the assertions that the book was unlike other crime fiction texts. To elaborate, this is a very funny book, and I’ve been led to believe that it’s rather difficult to slot humour into a serious crime novel about murder and whatnot. It does so with a cast of eccentric and incredibly memorable characters, a plot driven mostly by chance and farce, and a fantastic aversion to seriousness, with characters often getting drunk and passing the time with such games as ‘naming unreadable books’ before venturing forth to the next slapstick shenanigans. Without wanting to, yet again, go off on a tangent about how I always seem to read ‘book B inspired by book A’ before I’ve read ‘book A’, this book is very much in the vein of Adams' Dirk Gently (with the eccentric intellectual types pursuing investigations way out of their jurisdiction) and Fforde's Thursday Next series (with rapidly escalating storylines and fourth wall breaks and hilarious set pieces, right down to the protagonist’s needlessly flamboyant car). Everything seems to be very much entwined with the humour, be it the characters or the plot, and it has proven difficult for me to say exactly what else it is about this book that made it so enjoyable to read. I blazed through it so quickly that I didn’t think about it too strongly; ultimately, a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately are like this, which makes it increasingly difficult to write rambles about them, considering that these rambles were originally intended to allow for a bit of extra academic flexing. I’m not here to break down the components of farce or slapstick or the effectiveness of literary references when constructing a story or comedy. All I can really talk about is, how does this book compare to other crime fiction? We uncover the story’s mystery slowly throughout the course of the book, with new characters coming into the fray and bringing new light to the situation, but the book’s mystery is eventually revealed to be a tad too small and too restrictive to allow for any grand revelations as to who indeed dunnit. Every now and then the book displays some fun meta-knowledge of the genre when the characters are deciding what move they are going to make next, though this does lead to a rather anticlimactic twist at the end when a promising lead is revealed to be a red herring seemingly just because the genre demands one, and the characters shrugging their shoulders to say ‘well, that’s how these sort of things go’ wasn’t quite enough to offset the feeling that things didn’t really lead to anything. The final roundup of events, and eventual reveal of the one tiny detail that answers all other questions of the mystery, is of course not really dependent on anything exciting (as I’d probably expect from the genre), but I reckon that when it comes to revealing the small but significant detail that is the crux of everything, a lot of books have a more interesting crux than this book does. But perhaps I am merely nitpicking. In any case, my feelings towards the book upon completion were overwhelmingly positive, if not because of a wholly satisfying ending than certainly because I know I’ve got a shit load more of these books to be getting on with. Therefore, it seems unlikely that my attempts to breach this new genre will lead to any further exploration for a while yet; I’ve got to read all of Crispin’s stories first. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL FUCKING YES

Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle - Thomas Love Peacock I heard of Peacock some time ago in a romanticism lecture as a great and criminally underrated author, I picked up this book after skimming the blurb and introduction and learning that Peacock’s writing took inspiration from a superstar lineup of my sort of authors (Aristophanes, Rabelais and Voltaire to name a few), and started reading it recently because I was craving a Gormenghast fix but had sworn not to start any more giant fucking novels until I’d finished Barchester Towers. It makes sense that this book would be recommended to me by an old academic chap, because this seems to be a book mainly for old academic chaps; a Peacockian staple, as the introduction so refers to it as (I suspect as a means of justifying it), is that the narrative often stops dead to allocate large chunks of the story to men of various fields of academia discussing various smart affairs (in the words of Peacock himself, ‘discussing everything and settling nothing'), written in a form more resembling a drama text than prose. It’s fast and easy reading, and it’s fun to revel in the general vibe of Regency era learned men lounging in a club speaking listlessly on trifling matters over their booze. While there is humour to be found (both explicitly and quietly in Peacock’s writing style), and while I am not entirely ignorant on the era and characters within that this book is good-naturedly satirising, this book requires some background knowledge to get the most out of it. Nightmare Abbey parodies the ‘mordancy of contemporary literature’, with characters reflecting the romantic poets (all with absolutely fantastic Gormenghast-tier names) lolling around and bemoaning the times and customs and pontificating incomprehensibly on transcendental subjects and generally revelling in operating on various tiers of melodramatic morose being. The conversations that they have are often rather dense, and thus the humour tends to come from the ridiculous characters’ voices and attitudes (or occasionally the farcical antics that they get up to). Crotchet Castle is significantly more all over the shop, being a general clusterfuck of ideals and philosophies (the primary conflict being between common sense and rationality, with all the supernumerary other characters slotting in to lend their voices in pummelling the rationalist into the fucking dirt) pitted against each other; it is on occasion rather accessible, given the simplicity of the characters and their chosen philosophies to spout, but I’m really coming in on the bottom floor when it comes to rationality and political economy, so a lot of the nuance, while often enjoyable enough considering its delivery of light-hearted sarcasm, was totally fucking lost on me. Most of the characters are just mouthpieces for philosophies, some of the characters are parodies of pre-existing personages who I didn’t fucking know and didn’t care to learn about, and some of the characters are enjoyable enough because they slot into the story in other ways (such as in the trite but necessary romance subplots, forgotten about and reinstated as soon as a hackneyed conclusion is needed) or otherwise stand out on their own (such as Peacock’s stand-in, the Reverend Dr Folliott, who couldn’t give a blot about anything save his own dinner and booze, or indeed my aligned character, the deteriorationist and medieval buff Mr Chainmail, who remains ‘out of reach of [everyone’s] arguments’ from his own fortress of beef and ale (as the introduction describes), which I can fully relate to). The aforementioned romance subplots might give the reader of this ramble the impression that these stories are rather confused as to what they want to be, but the confusion (if confusion it be, and not just a juggling of ideas (hardly skilful juggling, but roll with it)) really only extends as far as the eclectic array of things within the novels. The overall intention of these pieces is to be escapism, or a conversation piece (given that much of the text is dominated by conversations), and in that regard it does its job well enough. I will say, however, that the aforementioned ‘inspiration’ that these texts take from such authors as Aristophanes and Rabelais is really just limited to occasionally quoting them, and considering that I don’t speak Greek or French, this became more of a pain in the arse than a pleasure, having to keep looking at the back for the necessary translations. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES TO NIGHTMARE, POSSIBLY TO CASTLE

Seven Men - Max Beerbohm I’m afraid that you’ll have to excuse the fact that I was only able to read about the titular seven men in this book, and not the promised ‘Two Others’ in the book’s re-release; I read this online on Gutenberg, dissatisfied with the prices and conditions of the physical copies of this book (as well as the fact that I couldn’t really be putting too many eggs in this basket, since I started this book on a whim after it was fleetingly mentioned in Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop), and subsequently my reading experience was a rather fragmented one, scrounging all of the individual stories in this publication together and reading them as one overall book. Let this book stand as another title in my guilty list of attempts to dip my toe into the pool of postmodernism, for the stories within it are less about seven men (well, technically six, since Beerbohm himself is the seventh) and more about stories told about them or stories that shape them. Men tell stories about themselves, find themselves shaped by their works or the rules of their works, are forgotten as soon as their works fade from public interest, etc., from everything to formally written pieces of dubious quality to spun yarns over dinner. Supernatural influences are occasionally added to facilitate some of the dafter ideas, but everything is played entirely straight, with our focal point Beerbohm, having interpolated himself into the stories, providing everything with a sense of… if not verisimilitude, than certainly seriousness. Characters find themselves entwined within their stories, sad that their works of writing will be all that remains of them (or deluded into thinking that such a legacy would be a thing to be proud of), ‘ghosts caught in a fiction solemnly protesting their reality’ to paraphrase a quote from Lawrence Danson’s 1982 piece. It all makes for a very fun read, with each story providing a different reading experience that keeps you guessing as to what to expect. Finding myself with not much else to say, permit me to give a special mention to my favourite story in the collection, ‘Savonarola Brown’. The word ‘story’ is a tad misleading, but just as I find myself calling this text a short story collection or novel for lack of a better term, a story ‘Savonarola Brown’ must be, when in reality it is mostly comprised of a deliberately atrocious farcical tragicomedy script, written, in the context of the story, by the titular Brown, who did so over the course of eight years by throwing himself into the character of his beloved Savonarola and writing the story as the characters within it determined it to be written, leading to a rambling and capriciously-changing text that never failed to make me (if only as a great fan of early modern theatre, however trite or shoddy) laugh my arse off. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH

Other shit I read that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (an absolutely amazing and very McDonagh play that I bloody wish I could have seen and would recommend to everyone (especially if they like fucked-up shit), The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth (a very entertaining and informative book (as to be expected from my favourite etymologist) that I resisted reading for a while because I figured that Forsyth was at his best when retelling historical events, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he manages to squeeze in a shit load of interesting history shit in here as well (my favourite example of which being the story of the two main faces behind the OED)), Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (a fucking incredible book that I resisted writing a review on because a) it’s a rather serious book with some hard-hitting stuff that’s difficult to make funny and b) there are only so many ways that I can say ‘it’s good’), The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher (a bloody amazing essay with some incredible content in it, made me very envious of Fisher for being able to contrive a means of writing about exactly what he wants to write about even when it is of passing or no relevance to the essay as a whole), and Swan Song by Edmund Crispin (another Crispin novel, so I didn’t bother rambling about it when it would just be the same points as my Moving Toyshop ramble, not as funny as Toyshop for the most part and focusing on a field of study that I know very little about but a very easy and enjoyable read nonetheless).

Imagine #19 Charles Xavier (Request)

Requested by Anon: Could you please write a Charles Xavier x reader where the reader likes him but feels she has no chance so she pretends to hate him. But then he finds out the truth through mind reading? I'm sorry if this is complicated!! But thank you so much.

Not my gif

Words: 2622

Warnings: fem!reader, swearing, typos

A/N: So, first of all, I know that request is from literal months ago, and I’m really sorry, but I kinda put off writing it for the following reason... I actually did that once, pretended to hate someone I believed not to be good enough for (he was a dick and probably deserved it, but still) and it’s connected to some of the worst, most uncomfortable and regrettable situations of my life. If you find yourself in that kind of situation, and you think that it would be easier to just treat your crush like crap, DON’T! I’m all for making mistakes and learning from them, but I really recommend you just talk to the person or, if that’s easier, distance yourself, but being a dick towards them will just make you look and feel like... well, a dick. Don’t! And secondly, I am not incredibly proud of this fic. I don’t think it’s that great. I hope, I’m not disappointing anyone. xoxo

Charles had hired you because of the way you worked with the students, the way you treated the other teachers and the impression that you were one of the smartest, most dedicated people he had ever met. He had hired you despite the fact that you apparently couldn’t even be in the same room as him without shooting him glares and avoiding any kind of further interaction.

Charles understood that there were people, whom one just couldn’t stand. Attraction was biology after all, and maybe you just really didn’t like him, maybe semi-polite working-side-by-side was all you were able to with him, but it still bothered him.

You impressed him every time he heard you talk, every time he listened to one of your classes or your contributions in meetings. You area of expertise was the mutant’s role in the world’s biggest wars since the 15th century, your thesis being: There have always been mutants, fighting on both sides of each war, that have simply been erased from history like so many other minorities. You seemed determined to find, analyse and prove every single mutant’s appearance in history and there was nothing more fascinating to Charles, than listening to your passionate presentations on history, the way you saw it. It was such a shame, he thought, that you never agreed to meet him for a cup of tea and some collegial discussions. But he wasn’t going to lie to himself, what he found enchanting about you was way more than just your professional expertise.

It was something in the way you moved, the way you tilted your head when listening and lowered your gaze when smiling. It was the shape of your mouth and the look in your eyes. If someone had asked Charles to explain it, he wouldn’t have been able to put his finger on it. It always seemed right out of his reach. Quite like you, actually.

 You had done your best to restrict your thoughts in the professor’s presence ever since you had started working for him. His ability, while being one of the most fascinating mutations you had ever encountered, formed quite the inconvenience for you, given the fact that all you were able to think about in his presence, were things that would practically file a restraining order all by themselves, if the professor ever found out about them.

You weren’t someone for cheesy clichés at all, but the phrase “so close, yet so far” had never made more sense to you, than at your first meeting with Charles Xavier. And what did the professional, grown-up woman do when having a completely unrealistic crush on a superior? Exactly, act like a cold, heartless prick towards him.

Looking back, you were really surprised, that he had hired you after all. Being charming wasn’t your forte as it was, and with him you hadn’t even tried! But somehow, the professor had still decided to keep you, which, today, had been exactly five months ago.

“Happy anniversary!”, someone mumbled in your ear and you turned around to look at Raven’s grin. She didn’t have a teaching position, but she visited Charles every once in a while. You two actually had quite a lot in common, as it turned out. Her activist enthusiasm being more focused on the present than your, as she jokingly called it, “moaning of dead kinsmen”, but you had mostly the same ideals. And the same shoe size, which you mentioned for no reason in particular.

“Thanks babe.”, you replied, because Raven hated that word. She rolled her eyes and stole your cup of coffee from the table. “The machine is right there.”, you murmured, focusing your eyes back on the book in front of you. “What’s that?” “Research.” You snatched your coffee back. “On…?”

You shut the book and pushed it over to her. “First appearances of the x-gene, by Charles Xavier. You’re only reading that now? It’s like fifteen years old!” You shot her a glare. “Have you read it?”, you asked and she laughed. “What do you think? So, how do you like his theory? You might be the one person, that is actually able to reasonably correct Charles on anything.” “Ha!”, you laughed, taking the book and turning it in your hands. Looking up at Raven, you realized that she was actually still waiting for an answer.

“I mean…”, you shrugged, “he does kind of imply that the x-gene, as he calls it, only developed in the beginning of the 20th century, which doesn’t at all fit my thesis…” “So he’s talking shit?” “I didn’t say that!” “I know. But I did. Isn’t it funny, how two people like you have contradictory theories about the exact same topic?”

“I mean, yeah, I guess. But that’s why we have science and not just some guy telling us, what’s right and wrong.” “You mean like the pope? Or Jesus?” “You’re in a critical mood today!”, you laughed, checking your watch. “Oh, I gotta run!” “I’ll tell Charles, you said ‘Hi’.”, she shouted after you as you hurried out the door and you immediately felt your face blush. You never talked about your crush on the professor, but you felt like she knew. He was her brother, which made the whole situation pretty awkward, but was there anything more awkward than having a crush on your boss?

 “You’re in an odd mood today.”, Charles greeted Raven as she stormed through his office door and violently dropped down on the couch. “Thanks, y/n said the same. I’m supposed to send her regards.” “Are you?” She grinned. Charles hadn’t thought so either. “She was reading your book.”

He sighed. “Raven, you’ll have to be a little more specific.” “The one that completely contradicts her theory.” “Right. I was young and naïve back then, I didn’t know any better.”, he joked. “You should tell her about that. You can also congratulate her on her five months of teaching without getting fired.”

“Oh right, that’s today.” Of course, he remembered that. “While we’re talking, there is a debate in the auditorium this afternoon. Nature vs. Nurture, y/n prepared it with one of her classes. Care to accompany me?”

Raven furrowed her brows. “If I come, will you finally grow some balls and talk to y/n?”

 Your day went by pretty uneventfully. You ignored several notes being passed in class and even collected two, because the student’s just weren’t trying hard enough. It was a matter of principle for you, being the unstoppable note-passing-queen yourself. Some people just needed a little motivation.

The debate was supposed to start at 5pm, so naturally the students showed up at 4:58, causing you to start late. You sat down by the side of the podium, crossing your legs and listening. You hadn’t heard all the contributions yet and even though none of your students had probably discovered a completely new approach on a subject that was about as old as humanity itself, you were still interested in the opinions and the way this discussion was heading. Right now, it looked a lot like Freud’s approach of ‘let’s blame the parents for everything!’ and you felt like you were watching a really eventful tennis match.

Eventually however, your eyes and thoughts trailed off as you subconsciously started searching the crowd – crowd being a rather wide term for the about fifteen people in the audience – for one specific face. The professor was seated in the front row, hands crossed in his lab above a folded grey jacket. You agreed with him, it was quite warm in the auditorium. His eyes were resting on the students, his lips forming a slight, almost unnoticeable smile.

Those lips, you thought, before you could stop yourself. You focused your eyes back on the discussion, but your mind wasn’t quite as easily restrained. You wondered, if the presentation bored him. He must have heard all of this before, in the minds of his students, but also in the minds of every person he had ever had a similar debate with. And still, you thought, here he was, supporting his students.

It had always impressed you, the way he smiled through everything, the way he managed all those things, his studies, this school, his political and scientific relations, everything, without ever even looking tired. Not to speak of all the shit he had to put up with! It had to be such a pain, listening to people’s thoughts all day. Damn, the poor man, you thought, smiling subconsciously. Sometimes – well, pretty often actually – you wished that you had just approached him, asked him out or something. He would have probably refused and then fired you, because it would have been way out of line, but at least you would have tried. You had always hated regretting decisions, but you felt like in this situation, you would have regretted your choice either way. Rather not be unemployed, you decided, focussing your thought back on the debate.

 It was rare to hear you think personal things. Charles usually avoided rummaging through people’s minds, but to a certain extent, he couldn’t help but listen, it was like a constant murmur in a room full of people, and he couldn’t always block everything out. And sometimes he got to hear some rather personal details that he would have rather not found out about. But you were never one of those people, all you ever seemed to think about was work and science, sometimes the other teachers or some issues you had with a student, but never in a way that would have shown any kind of personal attachment.

Your thoughts always felt somewhat incomplete. Mainly because Charles knew that everyone had personal, private thoughts and therefore so did you, but also because you didn’t look like the cold type to him. Again, he couldn’t really explain it, but hearing your suddenly distracted mind showed, that he didn’t have to explain anything to know that he was right.

Those lips. The words wavered through his head and left him in a state of mind that could only be described as shocked. He saw his face flash through your thoughts, as he couldn’t help himself but dive a little deeper into your world. You were warm, just like him, he thought and grinned. You weren’t bored, just distracted. He had distracted you, he realized. You thought about the things he had done for the school, and how hard it must have been. Your words rang in deep admiration.

Charles felt his heart pound against his ribs and couldn’t help but shake his head over his own childish excitement. How old was he, twelve? But he couldn’t help it, as your mind moved on to more personal matters. Were you… were you thinking about asking him out?

Could he have been that wrong about the way you saw him? He thought you disliked him, because that was all he had ever seen in your mind and your eyes. Where was all this coming from? Better not be unemployed, he heard, furrowing his brows. Was that, why he had never seen any of your personal thoughts? Had you locked them up in his presence?

Would he have to fire you, if he went out with you, he asked himself. Was it amoral of him? No, he decided. No, that wasn’t the reason he hadn’t approached you. The reason for that had just disappeared into thin air, he realized and looked at you, as your attention shifted back to your students and your mind returned to things, that you weren’t trying to hide from him.

You actually seemed to believe that he would push you away and then fire you, which was absurd! Why should he ever reject you? But of course, you didn’t know that, he reminded himself. How could you, he hadn’t approached you either. He grinned as he realized, how much of a cliché this whole situation was. Maybe the two of you had more to discuss than your different opinions on mutant history.

 You made a mental note to give all the students that had participated in the discussion some extra points. You also decided not to tell them until the end of term. Some of them were in for a pleasant surprise, you smiled while applauding alongside the audience. Your students had done a great job. And it had been nice to see them go back to things that you had taught them in class. This was, why you had decided to become a teacher.

The people in the audience started chatting and moving towards the exit. The one person that wasn’t doing either and instead heading towards you, as you realized with a confusing mix of nervousness and excitement, was the professor. Suddenly, you remembered the things you had thought about during the debate, when your mind had wandered off. Stupid, you scolded yourself, turning around to not look at the professor’s gentle expression. Oh God, he must have heard something!

“Y/n.”, you heard his voice behind you and immediately banned every thought regarding him or his beautiful eyes, only to have them return seconds later. Shit.

“Professor.”, you turned around and smiled at him as professionally as possible. “You did great work, as usual.”

“Oh, it was mostly the students.”, you replied. “But thank you.” “You’re very welcome. Raven told me that you are reading my expertise on the mutant’s origin.” “I am. I don’t agree.” It came out way too harsh, but Charles laughed, finally taking his eyes off you for one moment, allowing you to get your shit together. “I thought so. I would love to discuss some of the aspects, although I have to say that my beliefs regarding that subject have changed drastically, since I heard your point of view.”

“Uhm…”, you said, asking yourself, where all your brain went, whenever you needed it. “Thank you. But if you have already changed your mind, my work is done, so…”

“And if I wanted to talk about other things?”, Charles interrupted, raising an eyebrow and making you blush in a way that was impossible to hide. Damn it, you cursed, he had heard you. He had probably heard every… word, thought, whatever. “I… I am not as informed regarding other topics…”, you murmured, mentally screaming at him to just get it over with. To just tell you, how inappropriate and unrealistic your thoughts had been, ideally before you melted into a puddle of shame and disappointment. But of course, whenever you wanted him to read your thoughts, he wasn’t there, or he at least didn’t grant your wish.

“If I want to ask you out for dinner? Let’s say, in half an hour?”

 Charles saw your face drop in shock and for a second, he worried, if he had misunderstood your intentions, but then your cheeks turned even darker, to a shade of red that actually complimented your eyes quite well.

“I…” He waited, but you didn’t seem to plan on finishing your sentence anytime soon.

Y/n, I know, you think that I am going to fire you, but I really do not plan on doing so, he explained, grinning as he saw your face light up in relief. “Not after this debate at least.”, he added. “But I would love to go out with you.”

You didn’t look him in the eyes, which bothered him more than he had expected. “We don’t even need to talk about mutants, if you don’t want to.” A smile spread over your face and you nodded slightly. “But only, if you promise not to kick me out, professor.”, you joked, making him smile triumphantly. As if he would ever reject you, he thought.

José M Bertolote, Suicide prevention: at what level does it work?, 3 World Psychiatry 147 (2004)

Abstract

This paper reviews the prevention of suicide according to programme evaluation, risk and protective factors, type of intervention, level of intervention and the interface between clinical and public health levels. From nearly a century of experience, a few but important lessons have been learned: since suicide is affected by sociocultural factors, there is no safe indication that what has worked somewhere will work elsewhere; in order to acquire any public health importance, suicide prevention programmes must clearly spell out their objectives and targets; isolated actions have a much lesser probability of yielding significant population outcome results than more articulated approaches that integrate public health measures and individual care with appropriate follow-up and social support.

In 1942, the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote: "There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide" (1). If this is so, why are psychiatrists interested in this philosophical problem still more than 60 years later? Well, suicides are deaths and psychiatry – as part of medicine – has a serious interest in death, as well as in what is behind it and its prevention or postponement. And if it happens that behind suicide there is a lot of mental disorders and suffering – as it seems indeed to be the case (2, 3) – then the prevention and the appropriate management of those mental disorders would ultimately represent a form of prevention of suicide.

From a historical perspective, suicide – or self-killing, as it was referred to in most European languages before the 17th century (4) – has for many centuries caught the attention of theologians, jurists, philosophers, demographers, sociologists and, more recently, of psychologists, anthropologists, epidemiologists, writers, artists, historians, linguists and a long etc. Medicine started to be more systematically interested in suicide in the 18th century and, more frequently than not, through psychiatrists and in connection with melancholia.

From the 18th century on, the connection between suicide and mental disorders (or insanity, to use the epoch's term) was firmly established in the minds of most updated psychiatrists, to the extent that any death to which a natural cause could not be ascertained was ascribed to madness (5). In 1801, Pinel stated that there was a link between internal organs lesions leading towards a "painful feeling of being" and suicide. A few years later, in 1838, Esquirol wrote that "all those who commit suicide are insane", and in 1845 Bourdin categorically affirmed that suicide "is always a disease and always an act of mental insanity".

Since then, the polarity between those who see suicide as a consequence of a mental disorder (be it caused by biological/genetic or by psychological factors) and those who attribute it to other causes (social, economic, existential, etc.) has, to a large extent, taken precedence over other considerations; even the relevant legislation promulgated during the 20th century reflects this polarity.

This had the clear consequence of grounding suicide, in the health domain, somewhere between public health and psychiatry (6). It is from this double perspective that the prevention of suicide will be overviewed heretofore, according to programme evaluation, risk and protective factors, type of intervention, level of intervention and the interface between clinical and public health levels.

Suicide, Suicide Attempts, Suicidal Behaviours

In 1964 Stengel (7), reflecting a common clinical perception, proposed that suicide and suicide attempts reflected two distinct populations. At the root of this distinction was the intention to die (present in the former and absent in the latter), but there were also demographic factors (predominantly elderly males committing suicide and young females attempting it) and epidemiological elements (predominance of psychotic disorder among those who died from suicide and of personality and adjustment disorders among those who attempted it); finally the means employed also contributed to differentiate between these two populations: more lethal means were employed by the former group and less lethal ones by the latter.

Probably due to the fact that the outcome of completed suicide is much more obvious (and severe) than that of suicide attempts, the literature on the former is much more abundant. Also, information (which depends on recording systems and indicators) has been more commonly available for suicide than for suicide attempts. For many countries, for instance, there are extensive time series of data about mortality related to suicide, whereas similar information on suicide attempts is badly missing.

Nevertheless, with recent changes in demography, in social structure and mores and – perhaps more importantly – with the greater availability of more lethal means employed in suicide attempts, the previous clear demarcation lines between suicide and suicide attempt "populations" are getting more and more blurred. This brought in the need to find an umbrella term that would encompass both. Under the influence of North-American psychology, the term now commonly used is suicidal behaviours, and this term will be adopted in the present paper.

Preventive Efforts 

Documented systematic suicide prevention efforts are almost a century old (8). Suicide prevention programmes were initiated in both New York (National Save-A-Life League) and London (Suicide Prevention Department of the Salvation Army) in 1906, in Vienna (Suicide Prevention Agency) in 1948, and in Berlin (Suicide Prevention Service) in 1956. Whereas these initiatives remained basically local, the one launched in London in 1953 by the Samaritans soon spread out to numerous countries, using the same principle of "befriending". Today, there are countless numbers of suicide prevention services, as well as "crisis centres" aiming at preventing suicide.

With almost a century of preventive efforts, there should be enough data to evaluate their efficacy. Actually, numerous papers have been published on this, with sometimes contradictory, if not puzzling, results, probably owing to the only partial control of variables involved in the suicidal process. Should any one of these several efforts have demonstrated an unquestionable and universal superiority over others, in all probability it would have already been widely adopted. In reality, what we find is proponents of a variety of preventive programmes and theories trying – without great success – to convince others of the superiority of their own.

A careful review of the evidence of effectiveness of suicide prevention interventions published by Gunnel and Frankel in 1994 (9) examined the medical literature in English language from 1975 on. Out of 19 studies identified, only two were randomised controlled studies (10, 11); the majority of the remaining relied on experts' or expert committees' opinion or clinical experience. When they analysed results of studies combined by setting and intervention, and by exposure to intervention, sadly enough, the highest percentage of reduction in suicide rates observed was 4%.

With a few remarkable exceptions, most evaluative research in suicidology clearly reflects the ideological and etiological views of its authors and addresses the factors (i.e. social, economic, genetic, psychopathological, etc.) believed by them to be relevant in the suicidal process and ignores all others. As a result, a positive and conclusive outcome observed somewhere quite frequently fails to be reproduced elsewhere, where non-controlled variables are at variance (even though usually only the "positive" results are known, due to the fact that "negative" results tend not to be welcome by scientific journals).

In many instances, the lack of precision of the programmes in both objectives and indicators makes true assessment a difficult task. Objectives of prevention programmes can range from a modification of the underlying psychopathological process (e.g. suicidal ideation) to a reduction of morbidity (e.g. suicide attempts) up to a reduction of mortality due to suicide. Ideally, efficacy indicators should be, correspondingly, process or outcome indicators. However, many programmes aiming at modifying psychopathology or morbidity (admittedly or not) are evaluated against changes in mortality rates, whereas some programmes aiming at a reduction of suicide mortality present their results as an improvement in psychopathology or morbidity (or in collateral indicators, such as social integration); this is particularly true when the outcome does not correspond to what was expected and stated at the beginning of the programme.

So far, probably the only large scale, national suicide prevention programme that has been fully implemented and evaluated is the Finnish Suicide Prevention Project (1986-1996). Its aim was "to reduce the suicide rate by 20% by 1995, compared to the situation at the beginning of the project". The evaluation conducted in 1996 indicated a reduction of 8.7% between 1987 and 1996 (with a reduction of 17.5% between the peak years of 1990 and 1996) (12).

Risk and Protective Factors

A great amount of research in suicidology revolves around risk – and, to a lesser degree, protective – factors. At any rate, empirical evidence on risk factors for suicide is by far more abundant than that on protective factors, probably due to the fact that their measurement is more straightforward; in other words, there are more studies on the association of suicide with risk factors (irrespective of whether these are actually modifiable or amenable to controlled interventions) than with protective factors (which remain mostly at a rather theoretical level).

The literature on risk factors for suicide and suicidal behaviours is quite vast (albeit not always as critical as one might wish); interested readers are suggested the following critical reviews: Goldney (13), Beautrais (14), Wasserman (15) and Hosman et al (16). Forster and Wu (17) have also proposed an interesting typology of potentially modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors (Table ​(Table1). Most1). Most studies on risk factors are retrospective, commonly using a single, discrete variable identified close in time to the suicidal event, whereas protective factors remain largely at a theoretical level of discussion, probably owing to the interconnectedness of most protective factors with other variables and their long time span, which render well-controlled studies a quite complex task. Durlak and Wells (18) have reviewed some of these difficulties and suggested ways to improve research related to this issue.

Table 1. Major risk factors for suicide (adapted and modified from 17)

Whereas risk/protective factors remain one of the most exciting areas of research in suicidology, their translation into uncontroversial and efficient suicide prevention programmes still is in great need of both demonstration and evidence. One of the main obstacles to this translation is the not always considered distinction between "fixed" and "potentially modifiable" risk factors.

Probably the best way of estimating the contribution of specific risk factors is to calculate what is known as population attributable risk (PAR). Briefly, in this case, PAR gives an indication of the percentage reduction of mortality rates if a given factor, supposed to be causally related to suicide, was eliminated.

PAR can serve two purposes: on the one hand, in relation to "fixed" factors, it indicates groups and individuals that, due to an increased, albeit unmodifiable risk, will benefit from a close follow-up; on the other hand, for modifiable factors, it clearly indicates the type of intervention needed, both at individual and population level. Examples of the estimation of PAR have indicated that a reduction in suicide rates of between 9% and 29% could be expected if individuals with family history of suicide (19) and with substance use disorders were targeted. There is an urgent need of the consideration of PAR when designing and implementing suicide prevention programmes.

Types of Intervention

A thorough discussion of the comparative effectiveness of types of intervention is beyond the scope of this paper. Broadly speaking, major interventions for the prevention of suicide can be grouped under the following headings.

Reduction of access to methods and means of suicide - An overview of the evidence indicates that reduction of access to methods (e.g. medication, pesticides, car exhausts, firearms) is perhaps the intervention with the strongest impact at the population level (20).

Treatment of people with mental disorders - It is remarkable that the introduction, by the middle of the 20th century, of effective medication for the control of major mental disorders associated with suicide (e.g., depression and schizophrenia) has brought no significant reduction in national suicide rates in those countries where the medication was widely used. The recent introduction of new antidepressant medication has led to a controversial evidence concerning its impact on suicide rates (21). However, the evidence is far better when examined for specific diseases (e.g. major depression (22) and schizophrenia (23)) or treatment approaches (e.g. the use of lithium in mood disorders (24)). Probably a close follow-up of people who previously have attempted suicide would also fall under this heading (25).

Improvement of media portrayal of suicide - Although there is a consistent evidence about the improvement of media portrayal of suicide (26), the impact of this intervention at the national level remains to be convincingly demonstrated.

Training of primary health care personnel - The evidence of the efficacy of training primary health care personnel as an approach to suicide prevention, although much touted, remains based on a single remarkable but limited – both geographically and in terms of gender differences – example, developed on the Island of Gotland (27). Larger ongoing studies (e.g. in Hungary and UK (28)) should shed additional light on this issue.

School-based programmes - The same applies to school-based programmes. The ever-quoted example of Dade County (29) (nevertheless more related to suicide attempts than to completed suicides) stands unfortunately in isolation. A full evaluation of other similar ongoing programmes (e.g. in Stockholm) will hopefully contribute a much needed additional evidence. Environmental and epidemiological specificities of school populations should be carefully considered in planning and implementing suicidal behaviour programmes with them (30).

Availability of hot lines and crisis centres - In spite of their popularity and attractiveness, so far there is no conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of suicide prevention hot lines and crise centres (31, 32). Admittedly, it seems that their efficacy to help people in crises (not necessarily suicidal) is far greater than their impact on suicide rates.

Levels of Intervention

For an overview of the impact of suicide prevention programmes at the public health level, the conceptual model developed by Mrazek and Haggerty (33) seems particularly useful. Briefly, it categorises preventive interventions, according to their coverage, into universal, selective or indicated interventions. Table ​Table22 shows some examples of these interventions, both general and specific to suicide prevention.

Table 2. Examples of effective preventive interventions for suicidal behaviours, by coverage

A closer look at the numerous actual or proposed suicide prevention approaches and programmes, some of which are mentioned above, would indicate that, according to Mrazek and Haggerty's model, we have more convincing evidence concerning universal and indicated interventions than selective ones. This is not too different from what happens in the overall mental health field

The Integration of Public Health and Clinical Actions

Overall, in relation to the efficiency of suicide prevention, suicidologists and clinicians are much more optimistic than public health officers. And probably all are right, but not always one finds clinicians, suicidologists and public health officers working hand in hand (35). What is badly needed is an integrated approach bringing closer their specific objectives and outcome measures, allowing for the differences in their respective methods and techniques. Also, this integrated approach should take into account both risk and protective factors, ranging from universal through selective up to indicated interventions. Some of these find an easier and more appropriate implementation at the public health, collective level, while others would be best implemented in clinical settings, at an individual level. ​Figure 1 graphically depicts this integrated conceptual model.

Figure 1. Suicidal behaviours prevention: integration of public health and clinical approaches

Conclusions

From nearly a century of experiences in suicide prevention, a few but important lessons have already been learned:

Since suicide is intrinsically affected by sociocultural factors, there is no safe indication that what has worked somewhere will work elsewhere. It has been demonstrated that suicide prevention programmes have worked some times, somewhere. However, a "direct transplantation" of policies and programmes, without full consideration of those factors, will probably yield frustrating results.

In order to acquire any public health importance, suicide prevention programmes must clearly spell out their objectives and targets (i.e., specific results in a given timeframe). Without this, they cannot go beyond well intentioned initiatives, with many beneficial collateral outcomes, but perhaps without a real reduction in rates of suicidal behaviours.

Isolated actions have a much lesser probability of yielding significant population outcome results than more sophisticated and articulated approaches that integrate public health measures and individual care with appropriate follow-up and social support.

In terms of the prevention of suicidal behaviours, we have already learned a lot about what to do, and to whom and with whom, where and when. We have today a much clearer idea about the specific role of political/health authorities, health personnel, mental health staff, psychiatrists, journalists, survivors of suicide and the society at large. However, there is still a great deal to improve on what we know about what to do, and to whom and with whom, where and when. Many lessons have been learned but we still have a few terms ahead of us before a full graduation is reached.

I would like to conclude quoting once again Camus and – as a doctor, a psychiatrist, a public health officer and a being-in-the-world – agree with him that "Through consciousness only, I transform in rule of life what was an invitation to death, and I refuse suicide". Our current limitations should not abate us, rather they should be a strong stimulant for the improvement of the efficiency of our current strategies and methodologies for suicide prevention, both at clinical and public health levels.

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Autopilot

I’ve had dreams about going up or down. What takes me there depends: it could be stairs, escalators or lifts. I just dream about the constant moving, never stopping. Maybe I’m not even moving if I dream about taking a train somewhere - sometimes I don’t even know where. It’s the constant moving, just knowing you have to be somewhere - but where do I want to go? Will I ever get there? I don’t really know.

A lot of understanding about free will and liberal agency is built on space. The liberal free agent is imagined as the adventurer or the explorer who, in the Age of Discovery, found new lands and met distant peoples; now, it finds more recent cultural equivalents like astronauts, backpackers or people on their gap year abroad.

This means it’s important to critique and probe into the meanings of space, and how it can frame our wider cultural attitudes about individual freedom. Who gets space, or is excluded from access to space? What forms does space take, as something physical, mental or none of the above?

Firstly, we should explain how space is intrinsically linked with time in the Western imagination, usually in opposition and serving as a conceptual contrast.

Martin Heidegger provides an important perspective. He theorised about time in relation to Being and made several theoretical moves: Being, or Dasein, was essentially temporal; Being moves from an individual to a shared, unbordered understanding in his concept of being-in-the-world.

Existence is predicated on time, as an invitation to different possibilities being can actualise into. Consciousness is historicized: one uses their personal history to recollect the past, as inspiration for future projects, which create the overall unity of the present and creates authentic temporality according to Heidegger.

Heidegger helps us to understand several points. Firstly, we should dismiss materialist or causative accounts in our understanding of time. Time is about consciousness or being, which means it is a hermeneutic, meaning-finding exercise in relation to our phenomenological existence.

Secondly, Heidegger points to the historicity of consciousness. This explains nostalgia and respect for cultural heritage as forms of collective imagination, and suggests that personal or collective memories and histories help us to imagine an alternative future for the present. But if nostalgia is the starting point for change - as a way to reckon with a world we’re ‘thrown into’, according to Heidegger - we should avoid contrasting activity of the present with the passivity of the past, which could turn into a blank canvas we could freely paint on and interpret how we please.

Is there potential for us to become reified subjects of our past? As only playthings of collective, anonymous forces that have accumulated over our lives?

Two figures can help us delve into this question: Sigmund Freud, as the original thinker behind dream theory; and Carl Jung, who built important modifications into Freud’s theory.

Freud argued that our unconscious could only be interpreted and never directly accessed. One tool for interpretation was dream analysis; through symbols or tropes in our dreams, these could be analysed to uncover a whole panel of desires, tensions and previous childhood traumas.

According to Freud, the unconscious represented omnipotent time, without clear boundary or delineation. This was used by Jung to support his theory of active imagination: if the unconscious could be activated, it could serve to inspire and re-energise our conscious active life worlds. Jung went further, and argued beyond Freud’s theory of personal unconscious, but the collective unconscious; so far in history, we have only theorised about our personal unconscious thoughts, and not understood how we share collective archetypes with society or history in summation. While Jung’s thought was indeed dualistic and assumed rationality, it could be brought in conversation with later theorists like Jean-Jacques Lacan who joined Jung’s theory of archetypes similar to his thoughts on ‘signifiers’.

Several conclusions can be made then. According to Freud, the unconscious could be interpreted as a source of omnipotent, timeless imagination; for Jung, this was an active exercise, of understanding conscious life as the elaboration of a powerful unconscious logic based on imagination which served our self-actualisation. For each thinker, the image was important - how it left a mnemic trace which, with appropriate analytic tools, could be unearthed and create new meanings in our life.

To return to our original question about how space relates to understandings of agency, we can make several advances in our answer. Firstly, space is about consciousness which alludes to historicity and nostalgia for the past, inspiring us to search for possibilities in the future. Secondly, the temporality of consciousness could be deconstructed to reveal about our personal and collective imaginaries, transcended through analysis and the meaning of our individual lives overtaken by collective archetypes.

So far, we have only understood space as a set of personal interventions: tools for doing this include activating our nostalgia or interpreting our dreams.

But we could also understand space as a challenge to completely revamp our understandings of metaphysics. According to Gilles Deleuze, we have so long speculated about a metaphysical theory which could contains all ontological possibilities and outcomes; the point is to come up with a metaphysical theory which opens up these possibilities and outcomes.

Henri Bergson provides an interesting precursor to Deleuze. Similarly to Heidegger, Bergson was interested in consciousness, but was concerned with the data of consciousness. Bergson argued that temporality in consciousness had several features: it was heterogenous, having different elements; multiplicitous, having different elements which contradicted each other; and simultaneous, where these contradictory, different elements existed with each other. Bergson summarised his thoughts with his theory of duree, or duration; what counted more in understandings of existence in our consciousness was not their objective materiality nor their subjective interpretation, but combination to exist in our consciousness as a dialectical process.

Friedrich Nietzsche also contributes to our understanding of time. Nietzsche argues for ‘eternal recurrence’, by dismissing metaphysical theory as illusion; the only constant is the will-to-power, or struggle, where metaphysical theory provides only comforts which hold us back from realising this truth and actualising our ability to grow. If some are more powerful than others, than so be it, for that is the state of nature.

Deleuze combines both theorists on time to create a unique theory of space: his theory of metaphysics as difference. If we understand from Bergson that the duree is about simultaneous, contradictory elements in process; and if we understand from Nietzsche that history is non-teleological and creates its own collapse and renewal; Deleuze innovates upon these previous theorists by saying that discussions of theory system and categorisation are redundant if they neuter and sterilise difference.

Most radically, Deleuze posits the analogy of the ‘body without organs’: so far philosophy has only offered interior, isolated explanations of the world; the point is is that we should approach exteriority as a invitation for our spontaneous engagement with the world, which formulates in simultaneously and creative ways with our Being. We could almost imagine Deleuze talking about the philosophical nomadic, searching in the desert and visiting different tribes for their ‘truth’ but never settling.

Deleuze makes some interesting contributions to space as a result. For Deleuze, space is about difference and always shifts between the grids of the actual and possible, where the virtual exists like genetic information as unactualized potential to be realised in the present.

In this essay, we have wandered like Deleuze’s nomad through different understandings of space, as existential historicity, reified dream subjects and metaphysical theory of difference. To conclude, space could lead us to different understandings of space: it is about personal and collective imaginaries; it lends us omnipotent imagination, as subjects of an anonymous and overriding generative drive towards creativity; it is about the spontaneity and manifest forms of Being which erupt and escape theorisation in a constant process of unfolding ontological change.

***

I don’t know if I please others too much.

Sometimes I give in to what people say; I don’t know what I want.

Now, it’s funny if I reflect back and think about it. In some ways, saying ‘no’ is easy. It’s just a word. But in my head, there’s a mental wall stopping me from saying ‘no’ and after a while it’s just easier to go along with other people tell me to do.

But if think seriously about it, it’s embarrassing. There’s something about unconditional obedience which can violate your very core sense of being. It means being mindless, detached, like complete submission destroys what it means to live in the first place.

Too often, I’ve crafted a perfect image I want others to see. But I’m sick of it; it makes me feel so sterilised and neutered for other people’s inspection.

Now, I want to live authentically.

Milk Isn’t Bad For You (But 6 Types of People May Want to Avoid It)

It used to be that few foods seemed as wholesome as a nice, cold glass of milk.

Your mom may have served milk with dinner or offered it at bedtime when you were feeling restless. You’ve seen your favorite celebs don milk mustaches as part of an iconic marketing campaign that’s spanned 20 years and appeared to solidify the idea that milk was not just healthy, but a necessity.

Turns out, it’s not.

“Any kind of natural food is not inherently bad; it’s eating patterns that can contribute to disease,” says Robin Foroutan, RDN, an integrative dietician at the Morrison Center in New York City and a spokesperson for the National Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

In other words, there’s little reason to think that any individual whole food on its own is going to ruin your diet. Milk isn’t dangerous. But milk also isn’t for everyone.

Here’s what you should know about who benefits most from milk, and who would be better off cutting back or going dairy-free.  

Just the Facts on Milk’s Nutrition

Milk—or, more specifically, cow’s milk—is indeed a good source of vitamins and minerals.

“Milk is a great source of protein, calcium, vitamin D, which are ‘nutrients of concern’ in the U.S. population,” meaning that many people don’t get enough, says Vasanti Malik, PhD, a research scientist in the department of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It also contains magnesium, along with other minerals and nutrients.”

“If you don’t consume dairy it’s really hard to get enough calcium,” which is crucial for strong bones, says Ali Webster, PhD, RD, Associate Director of Nutrition Communications for the International Food Information Council Foundation. The vitamin D and potassium in milk are also important for bone health.

Webster acknowledges that you can’t rely solely on milk to fight osteoporosis. You also need magnesium (milk has some but isn’t a great source) and vitamin K (found in leafy greens, fish, meat, and eggs)—but it does help you check off a lot of these boxes at once.

That said, milk isn’t the sole source of bone-supporting nutrients. A cup of spinach, for instance, has 350 mg calcium (slightly more than the 300 mg found in a cup of milk), and also provides fiber and folate. A 6-oz can of salmon with bones provides 380 mg of calcium, plus heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.  

How Much Milk Should You Drink?

If you do choose to consume dairy, Malik says that one serving a day is a good guideline. Ashley Koff, RDN, CEO of The Better Nutrition Program, agrees. She tells clients who opt to include dairy in their diets to “accessorize” meals with it—say, one slice of cheese on a sandwich or a splash of milk in your coffee.

That might surprise you, considering that the USDA recommends 3 servings daily. But Koff, Malik, and Foroutan say that number may be overkill. The only people who might need that much dairy are children and the elderly, because they tend to be picky eaters who might not otherwise get the nutrients they need.

Why You Shouldn’t Overdo It On Dairy

Assuming you like milk and aren’t allergic to it, most experts say it’s fine and arguably even healthy to continue drinking it—at least in moderation.

The reason why eating too much dairy isn’t advisable is because it can push other healthy foods (like fruits and vegetables) out of your diet.

Conversely, the opposite is true: When people cut milk out of their diet and find they feel better, it’s often not because milk was wreaking havoc on their bodies. It’s because their overall diet quality improves when they replace that dairy with more nutrient-dense produce and other whole foods.

Another thing to consider is that, unless you’re going with skim milk, the drink will contain saturated fat. While the effects of saturated fat are hotly debated, most health experts agree that increasing saturated fat consumption elevates cholesterol, which can in turn increase your risk of cardiovascular disease.

Milk Myths You Don’t Need to Worry About

Not all concerns about milk are created equal, at least from a scientific perspective. For example, rumors that consuming milk will mess with your hormones, or cause heart disease or diabetes are largely unfounded.

Most mainstream experts say that, with the exception of a possible increased risk of prostate cancer (more on that later), the quality of any evidence indicating that milk would be dangerous is pretty weak—think “associations” or “based on animal studies” rather than high-quality controlled trials.

Also, most studies purporting to show milk’s potential harms also need to be considered in the context of other contradictory research. For instance, a study published earlier this year in the British Journal of Nutrition found that eating full-fat dairy products increased the risk of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes—yet a 2016 study, published in the journal Circulation, found that eating full-fat dairy was associated with a lower diabetes risk.

But Does Milk Make You Fat?

If you’ve heard that milk will make you fat, that’s not proven, either.

“It’s true that milk comes from mammals and has a biological purpose—to feed infants so they can grow up and develop,” says Foroutan.

Milk naturally contains growth hormone as well as IGF-1 (insulin like growth factor-1) — both of which are designed to make animals get bigger. But there’s really no proof that the amount found in milk would contribute to obesity—nor is it enough to make you get jacked. (There is some proof that drinking milk after a workout can help you build muscle, mostly thanks to the protein content).  

Of course, if you eat ice cream everyday or put cheese on everything, you might very well gain weight. But if you eat dairy—even full-fat dairy—in small amounts, it might actually help you slim down. “Fat sends an important signal to the brain that you’re full, which can help with portion control,” says Foroutan.  

The 6 Good Reasons to Ditch Dairy

While research is always evolving, for now the preponderance of evidence points to dairy being beneficial (or at least not harmful) for most people, says Webster.

For instance, a 2016 review of meta-analyses on concluded that dairy consumption was associated with easier weight control, neutral or reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, lower risk of stroke, and higher bone mineral density (though it has not actually been proven to reduce fractures).  

That all sounds great, but of course it’s not the full story. The biggest issue is that each person’s body is unique.

While most people seem to be able to tolerate at least some dairy, “if you don’t break it down well or have some sensitivity to it, then consuming dairy products may trigger inflammation,” says Foroutan.

So if you’ve been thinking you might be better off going dairy free, or at least limiting it to an occasional treat, your hunch might be correct if you fall into one of the following categories:

1. You’re lactose intolerant.

A true dairy allergy is relatively rare, but many people are lactose intolerant—meaning that they can’t properly digest the primary sugar (lactose) found in milk. As a result, eating anything with lactose triggers unpleasant GI symptoms like cramps, gas, or diarrhea.

“It’s easy to detect, because you’d have a pretty quick response to eating or drinking something with lactose in it,” says Foroutan. If you’d like a more official diagnosis, ask your doctor for a lactose tolerance (blood) test or a hydrogen breath test.

If you are, in fact, lactose intolerant, you may still be able to eat certain types of dairy. While you’ll have to steer clear of milk and ice cream or suffer the consequences, hard cheeses and probiotic-rich yogurt usually don’t contain any lactose.  

2. You’re not lactose intolerant, but dairy still upsets your stomach.

Maybe you’ve been tested for lactose intolerance and the test came back negative, but you swear that eating dairy makes your tummy feel lousy. You’re probably not imagining it.

Dairy contains proteins such as casein and whey that many people are sensitive to, says Foroutan. “Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to test for a sensitivity,” she says.

If your gut is telling you that something is off, feel free to trust it. Or consider doing an elimination diet: Give up all dairy for a few weeks, then do a “challenge” during which you introduce different types of dairy products one by one to see how you react. (Butter, for instance, doesn’t have much lactose, but it has casein and whey.) You may want to see a nutritionist for guidance during your experiment.

3. Milk makes you feel sluggish.

Digestive issues aren’t the only possible signs of an intolerance. Someone who feels bloated, tired, or sluggish after eating dairy might be sensitive to one or more of the components in it. “Some people don’t even notice until the next day; sometimes we call it a ‘food hangover,'” says Foroutan.

If that sounds like you, it might be worth eliminating dairy for a few weeks and slowly trying to reintroduce it to see if it’s really the culprit. But the bottom line is that if you feel better without dairy, you don’t have to have it.

4. You feel congested when you eat it.

You might have heard that dairy increases mucus production, but there’s really no good research to support that notion.

That said, it’s possible that milk makes you phlegmy. Koff says this happens to her whenever she has milk or ice cream, and that many of her clients report the same thing.

The reason why this might happen to some people isn’t totally clear, but it likely comes back to an intolerance. “If you have a sensitivity to something and you consume it, it will cause inflammation and your digestive tract will secrete more mucus; it’s how the intestines protect themselves,” says Foroutan.

5. You have a higher-than-average risk of prostate cancer.

The link between dairy consumption and several types of cancer is murky. Some studies, for instance, have said that it might raise the risk of breast cancer, whereas others show that it lowers it. (The most research seems to conclude that it’s associated with a lower risk of breast cancer.)  

Prostate cancer is a little different. The proof that dairy substantially raises prostate cancer risk is hardly iron-clad, but there’s enough reason for experts (including those at the American Cancer Society) to be somewhat concerned.

“It’s not the strongest evidence, but it’s worth mentioning,” says Malik. “If you’re at high risk of prostate cancer—maybe you have a family history or your PSA (prostate specific antigen, which can be measured via a blood test) is elevated—you might consider decreasing dairy.”

6. You just don’t want to eat dairy.

For most healthy adults, the best reason to eat dairy is because you like it. If you’re vegan and don’t wish to consume anything that involves animals, or are concerned about the toll that dairy farming takes on the environment, those are perfectly valid reasons to cut milk from your diet, says Malik.

Yes, you might struggle to get certain nutrients, like calcium, but there are other ways to meet your needs. Tofu, some beans, and certain leafy greens also contain calcium. When in doubt, consult a registered dietician.

Key takeaways:

Milk is a good source of calcium, vitamin D, protein, and potassium. These nutrients are crucial for good health (including bone health). But you can also get them from other sources too.

Consider limiting dairy to one serving a day so you don’t overconsume saturated fat or miss out on other nutritious foods.

If milk makes you feel sick, even if you’re not lactose intolerant, feel free to scale back or skip it entirely. You can get the nutrients found in dairy from other foods, or talk to your doctor about taking a supplement.

Some research has linked high dairy consumption with an increased risk of prostate cancer. If your risk for this disease is already elevated, you may want to limit or cut out dairy.

READ MORE: 

What is the Keto Diet? (And Should I Try It?)

Is Sugar Bad for You?

Fix Your Diet: Understanding Proteins, Carbs and Fats

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