The experience of being singled out by a teacher as unexceptional since day one. Trying something new and getting endlessly questioned about the why, the how. For months, going to class and giving up on doing well because it's not like this teacher ever cared about you anyway. Being berated in front of your whole class for your slipping grades and not knowing what to do about it.

And then the flip. In the middle of the year apparently something you did was impressive. Your teacher is friendly with you in a way they never were, and your sudden success was all a part of their plan, their method. "This is what I was trying to tell you, and you finally got it!".

You convince yourself of that too, grudgingly. It all worked out. That teacher really did know best after all. All that stuff at the beginning of the year, all that stuff for the two years before that, that was fine. It was all part of the plan. The humiliation and the stress and the nights spent wondering "What am I not getting about this?", were all necessary.

It's time for teacher evaluations. All fives.

Can you do alastor x fem!reader where she gets injured, so she tries to hide it (cuz he's a bit overprotective), and by hiding it, I mean basically ignoring him but he finds out anyways and he's more mad that she thought she had to hide it or something idk PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE I NEED THIS

(Hope this made sense)

Well shit, this one took me some time to write. Sorry about that! Hope you like it! It was very fun to write 🌹

Alastor finds out you have hidden an injury from him

The last extermination battle at the hotel had been brutal. Although you had won, the casualties were enormous. The hotel in ruins with dead bodies, sinners and angels, all around it. It had taken you and your friends days to bury them all on the grounds outside of the city, all while most of you were healing from different injuries. Some more severe than others.

During the battle, you had taken a spear to your shoulder, but it hadn't pierced you deep enough for it to be lethal. 

You just needed to ensure you didn't move your arm too much. Which turned out to not be a too tricky process since you were stabbed in the shoulder of your non-dominant hand. 

Only lifting things that you could carry with one hand was, making sure that you didn't move your arm in strange ways; it all became a strange dance you did around the others to make sure no one paid you any mind. 

You were the sole healer in the hotel, and therefore, it was essential that you remained at your best. You had only suffered an injury to the shoulder; you weren't dying, so you couldn't let that affect your work. After all, Charlie and the others relied on you to provide medical assistance, and any delay or absence from your side could prove to be disastrous. You had lost count of how many times you had scolded Vaggie or Husk for ignoring their injuries or not treating them with the needed care. However, you were keeping count of how many times you had smacked Husk in the back of the head to stop him from licking his wounds. As of right now, you have hit him five times. You knew that you needed to prioritize the needs of the hotel, and so you decided to put aside your own health concerns for the time being. You trusted that you would be able to care for your injury later when your work was done, but right now, your friend's well-being was the most important priority. 

There was just one person who you feared would put a stop to your work. Alastor, although absent during the hotel's rebuilding as he had suffered a significant injury to his chest that he had, thankfully, let you treat, was probably suspecting that something was wrong with you. But since he hadn't been there during the rebuilding, he hadn't seen you at your worst, and you wouldn't let him see it either. He was caring but could be overprotecting when it came to you, which could be cute if it didn't hinder your work. 

While your partner admired your work ethic, he didn't quite understand why you needed to put everyone else before yourself to the point of ruination. Seeing others as more important than oneself was nonsense to him, especially if one's health was at risk, but you didn't share his worldview. To you, it was important to care for others, to care and shield them, for that is what you were raised to do. To care for those who needed your help, to shield the ones who needed your shelter, and to protect the ones weaker than you. You alone needed to carry that burden; if you didn't, who would?  

­­­The new hotel was magnificent, more stable, and much bigger than before, which worked to your advantage since you avoided the other residents of the hotel. Your injury had gotten worse, making it almost impossible to move your arm without winching. If the wound had been in any other position on your body, you would have cared for it a long time ago, but since it was in such an awkward position that was hard to reach, you had a hard time properly caring for the wound. 

And here you were now, standing in front of the mirror of your bathroom, trying to clean the infected wound. Bloody pieces of paper laid spread out on the bathroom vanity as you dried to reach the infected stab wound on your shoulder. It proved to be quite difficult because no matter how you tried to contort yourself to reach the injury, the infection made it difficult for you to move your upper body without significant pain. 

A small part of you begged you to call for help, saying that you couldn't do this alone, but you refused to be a burden. You could care for yourself. 

You didn't want to trouble the other with something that you should be able to fix yourself.

You felt a chill running down your spine as beads of cold sweat trickled down the small of your back. Your breathing was laboured, punctuated by ragged gasps as you tried to cope with the excruciating pain that was coursing through your body. You attempted to raise your dominant hand to clean the wound, but the throbbing ache in your arm made it almost impossible. It was then that you heard a soft knocking at your bedroom door, which came as a surprise, as you had been so focused on dealing with the pain that you had lost track of time. The ringing in your ears made it difficult to discern who could be knocking, but you knew that you had to muster all your strength to answer it. 

"Yes?" you called out, leaving the bathroom by leaning your hand against the wall. 

"My dear, are you alright?" came Alastor's ever-chipper reply, and you silently swore to yourself, wishing that he would just leave.

"Yes, I'm fine!" you tried to sound confident and happy, but the pain made your voice waver in a way it never did. 

"You haven't left your room all day. I must say, I'm getting quite concerned. Is it alright if I come in?"  

"No! Please, go away-" 

"I'm coming in!" Alastor called out louder than before, and you wondered if he deliberately ignored your answer. Panic pooled in your chest, cold and numbing, as you pushed yourself away from the wall to lock the door before Alastor could get in. However, you had overestimated how much weight your legs could bear in your weakened state. Halfway to the door, your knees collapsed under you, and you fell down to the floor. Your injured shoulder taking the fall. 

Red, hot pain ripped through you like a tsunami, taking all your senses with you, and for a moment, you were blinded by the pain. When you came to it, you saw Alastor kneeling beside you, his hand hovering hesitantly over your shoulder.

"My dear, what have you done?" Alastor said, his voice but a whisper. 

With a surprising amount of strength, Alastor lifts you up from the floor without putting too much pressure on your wound and walks into the bathroom, where he places you on the toilet seat. He looks around at the bloody mess that was your bathroom vanity with an emotionless expression, and hadn't you been so experienced with reading his body language, you would have missed the flexing of his hand that he only did when he was frustrated or angry.

"Why didn't you tell me?" A shill travelled up your spine when he said that, for there was barely any radio overlay on his voice. Refusing to look at you, Alastor picked up one of the pieces of paper you had used to try to clean your wound. 

"I didn't want to be a burden," you mumbled, looking down at your feet. Shame swam around in your hollowed stomach, making you feel sick and empty.   

"A burden?" You could hear the disbelief in his voice, "Have I made you feel like that?"

"No!" You hastily say, "No, never." 

"Then you don't trust me." He's still not looking at you. 

"No, I trust you," you plead.

"Then why did you not tell me that you were hurt?!" You can hear the anger and hurt in his voice, but worst of all, you can see it in his eyes. A swirling storm, contained chaos, rages within him, dribbling out within the bathroom walls as it licks against your skin. You're sure that your shame radiates from your body as tears form in the corners of your eyes, and you look down again, unable to meet Alastors anger, his anguish. 

"I... I don't know," you whisper, and you genuinely don't know. What you once believed and told yourself was so important now felt so small and stupid. To forego your lover's caring hand for a duty you had put on yourself. 

Your vision fills with red as Alastor goes down on one knee before you. He takes your shaking hands within his.

"My love, please, come to me whenever you need help. I couldn't bear to see you destroy yourself; you are too important to me for that." He lifts one of his hands and gently caresses your cheek. Closing your eyes, you lean down and press your forehead against his.

"I'm sorry," you say and genuinely mean it. After all, you would have been angry and hurt if Alastor had done something like this to you. 

He sighs before he closes his eyes and says, "Don't apologise, my love. Only promise me that you will come to me whenever you need it."

"I promise," you say and kiss him on his cheeks and forehead before you finally kiss his lips. Featherlight and sweet, a seal to your promise. 

"Let me help you with your injury," he sighs and stands up again as you turn around, showing him your shoulder. 

Alastor helps you with your wound for the rest of the evening, and never have you felt so cared for. Even if the situation was laced with a bittersweet pledge. 

Dungeon Meshi is possibly the best case I've ever seen of fantasy being used as an extended study of casual racism. Most of our beloved blorbos are, in fact, casually racist in some way, including the central party. It's not treated as a good thing. Their ideas are not treated as true by the narrative. But most importantly, the characters are still treated as fully realized people who are likeable and doing their best...but operating under a skewed worldview. Casual racism is a character flaw, and a bad one, and not one that can turn into a benefit in the right situation; the closest it can come is...being mildly useful against shapeshifters.

But most importantly, it's explained by their life circumstances without excusing it. Laios is casually racist - in the kinds of ways that people in real life might be; he's Like This toward other groups of tallmen, even - because he isn't good with people in the first place, let alone enough so to question "ambient" attitudes toward "outsider" tribes or think about why deciding someone's name is too hard to really get right might just be a dick move (in other words, his casual racism exists in a way that a lot more white autistic people need to be aware can happen, tbh) - and he faces the consequences, some of which are fucking devastating (I straight up can't revisit the part where Toshiro admits he hates Laios because holy fucking shit it hits way too close to home to understand BOTH of their viewpoints that deeply, like I had to lay down after that one). Senshi is also casually fantasy-racist, because he's never been in extended contact with a multiracial group before - hell, he hasn't been in extended contact with ANY group since childhood. Marcille seemed like she was at her worst when arguing over the history of the orc war, but the deeper-running thing is that her stubbornness extends to a good bit of egomania; when she has what she thinks is a good idea, she thinks she knows better than anyone; we see this flaw with the mandrake incident and think a valuable lesson has been learned...only for it to REALLY rear its ugly head later, and what else could you expect? Elf culture is, itself, pretty damned racist. She's spent her whole life being told she's smarter and wiser than anyone from a shorter-lived race because ~with age comes wisdom~! That's not something that goes away overnight!

And Chilchuck, as the guy on the receiving end of so many of this society's shitty attitudes...in a lot of media, and hell, often in real life, with someone as initially cold and closed-off from his party as him, we would expect to see a whole scene where he apologized for the mistake of not trusting them...but we don't get that with him, as I honestly believe we shouldn't, because he had no way to know or even suspect that this party would be the one that wouldn't try to just use him as an expendable tool - and in fact, as established above, plenty of evidence to suspect that they very well might. He can't read minds. Any time he's up, he doesn't know how the party will respond if he dies - would they mourn, or would the last thing he heard while bleeding out just be "aw, shit! Where are we going to find another competent half-foot THIS deep into the dungeon!?" We know the answer, but we have every reason to understand that he does not. He's using very rational defensive tactics...against people, it turns out, he doesn't need to use them against, but he's not exactly WRONG to do so - you can't even call him mistaken; he's making the best decision he can with the information at hand (i.e., his history, their casual racism). He sees people who are not half-foots and fully expects them to exploit him based not on outside stereotypes but on his own history, and while it's not cruel, exactly, it sure does make things harder - more so on him than those around him - than they need to be.

And what I like about this is that the narrative says - yes, these racist and ignorant attitudes are bad. They do harm to the people who have to deal with them, both directly and indirectly. No, they aren't going to be 100% resolved in a single story arc; they have to be chipped away at slowly, bit by bit. Yes, they exist in fully realized people. They are the result of Living In A Society, not individually just being the most evil kind of motherfucker on the planet.

They might even - probably even - exist in you.

So maybe we should all be working on that a bit, hm?

Today's horrible Star Wars thought, prompted by some meta I'm not sure I fully agree with: when would have Anakin actually found out what the inhibitor chips really do?

According to RotS Anakin's not present when Palpatine sends out Order 66, he's already heading out with the 501st for the Jedi Temple. And up until that point, just like the rest of the Jedi Council, he knew that inhibitor chips existed but had no idea they could actually control minds and cause the clones to act against their will.

So when would he have actually found out the truth? I think there's actually two options here.

Option one is that in some missing moment after Mace's death, while Anakin was swearing himself to Palpatine, Palpatine told him ahead of time exactly what the inhibitor chips would do. This is possible, and frankly I think there's a decent chance Anakin would have gone along with Order 66 regardless - but I don't think it's the likeliest option.

At this point Anakin is, frankly, delusional, and he's flipflopping all over the place. A few hours ago he was completely loyal to the Jedi and turned Palpatine over to them. Could Palpatine be totally confident Anakin was completely and securely under his control and wouldn't change his mind yet again?

Sure, by the time Anakin commits himself to the Sith he is fully onboard the Jedi=evil train with Palpatine, fuelled partly by his resentment towards the Jedi Council but primarily, imo, by his desperation to erase his guilt over betraying Mace by convincing himself that the Jedi were traitors all along so he did nothing wrong. But "support me, the Jedi are evil, btw these people you trust and feel responsible for don't agree so I'm going to have to use mindcontrol and fully enslave them so they help us" doesn't fit into this neat narrative Anakin is using to justify himself. And it surely would have had the potential to trigger Anakin's slavery issues - in the wrong direction for Palpatine's purposes. It might be a low risk, at this point, but it's still a risk.

But also, there was a better option and one that, imo, better fits Palpatine's usual style.

Because option two is that Palpatine doesn't tell Anakin the truth about the inhibitor chips immediately. He just tells Anakin that the clones are loyal to Palpatine and the Senate (and, critically, Padme), and the clones have realised that the Jedi are traitors too, and Anakin should trust them.

And sure enough! Anakin's men in the 501st willingly attack the Jedi Temple with him, even down to helping him kill kids. Anakin can sense as, all over the galaxy, other clones turn on their Jedi generals. The Jedi must be evil, if the clones are turning on them too; Anakin must be doing the right thing.

In the critical moment when Anakin was still only taking his first steps into the dark it would reinforce his delusions, it would reinforce the worldview Palpatine was trying to push him towards, where Jedi were evil traitors and Palpatine (and Anakin, and the clones) were doing the right thing for the greater good.

And of course, it would give Palpatine something extra to torture Vader with, much later - much, much later. Another atrocity to bind them both together, and keep Vader feeling like he was irredeemable, he was so deep in the dark he wouldn't deserve to find a way out.

And like - this is not an exoneration of Anakin. He should have known something was wrong. In their right minds the clones would never have killed kids on Anakin's orders, they'd never have turned on the Jedi - but quite frankly if Anakin himself was in a place to recognise that, he wouldn't have been killing those kids himself, you know?

Here's how it works:

Either,

A) Human memory is a perfect record of an exact experience, and those experiences are always correctly interpreted OR

B) People can be really wrong about even their own firsthand experiences

Right? Like those are the options. And here's the thing, I don't think anyone who has ever once tried to find a thing they swore they put right there has ever believed A. Like you can pretend to, but you don't. You have written things down before for yourself for later. You take a picture of your parking spot like anyone else.

And B is obvious, because the alternative to the possibility that people can be wrong about their own experiences is that: we are constantly hopping from alternate reality to alternate reality. Dreams are real. Did you find inconsistencies in your reminisces with someone else? You're both right and one or both of you ?dimension hopped? ??somehow?? which is a thing that apparently happens all the time. Every conspiracy is real. Every God is real. Every prophecy and vision is real. Aliens are real and bigfoot is real the chupacabra is real and ghosts are real and fairies are real and chemtrails are real and antisemitic lizard people are real and satanic child-sacrificing cults are real, all of it. Every single thing any person fervently believes, so much so that it is real to them, is objectively real to everyone, in an inherently contradictory universe that can hold no meaning.

But, like, that's why we have to find some other kind of evidence for things, right? That's why we have to compare notes and test our senses against the evidence and against reason. There are, of course, some things that we have to take other people's word for. When measuring people's feelings experiences, about the only thing we can do is ask them. Which is impossible to double check. But it's all we have.

But when someone's experience goes outside the bounds of what is possible according to much more duplicable and predictive sciences, the only thing I have any evidence to believe is that you believe it. And I will respect that you believe it, but I don't have to alter my behavior or worldview to accommodate it. I don't mean that harshly. It's not an insult. It's just a fact. It's not reasonable to expect someone to alter their entire worldview based on a single conviction and no other evidence. That's a wild thing to ask even someone you are incredibly close with to do.

There are maybe one or two people who I know well enough and respect their incredulity enough that if they came to me in confidence and told me a story neither of us would usually believe for whom I would at least entertain the idea that maybe it really was aliens/ghosts/angels/w'ev. But even that. Even that is highly contextual and I wouldn't just believe them. Now, I might play along, again depending on context. Because I'm not an asshole. If your close friend comes to you and says they think they saw an alien vampire ghost Christ then you, like, read their vibe and talk it out and help however you can because like, real or not that sounds stressful.

But if I don't know you? And you lead with that? And are offended I doubt the veracity of your experiences? Like? What were you expecting? What if I told you I don't believe you because I personally saw or experienced something directly contradictory? Are you going to drop your ideas in favor of mine?

And here's the thing, there's nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of evidence. That's actually really recommended. It's good to be willing to be wrong. About anything and everything. Which has to include even your most fundamental ideas about the world. But when you get enough scientific literacy and logic/semantic literacy and media literacy and social literacy (or use your other literacies to help you find reliable sources on the ones you lack), there's some stuff that becomes more and more supported by evidence.

And it also becomes easier to see the traps, and a lot of them take predictable, repeatable shapes. There are only so many potential points of error in a usual argument. Like an experienced veterinarian who can spot a common illness on sight, but who runs the test to check anyway.

That's the only reasonable way to operate in a world where the only direct experience we have is our own, and even that is something we cannot rely on.

Because if you can absolutely rely on your experience, so can everyone else. So if you and them contradict one another, either they are filthy liars for no apparent reason, or you are from different realities. And those are both completely unlivable mental states to take on with no evidence in their favor.

No. The mental state that is both more personally enjoyable and gets better and more accurate results is the one of curiosity and skepticism. One that demands kindness to others, but not deference.

IDK what I'm talking about any more

Ooooh how about 🎭💔🧸🎶 for barba and/or bobby??? Noone gets these guys the way you do.

omg that's such a compliment <3 i will do both of them

barba

🎭(a headcanon about what they lie about) - honestly i would not put it past him to preserve his private life by just making shit up. as he got to know the squad better, it stopped mattering so much, but it's become a bit of a game that only he knows about. it's also usually so innocuous that no one would even bother to check - someone asks him what he's doing this weekend? he's going to that string trio performing at the lincoln center. (he has actually set aside time to read the latest pulp thriller he got from the library while eating too much take out and he is not going to be disturbed.)

💔(an angsty headcanon) - rafael deals with depression and self-hatred frequently, but it rarely/never comes in the form of suicidal ideation, so he dismisses how serious it is. it's why he throws himself into work so wholly; at least if he's helping people, he can justify his existence. it also means he's too busy to have time to think about all of the problems he's ignoring.

🧸(a headcanon about their childhood) - oh there's so much i could say. well i don't think it was Good. but for a shotgun-blast-let's-see-what-we-hit of childhood hcs..... he spent every sunday with his grandmother, and almost all of his happiest memories are around her kitchen table. this is alluded to in october surprise but this kid got in FIGHTS oh my god he could not keep his mouth shut. thank god for eddie or he would have had his shit kicked in so fast. sorry to make this sad too but he dealt with the same problem at home with his dad, and eddie wasn't there to protect him. he read voraciously but almost exclusively in private; he wanted people to know he was smart, but he didn't want to get made fun of. he tried exactly one basketball summer camp before realizing he was too short and scrawny to compete.

🎶(a headcanon about music) - not to let actor bleed influence this too much, but i do think barba probably takes after raúl when it comes to music taste; i think "the music he loves best is the Cuban songs he learned from his grandmother." that said, other artists that i associate with him: frank ocean, bruce springsteen & 80s ballads

bobby

🎭- unfortunately bobby is lying to himself at basically all times as a baseline and therefore incidentally to the people around him. but for something more specific, i think he lies about how quickly he gets drunk. he doesn't like actually giving up control over himself and what he says, but he does like the social justification of being able to relax and open up, so he meets it somewhere in the middle and lets everyone else think he's gone before he actually is. it's pretty rare that his friends see through this, which both suits him fine and makes him lonelier.

💔- oh baby. well. tbh it's kind of hard for me to find a headcanon bc so much of what i consider heartbreaking about his character is very much text. However. i do like to play with the idea of his first encounter with a guy in college going so poorly that it contributes to him shoving his sexuality deep down and the subsequent repression we see in show. which is so sad for him bc he wouldn't have done it if he wasn't questioning right like. it might not have been an answer he liked but even that would have been an answer. and then he is just so completely in his head (and he's not even Into the other guy he just offered) that the whole thing goes terribly and he feels so broken bc if he's not gay then what is Wrong with him that he feels like this. (he does discover, some ten-odd years later, that he doesn't mind sleeping with men as much as he thought, but he's spent such a long time of convincing himself that it's not for him that it takes a Lot of pressure to break through that worldview)

🧸- did not have many friends :( on the one hand he really didn't mind that much bc he was absolutely the sort of kid who enjoyed playing on his own, but on the other hand that isolation of not feeling like there's anyone who understands him set in early. he was set up on lots of playdates by his parents where neither kid wanted to be there. he was an observer and a listener though. sooo much of the personality he presents over the years is drawn from copying the behaviors of people he likes.

🎶- this is such a good question bc his character playlist is So fully music i think about him to, not like. songs i think he would listen to. i don't actually think he seeks out music that often? i think he likes the noise of the city and whatever's playing on the radio; it makes him feel more connected to everything in an indirect way. if i had to choose a band i'm weirdly getting they might be giants. that said if he ever really listened to conan gray or mitski it would be so over for him.

Spiderwebs #2: Firecracker

Masterlist

content: lab whump, kidnapping, gun violence

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

This is what I get for being nice. 

Jackie had a splitting headache, it was dark, and he couldn’t move much. That was something, at least. It was not comforting information. He was one of those people that saw the benefit in optimism, saw the use of it, but simply could not let go of dread. Dread, after all, kept you alive. Fear didn’t let you sink into complacency. Oh, comfort, that lovely lie. Things could always go wrong, even if he tried to close his eyes and shake it all away. And things had indeed gone terribly, horribly wrong. 

Well. It could be worse. At least he was in one piece. It would probably all be over soon, right? She would kill him sooner or later. Unless she was planning something worse. Then he was screwed. 

Shit. What had he even done? Jackie didn’t recognize the woman who’d put a gun to his head. He didn’t know much about kidnapping. Usually, the only people that went missing were young children and those involved in crime, gang members and the like. Perhaps that was a narrow worldview, but he thought it was generally true. He certainly never felt afraid of being tied up and gagged in a—what was this? A box?

Jackie looked up. There was a rod on the ceiling. He looked down. The gap beneath the door lent a thin light. A door. He looked straight forward. A doorknob. This was a closet, then. He looked side to side. There wasn’t much to take notice of, just white walls and the smell of unuse. The scent of a hotel room, or perhaps an empty venue. Pleasant but unfamiliar, and therefore unnerving.

 All this moving about set a wave of nausea flowing through him. He screwed his eyes shut and went still until it subsided. He wanted to think of an escape plan, but thinking felt like looking through boiling water, trying to grasp what lay below the bubbling and rising steam. All he wanted was to go home. Go to bed. He didn’t want to play the clever Houdini, or the victim, or whatever that lady wanted from him. 

It wasn’t like he had a choice. He felt the knots on wrists, binding his hands behind his back. They were tight. Yep. Hard, taut rope. No chance of getting that off. 

Then what?

He would wait, he decided. The moment the door opened, either he’d die or he’d find something to escape. Nothing to it. Bob’s your uncle. The cops would find him eventually, even if he was six feet under by that point, and this sudden burst of violence would not amount to much in the world. 

Luckily, he didn’t have to wait long. Another burst of nausea clawed at his head as the door opened, spilling bright light into his face with wasteful abandon. He didn’t notice the gun in her hand until it was too late.

The sound of a gun is incredibly loud, especially in enclosed spaces, and that was what startled him before the pain. Only when focusing his gaze at the barrel did he realize that a bullet had gone straight through his skull. The force of it had sent his head reeling back, knocking against the wall.

Well, then. He turned his eyes heavenward. Goodbye, cruel world… He let out a long exhale. Hm. It takes an awfully long time to die, doesn’t it? Ouch. That really hurts. Is it supposed to hurt?

The universe answered him in the form of another gunshot. 

Again, he didn’t have much time to react. It didn’t hurt any less. This really was not helping his headache. That wouldn’t be a problem for long, though…

He felt a hand at his neck, checking for his pulse. “Oh.”

Another gunshot. Then another. Then another. This lady was wasting a lot of ammo on him. He made a muffled attempt to speak, which prompted yet another gunshot. Rude. 

He made his best effort to focus on his killer. Her face was round, and her eyes were a soft shade of sable-brown, but that made them no less intimidating. Her features were packed into a scowl. Smoke was beginning to overflow from the gun's muzzle. He could smell it, an acrid metal scent, overpowering all unfamiliar niceties. He was afraid, yes, but unsure of what was scaring him. He was dead. Or dying. Halfway there, no looking back, no crossing the Jordan river. 

Her gun lowered. Her eyes fluttered, went all wide. Her scowl was still there, but not as intense—more of a slight frown, really. 

Jackie closed his eyes. He took this as a sign that things were over. He’d given life a try. He had a good run, but it was over. Nothing left to say. At least, that was what he thought before he felt a hard pain strike his head.

He let out a muffled, indignant shout. Was this woman not done? What—she was holding a baseball bat, a metal one. A real slugger, a firecracker-red thing wound with black tape that was starting to peel off. He barely had time to read the words printed on its side—Washington Whackers, how charming—before it came down on his head again. His muffled shout was louder, but no less indignant. 

A hand seized his shoulder. She was kneeling in front of him, staring straight into his eyes. 

“Why won’t you die?” she hissed.

Jackie shrugged, then flinched as the bat came down again. He could smell the blood now, and he knew the closet was probably trashed at this point. What a shame. 

She finally let the baseball bat topple to the ground. It rolled away unceremoniously. She shut the closet door, stomped away. Jackie’s headache didn’t even have time to fade before she returned.

“See this?” She shoved a jar of something glistening and red in his face. Jam? No. That was a heart. Still raw and bloody. Veins and arteries hacked away from the body, the aorta thick as a pipe, the wet and bulging outline of chambers and ventricles on its surface. His own heart skipped a beat. Looked like he wasn’t the only unlucky victim.

“Tell me,” she continued. “Can anyone live without a heart?”

He shook his head. What was her point? Was this a threat?

“Then tell me this. How did I remove your heart without killing you? Hm?” That last syllable trembled with rage. “I cut you open! How the hell are you breathing without a heart? Are you a fucking plant? How?”

Jackie wasn’t sure why this was his problem. This woman was just batshit crazy. Then again, he’d just been shot four or five times. Despite an awful headache, he was alive. Maybe he had really thick skin? Not that thick skin could stop a bullet. He’d always been quick to recover, sure, but nobody had ever shot him before. He’d never even thought about the possibility. There were cleaner methods, after all.

She pulled his gag out. It appeared to be a thick silk scarf. That couldn’t be cheap. “Answer me now, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

He moved his jaw, trying to stop it from aching. “Why’d you wanna remove my heart in the first place? Or bring me here?”

“Irrelevant.” She picked her pistol up again. “I’ll give you three chances.”

“Listen, lady, are you sure that’s my heart? Because as far as I can tell—”

She pulled the magazine out, reloaded another set of bullets while he spoke. “Two more chances, Jackie.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m a psychic,” she replied dryly. “Now. One last chance.”

“I—I don’t know, okay?” He glared at her, then at the pistol’s muzzle, yet again pointed at him. “I have no idea what the hell you’re going on about! Stop shooting me, for God’s sake. Maybe your bullets are cheap. That’s not my fault.”

She lowered the gun again with a sigh, as she stood up. Jackie took this moment to inspect his surroundings. The lady attempting to murder him—now pacing around the room—didn’t look particularly powerful, for sure. He could probably take her in a fight. Her apron was splattered with blood, and her silky hair had been tied back in a rough ponytail. Behind her, he could make out the fuzzy outline of a bedroom. Nothing special. A bed, a nightstand, a lamp, a single-seater sofa, a few empty rodent and bird cages, what might have been a bookshelf, and a lush white rug. All the furniture was expensive-looking, though, and very neat. 

“So.” She glanced at him.

“So.” He looked up at her. “Can I leave now?”

“And go straight to the police, right? Very funny. Just shut up. I’m trying to think.” 

The stranger had a pleasant voice, despite all the rather unpleasant things she spoke of. Pleasant like a hospital room is pleasant, polite without any sign of sympathy. Was she a hitman? An assassin? Jackie tried to avoid making enemies, but he did piss off a guy on the bus that one time. Some people just found him generally annoying. Annoying enough to kill him? It was a possibility.  The fact that she apparently removed his heart pointed towards organ trafficking. Or maybe she was a serial killer. Ooh, spooky. Jackie hoped he’d get his own podcast episode, if nothing else. 

She stopped pacing around and turned to Jackie. “Is your name Jackie Rockwell?”

Jackie narrowed his eyes. “No.”

“Really.” She gave him the most piercing look she could fathom, which was very piercing, to be fair. “Do you know what happens to captives that lie?”

“They get sent to bed without dessert?”

“They get their bones broken, that’s what. Then their eyes are gouged out. Then their tongue, their fingers, their teeth… should I go on?”

“No, I get the gist of it.” He gave her a nervous smile. “I’m Jackie Rockwell, yes.”

Her expression softened. “Right. My sincerest apologies, for all this. I don’t intend on letting you go. That doesn’t mean we have to be enemies.”

“Yeah. Right.” He supposed that laying low would be ideal. Striking out of the blue. Catching her off guard. “If I have to stay here, can’t you untie me?”

“No.” She smiled coldly. “Again, apologies.”

“Then I guess I’ll just...“ He glanced around at the closet again. It was absolutely covered with blood and bits of something he didn’t want to think about. “I’ll just hang around, yeah?”

“You’re taking this entire situation very well.”

“Thanks.” He managed a weak grin. Dread was wreaking havoc on his mind, truth be told, but he had a way of hiding it. “I don’t have to go to work, at least?”

“Who do you work for, pray tell?”

Pray tell. She’s one of those people. Rich girl with a rich vocabulary, huh? “I’m a waiter. Not great for the lower back. It would be nice to have a day off.”

“Good. Keep that optimistic spirit. It will help.” 

With that incredibly ominous piece of advice, she shut the closet door.

Oh yeah and sorry for the spam but I was looking through my notes and I think I forgot to mention it but in Who Am I, the contrast between the Faith/Riley intimacy scene and how freaked out Faith was by it and the much more wholesome and good for each other intimacy of the Willow/Tara magic scene that was in between them that was real good.

okay yeah i think this was a brilliant choice the show made.

i also think the depiction of faith's sexuality on the show is deeply and obviously troubled but kind of incidentally a little bit genius?

under the cut to discuss issues of sexual assault and some of the darker things the show has implied about faith

like to be clear i think that the way the show often equates faith's desire for sex with her evilness sucks and is bad.

but i also think the kind of hyper-sexuality we see from her fits in very well with all of the very strong implications that she's a victim of CSA.

i've talked about this before, but i can't find any of the posts on my blog so forgive me for repeating any points

but there's a lot of alarming details that point to faith being a CSA survivor. she makes a lot of comments about her mom's predatory boyfriends, there's the "let me stay the night, promise i won't try anything" line she mocks, there's hitting on giles, in later seasons she makes reference to events that could have only happened pre-sunnydale involving a man who asked her to dress like a school girl. all of it paints a pretty horrible picture, especially compounded with all of the implied details of the physical abuse faith suffered at her mother's hands.

so you have a young girl with a horrific background of abuse and victimization and then you give her powers but no stability, no support - is it any wonder she went dark? when faith's relationship to power has always been the ones who have it make the rules and everyone else just deals with it?

because i think this is something you see explicitly in the way faith transgresses against xander and riley.

with xander in particular, it's like. the scene where she assaults him begins with him asking to come in "just to talk, i swear" to which she replies "think you could make something happen if i didn't want it to?" which is just. a horrible bit of foreshadowing, and very telling as a first reaction. it's actually a great precursor to the riley stuff, because xander shows up and tries to connect with her emotionally. he tries to imply that he knows her, that he cares, and her immediate reaction is to dissect that genuine offer of support for the ways that it must be an attempt to manipulate her. he wants to brag that he had sex with her, or else he's trying to trick her into sleeping with him again. she denies that they have a connection because "it's just skin" which is fundamental to the way she thinks about sex. it's a tool - it offers relief or power, but not anything else.

"what do you want to do with this body?" is what faith asks riley. "am i a bad girl? do you wanna hurt me?" i mean it's not hard to read into this. fucking riley isn't about riley, it's another one of faith's weird sexual proxy deals with buffy and it's about being buffy and it's about dicking buffy over. when riley is kind and genuine in bed, when he tells 'buffy' that he loves her is when faith starts to flip out because the script she keeps trying to lay over buffy's life keeps breaking. she flips out, gets panicky, tells him "this is meaningless" in an effort to reassert something she believes to be true about sex -- that it's a tool of power with, at best, an inauthentic veneer of intimacy.

if there's one specific turning point in faith's post-graduation day redemption arc it's here. THIS is when she starts to realize she's fucked up, that her entire worldview was wrong.

to accept that she was wrong about about sex is to accept that she was wrong about power. it means the narrative of her life is all wrong. that she was hurt by her mother and by men who preyed on her was not, in fact, the uncaring laws of power in action but deliberate acts of cruelty that needlessly victimized her. it also means that every fucked up thing she's done to buffy, and xander, and angel, and riley, and everyone else is, in fact, her fault. she loses the ability to hide behind a law of the universe - we're not at full accountability yet, but this is where it starts.

right here:

when Faith stumbles out of bed, trembling and panicking, and Riley asks "what happened?"

"nothing," faith says, stricken. she says it twice, actually. the second time sounds like more of a lie.

[obligatory disclaimer here wrt the fact that consent here is. a messy thing to talk about. given that this whole post is in regards to fictional characters and that the sex between riley and faith is 1) not framed as rape 2) utterly and completely fantastical given that it's facilitated by the use of a magic artifact i've avoided using the language of irl sexual assault to discuss it. ymmv]

The thing about "conviction in one's own understanding" is that it's all around horrible for helping you obtain and hold a reasonable grip on reality. It's extremely ineffective at stopping people from internalizing bad info, and it also prevents them from absorbing good info. So here's the deal: conviction is a feeling. It makes you perceive yourself as right and just, regardless of whether you actually are. Now the thing is, it's impossible to know just how much we don't know, and people who feel like they know more are usually the ones who know very little. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge that they aren't aware of, and the thing about a lot of wrong info is that it aims to fill a gap you don't even know you have. Let's use flat earth, for example. To the average person, the whole idea feels really ridiculous - key word, feels. This isn't because they have a solid grasp on how the evidence points to a round Earth, or because they fully understand how we obtained that evidence. They just know it's round because it's what they were told, and it's what everyone else believes. This means that a flat earth believer can come in and ask, "yeah, but how do you know? I mean, you know what you've been told and you know what everyone else believes, but how do you know?" And then they stop and think about it, and they realize... actually, they really don't know. They begin to realize that they have massive gaps in their knowledge. Their conviction, which up to this point felt unassailable, is now critically shaken, and the conspiracy theorist can move in and fill these gaps with a lot of incredibly wrong information that this person has no way to evaluate right now. And you might think, "well, they can just evaluate it later-" but no, that probably won't happen, and here's why. So our average person here - we're going to call them Jamie - feels like their mind is being expanded. This information is completely novel, and it's huge. Jamie gets a big dopamine rush, which makes everything they're hearing feel super deep and profound. The whole time, the conspiracy theorist is explaining how they don't want people like Jamie to know the truth, and that all of the history books, science books, etc. have been written or edited by in on the conspiracy, or at least brainwashed by it. With these seeds of mistrust planted, Jamie is very unlikely to try and debunk the flat earther's claims. Now Jamie has a new conviction - that the world is flat and there's a massive conspiracy dedicated to covering it up. And this time, Jamie's conviction is backed up by massive amounts of information that appear to provide lots and lots historical context. The more Jamie internalizes the worldview of a conspiracy theorist, the more Jamie sees evidence of the conspiracy everywhere, and the more Jamie's conviction grows. Conspiracy theorists have conviction up the wazoo. What's far more important than having conviction is being willing to recognize and acknowledge when the evidence doesn't actually stack in favor of your belief. This is what the vast majority of conspiracy theorists lack, and is the main reason they remain conspiracy theorists. Instead of learning actual critical thinking skills, they simply get better at rationalizing things away. Another thing you need? The Five Ws - Who, What, When, Where, and Why. Find out who started claiming shit and find out exactly what they said. Examine the politics and prejudices common in the place and time they lived, and observe where their claims align with those. Find out why they were so invested in putting this stuff out there - what did they stand to gain from it? (There's always something to gain, even when it seems like there's nothing to gain.)

i NEED yr insight on cee loanshark PLEASE 🙏

Okay LISTEN UP Y'ALL

I'll set the scene. The date is sometime after LN5 first airs. I was in the middle of rewatching Foolish's six-hour building stream in which Quackity recounts his entire life story, when suddenly my third eye burst the fuck open.

And I guess there's no better time than now to drop my c!loanshark meta.

/dsmp /rp

I've always liked these characters, and I've picked up on a lot of really cool connections between them. c!Quackity is a former idealistic young politician turned jaded capitalist, building a legacy and clawing his way up with bloody fingers. c!Foolish is a physical god who once used violence to get his way but came to regret that way of life and now copes through creating beauty. Quackity explicitly manipulates Foolish into joining him by appealing to his newfound fear of mortality, a fear which Q shares. They're both trying to move away from past versions of themselves, but what they each see as "the problem" is very different.

What compels me about this dynamic is that Foolish simply existing as himself is a refutation of Quackity's worldview; building things up rather than tearing them down worked for him. That's how he got immortality! That's why he has so many friends! And while Quackity is trying to push Foolish back into the life he used to live because he desires and envies that strength, Foolish does not want to lose himself to that side of himself; when he does join Las Nevadas, he claims he's simply trying to find a "healthy balance."

But because of the kind of person Foolish is trying to be, combined with the perspective from centuries of existence, he's in a perfect position to reach Q. Quackity has a history of getting easily attached, both to powerful people and to people who show him compassion unprompted. Foolish is both of these.

And we see this! We see Quackity in that very same stream opening up and telling Foolish everything about himself, despite admitting that it makes no sense for Foolish to stay and listen. We see him trusting Foolish to run the country after Slime died. We see him enlisting Foolish's help to make canonical babies clone an army of slimes.

And... controversial take incoming, but this dynamic is easier than Quackcicle for me to read as potentially romantic. I think that generally, and especially post-Schlatt, Quackity prefers to be intimate with someone he sees as... an equal, at least in some sense. And as much as he cares about Slime, he does not view him as an equal; him simultaneously infantilizing and idealizing the guy is one of the big problems Slime rips into him for ("you found me, something malleable"). Meanwhile, he's still Foolish's boss, officially, but he also knows that Foolish is experienced, capable of extreme violence, and definitely capable of killing him if he wanted to. He's kind, he's nice, but he's not pure. There's a certain... safety in having someone like that on your side. Doesn't hurt your ego, either.

So for Quackity it's "you are one of the few people who can truly understand why I am the way I am" and "you could destroy me if you so chose, and you wouldn't be wrong for doing so" and perhaps later on, "knowing you better now, I want to do right by you; don't I wish someone had done that for me?" with a healthy dose of "you know, the fact that this guy could snap me in half and I'm only still alive out of mercy (or am I the one in control here? Nice.) is… kinda hot."

And for Foolish, it's "I still hate you for what you couldn't or wouldn't do" and "I feel sorrow for the parts of you I see myself in" and perhaps later on, "I came here for my own benefit but maybe you and this place deserve a second chance; didn't I want a second chance my own?" with a little dash of "… okay, I'll admit it, this mortal is kind of cute, and I could always kick him and bail later if I really wanted to."

The rub we find with a romantic relationship between these two, though, is getting it to go the other way. Despite having been very civil to Q, Foolish has no reason to trust Q. This guy let him die, came into his home, insulted him to his face, and probably doesn't pay him nearly what his work is worth. Foolish still has some self-respect left. He seriously considered betraying Q to Dream, for goodness' sake, and it's hard to blame the guy.

But after Quackity's second death, Foolish is... basically all that Q has to confide in. And again, maybe he's in the perfect position to understand and discern whether or not Q's change is genuine. Given his own history, he knows that people can change.

Picture this: Quackity now has hundreds of humanoid slimes to care for, right? Maybe he wants to do better by them than he did for Charlie, and is realizing just how badly he might have fucked up by raising them the way he did. Maybe he tries to encourage them to do things independently, too, and it isn't quite working. Maybe some of them gain enough agency to be angry and choose to leave Las Nevadas, and maybe part of Q's growing process is letting them go.

But maybe Foolish stays to help those who remain; after all, wasn't he their creator, too? Doesn't he have some responsibility? And while he's teaching them new skills like building, or helping them hone their individual styles, he's also there for Q to lean on, ask questions, confess things he hasn't told anyone else. Maybe Foolish tells Q a few stories from his own past, and Q isn't horrified to hear the gory details. Maybe they go from coworkers to tentative friends, and perhaps something a little more... flirtatious. Yeah, that's the word. Nothing too serious, just fun. Like when Quackity comes to Foolish in the middle of the night, shaky from a dream he's not remorseful enough to call a nightmare yet, and asks if he can sit with him. Or when Foolish asks for feedback on a blueprint that's giving him trouble, and Quackity spends half an hour praising and hyping him up (it's little... weird, but appreciated). Maybe one day, Quackity finally gives Foolish a true, heartfelt apology.

Foolish isn't going to hold Q's hand through his self-improvement journey; Q has to face his guilt and do the hard parts alone. But maybe at the end of it, Foolish will still be there, in this cold country that's starting to feel just a bit more like a family, and maybe that says everything it needs to.

On a completely different end of the spectrum, cAN YOU IMAGINE THE ANGST IF FOOLISH HAD ACTUALLY BETRAYED Q IN LN5. AFTER Q HAD FINALLY STARTED TO TRUST AGAIN HE GETS SMACKED WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS OWN ACTIONS. WE WERE FUCKING ROBBED OF THIS SCENE. ROBBED, I TELL YOU-

Sooo... yeah. Their dynamic doesn't need to be romantic, per se, but it's a ship I find very interesting and appealing. Hence the essay.

P.S. - tiny prettyboy twink + muscular literal god, do what you will with that

1, 2 and 3 for the choose violence ask game?

1. character everyone gets wrong

I think I've spoken enough about Enjolras and Cosette's characters so I shall go with MARIUS! Bet you didn't expect that....but yes, I think fandom opinions on Marius tend to swing wildly between "revolutionary hero and besties with Enjolras" (usually the musical-only fans) and "absolute useless piece of trash who ruined Cosette's relationship with Valjean". I think, in a story full of characters as Symbols, Marius is our only truly human character, which means he has flaws that makes him extremely unlikeable at times, which might contradict his moments of bravery and kindness. Not to mention the one thing that he gets flamed for the most (ostrascising Valjean) was partially Valjean's own fault too! It's just that Marius' upbringing has made it very difficult for him to put his past behind him and accept radical new worldviews easily. Marius is a very interesting character and I think brushing him off as just one of the above two sentiments downplays his true conflict throughout the story.

2. compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

Going to go with Cosette for this one. Her most popular ships are with Marius and ��ponine and she definitely tops BOTH of them. We can see that canonically, she loves to tease those that she loves (Ten years later, with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: “A pedant, and insufferable to the sight! You are right!”), as well as being very strong-willed (“Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?” / “Because, my daughter.” / “Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too.”). She's going to dominate any relationship she's in, platonic or romantic otherwise, because no one is going to be able to go against her lol

3. worst take you've ever seen on tumblr

This is not fandom-specific and idek if this originated from tumblr but I will NEVER forgive whoever created the "the curtains are just blue" post. I know it stems from the annoyance of badly-taught English classes but it snowballed into such a big anti-intellectualism movement and I just can't stand it. Literary analysis is never about wanting to figure out the One Meaning the author wants to say. If that's the case, we would only ever need one academic paper per book and that's it. The field of Literature and Philosophy and the like would not need to exist. But what we actually want to find out is why so many people get different interpretations from the same texts. What devices were used - purposefully or otherwise - in the story to get people to those conclusions? That is the essence of literary analysis. To think that people are just "over-analysing" something is pure ignorance will never not infuriate me.

Hello Charity, I've been an avid follower of your blog for a few yeaars, and as a fellow enfp, I wanted to ask you for advice you feel might help enfps during development and ways to overcome problems during going along with them, thank you, sorry if I sent this in the wrong place the first time

ENFPs tend to get impatient and want to get things done quickly, so they can loop into Te and stop caring about people’s feelings, or being in touch with their own, so that’s probably the biggest thing to look out for—a strengthening Te means possibly losing touch with Fi.

What does strongly developed Fi look like in an ENFP? Passion leads to pursuit of their direction. Self-knowledge and self-awareness of their patterns in life. They are not as easily influenced in every direction by new ideas (inconsistent in their beliefs, or scattered in their focus). Left to its own devises without Fi checking in with myself to determine “how I feel about this/what I believe,” Ne-dom will be a kite in the wind, bouncing between air currents, riding this one for a short time and abandoning it to find another one, instead of an eagle gracefully soaring in circles above the ground.

ENFPs need to spend time alone in introspection—observing their inner reactions, questioning what it means for themselves, and allowing it to build into a solid sense of Self – what I want, what I feel, what I think, and from there, broadening it into a worldview that holds back Ne from being so scattered. It should develop into a radar or what interests me and what doesn’t, and what direction isn’t beneficial for me, so that the ENFP doesn’t waste as much time or energy going in directions that will ultimately take them nowhere. Until they do this, they will over-use Te in trying to force themselves to get things done or earn a living or turn a profit, but they won’t really know what they want or care about what they are doing, leading to half-assed results. They need to slow down and figure out a worldview to stand behind, and then allow that to influence their belief system and filter down into their actions; otherwise, they will be erratic, scattered, inconsistent, and others will notice this about them and think they’re flakey.

Another risk will be the struggle with inferior sensing – either they will ignore details complexly and screw things up, or they will over-focus on them and not know which ones are important or not. They need to remember that and strive for balance. Or in a project that requires details, go for the broad strokes first, and then fill the relevant ones in later. (Like writing something – get the concept down, then figure out examples or the details of what KIND of a tree it is.)

Finally, ENFPs are idealists, which means the real world sucks unless it has potential for change, but if they purse change that isn’t possible, it can leave them feeling deflated and like there’s no difference to be made here. It’s important for them to find tangible (sensory) ways to see progress, so they don’t prematurely give up. By that, I mean that it’s fine to work toward global peace, or your best friend getting in touch with her soul, or whatever, but an ENFP also needs to see ways to inspire and improve in small areas of life, and make that a priority. They need to feel like they are always moving forward and becoming better and fulfilling their own potential, so learning to set reachable short-term goals is good for them; it will help them feel less restless and frustrated not to achieve ‘great things’ in far too little time (due to being unrealistic about how long things take or why you can’t just change overnight and have it stick).

Horde Clone Headcanons #4 Horde Prime Doesn’t See All

A part of my headcanons series for Horde-clones, what shows up in my fanfictions.   Horde Prime Doesn’t See All and the Clones Know It  While they’ll be hard-pressed to admit it, or will not admit it at all (on pain of baptismal, exile or culling), the clones all somehow know that there are things that escape their Emperor’s grasp.   After all “Brothers! You are correct! We do not talk about Krytis!” _ Wrong Hordak.  While it does not seem like Wrongie / Kadroh / Whateveryouwanttonamehim really “knows” in forefront about Krytis and what went on there, as getting the full story from the old computer records shattered his worldview and inspired him to rebel, it was obvious that some part of him knew that there was “something about Krytis” that was forbidden to be discussed or thought about among the clones.  He weirdly, out of the blue VOLUNTEERED that information as soon as he heard the words “Horde Prime’s weakness” when the Etherians he was with were trying to find a weakness.   This smacks of a hive mind-wide conspiracy to “not speak of certain things” that apparently leaked there in some form that they are “not supposed to know” but all do.  Most clones likely do not know the details, if any living clones do (I’d imagine that Prime would have purged all who knew the true story of Krytis from his ranks), but it would seem that some vague sense of “weakness” or “something wrong” breached into the hive mind, anyway.   And they know “not to discuss it,” because, obviously, if any of them are caught acknowledging the existence of Krytis, something bad will happen to them.   Therefore, it must happen sometimes.  A flock of clones or a pair of clones slips.  Some brother sends a mind-shock into another brother to “SHUT THE HELL UP!” and everyone shuts up and goes about their day, hoping that Prime was not “nearby’ enough to overhear.   It is one of those ill-kept, everybody knows it secrets.  “Krytis” - although vague. “Don’t think about it again.  Krytis does not exist.  If Prime catches you asking about it, you will die. Let us hope that he does not know that we were just thinking about it.”   Also notice how Prime literally does have to possess certain bodies to see certain things.  He is also not aware of Despondos or the whereabouts of his “little brother” (Hordak) whom he thought had perished.  He is not aware of the whereabouts of She-Ra until a “strange ship” is detected on radar.   Horde Prime claims that he “sees all” and “knows all,” but it is plainly evident that he is not omniscient.   And Wrong Hordak’s behavior in blurting out “Krytis” tells us that the clones, for all of their programmed worship, know this to some degree.   This shows up in my fanwork.   One of my main clone-original characters is a nice young clone named Jerome in the post-Prime era.  He wears eyeglasses, prescribed by Etherian doctors due to his eyes not being able to be fixed via clone-hardware measures. He is mildly nearsighted and will have worsening vision throughout his life (much like myself and many other humans).  His backstory, all the way from my early writings of the Robin and Jerome stories when I’d decided he wore glasses (something I conceived when playing with the Horde Clone Picrew that used to be around) was that he did not gain his visual defect on Etheria, but had it as a pre-existing condition upon coming out of his vitrine.  Now, his visual defect was mild - hardly affected anything.  He was probably going to be canon-fodder anyway, and nothing serious would progress beyond a likely “natural death” (for a clone) on the battlefield.  He could be a good soldier, and so he was not culled when born.  However, other clones could read his mind when he was around them - as they all kind of swam in each other’s minds in close proximity - and elder clones noticed the mild defect that he did not.  They also knew that Prime would order him culled if it was found out, mild as it was.  This was why the clone who would later take the name Jerome was shuffled in his on-ship work on the Velvet Glove toward the ship’s bowels for work and generally did “undignified” work, mainly waste-disposal. My poor little Jerome was a garbageman, which is honorable work, but like in most societies, in the Galactic Horde, it was overlooked and seen as “dirty and dishonored.”  It was a job where he would never be close to the Glory of Prime.  Only in the post-Prime era did he realize that he was shuffled off to lower-decks work not for something shameful or sinful, but because his brothers were protecting him.  They were protecting him from the off-chance of being seen by Prime or possessed by Prime and found out.   Prime was too high and mighty to check on the trash-sector of his ship.   As for Robin, my other main OC, in the ship, he worked robotics, on the field, he was a Force Captain.  While the clones did all have interchangeable jobs, some emerged on the field as being particularly good at certain things, like field-leadership and Robin was just such a clone.  To keep him from being a threat to Prime, I do think he went to the Pool many times.  Well, in one of my stories, I mentioned that in war camps, other clones liked to fight him for sport as a weird thing among clones to test their strength.  Force Captains tended to need to assert their dominance when challenged by other clones in Flocks when planetside.  This was not a Prime-approved activity and so this tended to be done when they were sure that “Prime was not around,” typically just after the Force Captain had been used as a vessel to assess battlefield conditions.  (If one camp’s position was assessed, the Flock knew that Prime would be busy for a while checking the other Flocks).  Time for a boxing-match!   It is by far “my own idea,” nor owned by any other person in the fandom.  I’ve seen other writers do “Prime’s not watching, let’s have sexytime” stories, for those of you who are into clone x clone shipping. From what I’ve seen, “Prime’s little slips” seems to have shown up everywhere, because it has ample basis in canon.

Episode 5

This is an episode with no warning.

The girls go on about the day and Tori checks a new character called Paulina.

The show's subtitle in many materials markets WAS as "A story to find where you are."

If we expand on that and take an overtly philosophical angle, this can be taken to mean one's philosophy of life.

Aristotle in Nichomachean ethics describes three common philosophies of life,

Honor.

Simple happiness (pursuit of joy).

Contemplation.

In this interpretation, ethics is the way in which one pursues eudamonia- the end goal of life.

Mel's goal thus is clearly the second! The question of what we should do today-is a hidden inquiry into life, which Mel immediately decides should be about doing something fun.

Picatrix immediately decides her life philosophy is to be closer to her ideal self-virtue or honor.

Tori simply inquires (perhaps this is in tone with Tori's role in episode 1-2) and finds the new character. That one clearly represents the third.

They then form groups and go around the campus. Truly striking.

Paulina's character embodies the Socratic method to such an extent it's clear the writers are aware of this. It's almost a Socrates expy. She expresses common sentiments among learners-that the more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know. Paulina's catchphrase is similar to,

"All I know is that I know nothing." - Socrates

Mel decides it's a good use of time to play hide-and-seek, discusses urban legends (at this point Al thinks an urban legend might be created from a misunderstanding in the previous episode) and finds Abra.

A lot of analysis time was spent on the hide-and-seek game. I looked at this hide-and-seek game exhaustively to make sure I had not missed anything and this post had to be delayed.

You could make a game out of trying to pinpoint where the characters are at which time and that in itself is almost its own hide-and-seek game. You get the idea.

Abra is the only one whose initial plan turns out wrong and then is found by Mel. This may be just because I read it some while back but later it cuts to them meeting at the hall. Then, they agree it was Tori that "found" them. This ends the game. I wondered if there were some similarities to Umineko. It's very similar to the scene when the game ends and it cuts to the Golden Land and they meet a witch behind it all. They then make a few meta-commentaries and point that mystery novels and fantasy might have something in common. Clearly, you might try to see the game through this lens. Maybe Tori is the witch then and Abra had a fake alibi, etc. Let us not get sidetracked, we're not here to analyse Umineko.

WAS and free will

What even is Abra's perspective in this? Abra is not in any group nor does she present a particular worldview.

"The practical magic of Abramelin ... centres around a set of talismans composed of magic word squares."

Abra then is named after a book centered around puzzles.

However, the books Abra cites are important. Abra goes to the library to find two books and if you look it up one of them was an important breakthrough in astrophysics while the other was the precursor to horoscopes.

Why those two books?

Surely, this could be to provide an esoteric perspective on the game, or even put forth some idea of destiny or fantasy to it.

You might even extrapolate it to be an inquiry on free will. The motion of stars is here compared to the life of a human. (I believe this is brought up again in a later episode).

If the motion of the planets can be explained, is it the same for the path taken by each of our protagonists through the game-through which we can see their motion aswell as their philosophies? Are our protagonists stars? Was the entire game set in stone? If the motion of these stars is explained-the entire thing may have been pre-ordained either by physics or some concept of 'destiny'.

(TW: this letter contains two real hate messages/threats I received which may be frightening to younger readers. Short mention of child sexual abuse.)

My dear lgbt+ kids,

I want to address something that happened on this blog a few months ago:

I published a post and it ended up in the wrong crowd.

More specifically, it was this post ("You are allowed to call yourself trans even if you can "explain away" your feelings in other ways.") and it ended up in the terf community.

If you don't know what that means: It stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. They often describe themselves as "gender critical". A (slightly oversimplified) summary of typical terf talking points is: There are only two genders, your "biological gender" determines everything about you, amab people are biologically determined to be predatory and violent, trans women are evil men who try to gain access to women's spaces for predatory reasons, trans men are evil women who are traitors to womanhood. Penis bad, vagina good and if you don't think you are your genitalia, you really really bad.

As a trans person on the internet, I have encountered people like that even before that fateful post. Every now and then, I'd get a message or a comment on tumblr, and after publishing my book, I got a couple of angry E-mails.

But after that post? Well, you may have seen some of the comments under the original post (if you already followed me back then) but you didn't see the messages - and we are talking like a hundred over them within two or three days. Stuff like "I have been collecting receipts on you for months and when I publish them, someone will find you and will kill you". "Stuff like "Just admit you are a pedo and kill yourself, it will be less painful that way".

I created this blog almost 8 years ago, I have seen hate mail before. But this massive wave of hate, that was new - and it wasn't as easy to shake off as I wanted it to be. When I look back, I assume it was really just one person (and perhaps some of their friends) who created a ton of fake accounts to keep messaging me after I blocked their real ones. But it was just so much.

As a child sexual abuse survivor, the pedo accusation was especially hard to deal with. I knew there isn't any "evidence" on that to collect because it's simply not true. But it left me paranoid: Had I accidentally shared a post by a known abuser? Am I friends with one and I am the only one who doesn't know it? What, exactly, have they been collecting on me?

Well, in the worldview of that blogger, trans men are apparently not only evil traitors to feminism, they are also all pedophile women who only want to be men to be able to abuse young girls. So, the evidence was... my existence as a trans man. Just me being alive. I am breathing, which is apparently enough to make me a danger to young girls.

I reached out to tumblr support and they advised me to change the settings on my blog, so people I don't follow can't message me or reply to my posts anymore. So I did that and I deleted the original post (I re-uploaded it later) and then, well, I disappeared. I filled my queue with some reblogs of my top posts, some new posts that still lay around in my drafts and then I logged off. For a while I wasn't sure if I'd ever log back in, to be honest.

Clearly, I did - and with a breath of relief, I noticed that my new settings helped. The re-uploaded post didn't attract any ugly attention.

I don't tell you all this to get pity or play the victim (and I do want to stress that the overwhelming majority of tumblr messages I received over these 8 years have been supportive or helpful! There are a lot of kind and wonderful people who read this blog.). I just want to be transparent about this negative experience. Maybe it'll help you feel less lonely if you ever end up in an online "sh*t storm" like that.

With all my love,

Your Tumblr Dad

As a historian, I really want to do a piece on how 9/11 has been commemorated and how it’s been remembered by the people who lived through it and the generation that came up after. So I need to see 9/11 memes so I can determine what jokes about 9/11 are deemed acceptable by society, if any, and which ones are purely tasteless.

Having lived through that time, and remember the South Park era of comedy, I saw a lot of 9/11 jokes in the years after the attacks. They were tasteless then but laughing at them felt cathartic in a way. We’d all been through this collective trauma, and laughing at some shitty jokes was a way of coping with that trauma. But were these jokes tasteless? Probably.

I feel like as we get further away from the event, our memory of it gets more and more distorted. I think for a lot of people who weren’t there and don’t share that collective trauma they can be more cynical about it than the people that were. What do I mean by cynicism? This refers to a couple of trends I see in 9/11 discourse. The first is tasteless jokes, usually in the form of memes. The second is discourse that usually makes a lot of (false) comparisons between 9/11 and some other tragedy. This can be a comparison between some military mission performed by the US military or a natural disaster and most recently the pandemic. The emphasis in these comparisons is that 9/11 wasn’t that bad actually OR what America has done in retribution for 9/11 is worse than the original act itself. The latter point isn’t necessarily wrong but using a tragic event in which thousands of people lost their lives to do it, while an effective rhetorical strategy, can also come off as cynical and disrespectful to the people who survived it or lost family members. I feel like the best way to make that argument is to emphasize how horrible 9/11 was but explain that what the military did in response was perhaps even more destructive and cost more lives. I think deemphasizing how bad 9/11 was or just using it to make a political argument can read as disrespectful and not enough people find that tricky balance between political argument and disrespect.

As for the but such and such was worse, those people can shut up. Like I can entertain conversations about the actions of the US government and military in response to 9/11 because those are conversations worth having. This sort of cynical worldview doesn’t actually yield effective discourse. It essentially posits that because more people died in say a hurricane or an Earthquake that that event was a bigger tragedy. But as a historian, I can tell you that historians don’t claim that something is more significant or even more tragic or less tragic just because at some point in history a worse thing happened. Like as a historians were more aware than most how many bad things have happened in history, so there is no point in comparing all the tragic things to all of the other tragic things like some kind of mad web. Like there is no point in comparing a natural disaster to a terrorist attack because they are in no way similar other than the fact that innocent people died. They are far more dissimilar than similar, and comparing to disparate events that may not have even happened around the same time doesn’t make any sense. What points of comparison are we drawing and to what end? What does that really tell us about the society we’re living in or were living in during the time of these events? So just the business of comparing tragedies is a pointless endeavor but it also posits that the only thing that measures how tragic something is is it’s death toll and that’s not true. 9/11 is a tragedy not just because innocent people died but because of how meaningless their deaths were. They were caught in the crossfires of a conflict that these random office workers, flight attendants, flight passengers, and first responders had nothing to do with. An ongoing struggle between the East and the West, the dynamics between the most powerful nation on Earth and tiny subsections of a massive global religion has nothing to do with these people who died and yet they lost their lives anyway. Now that is true of any civilian attacks. But that’s the thing: there have been far worse civilian attacks in history, even some conducted by the US military (the Dresden bombings come to mind) but that’s kind of the problem with drawing comparisons. I can’t really say if the Dresden bombings and the Blitz were worse than 9/11. It simply doesn’t feel like my place to say to someone that suffered that your tragedy is actually smaller or less significant than this other tragedy that happened some other time. They are all hugely significant in their own ways, they are all tragedies, and they should all be remembered and discussed with reverence.

I do feel that a lot of the comparisons between 9/11 and some other tragedy come from this place of “why does the US make such a big deal about 9/11 and not xyz tragedy?” And this is a valid question but not all of the answers come down to “the US doesn’t care about xyz tragedy” or “the US only cares about itself!” So let’s go through some reasons why the anniversary of 9/11 is so widely covered. Firstly, it happened on our soil. Countries are always going to honor things that happened to them. It’s just a thing. If it affected the people in that country, then yeah they’re gonna go on and on about it. Secondly, it happened 20 years ago so it’s still in very recent living memory. Most people alive on the planet have vivid memories of that day, so most people still remember what that day felt like and want to honor the victims and commemorate it. Thirdly, all the cynical reasons. Yes the US is less concerned about anything else that’s happened outside of our borders. What happened to us matters more to anyone else. No this isn’t great but I’m just reporting the state of things. And yes, the US is selective about what it remembers and what it doesn’t, and the government has a history of struggling to acknowledge the bad things America has done. And lastly, America never really stopped being overly nationalistic like a lot of other countries did after the rise of fascism scared them out of ever doing that shit again. America just maintains its nationalism. Maybe one day it’ll have a more nuanced perspective of itself like other countries do but we’ll see. So yeah there are a lot of reasons why the US makes a big fucking deal about this day and will forever and not all of them are bad or reason to criticize.

Ok now to acknowledge the memes. God any time I tell kids not to make memes about 9/11 I feel like a grandma. I mean I could go on and on about how it’s disrespectful but the people making them know this and don’t care. I guess I’m more interested in understanding why people make memes about a national tragedy. I think it has to do with how 9/11 has been remembered which is largely clouded by all of the political and military stuff that happened as a result of it. For people who learned about 9/11 years after it happened, they didn’t experience these events in real time. For those of us who lived through it, we didn’t know all that was going to transpire because of it. On that day, all we really knew was that thousands of people were dead and more were going to die in the conflicts that would result from it. We didn’t know that the wars would last decades or how pointless it would all be in the end. We had no idea how shitty George Bush was or how incompetent his administration was. We definitely had no idea that Trump was coming. So for a lot of us, we can separate the mess that happened because of the attacks from our memories of the attacks. It’s so much easier for us to think only about the events of that day because we were there. We have specific memories of it which we can latch onto rather than just thinking about news footage or events that came later.

And the cynicism that people feel is somewhat earned. The attacks obviously spurned two decades of Islamaphobia as well as countless military attacks in the Middle East. For a lot of young people, they feel like they’re supporting Muslims or standing against Islamaphobia by disrespecting an event that prompted so much Islamaphobia. And I get that. But also that’s not the way to do show your support or take a stand. Keep in mind that the people who died that day had no idea what they were dying for. Most in their last moments probably didn’t even know it was a terrorist attack. The American people didn’t even realize the first plane was an attack. So it doesn’t really make sense to disrespect their memory when it’s not their fault that their deaths resulted in so much pain and suffering for the Muslim diaspora. Disrespect the people who were openly Islamaphobic after the attacks, criticize the American government for their actions in the Middle East. But not the people who had no control how their deaths were remembered or used by politicians, military leaders, white nationalists, and other racists to attack Muslim people.

As a historian, it’s my job to try to apply a historical context to people’s actions. A lot of people have done this to observe why people responded to the attacks the way they did. Now I want to use it to understand why so many young people feel at best indifferent to the events of that day and at worst resentful and disrespectful towards ur