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aminiatureworld · 3 years

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Damocles

Characters: Zhongli, fm!reader

Word Count: 3,211

Warnings: Hanahaki disease – depictions of a fictional illness with symptoms mimicking tuberculosis, mentions of coughing up blood, talking a lot about death

Premise: In which the reader thinks Zhongli doesn’t reciprocate their feelings, and fears the consequences.

Author’s Note: Ngl, I don’t think I’ve ever really heard about this trope before, except maybe in passing. So if it’s a little weird that’s why.

I ended up taking the story in a bit of a macabre direction. Hopefully not too melodramatic, but I kinda like how it turned out.

Zhongli

“Thank you for telling me, but I’m afraid I cannot return your feelings. I’m sorry to be a disappointment.”

In truth you couldn’t decide whether or not you had expected your feelings to be returned. You and Zhongli had been friends for years now, and you had grown closer to him than you had to most of your previous friends and acquaintances. Indeed, you had grown closer to him than you had to many of the people you’d been in previous relationships in. You called upon him in some form almost every day, whether it be to discuss something of importance or simply bask in his presence. When there was something new you found about, whether it be a story in a book or a particularly funky looking shell, you almost immediately sought out Zhongli to share your find with.

For Zhongli’s part, he also liked to share experiences with you. At the very least you couldn’t say that your friendship was one sided. He often would be the one to walk up to you on the street, a new brand of tea written down on a piece of paper in his pocket, or a location where one could find particularly beautiful glaze lilies on his lips. He never seemed to mind when you peppered him with endless questions, or talked his ear off about your own day; something which you often asked if he found annoying. No, you were very sure that Zhongli wasn’t simply spending time with you out of pity.

In truth it was your friends who guessed the trajectory of your personal feelings before you did. Though you often found their poking and prodding intensely irritating, they had the common sense to keep the questions to a minimum – perhaps in hope their silence might guarantee that your affections would reveal themselves naturally one day. Now though you had to admit they had been right. You had fallen for Zhongli how long ago? It seemed so difficult to say when, so gradually had your feelings changed from viewing him as a confidante to viewing him as something more. Once you had finally come to terms with it you’d put off revealing your feelings as long as possible.

It wasn’t just the chance of rejection, something that would already cause emotions to run high. You had seen what sort of disease could ravage those who were unlucky in love. One of your own friends had suffered from such a disease, a fellow member of the Liyue Qixing had died from such a thing only a few months ago.

It was a terrible disease, everyone at least could agree about that. The origins of such an unfathomable sickness was much less understood. Most saw it as a curse from the gods, a punishment to the humans who would love a fellow mortal more than those who ruled above them, who gave their protection, their mercy, and their gifts to the people below. Others argued that it was simply a result of stress, for what heart could take the shock of a truly deep rejection. A rare parasite, a curse from malevolent demons, all these theories made little difference when it came to the actual disease. You were fairly sure anyways that people dying of it couldn’t care less why it happened, only that it was happening to them.

First came the coughing, easy enough to ignore in a land where the common cold truly lived up to its name. Then you couldn’t run as fast or as far as you had once, at least on the days were you weren’t fighting off crippling fatigue – the night sweats doing little to help you in your desperate need for rest. Then the fever set in, then the blood that stained the porcelain sink. By the time the first few petals would appear emaciation would already begin to claim your muscle mass and the precious body fat that kept you alive. Some people didn’t even get to the point of regurgitating fully formed flowers. Those people were usually considered lucky, for when one must deal with an incurable disease, well, surely it is better to go sooner rather than later.

You wouldn’t lie and say that wasn’t one of the reasons it took you so long to confess. After all, what you don’t know won’t kill you, right? You weren’t actually sure about that, but it sounded right in your mind, regardless of its actual veracity. However, as with most people in love, you’d found a growing recklessness inside you, paired with the sudden desperation for a happiness which you would certainly never obtain at this rate. So you’d made up your mind to tell him, deciding that perhaps the certainty would be better than the ever growing cloud of anxiety that surrounded your thoughts.

Now you’d been rejected. You had to admit that your first reaction was utter panic, the distinct feeling of having made a terrible sort of mistake. Oh sure, your feelings were undeniably hurt, but that was less important than the virtual death sentence you’d been handed. Why oh why had you decided to do this? The world seemed to swim in front of your for a moment, as simultaneously everything came into sharp focus and faded away into the recesses of your mind. What would you do now? There was nothing to do, you just had to wait for the inevitable, wait for the cold embrace of death to welcome you to its abode. You took deep breaths, trying to control yourself. Tears were forming in your eyes, but you knew that they weren’t from romantic distress. Ironically romance was the last thing in your mind right now.

“I, I see. Thank you for your honesty.”

It was all you could manage to make out. Turning around, head light from fear, you bolted down the streets of Liyue, desperate to be in your home, desperate to ignore the sword of Damocles that now hung dangerously low over your head.

Zhongli watched you go, watched as you stumbled your way through the crowd that always packed the streets of Liyue in the daytime. He was fine, he was perfectly fine. He had seen it through, had done what he knew was right. There was no reason to regret. Surely the small stab of pain he felt was temporary, a pinprick compared to all that the ex-archon had suffered over the years.

Zhongli had suspected that a confession like this might’ve been on the horizon for quite some time now. Not that he was dreading it out of a personal inability to reciprocate. No, in his heart Zhongli already reciprocated your suspected feelings. He loved you, adored you even; within the stony heart that had atrophied over years of war, suffering, and personal duty, grew a love that Zhongli had not felt for a very long time. He cherished every moment with you, knowing that his long life would try to compress the memories that were so precious to them. Seeing you whenever he could, dragged out conversations as long as he possibly could, Zhongli was practically desperate for time with you. He was also intensely aware of how short that time would ultimately be.

How could Zhongli push the curse of loving an immortal being on you? For it truly was a curse, to both parties involved. His side was painful of course, the knowledge that your memory, you lifespan even, would slip through his fingers like grains of sand. He would always be wondering whether or not the two of you would be experiencing a “last”. Last visit to the sea, last time to climb up the Huaguang Stone Forest to watch the sunset together. Last, last, last. Always the shadow of death would hang over you, so palpable in Zhongli’s mind that he might almost reach out and grasp the gossamer veil that would eventually steal you away. Yes, it would be a truly painful experience. Not nearly as painful however as your own experience.

Zhongli had long ago come to the conclusion that mortals had no true concept of the passage of time. You were young now, the world was your oyster. Zhongli’s immortal status would be nothing more than a passing thought, an anomaly and nothing more. Then your 40th birthday would pass, then you 50th, then you 60th, 70th, 80th. By the time you reached the end of your life the difference between you and Zhongli would stretch out like a chasm between the two of you, something to never be reconciled, for the old rarely forgave the young for their youth. Not to mention the other scenario, the one that Zhongli would never allow the freedom to truly cloud his thoughts. Your death of old age would be a tragedy, the alternative a catastrophe.

He knew all this, had seen it time and time again. Zhongli was hardly the first immortal being to fall in love with a mortal, would not be the last. Adepti, archons, all walks of immortal life were drawn to humanity, drawn to the freedom that came with mortality. Humans did things because they died; they had no forcible tie to nature, no innate duty other than to themselves. Humans could be wicked or kind or cruel or merciful as they wished. To those who were chained by their destiny, well, there was something very anomalous in such a choice. Perhaps it was no surprise then that an immortal being would inevitable find themselves interacting with those supposedly below them. Perhaps it was no surprise that this often led to love.

All that being true, Zhongli still refused to give into his needless selfishness. He loved you, yes. Knowing that was enough. He wouldn’t push such a burden on you, wouldn’t cause you resentment or pain. It would be better if you thought that your feelings weren’t reciprocated, it would be less painful.

Nor would you have to worry about the curse to which many less lucky fell. Zhongli still loved you, still cherished you deeply. You would never have to worry about that, for archons and adepti do not move on from love the way humans do. Zhongli’s love for you would long outlast your lifespan, one which, the archon prayed, would be very long indeed.

Yes, everything had been handled well enough. Perhaps you would never wish to speak with him again, perhaps you would grow to resent him even, how quickly love can turn into hate. It didn’t matter though. Zhongli had shielded you from long, drawn-out suffering, and that was all that mattered. He should’ve been satisfied, should have felt relief. Instead however he only felt a great sadness pressing down, a sadness combined with the pain that accompanied a love that must never truly be realized.

It had been nine days since you’d been rejected by Zhongli. Crossing off another square on the calendar which you had dug out of your old stationary you sighed. The nine days succeeding the encounter had been utter hell. At first you were convinced that the worst thing that could happen was the symptoms of the wretched illness showing up quickly, so convinced you were that the next day you would wake up with blood on your pillow. Soon however, you’d come to a completely different conclusion. There was nothing worse than waiting.

Every day was spent in the agony of anticipation, every day waiting for the coughing to begin, for the night sweats to begin ravaging your sleep, for the breathe to be stolen from your lungs. Yet every day you woke up with none of these things, though your fatigue was real enough.

You should have been relieved, should have been glad for the opportunity to live even a few more days. Yet instead of relief you only felt deep, unrelenting dread. You couldn’t bring yourself to do anything, so crippled were you by morbid anticipation.

Not that your thoughts were particularly worthwhile either. Perhaps it would be one thing if your ruminations had brought up something profound, something that you could write down in a book for your family or your friends. Though it still would be poor solace, well, at least it’d be something. But your thoughts had all turned to mush, replaced by a paranoia so strong it confined you to your bed most days.

You thought that the death sentence would in some way be freeing, that you might be able to recklessly throw yourself at all the things you had avoided out of fear for so long. Instead you found yourself depressed, waiting for an inevitable so terrifying you found yourself disconnecting from the people around you. What did it matter anyways? You’d be dead soon enough.

This gross neglect of your wellbeing was at least somewhat allayed by the routine that had been drilled into your body from so many years working for the Liyue Qixing. Though you didn’t go to work, something you were sure you were going to hear about eventually, you still dared to venture out to the market. At the very least you would eat your fill in good for before the end was nigh. No need to worry about your health after all. Besides, your definition of good food didn’t necessarily always align with completely unhealthy.

Walking through the familiar streets you stared at the people around you. How odd it was to see people so close you could touch them but so far they might as well have been in Inazuma. Was there anyone else here suffering like you were? Anyone who could understand the thoughts that now flooded your brain? You stared at the ground, trying not to think about it. You’d be confronted with these thoughts the minute you got home anyways. Might as well delay it a bit.

Turning to find the fishmonger you spied a familiar silhouette. Stopping in your tracks you stared unabashedly at Zhongli. The man seemed to be carrying himself much as ever, but the unapproachable atmosphere which he’d blanketed himself in seemed somewhat more prominent. Perhaps it was your imagination, he seemed to be talking to the butcher easily enough. Not that it was any of your business. Zhongli wasn’t any of your business anymore. It would be better if you could forget him, if you could erase this feeling in your heart that refused to go away. Even now Zhongli was beautiful. Even now you wished to run up to him, to hug him, to make pretend everything was right with the world. You couldn’t do that though. Just as you couldn’t forget him, you couldn’t love him. Not in the way you wanted. Turning away you trudged back home, good food utterly forgotten.

It was day eighteen since Zhongli had rejected you, and by now your emotions were running almost unbearably high. You’d sunk into an odd reverie of adrenaline, anxiety, and utter disbelief. What in the world was going on? This was a familiar illness to you, something that had almost claimed the life of your friend and had felled your coworker. You knew everything about symptoms, timeline, etc.; and what you knew was you were supposed to be falling ill ages ago. Eighteen days between the initial rejection and the beginning of symptoms? It was unheard of! You didn’t know what to think. Were the rumors about the gods true, had Zhongli imposed some divine protection on you for the sake of your friendship? Were you somehow a superhuman who had the white blood cell coding to defeat the bacteria that caused this disease? Why hadn’t your descent begun yet?

You lounged on the couch, having moved out of your bedroom on the thirteenth day, three days after the latest possible showing of symptoms. Though you still felt deeply afraid, you found that curiosity was a surprisingly good deterrent when it wanted to be. Your fears hadn’t disappeared, but mixed with them was a disbelief so great that you often found your thoughts drifting to questions of how rather than questions of when.

Of course your initial instinct had been to seek out Zhongli. Pride mixed with fear however had kept you firmly at home. Really what was the point in even seeking out the answer to your miraculous reprieve at this point? It wouldn’t really change the outcome. Instead you might as well enjoy this unexpected extension of your life. Besides, you didn’t want to tempt the fates a second time.

Zhongli stood at the window of your first story apartment, a glaze lily in hand. He hadn’t meant to do this, but the urge refused to leave him.

He’d noticed you a few times at the market, face drawn, eyes empty. Zhongli wasn’t sure what exactly he was expecting, but certainly this wasn’t it. He knew you weren’t suffering from illness, your pace was strong, if slightly erratic, your general aura not that of the sick that Zhongli was all too familiar with. Why then did you look so terrible? The doubts that had plagued Zhongli began to rise again, jeering at the mistake he had made. He was supposed to protect you, right? Why then did you look as if you had experienced a total health collapse?

At first Zhongli tried to ignore it. You had not come to him for help, it was not his place to try and insert himself back in your life once more. The more he thought of you however, the more he found himself uneasy. He had to have some form of communication, some way to enquire about your health. At least one last time. If you explicitly rejected all forms of contact, well then Zhongli would leave. He would never defy your wishes in such a way. Until then however, he felt like he needed to ask.

The idea of walking up to your apartment and asking you was utterly off the table. Who knew how that might end? No, he wanted a subtler way. Glaze lilies had always been a favorite of yours, sneaking out into the evening to see them bloom even more so. He would simply leave one on your windowsill. If you took it, then he would enquire about your health. If you left it, well Zhongli would have his answer.

His hand trembled slightly as he stared at the windowsill, causing the gold ribbon tied around the lily to tremble slightly. At first Zhongli wanted only to give you the flower. He realized soon however that you might be confused, wondering if someone had not simply dropped a flower on your windowsill, or had the wind blown it there? The ribbon would hopefully clear things up. Even if it looked a little silly.

Slowly placing the flower down onto the open window Zhongli sighed. Turning around he did not dare spare a glance backwards. He would have his answer soon enough after all. Until then, well, there was no point in looking back.

You exited from the kitchen, having finally felt the energy to make yourself that good food you’d been promising yourself. Going to look at the sunset you let out a soft gasp.

On your windowsill was a single glaze lily, wrapped in gold.

#no one dies but I left the ending a bit ambiguous on purpose #I wrote more about it in the ask #genshin impact fanfiction #zhongli x reader #genshin zhongli #genshin impact #requested #oneshot #my writing

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youllallriseintheink · 3 years

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A Worthwhile Investment, chapter 3

Please enjoy this Grant x Shawn story. Yes, I split it into two short chapters. Apparently I can’t be succinct with these two... hopefully I made the right choice!

Next is Thomas x Allison!

Time went by. The studio worsened in most respects. Though its installation was nothing out of the ordinary, it felt as though the ink machine was creeping through the halls, its long pipes growing into new areas. Wherever it went, it left the scent of sickly rubber ink and stained through the walls, like a creeping, musty black mold. That alone would have brought down morale, but it was nothing compared to the financial crisis. Every department was operating on a slashed budget, and yet Joey refused to lower his demands on any of them. Whenever someone quit out of anger, there was relief- it meant that those who remained would be less likely to be laid off. The studio was a rotting body, ravaged by the parasite of the ink machine and struggling to move its massive weight now that so many of its workers were gone.

Grant was not handling it well. His department understood that it the studio’s financial problems weren’t his fault, but he didn’t blame anyone else for hating the man who had decided how much to slash their budget, or who told them, while they were already underpaid, that their paycheck would be late because there simply was no money to pay them. It was his job to prevent this from happening. But with Joey spending more and more on Bendyland and the ink machine, and refusing to downsize anything when it was really overdue to do so, it was proving impossible. It was soul-crushing.

Things weren’t easy on Shawn, either. Fewer staff for the same amount of plushes meant having to work longer and faster, and making plushes out of cheaper materials meant that there was less room for error before the cheap, delicate things they’d been reduced to selling simply fell apart. Shawn was getting screamed at more than usual nowadays.

At least they had each other. During better times, their relationship had been on and off. There were periods when one of them just couldn’t handle the other’s issues or couldn’t handle being in a relationship at the moment, and they’d break up, only to get back together after a while. Shawn had even dated other people during their temporary breaks. Neither of them were especially serious about their relationship, so it worked for them. Now, they were together for the foreseeable future. There was little time or energy for romance anymore, but they stole the moments they could and hoped that things would eventually improve. Shawn had even moved into Grant’s house at the time. This was good for both of them- living with someone else made things easier domestically during this busy time, and it was good to come home from a difficult day at work and meet up with someone who loved you and brightened your mood.

“Ah think we should quit,” Shawn said one day over dinner. “None-a this is healthy. I’m sick of it, you certainly ain’t yourself, and anyhow, yer always saying the company won’t last another year.” Shawn saw Grant hesitate. “Well, Ah’m quitting. Join me or don’t, Ah don’t care.”

“I have a feeling that things will improve once Bendyland opens. It’s supposed to open in three months,” well, it was supposed to open over a year ago, but hopefully they could reach the new deadline, “so, let’s see where the studio is in five months. If we’re not having a much better time at work by then, let’s do it. Or you can quit sooner- please, don’t let me hold you back. But that’s when I’m doing it.”

“Five months sounds great! I’ll mark it on the calendar. To a chance at a better life!”

Grant forced a smile. “To a chance at a better life.” He honestly wished Shawn would just quit so that he didn’t feel like he was holding him back.

There were a few reasons that Grant didn’t want to quit. It wasn’t about money (he had some saved up), or fear that he couldn’t get another job (he had the experience to land another). Mostly, it was about pride. Grant might be the financial manager of a failing massive company, but still, he was the finances manager of a massive company- with a department working under him and his own secretary. This could be the highest-profile job he would ever have. He also worried that the next job would be just as miserable. He recognized, though, that he couldn’t stay in an awful work environment for those reasons, let alone keep Shawn in one. And no matter what, the studio would be dead in a few years, so he’d have to leave it eventually. And heck- maybe Shawn was right. Maybe it would be better.

---

It was while Grant was walking down one of the Joey Drew Studios hallways that it happened, though it had seemed rather insignificant at the time. A burly, blond GENT worker deliberately loosened a bolt on one of the ink pipes as he passed, spraying a cloud of ink fumes into his face.

“That’s for getting my buddy laid off,” the man grumbled as Grant coughed on the fumes.

“Hey!” another GENT worker, shouted, “pull another stunt like that, and you’ll be the one leaving for good!” The GENT worker ran over to Grant. “You alright, sir? I can pay for the dry cleaning if you want.”

“Don’t bother,” Grant snapped, “just teach your men some respect.”

Grant looked down at his thoroughly stained suit and dress shirt and weighed whether to arrive at his next meeting late or drenched. He decided on the former and turned for the exit. As he left, he heard one of the GENT men telling the other, “that’s how you get our budget cut even more!” It was rather strange to be such a frightening creature nowadays.

By evening, Grant was feeling sick- as though he had a flu coming on. He spent a few days laying around before returning to work, feeling just as badly. He couldn’t afford more time off if he didn’t want to end up entirely buried by work. Shawn was mildly concerned when it was a few weeks in and the illness didn’t seem to be going away- and that Grant was intent on working through it- but all he could do was support Grant through it and give him the space he needed. Even in the beginning, it was extremely frustrating that his boyfriend was suffering and unable to do much of anything outside of work, but to an extent it was nothing Shawn wasn’t used to- Grant had had bouts of depression nearly as bad as this. As time went on, Shawn noticed some more disturbing changes.

It was about two weeks in that the voice emerged and the hallucinations began. Grant had been in his office when he’d heard a pained scream- seemingly from right outside of it. He rushed out, expecting to see an injured person or an emergency of some sort. Instead, he found only his secretary, perfectly calm and looking at him as though he was an alien. “Do you know where that came from?” Grant asked.

“Where what came from?” Oh, that judgmental stare.

“The scream? You heard the scream, right?”

“No.”

Grant cringed and closed the door to his office.

The headaches, the brain fog, the fatigue, and now the hallucinations, a voice said. It was a voice that sounded as real as the scream had, but it wasn’t one he’d heard before. Do you want to know what’s causing it? There was a pause, as though Grant would answer and let his secretary think even worse of him. You’re losing your mind. You know what they do with crazy people, right? An image of an electric chair flashed through Grant’s mind, followed by an image of locked insane asylum doors and tools used for a lobotomy. Just carry on. Try to act normal, and don’t let anyone know about this. I’ll be here when you need me. Grant sat back down at his desk, taking a look around the room as though he could find where the voice was coming from. Finding nothing, he returned to his paperwork.

A few weeks later, Grant decided to coax some answers from the voice. It was absurd- if it was right, and it probably was, the voice came from him, and couldn’t know anything he didn’t. But he had few options. His symptoms were becoming glaringly obvious. Shawn had noticed that he was spacing out during conversations, and his department was noticing that he couldn’t keep track of time and was making mathematical errors he never would have before. Shawn had even seen him react to hallucinations a couple times, and it frightened him. Grant knew he needed to figure this out before it hurt his professional life, or hurt his relationship any further.

It was a cold winter’s night. Grant returned home after work- thankfully Shawn wasn’t home yet- and went to his room to interrogate.

“Alright,” he said, facing the wall. “Tell me what I have. If there’s a way to fix it, I’m going to.”

Shawn had been unable to sleep that night, so he heard Grant’s voice. It didn’t bother him, though, until Grant started yelling. Shawn got up and went to investigate. The house was totally dark except for the light coming from Grant’s room. Shawn creaked open the door. Grant was facing a wall, shifting his weight as though he might spring on his invisible adversary if it proved necessary.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #shawn x grant #shawn flynn #grant cohen #my fanfiction

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honourablejester · 3 years

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Ideas for Sorcerers (D&D)

I do love a bit of innate, chaotic magic, the forces of the world writing themselves onto people. Whether said people wanted them to or not. Heh. I will admit I’m a bit more attached to the ‘touched by cosmic forces’ angle for the sorcerer, it’s really great for backstories, but the bloodlines are also fascinating for the ‘family lore’ and ‘really adventurous ancestors’ ideas. So!

I’m mostly focused on the classic sorcerers and then the horror-adjacent sorcerers, because I’m me, and we know what I like. Apologies to fans of the Divine, Storm or new Clockwork sorcerers!

Draconic

Because dragons (and dragon ancestors) are the best. There’s a lot of fun and aesthetic with choosing your dragon ancestor too. The little scales you get with draconic resilience just make for some really cool-looking characters.

I love the idea of mixing ancestries with a draconic sorcerer. Compare and contrast. For example, a tiefling draconic sorcerer with gold dragon ancestry! Combining a ‘tainted’ bloodline with a respected one. Maybe the clan lean heavily into the lawful reputation of gold dragons, as well as a sort of internalised racism against their own darker ancestry as well. They view the fact that they were once favoured by a divine dragon as proof that their bloodline can redeem themselves of their demonic pact/ancestry, and they lean towards lawful occupations, city watch, soldiers, clergy, etc. So your sorcerer has a bit of internal conflict going on. (Also, a red tiefling with gold scales is an awesome look – tiefling skin colours with dragon scale colours is a really fun combination)

Other cool-sounding ancestry combinations: high elf & white/silver ancestry, for that ethereal immortal feeling (also fun to add stereotypical dragon traits with the white dragons, in that you’re an ethereal immortal who really holds a grudge and does not do ‘forgive and forget’), half-elf & green ancestry, for a strongly outcast, political bent, halfling/gnome & copper ancestry, because if you’re going to go for a tiny trickster you might as well go all out …

Or we have my old favourite, a tortle sorcerer with (somehow) a dragon turtle ancestor, because great-grandpa Uhok never met an older and (significantly) larger lady he didn’t want to pursue, and great-grandma Korthalok was honestly rather flattered. (Yes, I am aware that dragon turtles are not high dragons, but they are intelligent, and they’re probably innately magical/elemental enough to put a bit of magic in the bloodline)

Shadow Magic

The sorcerer’s gothic option! I do love it. Your magic comes from a strange, grim shadow realm, either because you were touched by said realm, or one of your ancestors was an entity from said realm. You get a demonic shadow hound, teleportation from shadow to shadow, and later an actual shadow form. Lots to work with there.

I feel like there’s a lot of Lovecraftian, Dreamlands, William Hope Hodgson sort of feeling here. The dark touch of a strange realm. Emphasis on isolation, desolation, alienation. Loneliness. This is also the subclass where I really, really like a later-life coming into your powers, a traumatic event causing a normal person to suddenly develop horrifying magic.

So. Any of your gothic/cosmic horror backstories. You were kidnapped and subjected to a horrific ritual. You were created in a horrific ritual (hi Warforged!). You suffered a severe, inexplicable illness as a child, and remained pale, half-dead, and possessed of strange powers for the rest of your life (I love the shadow sorcerer quirks list). An insane ancestor entered the Negative Plane and your line was almost annihilated by the resulting Nightwalker, but you somehow survived. Your parent was an extremely powerful magic user studying the Shadowfell, and you only realised much later on in your life that your childhood ‘imaginary friends’ were actually Sorrowsworn (Lost and Lonely?) that haunted your ancestral home and that your parent was somehow keeping from killing you. You tried to steal from a powerful, vindictive wizard, who flung you into the Shadowfell for your temerity, and you don’t fully remember how you survived. You slept in a barrow as a dare when you were younger, and an allip whispered secrets to you that lead you to dream of a dark realm, dreams that seemed to gradually change you as you ‘recovered’ …

This entire subclass is just very much ‘go nuts on the horror tropes and have fun’. I love it dearly.

Aberrant Mind

A new one from Tasha’s, but the other Lovecraftian/horror themed sorcerer subclass now. Which is perfectly fine, because I can always roll with more Lovecraftian horror! If shadow magic was themed strongly towards undead, Aberrant Mind seems strongly themed towards aberrations. Body horror and psychic powers! Boo yeah!

I do like the suggested origins. Particularly the parasitic twin and the imaginary friend ones. I think there’s a lot of fun to be had with those. Aberrant mind does feel more … on the science fiction end of horror, more than the fantasy? There’s a different flavour compared to shadow magic. We’re talking alien abduction and Carrie-esque childhood trauma here. Particularly when you get to the higher level actual physical transformation elements. Bit of Akira in there, bit of Innsmouth. So.

I’m liking characters who are a bit ‘aberrant’ on their own merits, even before their powers kick in as well. The outcasts from the get-go. The albino half-orc abandoned by the tribe as a child and befriended/kept safe by their possibly-imaginary flumph friend. The fallen aasimar whose blessings allowed them to survive where their stillborn twin did not, but who still feels the touch of a ghostly hand in theirs (I’m not sure how well it fully gels, but I feel like an Atropal is a very interesting concept to lay alongside this – stillborn gods and blessed, aberrant champions – celestial guides and the whisperings of parasitic twins … not sure how well it fits, but there’s a lot of crunchy concepts there)

Also, there’s your chance to have some fun with the Underdark races. Duergar, Deep Gnomes and Drow. Or sea races, when we have fun with Aboleths. Or non-sea races who still had a bit of fun with Aboleths, if we want to fully embrace the Innsmouth vibes and have normal land-based elves/humans/halflings who come over all Deep-One in the end. You come from a quaint little village on the coast, where the coming-of-age ceremony involved something of an opening of the mind. Nothing to worry about, everyone does it where you come from. Yes indeed! Heh.

And then, to bring us back to the less-horrifying end of sorcerers, and to revisit my childhood in a big way, we have:

Wild Magic

Schmendrick the Magician! Sorry, I grew up on The Last Unicorn, you’ll have to forgive me this. (Is Schmendrick actually part of the inspiration here, I’m wondering?)

But honestly, wild magic really lends itself to down-on-their-luck characters, running ahead of their own chaos, or striving to learn to control their powers. Or, on the flipside, incredibly laissez-faire types who decided to just roll with and eventually enjoy or perpetuate a little chaos. So. Tricksters, shysters and earnest young things trying to do their best.

So. You could do a straight Schmendrick. A down-on-their-luck kid who really, really wants to be a real wizard, a great magician, but their magic just will not cooperate. It has a mind of its own, and their struggle is learning to either minimise or lean into the chaos and power of it. (I like a background as a tailor/seamstress for this, partly because of animated Schmendrick’s memorable patchwork robes, but also as a little practical detail in that, if you can’t trust your magical mending not to do a ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ on it every damn time, you probably would learn to darn your socks the old fashioned way)

For a variation, you could do a bit of a snake-oil salesperson sort of deal. A down-on-their-luck sorcerer turned shyster/criminal to make ends meet. Wild magic works very well as a sort of bloodline curse, bad luck and chaos following a family. A woman of the Witchbottle clan pissed off an archfey way back when, and so every girl born to the line since has struggled with wild magic. So the clan tends to move around a lot, both individually and as a whole, and individual members of it tend to work around their inevitable getting run out of town for magical mishaps in their own ways. The clan has a lot of travelling entertainers, salespeople, criminals, etc, and tend to be very loyal to each other, even if they don’t see each other all that often (concentrations of wild magic in a single area tend to be bad for said area, so family gatherings are discouraged near civilisation).

And then there are your straight trickster characters. Ones with a more philosophical approach to chaos, a belief that you should be able to deal with the unexpected, and that maybe other people should be helped along in experiencing and dealing with it too. I like bards for tricksters, but wild magic sorcerers work very well too. Heh.

I know Wild Magic might not be the most functional of the subclasses, but it’s got a direct line to my childhood, and I feel like it’s still a really fun idea.

In summary? I like the squishy spindly magic people. They’re fun.

#d&d #dnd #sorcerers #character concepts #long post #fantasy #dark fantasy #horror #lovecraftian #i do love d&d's more horror-leaning elements

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cruelfeline · 4 years

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As we all know, I am highly partial to Hordak and find him extremely sympathetic. While I don’t really talk about it much (because this is a Hordak Zone), I also find Catra extremely sympathetic.

The one known villain I don’t find very sympathetic is Shadow Weaver, and I swear it’s not for lack of trying! I’ve read people’s metas. I’ve watched Light Spinner over and over, trying to pick it apart and find that demonstration of SW’s inner turmoil, but it’s all been in vain. And I think I know why. So I’m going to discuss it while using Catra and Hordak as comparisons.

Hordak and Catra both suffer from a poor sense of self-worth and severe difficulty self-validating without the approval/affection of the abusers in their lives. Catra cannot be at peace without proving herself to Shadow Weaver (and Adora, though obviously she’s not an abuser). Hordak cannot be at peace without proving himself to Horde Prime.

I’ve seen it said that Shadow Weaver suffers from the same difficulty: namely one of self-worth and, as often follows, self-loathing. The problem I have with this is that, while I can look at Catra and identify the source of her issue (Shadow Weaver), and I can look at Hordak and identify the same (Horde Prime), I can’t actually look at Shadow Weaver and understand why she supposedly feels the way she does.

The answer to this that I’ve seen floating about is that the ruling guild of Mystacor is the source, that they have never trusted her, that they look down upon her and thus cause her this emotional turmoil. Potentially suggested in the scene pictured above. And I... hm. Hmmm.

I just don’t see it.

The thing that makes Catra and Hordak’s stories work is that their abusers harm them for no fair reason.

Catra is essentially abused because she is not Adora (no, I don’t buy SW’s claim that it’s because she sees herself in her, mainly for reasons that we’re discussing in this post right now).

Hordak is abused first because he suffered physical illness (as far as we currently know; I know various free-will theories abound), and later because he became an “abomination” by daring to exercise his will and take a name.

Both of these reasons are cruel, unfair, and unjust. There’s no logic behind them save for the ugliness of their perpetrators. There’s nothing anyone can say that can justify little baby Catra’s suffering, and while some may try to support Hordak’s treatment by pointing out his own evil deeds, the fact remains that he is not hurt because of those deeds; he is hurt because he got sick, and later because he has to gall to be his own person.

With Shadow Weaver, this pattern just doesn’t work. Yes, we see the Guild distrust her, shoot her ideas down, reject her proposal, but it’s for a good reason. Her plan is dangerous. It is foolhardy. It is just a bad plan. Mind you, I agree with the sentiment that the Guild should take greater action against the Horde, but that does not mean that Shadow Weaver’s proposal is the right way to do it.

It would be one thing if she proposed the idea, got shot down, did it anyway, and ended up succeeding, but that’s not what happens. She gets shot down, does it anyway (wrongly thinking she’s altered the spell), risks Micah’s life, risks her own life, becomes a magical parasite, kills some people, and magically consumes a goat man. The Guild may not have trusted her, but the way the narrative works out, it was for good reason.

If the writers want me to group SW in with the likes of Catra and Hordak, even a little, then they should portray her supposed plight as unfair to her. They should, in some way, demonstrate that the Guild didn’t trust her for illogical, unjust reasons. As it stands, the Guild’s distrust ends up being the right call, because Shadow Weaver’s plans end up mutilating her and costing others their lives. And, after this, she follows her powerlust to the Horde, negating any sort of “planet-saving” endgame she may have been able to claim as justification for it all.

It’s funny; I initially went into the Light Spinner episode really looking forward to connecting with SW in some way, but I came out of it somewhat disappointed. I just don’t feel like the writers made a good case for SW being anything but a power-hungry individual, especially when the Guild rejecting her proposition is followed up with a scene like this:

Focusing on being held back from power, rather than on the Horde, really does not a sympathetic look make. Rather, it makes her look like someone who thinks very highly of herself and is pissed when others don’t agree. It makes her look arrogant, especially with her (failed) claim that she “fixed” the spell of obtainment.

The whole thing just doesn’t give me a sense of her reacting to unfair, unjust, emotionally damaging treatment. Maybe such treatment existed in the past, before the Light Spinner episode, but it’s certainly not shown to us in any way. It’s not even alluded to, and so I’m left with just what I canonically see, which is that SW is angry that her terrible idea is rejected, does the dumb thing anyway, kills some people, and then flounces off to get addicted to Black Garnet huffing.

I dunno; maybe I’m missing something? I’m certainly open to people showing me whatever sympathy-inducing story I might be overlooking, but as it stands? I feel like I’m not really supposed to feel sad for Shadow Weaver. If I am, then I’m afraid the writers made a pretty heavy misstep in how they’ve portrayed her.

#shadow weaver #she ra #light spinner

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mcrninqstar · 3 years

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discord: it’s you. it’s always been you.

SUMMARY: Lucifer accidently sends Maze the wrong text leading her to believe her best friend is dead. He goes to her to clarify and they end up revealing more to each other than they anticipated. TRIGGERS: Death Mentions, Daddy Issues, Mommy Issues WRITTEN WITH: @mazikeenofmurders

MAZIKEEN: She'd been in Hell, torturing Will when she got the update from Lucifer. Charlie's dead now. She'd seen a lot of people die in her lifetime. Most of the time it didn't bother her, but Charlie was her best friend. It was heartbreaking. Her chest felt restricted, and her eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away before anyone could see them. If Charlie had ended up in Hell, Maze should've been told, but no one came while she let out her anger on Will, which meant that she'd gone to heaven and that Maze wouldn't be able to see her again. She let Belphegor continue torturing Will on their own while she went back to her own place in Hell. She didn't tell Belphegor the news yet. They'd need to figure out how to break that down to them. They were already upset enough that she'd been hurt. Maze had diverted their sadness to anger, but handling her death would be harder. Maze remained stoic until she got home and saw a picture of Charlie, Lucifer, and herself in a frame on one of the walls. She picked it up and broke down into tears, clutching it to her chest as she laid down on her bed. Now she'd really never get Charlie to sleep with her and Lucifer. That made her cry more.

LUCIFER: "Well, that was bloody awful," Lucifer lamented as he appeared in Maze's home. He needed someone to complain to about this. He'd already tried calling Linda a couple times but she declined the calls on account that it was close to 2am now. "Maze?" he called out to her. She wasn't in the living room, but he could feel her presence about. He figured she must've gone to bed. Surely she wouldn't mind being woken up to some good news. Lucifer helped himself to the bar, pouring two glasses of champagne and placing them on a tray. He carried them into Maze's room like some sort of fancy butler. He expected to find her maybe in some sexy little number or maybe nothing at all. But what he hadn't expected was to find her crying. "Mazikeen..." he lowered the tray onto the nightstand beside her. "Why are you crying? I thought you'd be over the moon, honestly..." Becoming Death was one hell of a promotion, especially for a human reaper. Charlie had essentially ascended to an angelic form of being. It was unheard of for humans to do that. It was historic and spicy and no doubt causing Uriel to panic a little. Lucifer very much liked that idea. But Maze...he'd never seen her like this.

MAZIKEEN: She heard it distantly when someone came into her home. Sometimes the other demons tried to sneak into her place to fight her when she was off guard. She was never really off guard, but she could recognize Lucifer's presence. Archangels like him radiated power that was unmistakable, especially him. She didn't move when he called her name. She didn't want him to see her crying like this, but she couldn't stop. It hurt too much. Charlie had been too important to her. "I'm not crying," she insisted, even as her voice cracked and tears spilled down her face. The picture frame she'd been clutching left imprints on her arms as she sat up. She sniffled as she wiped at her face, but more tears kept coming. She looked at Lucifer with confusion. "Why would I be over the moon about this?" she asked. Why was he? What was good about any of this? "She's gone, Lucifer." She took in a breath trying to push back the tears, but it just distorted her face. Admitting that she was gone was hard. It was possibly one of the hardest things she ever had to do, and she dealt with Cuphegor all the time.

LUCIFER: "Right, of course," he nodded and sat down at her bed side. She was too crying but he wasn't going to call her out on it. He simply pulled out the handkerchief from his pocket square and held it out to her. He had no idea what brought this on. Maze normally loved when he sent people out to be tortured by her specifically. William especially had been a thorn at her side. What he'd done now warranted permanent death so naturally he figured Maze would be happy about that but she wasn't. She was crying about someone being gone. It didn't take long to realize she was talking about Charlie. "She's not gone," he replied, placing his hands on either side of her and rubbing down the length of her arms in a reassuring manner. "I mean, I don't really know where she's at right now specifically. She's kind of hiccupping in and out of afterlives and I'm not allowed entry into some of them because of politics. But she's very much alive...unalive...sort of dead?" he sighed trying to figure out how to explain it. "She's Death now." He didn't see what was so bad about that. Maybe it was because Maze couldn't hug her? "I mean, sure, it would be ill advised to touch her at the moment but you'll be able to give her a hug when she reigns her powers in a bit. Raphael said they'd help."

MAZIKEEN: She took the handkerchief he offered her and wiped the tears off her face, still not admitting that they were tears, not that he was insisting they were or anything. He hadn't argued her lie, and she appreciated it. She leaned against him as he rubbed her arms. She thought he was giving her some spiel about how their afterlives didn't really mean they were gone or something. That wouldn't have made a difference to Mazikeen if she couldn't see Charlie herself, but that wasn't what he was talking about. She wasn't sure what he was talking about actually. "What do you mean she's alive? You texted me and told me she was dead." Her voice was raising angrily. She'd been so upset. "You made me think my best friend died!" She hit him in the chest as she spoke. "I was crying because I thought I lost her!" She spoke with a mixture of shouting and sobbing.

LUCIFER: "What do you mean? No I didn't," he defended as she shouted that he sent her a text saying Charlie was dead. He pulled out his phone to try to get a look at what he said but she started smacking him. He swatted her away briefly to take a peak and sure enough...he grimaced. Bloody autocorrect. "That was meant to say she's Death, not she's dead," he corrected, not that it mattered in hindsight. "I wouldn't break that kind of news to you over a text message, Maze," he tried to assure her calmly. "That's Levi levels of avoidance. I'd send a carrier pigeon at least." Perhaps it wasn't the best time for jokes but that was really the only way he knew how to work through the kind of day he had. It wasn't exactly easy having to run a death scythe into an old friend and hope for the best.

MAZIKEEN: "Yes, you did!" she snapped. She'd read over the text several times just to make sure she'd read it right because that news was so serious. It didn't make a difference to her now that it was a typo. If anything, she was more furious that he hadn't noticed the typo before he'd sent it, or even that he didn't see that it had changed once he had sent it. He could've corrected it immediately and saved her the heartbreak of thinking she'd lost her friend. "A carrier pigeon?!" she repeated angrily, not finding his jokes as funny as he did in the moment when she was still reeling from thinking her friend had died. She started hitting him. "You're so stupid! I can't believe I fell in love with you, you asshole! Who jokes about that?!"

LUCIFER: "In my defense a lot was going on," he lamented, still wanting to complain about the situation. "I wasn't exactly sipping Bacardi with Raphael up there." He might've put too much faith in his phone to get the message across. "I knew you were worried about Charlie's condition and I wanted to get the news to her ASAP. I had a million and one things I needed to do to secure the veil after everything happened and I wouldn't have had time to come down to hell until well...now. I didn't think it was fair for you to wait that long." He was trying to ease her nerves but thanks to his phone he'd done the opposite. He grimaced as soon as the pigeon joke left his lips and braced himself for another round of smacking. It didn't hurt and he let her carry on. It was best to just let Maze air out her frustrations rather than let them fester. He expected her to insult him. That was par for the course. But he hadn't expected her to say the other thing. He sat up a little straighter and held her firmly so that she would stop hitting him and look at him instead. "You don't...you can't...you don't mean that, do you?" he asked her in all seriousness.

MAZIKEEN: Realistically, she couldn't blame him too much for what had happened. All in all, it was a simple mistake, and anger was the main way she knew to release her emotions. She knew Lucifer knew that, and there were ways she could make it up to him later when she wasn't emotional. She sighed. "I guess I do appreciate you trying to tell me as soon as possible, even if you did fuck it up." She really did appreciate that, considering how worried she'd been about Charlie. "So I really can't hug her though?" She was one of the people Maze actually liked to hug. Lucifer was also one of them, but him grabbing her took her by surprise. He probably just was getting annoyed with her constantly hitting him, but most of her anger had gotten out now. She sighed. "You are kinda an asshole sometimes, but I like it most of the time."

LUCIFER: "Well, someone will suffer for the ill conceived attempts of autocorrect," he assured her. It wasn't going to be him, but someone would. Surely there was probably a demon to blame for this. "Probably Sam," he offered, hoping that would lift her spirits some with another soul to torture. "Charlie managed to separate him and his evil twin. She dragged the parasitic one here. Not sure which kingdom but when we find him, he's all yours," he replied, still running his hand up and down her arm in a comforting gesture. "No, I'm afraid you can't hug her for now. She's deadly to everything except the Archangels now." Although Charlie was young by comparison, her ranking was up there with Cupid now that she was Death. Love and Death were fundamental forces in the balance of things. "But I'll give her extra hugs on your behalf," he replied. He didn't mind it one bit. Having to stab Charlie wasn't exactly pleasant and he wanted to ensure she was okay every step of the way. His features softened and his grip lightened when she remarked he was an asshole sometimes, but she enjoyed that about him. "That's not what I meant...I meant the other thing you said. The one about falling in love with me..." he clarified so that neither of them could be mistaken this time. "You don't mean that, do you?"

MAZIKEEN: "As they should." She nodded in agreement. She smiled brightly when Lucifer suggested that it would probably be Sam. She'd always wanted to torture him. "Is it my birthday again already?" she asked jokingly. She was a little disappointed that it wasn't both Sams that ended up in Hell, but she guessed that it was good for Charlie's happiness or something. "That's pretty hot," she remarked with a smirk. "It makes me want to try it anyway. I'll tell you what it feels like." She grinned. Lucifer couldn't have all the fun in being the only one of them to be able to hug Charlie. Her smile faltered when he clarified what he'd heard her say. "Ah," so she had actually said that then? She'd thought that part was just in her head, but it was hard to keep a cap on her thoughts when she was that upset. Her chest clenched up. She was trying to gauge his reaction to that before she said anything else, but it was hard to tell how he was feeling about it. The most she could tell was that he was uncertain, but she couldn't decipher if that uncertainty came from disgust at the idea, if he wanted it like she did, if his trauma from the curse just had him scared to trust it, or a combination of a few of those. She sat up straighter, holding herself higher to make sure this confession didn't make her look weaker in any way. If he didn't like it then fuck him anyways. "I do. I've been in love with you for a while now." She let out a breath of air. That was a weird thing she never really thought she'd let out, but it was out there now. She watched Lucifer carefully for his reaction, prepared to backtrack or defend herself if she needed to.

LUCIFER: He was glad to see her smile after the particularly awful news she thought he'd delivered. He knew he'd be paying for that for the next few weeks but for now at least the storm had passed and she knew Charlie was safe. "If your birthday occurred anytime that man nearly dies, you'd be aging at twice the rate," he pointed out. He really did feel for the Winchester's Guardian. That angel had to be doing overtime on most days. "Wear protection," he teased. "Safe hugging to prevent untimely death." Maze wore enough latex that it really shouldn't be a problem. Charlie was careful too. Lucifer had instructed her to go to Val in the meantime for pointers and perhaps a pair of sturdier gloves.

He swallowed back a bit of initial panic when she confirmed that he'd heard her correctly. His automatic thoughts and fears were that his curse was back. Why else would anyone love him? He projected outward confidence because he had to. It was expected of him as King of Hell to know what to do, or at least to look like he knew what he was doing. Maze knew better than most Lucifer had no idea what he was doing. He was a mess just trying his best. Truthfully, the curses had set him back quite a bit. He still struggled, wondering if any of the relationships and connections he'd made in his life were real. Chloe had left him long before the curse was broken and he couldn't blame her. But Maze stuck around. She'd been there before he discovered his curse and she was still there afterward. She'd been there through all of his milestone and all the trials life could've thrown his way. He couldn't have imagined doing any of this without her. In fact, he was certain he couldn't have done it without her. The duties of keeping Hell running and keeping his siblings both happy and alive stretched him thin. He needed a partner and Maze was the best one he could've ever asked for.

If she really did love him, then this was a blessing because as much as the feeling scared him, he loved her too. He hadn't realized how much she did for him until she'd disappeared to the other timeline. He'd been a mess then and so had hell. Since then, he tried to show her that he appreciated her more and more. He tried to do what he could to spend time with her because he didn't know how much time they had left. He realized some time ago if the void was going to take over, she'd be the person he'd want to be with in the end. He thought those feelings were just friendship, but he knew deep down it went deeper than that.

"Okay...." he took a deep breath. "Okay..." he ran his hands up and down her arms as a soothing gesture. "Mazikeen, you are one of the most important people to me. You're the first person I check in with in the mornings and the last one I see before I go to bed. You're..." You're the one person I can see myself spending an eternity with. Just say it Lucifer. Come on. "The last time I felt like this about someone, it turned out to not be real. How do we know any of this is real?" he questioned. It was an unfair question to place on her but he wanted to be upfront with his fears. He'd known Chloe for all of 4 years when she left. And her leaving left a hole in his belief in love. He'd known Maze for much longer. If this turned out to be a curse and if she left too...he wasn't sure where that would leave either of them.

MAZIKEEN: She laughed a little at his comment about Sam's deaths. "Even better. Maybe I can catch up to you, old man." It wasn't like they really aged anyways. Birthdays were an arbitrary thing they made up just for an excuse to celebrate. They were all too old to actually keep up with their ages, and even if they did, it just made them look so much better despite their ages. "Don't worry. My strap-on has a condom and everything." She grinned. She'd be careful enough, but the thought that her best friend could kill her with just a single touch was exciting and she wanted to see what it felt like. Hopefully, she wouldn't kill herself completely in the process. She wasn't actually suicidal like some people.

Her chest ached seeing that look on his face. As a demon, she considered it a skill of hers that she could recognize the fear in her victims, but Lucifer wasn't a victim. He was her closest friend and the person she was in love with. She usually knew him better than she knew herself most of the time, but she couldn't tell where that panic came from in the moment. Was he as scared of rejecting her as she was of being rejected? Or was he just as scared of allowing himself to love as she was. She knew that with his curse, he'd been hesitant of his relationships, romantic or otherwise. It was part of the reason she'd been so hesitant herself recently about talking about it (though it was mainly because of her own fear). The way he held onto her arms, rubbing them to reassure her, convinced her that this was a rejection, so she prepared herself for it.

She had to admit, he was setting up the rejection nicely. She imagined that he was going the route of asking if they could still be friends so they could still do all of those things. The last time I felt like this about someone... So he did feel the same way about her then, and his panic was about the curse. Even so, the doubt of whether this was real or not hurt. She knew his curse was broken. Cupid had confirmed that. Maze wasn't particularly great at dealing with her emotions, so the pain she felt at his doubt turned to anger. It wasn't rational anger, considering how valid his doubts were, but she was angry nevertheless. How dare he doubt her love?!

"I'm not Chloe," she snapped. "What, do you think that just because I was with her when Cupid broke your connection that it somehow transferred from her into me? Well, it didn't because I've been in love with you for a lot longer than that. I didn't fall in love with you because of a curse. I fell in love with you because unlike everyone else you were always there with me and for me from the day I met you. It wasn't some immediate infatuation. I don't do the love at first sight thing." She barely considered the love thing until she realized it was actually a possibility. "I don't just have the feeling that I love you. I know I love you because I consider the day you picked me to be your right hand one of the best moments of my life, and maybe kicking Azazel's ass made that day better too, but that's not the important part. You are. I like working for you. I like your dirty jokes because I have the same sense of humor. And your corny jokes are awful, but occasionally I'll find myself making them too." She sounded annoyed as she said all of this, only angry that he didn't see it. She shouldn't have been surprised though considering that seemed to run in his family. "I know a lot of people think it's a little extra the way you will do whole musical numbers. I agree, but I fucking love it!"

He looked like he was about to say something, but she cut him off. "I'm not done yet! You wanted to know how I know that this is real, so you're going to hear it all! When I was younger, and practically everyone was doubting me for being your right hand, you didn't. You never doubted my capability to kick their asses and make them shut the fuck up. I fucking love the fact that even though you're an archangel, you trust me to handle myself and fight my own battles. I'd be pissed if you tried to, but I never had to worry about that with you. I never have to worry about most things with you because I trust you. Hell, even your problems I don't mind dealing with. You self-sabotage constantly, and so do I. You've got the the world's biggest daddy issues, and I've got the world's worst mommy issues. But we know how to deal with each other's issues. The drama in your family is exponential, but I don't ever want to stop dealing with it. It's honestly really entertaining, and don't you dare fucking tell them this, or anyone for that matter, but I started to care for them too. Some of them anyways. Just a tiny barely noticeable amount." She probably shouldn't have said that, but she kept going.

"When we came up here together at first and Chloe made you vulnerable, you have no idea how terrified I was. I am your right hand and your bodyguard. I don't usually have to protect you from much because you're an archangel, but there you were getting injured constantly just because you kept going near the thing that was making you vulnerable. I was honestly glad that it was a curse just because it meant that you could be safe again." Sure there were other things that could hurt him but not many. "I was just glad that I didn't have to worry about losing you."

She continued to list off more and more reasons to prove how she knew her love was her own and not from some curse. It spanned from centuries in the past all the way to the present, including the smallest details like the way he laughed when he was scared or the way his hair looked after sex to more major details and events like the fact that she saw him when she looked at Asmodeus or how jealous she felt when she saw the other universe's Maze seeming to have everything with her Lucifer and how glad she was to come home to her own. It took her hours to get through everything, and it was well into the morning now. "And if that's not enough to convince you that this is real, I don't know what is," she huffed. "Cupid's been trying to get me to tell you for ages now, and she wouldn't do that if she had any doubts about my feelings for you being a curse. She might be a pain in the ass half the time, but I know you at least can count on her being genuine about love."

LUCIFER: "At the rate he dies, you'll likely catch up to Aamon or Michael at this point," he joked although he really hoped Sam would slow down a little for Charlie's sake. He chuckled when she replied that her strap-on had a condom. "A paragon of safe sex. I expect no less. I'm sure Charlie will appreciate the sentiment." If anything, Charlie would at least appreciate the jokes and the company. It had been a rough few hours for her. Those hours spanned days in hell. Days that Maze must've spent feeling anxious about her friend's wellbeing. No wonder she'd reacted so poorly to his faux pas.

He was hoping to make it up to her, but it was clear his hesitation was contributing to her anxiety. Being a demon from Aamon's kingdom, that anxiety naturally expressed itself with rage. He flinched as she snapped at him. He swallowed hard when she replied that she'd been in love with him for a lot longer than he'd been cursed. Maybe they'd looked at the curse all wrong then. Maybe it was there from the beginning. Maybe Chloe wasn't the original victim, but rather Mazikeen. The thought of that ached and hurt more than anything. She was his best advisor and his closest friend. The thought of their closeness potentially being driven by a curse was a hurt that threatened to tear his chest open, but continued to listen. It was best not to interrupt her when she was in one of these passionate rages.

His features softened and his panic started to drop off slightly as she started listing tangible things she liked about him. Love curses couldn't go that deep, could they? Cupid had told him even the strongest curses can only mimic a base and superficial love. What Maze was describing didn't feel superficial. She'd also said that real love felt different. It made you feel complete even when you felt like you were falling apart. Maze made him feel that way. She understood him in ways even those around him didn't seem to get.

She didn't try to change him or insist that he be someone else, someone more mature or someone she felt he needed to be in certain situations. She trusted his judgement even when he didn't trust himself necessarily. Apparently not everyone was the same way though. There were people out there that didn't like his musical numbers? He was about to open his mouth to retort, but she cut him off. He closed his mouth and patiently waited as she continued, a smile growing on his face.

Just as he'd been reminiscing about how she never doubted his abilities, it was clear she felt the same way about him never doubting her. He always knew that she was capable. His siblings might have been more powerful than her, but they always knew that Maze was an extension of Lucifer. She wasn't a subordinate, she was family to them. And it was clear Maze felt that they were her family too. That made Lucifer brighten considerably. He knew Maze didn't have a good relationship with her family and sometimes his own relationship with his family was rocky too. But she found her place among them and that was important to him.

She was as afraid of losing him as he was of losing her which was both terrifying and a relief. When she was off in the other timeline, he'd been a mess just thinking about it. It wasn't just the daunting task of finding another right hand if she never came back. It was the inexplicable pain of losing someone whom you couldn't imagine your life without. There was no one in this world or the next that could replace Maze.

"Mazikeen," he cupped her face as she finished, letting her take a few deep breaths to calm down. She looked like she needed a drink too. "I believe you," his voice was soft and gentle as he spoke. The previous panic that it carried was now gone. He really did believe her. He knew Maze well enough to know cursed or not, love was the last thing she wanted to admit to. It took guts to get this far and now it was time for him to show the same kind of bravery. "And I love you too," he smiled. "You make me a better person without trying to change a single thing about me. You listen to my fears and insecurities and you don't let them be the only voice inside my head. When shit hits the fan you are the only person I know I can count on. It's always been you," he replied as he leaned in and kissed her gently. "It's always going to be you."

MAZIKEEN: "He's really got issues if he's going that far." Maze could see the appeal of getting close to death. She liked pushing things that far all the time. Having sex with archangels who could easily end your existence provided a similar thrill, but Maze didn't actually want to die. "Yeah," Maze agreed. "Hopefully becoming death doesn't autocorrect her sense of humor." She was joking just to pick on Lucifer's mistake, but she was a little worried about how this change would affect Charlie. She didn't know everything about what becoming death entailed. She had always been closer to Charlie than Azrael, and Azrael wasn't very social. She hadn't talked much about what being Death was like either. Maze didn't know how much she could help Charlie, or how much any of them could.

She looked at Lucifer angrily as he cupped her face, waiting for him to make fun of her or say that her explanations weren't enough to prove that this was real even though she knew it was. Her expression softened when he said he believed her. "You do?" She asked, relaxing into him now. He'd gone through so much lately that she really didn't expect him to take her at her word. "You do?" She asked again as he told her he loved her too. She felt warmer, and she was smiling brightly. She didn't think she'd been in love before him, and just getting that confirmation was such a relief. She felt lighter and happier. She looked at him in awe as he explained just what made him love her too. "I don't need to change anything about you," she said in defense of him, but she couldn't counter the rest of it. She deepened the kiss. Her hands moved into his hair, pulling on some of the strands, but this kiss was different than their usual make-out sessions. It wasn't just from lust, though she was feeling hornier now. Adding an emotional extension to kissing someone was . . . Interesting to say the least. She might've loved him before, but loving him and knowing he loved her had the most thrill she'd ever known. Cupid could never be told that. She'd never hear the end of how right Cupid was, but this was something Mazikeen had needed to do on her own anyways. Maze smirked as they pulled out of the kiss. "If it's always going to be me, do we need to discuss anything else, or are you going to get me out of these clothes?"

LUCIFER: "There's minor death kinks and then there's whatever Sam's got," he chuckled. He would pass off Linda's number to Sam and maybe even introduce them. She'd get a kick out of an interdimensional client and Sam could really use the help after all of this. He groaned at the joke Maze made about Charlie's humor getting autocorrected. If course she wasn't going to let him live it down. Despite her ribbing at him, he knew there was some truth hidden in her jokes. She was afraid that this whole transition to becoming Death would change Charlie. "She's a little overwhelmed right now, but still Charlie. It's like the second Frozen movie where Elsa transitions into the fifth natural force," he giggled to himself. "You know, that sort of makes you Anna. I've seen dark before..." he sang through his giggles, ducking away before she could smack him.

"I do," he nodded. "It doesn't mean I'm any less scared about it or that I even know what I'm doing, but I believe you and I love you," he assured her. Admitting it out loud again felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulder. The more times he said it out loud, the more sure of himself he felt. He did love her. This wasn't the curse talking, this was him. He smiled when she replied that she didn't need to change him. He'd gone a good portion of his life thinking there was something wrong with him. He didn't fit the mold his Father intended for him. He never accepted him for who he was and simply wanted to beat him down until he was a perfect soldier like Michael. But Maze never tried to change him. She never made him feel like he was built wrong or that he was too soft, too hard, or too much for the role placed on his shoulders.

As she deepened the kiss, he pressed her against the wall, wanting to feel every inch of her. Having aired out how he felt, and having her accept it and feel the same was exhilarating and quite frankly more of a turn on than anything else he'd ever experienced before. He could hardly focus as she pulled away. "Well," he smirked, trailing kisses down her neck as his hands explored her body. "I do have some making up to do for my previous faux pas." He gripped her tightly and picked her up before plopping her down onto the bed. "You know what they say, no time line the present," he smirked, dipping down to kiss her again.

#╰☆☆ now tell me what is it you truly desire? | replies ☆☆╮#╰☆☆ it's you. it's always been you | mazikeen ☆☆╮#maze: discords #discord chat

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medea10 · 4 years

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Medea’s Top 20 Animes of the Decade

Hey all! Disappointed in some “best of” lists of this past decade? Well…prepared to be possibly disappointed some more because I’m doing one now! Here’s a top 20 list of my favorite animes that came out in the 2010’s. I seriously couldn’t do 10 this time due to how many awesome animes came out this decade. Unlike my anime superlative list, I’m going to be stricter here. Anything that aired in Japan before January 2010 is stricken from the list (which sucks because that means Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood & InuYasha: The Final Act are disqualified). And these are going to be MY favorites from this decade. Be aware that there will be popular animes I leave off the list due to my own personal opinions and the fact that some of them I have not watched yet. So I’m just going to tell you right now, don’t expect My Hero Academia, Hunter x Hunter, or Demon Slayer on this list because I have not watched any of that shit! Let’s get cracking!

20. Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card (2018)

After nearly 20 years since the end of the first series, Cardcaptor Sakura returns with a sequel no one asked for and no one expected to come back. But it definitely brought back the nostalgia for those who grew up watching CCS. This story gives a continuation where Sakura is in middle school and ends up collecting a whole new set of mysterious cards. And the series is what you would expect with the cutesy feel whenever Sakura is with Li or it gets really intense when Sakura’s up against a really powerful card. While the ending leaves us on a bit of a cliffhanger with no continuation in sight, this series was one of the best reboots I’ve watched in recent years.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu Coming soon to home video

19. The Rising of the Shield Hero (2019)

This is my first (modern) Isekai and I gotta say I really enjoyed the story. Unlike other anime characters that travel to another world, the main character Naofumi is not praised as a savior nor put on a golden pedestal. Quite the opposite, this guy has to fight for even a shred of respect from anybody. Because after watching past protagonists like Miaka Yuuki, Kagome, and Kirito, that trope gets boring. Despite many of these episodes making me physically ill as I watched Naofumi being shit on by the other heroes and everybody else, it was great to watch this struggle with Naofumi to become a great shield hero.

P.S. Myne is still a raging cunt!

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll & FUNimation

18. My Love Story!! (2015)

One of the BEST rom-com animes out there! The story of a gentle giant boy named Takeo falling in love with a sweet, petite girl named Yamato and their story as a couple. Yeah, the big difference between this anime and a bunch of other anime rom-coms is that Takeo and Yamato reveal their love for each other in episode 4 in a 24 episode series! By anime standards, that’s unheard of because most love stories want to wait until the finale for something like that. This anime is just a cute story of watching Takeo and Yamato bloom with their budding relationship. Yeah, I admit some of the stories can be a little boring. Sometimes the beginnings of romances have a slow-start before we get to the good stuff. But even when they’re doing little things, they’re just so cute to watch.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, HI-DIVE & Hulu Available for home video

17. Durarara!! (2010, 2015-2016)

This story is a complete cluster-fuck, but I don’t care. The stories that come from this anime and the characters make this one of my favorites. Durarara follows the strange stories that happen around the town of Ikebukuro with a headless motorcycle rider, super-human strengthed men, an internet troll who loves to mess with humans, otakus, a mad scientist, a parasitic carrier, and gangs of different sorts. But if you would ask me what’s my favorite thing about Durarara (because there’s a lot of random things for anyone to choose), it would of course be any time Shizuo Heiwajima is on the screen. This guy is just pure rage in a bartender’s outfit. He’s able to casually pick up and throw a vending machine at a person, he can punch the clothes off a guy’s body, and even kick a mid-sized car down the street.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, Hulu & Netflix Available for home video

16. Daily Lives of High School Boys (2012)

If you’re looking for something random and hilarious to watch, look no further with this one. Each episode has random segments, mostly featuring three boys, Tadakuni, Hidenori, and Yoshitake in some of the most absurd moments ever showcased in an anime. Just to name a few fun moments; being caught experimenting with women’s underwear, finding a clever way to kill a hornet (indirect kiss), intellectual talk with a cute girl, using your jacket as a soccer ball replacement, and how to unzip your fly without using your hands! That last one still confounds me. But the show also expands to other characters around school and town. I know this series is severely random to have a coherent plot, but sometimes I prefer randomness. And that’ll continue with the next entry!

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll Available for home video

15. Nichijou (2011)

Yet another random segment anime (only this time with girls)! I know the official title is “My Ordinary Life”, but there is nothing ordinary about an anime where you have a six year old professor, a talking robot girl that was created by the six-year old professor, a talking black cat, high school girls capable of body-flipping police officers, a young boy who rides a goat to school, a high school girl capable of firing a bazooka, and a principal who fights a deer. That last one is just epic! If for no other reason to watch Nichijou, just watch the scene where the principal fights a deer! Much like Daily Lives of High School Boys, this series relies more on the random shenanigans of many of these characters (but mostly the main three girls, Mio, Yuuko, and Mai). It’s silly and fun! Check it out and give this anime a little love. Because there’s no way it’s getting a second season (Japan showed no love for this one)!

Available to watch on: FUNimation Available for home video

14. ERASED (2016)

I don’t care what manga readers say, this was a fine anime, you anal-rententive fuck-wipes (soooo not sorry for that statement)! This murder-mystery captured my attention when it first aired. The story is about a man named Satoru who has this ability to go backwards in time (usually a few seconds or minutes) to prevent a tragedy from occurring. But after an incident involving his mother, he ends up going all the way back to his ten-year old body in 1988 in order to prevent a tragedy from his childhood. This included saving his classmate, Kayo from her premature demise. It was a catchy time-leaping mystery that would enthrall me week after week…up to a certain point. Yeah, you can already guess who the culprit was early on. But all the suspense leading up to this was still a great tale.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll & Hulu Available for home video

13. Panty & Stocking w/ Garterbelt (2010)

GAINAX, you wishy-washy, crazy-ass, can’t give a full conclusion to a story to save your life, leaving us on a decade-long cliffhanger bastards, YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN!

So this bizarre-ass anime is about two bitch-angels kicked out of Heaven, named Panty and Stocking. One likes to fuck men and the other gorges herself on sweets! In order to get back into Heaven, they must exterminate ghosts with the help of a black priest named Garterbelt, a fanboy named Briefs, and an Invader Zim knock-off named Chuck. And did I mention Panty and Stocking use their own lingere as weapons to take down ghosts? This story is balls-to-the-wall insane! And it gets crazier when you pop in the English dub! Dick jokes, fart jokes, and a whole lot of fucks! As any superhero show will do, this anime does stay to the villain of the episode trope with a few leeways here and there. This included a segment dedicated to the late Satoshi Kon and a music video. All of this leading to an ending NO ONE expected to happen leaving us on a cliffhanger that is now going on 10 years. Regardless, this absurdity in a thong is a treasure to behold. I would also advise not doing a drinking game whenever one of them says “Fuck”. You’d be dead by the end of the first episode!

Available to watch on: FUNimation Available for home video

12. Attack on Titan (2013, 2017-2019)

*singing incoherent Japanese*

YEAGER!!!

Get ready to get hooked on two of the catchiest opening themes of all time! I thought it was just about a young boy taking revenge on a race of titans for the death of his mother. No one expected there to be a twisted, messed-up origin to the titan race where the main character is connected to everything! That’s all my messy thoughts coming out after witnessing the climax portion. As for the rest of you, Eren Yeager’s world is turned upside-down when the town he lived in is demolished by titans. As a result, the entire town is demolished and left for dead and Eren watched as his mother is eaten by a titan. Eren ends up joining the Survey Corps along with his friends Armin and Mikasa to take down titans and prevent another town to suffer the same fate as Eren’s home.

Going into this anime, I SERIOUSLY thought this was going to be a comedy. You would too if you were going off of all the memes that emerged in 2013. But this anime takes a sharp left turn when Eren discovers a horrifying secret involving his own body. After that, this lead to more unbelievable discoveries involving people we all initially thought was the supporting cast. And this is as cryptic as I can be without delving into severe spoilers. The only way to get my meaning is if you watch this series. It’s just…WOW!

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, FUNimation, Hulu, & Toonami Some seasons are available for home video

11. Kill la Kill (2013-2014)

A girl with a giant pair of scissors picking a fight with the main bitch at school, all the while wearing a sailor suit that talks to you! That is the balls-to-the-wall insanity Studio Trigger gives you in a show like this. Ryuko Matoi enrolls in Honnouji Academy in search of the person who murdered her father. There, she comes face-to-face with the potential murderer, Satsuki Kiryuin. Satsuki rules over Honnouji as she has a special uniform capable of giving her super-human strength. But what Satsuki doesn’t know is that Ryuko is about to get a special uniform to give her that as well. A talking sailor uniform named Senketsu helps Ryuko in her journey of finding her father’s murderer. Yeah, this series goes all-out with the special powers brought on by certain clothing. Then again, it’s Japan and fanservice is a must in at least 75% of animes! I mean, there are moments where Senketsu gets skimpier on Ryuko, not leaving much to the imagination. As absurdly off the wall this anime was, I enjoyed every frame of it and it’s easily one of Studio Trigger’s best works.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll & Netflix

10. Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma (2015-2019)

You’d think with my picky-ass, I would have never watched an anime about cooking (and if my family is reading this, close this page now and play a wholesome game of shutting your gobs). But Food Wars never fails to increase my appetite. Yukihira Soma ends up in Japan’s most elite cooking school (with a 10% graduation rate) where he finds himself up against Japan’s and even the world’s greatest up and coming chefs. And every now and then, he ends up having to go up against one of these chefs in a cook-off known as a Shokugeki. If it wasn’t for the food orgasms, I would easily tell my cooking-show obsessed family members to watch this. I know no normal person would ever strip off all their clothes and have a raging orgasm when eating delicious food. But hey, it’s Japan! Gotta stick in fanservice somewhere! With inventive ways to spice up a regular dish, I may one day broaden my taste-buds into more exotic food-stuffs. Just, keep the peanut-butter squid away from me.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, HI-DIVE, Hulu, & Toonami Some seasons are available for home video

09. Your Lie in April (2014-2015)

Grab your tissues, children. We follow Kousei Arima as he regains his ability and passion for playing the piano with the thanks of new-found friend Kaori. What can I say about an anime that’s so beautifully animated with likeable characters and music to die for? OHHH…I shouldn’t have said that last thing! Yeah, the main character Kousei goes through quite a bit in his life dealing with the aftermath of his mother’s death and having to relive seeing someone he cares about die the same way. There’s just so much you wish would happen with these characters and watch as it’s dashed away during a Chopin piece. OHHH…I did it again! Well folks, if you’re into tear-bait and classical music, definitely watch Your Lie in April!

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, Hulu, & Netflix

08. The Promised Neverland (2019)

One of the newest entries with one of the most shocking first episodes in recent history! I know in the past decade we got a lot of first episode hookers like Attack on Titan, but if you came in this blind-folded, get ready for a trip. We follow orphan children Emma, Ray, and Norman as they plan to escape their home before they become food for hungry demons. In a weird way, this anime is almost like the 2000 film Chicken Run. I know I’m not the first person to think that up, but yeah, gotta say it here. This was one of my favorite animes of this year and I was hooked week by week with what was going to happen next. It got so intense that immediately after the series ended, I picked up the manga to find out what happens next. And let me tell you, it gets more insane after the events of episode 12. But one thing that always astounded me was watching all of these kids plot an escape so elaborate when all of them range from ages 6-12.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu

07. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (2017)

What would you do if you opened the door one morning and found a dragon standing outside? Not just that but what would you do if you were living with more than one dragon and you now find yourself hanging around other dragons?! Kobayashi’s world changes for the better as she meets a dragon (named Tohru) that loves her so much that she would happily become her maid. And given the stigma for eons between humans and dragons, this series we see cute interactions with humans and dragons. Up to a point that it feels like all these characters are becoming family! There’s a dragon named Fafnir who finds humans horrible people, but ends up changing for the better when he finds himself hanging with a human that plays video games and creates manga. But I’m always so drawn to the relationship of Tohru and Kobayashi. Kobayashi was never really close to her family and when she moved away she mostly spends her nights drinking alone. But once Tohru and Kanna move in, it’s always a fun day with their cute shenanigans. It’s definitely brought Kobayashi out of her shell and gave her a family of dragons to live with.

And there’s this cute little dragon named Kanna! She’s so cute and adorable! Look at her nom at just everything she eats. She’s so adorable! Who’s a cute wittle dragon? Yes you are! Yes you are!

As a final note in this particular entry, I want to mention one particular member of the staff. Yasuhiro Takemoto! This man was the director for Miss Kobayashi, as well as many other animes from Kyoto Animation and I feel the need to thank this man for all the hard work he had done. I’m thankful for all of your work in the anime community and we miss you.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll & Funimation Available for home video

06. Pokemon XY (2013-2016)

It might be cheating a bit to put a Pokemon series on this list since they’ve been around since 1997. But it’s not a continuous shot like Detective Conan and One Piece, so I’m counting the XY arc for this list. Even though this series didn’t show me my favorite character and it gave me a shipping that’s worse than Herpes (with a cult for that ship that’s on par with MAGA), this was one of the best arcs to the Pokemon series. And I was excited for this series when it first came out because with the introduction of Mega Evolution, I was hoping for Ash to delve into that. While Ash wasn’t the one using Mega Evolutions, we did see him grow more through a synchronization method with Greninja that brought about so much in terms of battling. Just to name a few awesome moments with these two, he took down an iceburg pokemon, went toe-to-toe with a champion, and even made it all the way to the finals of the Pokemon League. Now did he win that league? That’s not important! What is important is that these were some of the best moments this series had to offer.

But it wasn’t just Ash we followed, but an anime-only character introduced named Alain as we followed his journey to becoming stronger through Mega Evolution. It felt risky following a different person for 5 or more episodes (without mentioning Ash), but it was all worth it when we came to the climax of the series when Team Flare came from the shadows. Listen guys, I know Pokemon has given some disappointing seasons before (especially the arc prior to XY), but if there’s any season you should watch, it’s definitely this one.

Also, Rica Matsumoto sings this one song called XYZ. I don’t know if you all have heard this song, but I think you should. It’s so bad ass and always pops up in some of Ash’s best battles in this series…in the Japanese version! I love it so much that I always feel the need to bring up XYZ whenever I talk about this arc.

Available to watch on: Disney XD, Hulu, & Pokemon TV Available for home video

05. Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)

I will always be a sucker for magical girl animes. Especially since Sailor Moon was the very first anime I watched fully! But Madoka Magica was…different and edgier. The premise is that a cute, white animal asks you to form a contract with it so you can become a magical girl. Magical girls defeat witches that cause havoc! Better read the fine-print on the contract ladies, because what the little rat doesn’t tell you is that you eventually become a witch yourself and will end up dying a horrible death, thus repeating the cycle. This anime would always leave me in a state of awe when watching it, whether it was the shocking deaths or the clever animation used when a witch emerges. But when you’ve got Shaft Studios animating this, expect some trippy moments. I think it’s because episode 3 was a big turning point that many of us were caught off guard by what happened and were scared of what happens next. Although thanks to Madoka, many other magical girl animes are following down the same path and trying to make it edgier. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I gotta say Madoka has definitely set the bar on edgy magical girl shows.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu Available for home video

04. Violet Evergarden (2018)

Prior to this anime’s release, Kyoto Animation had a reputation for putting out anime that was geared to the “moe” genre. But with recent releases of A Silent Voice, Miss Kobayashi, and Violet Evergarden, their style has evolved into something I can’t describe in just one sentence. This anime is just beautiful to look at. The animation is just stunning, look at it. Now, I was a bit turned-off by the main character of this series, Violet. First of all, she literally looks like Saber from the Fate series and has arms that rival Ed Elric of FMA. Secondly, her almost robotic personality really turned me off. But it wasn’t until later in the series where we watch her interact with the people she was helping in each episode that made me truly appreciate what she’s doing.

Violet was once used as a tool for war and would always obey her commanding officer. But once the war was over, she found herself as an “Auto Memories Doll” where she’s writing letters people want to send to someone. Many of these episodes, we watch her see the world outside of the war and hell she was put through in her past. Her words were able to bring people together, heal two fighting nations, bring a family closer together, give closure to a grieving family member, and so much more. Add to that, this series gave out one of the most heart-breaking episodes I’ve ever watched in anime. It made me ugly-cry and that rarely happens! Not just me, but litereally everyone who ever watched this episode, but also Violet herself. This episode (that’s episode 10) was like the first time where she felt actual human emotions for anyone other than the person she once loved. This episode felt like a turning point in how I felt about Violet as well as the show in general.

I feel I have to say a little more on this entry. This anime is without a doubt, the most beautifully animated anime of this entire decade (despite what OTHERS have to say). And it couldn’t have gotten that way without the talented folks at Kyoto Animation. I can’t express enough how much I’m blown away by this series. Only now when I think about it, I get horribly depresssed due to the recent tragedy that struck KyoAni. Only now, do I appreciate all the hard work to put this masterpiece into action. And I wish it didn’t take me until a tragedy to watch this anime. But I’m glad I was able to watch Violet Evergarden. And I wish for you all to take the time to do the same!

Available to watch on: Netflix

03. Assassination Classroom (2015-2016)

Stand. Bow. Kill your sensei! Middle school students being trained by professional assassins to take down a yellow-tentacled monster (who is also their teacher)! These students must assassinate their teacher within one year, otherwise the world will blow up. Now I had my reservations watching a cast this big! I mean, we’re watching an entire 28-person class try to shoot their teacher. Thankfully, I didn’t grow to be annoyed by the concept like with Negima. I loved nearly all of the students and remembered many of them. One of the biggest drawing points with me is that, all of these students were seen as the ones to give up on. They were in the lowest-level class where school, family, and society have just given up on these children. Being in a much similar situation in middle school, I can relate. That’s why when I saw someone like Koro-sensei teach these kids so much more in the world of academics, it made me happy to see these kids have someone to look up to. Many of these episodes were fun to watch. Koro-sensei is a laugh-riot sometimes when the class has to do an activity together. Add to that, one of the hardest to watch goodbyes in recent history. For a good laugh and a good cry, Assassination Classroom is the way to go.

Available to watch on: FUNimation & Hulu Available for home video

02. Yuri on Ice!!! (2016)

AAAAAAHHHHHHH! *random screeching noises*

Why yes I love this series! It is so beautiful. I wish to see more of this in the future. I would like for Viktor to have Yuri’s babies. Don’t at me! I didn’t expect this series to give the female viewers an actual loving relationship between two of the main male characters. But halfway into the series, we get the kiss that cemented the deal. So besides the gay relationship, we’ve also got a beautiful soundtrack, animation that’s stunningly gorgeous, a story about an underdog working his way to receive a gold medal with the help of his hot, Russian coach…God, I just love this anime!

I’m a sucker for a root for the underdog story. And Yuri Katsuki definitely fits that description! Before Viktor came along, he was coming off of a humiliating defeat at a previous competition where he came in dead-last. But throughout the series, we watch Viktor mold Yuri into something audience members have overlooked in this boy. Viktor taught Yuri what love really is in more ways than one. But Yuri isn’t a total zero-to-hero in a span of 12 episodes, but at times he does come damn-near close. Every week, I’m amazed at how much Studio MAPPA put so much effort into this. While the quality did take a slight dip in some of the final episodes, so much has happened before that I’m willing to let that go. Watch Yuri attempt at making history with Yuri on Ice.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll & FUNimation Available for home video

Before I get to my anime of the decade, how about I quickly do my TOP 10 ANIME MOVIES OF THE DECADE? No commentary, just announcing them quickly.

10. The Last: Naruto the Movie (2014)

09. When Marnie Was There (2014)

08. Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018)

07. Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods (2013)

06. Kizumonogatari (2016-2017)

05. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (2010)

04. Pokemon: I Choose You (2017)

03. Your Name (2016)

02. A Silent Voice (2016)

01. Wolf Children (2012)

CLOSE CALLS FOR THE LISTS: Black Lagoon – Roberta’s Blood Trail, Sailor Moon Crystal, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Fate/Zero & Fate/stay night: UBW, Angel Beats, The Wind Rises, Parasyte, One Punch Man, Aggretsuko, Steins;Gate, Inu x Boku SS, and Dragon Ball Super.

And now, #1…oh, you should already know what it is by now. One of my favorite animes came back with the vengeance in 2019 that no other anime can touch it. Rightfully so! You know it, I know it, let’s get it over with! So say it with me now, three, two, one…

01. Fruits Basket: 1st Season (2019)

Thank you! Just…thank you! In a time where I hate reboots, this one was handled with the utmost care. What can I say about this anime that everyone else hasn’t said already? This anime is like warm soup on a cold day. The nice pick-me-up when you had a shitty day on the job! That beautiful rainbow you see after a rain shower!

Coming upon a family with a terrible secret, there’s much hesitation on who (if any) can be let in without being hurt. Tohru Honda accidentally learned of the Sohma family secret, where if one of them is hugged by someone of the opposite sex, they’re turned into an animal from the Chimese Zodiac. These people have had to live with this stigma their entire lives. Because of this, relationships are put in turmoil, obtaining friends was damn-near impossible, and everyone has to be on a constant state of worry in case their secret comes out. But Tohru loves and accepts everyone, no matter what. In many of these episodes, we see Tohru reach out to the members of the Sohma family to tell them that she sees the good in them and that they are loved. To reach out to the hurt, silent tiger, Kisa! To reach out to the mentally-scarred rat, Yuki! To reach out to the heart-broken dragon, Hatori! And to give a hug to Momiji…when his momma won’t!

All of these individual stories always gets to me! Even re-told, these stories have improved 100%! And in some cases like Ritsu’s story, done better than the original! I watched the original story God-knows how many times! But with the remake, I found myself re-watching random episodes in my off-time when I should be watching something else. I always have to go back to watching everything from this series. From the good and the sad! From the ultra-laughable moments, to the jaw-dropping moments! In a time where many of us yearn to be accepted for who we are, an anime like this feels absolutely necessary. I know it might be biased of me to pick something from this year and cheating a bit considering at the beginning of the decade I was heavily into the original series. Regardless, this is still my pick for Best Anime of the 2010’s.

Available to watch on: Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu

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theritualofourexistence · 3 years

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Odes to Old Gods

I started this year intending to journal about things I survive. Then at the end of the year, I could look back on my challenges and think about them in a more positive way--wow, look at what I overcame! The plan was to document everything, both good and bad, so that I could think about them more as experiences and lessons learned than as... good and bad.

Needless to say, I stopped keeping track of those things in April.

Earlier this month, I pulled out the journal again to update the list. I ended up quitting on that too.

I do think, though, that in a less chaotic year, thinking about my life this way would be good practice. So, here I am, sharing my list with you in the form of an end-of-year, wrap-up blog post.

A few quick caveats:

This year was hard for literally everyone except maybe Jeff Bezos.

It is not healthy to compare challenges or struggles or suffering.

I am not sharing this because I am looking for sympathy... I believe that being vulnerable is a very important part of the human experience but we can all also use a reminder that we never really know all of what anyone is experiencing. We shouldn’t need that reminder to treat others with love... but the older I get, the more I think those reminders might be necessary.

Things I have survived in 2020:

- A bit of a stalking experience in January which has since been resolved.

- Losing my job, hunting for a new job, securing a new job, training for the new job.

- My first Harry Potter tattoo for my ten-year tattooiversary.

- The fires in Australia.

- An absolutely wonderful trip to NYC with my dad when I got to see both Beetlejuice and Hadestown and have an enormous strawberry cheesecake milkshake from Junior’s.

- Losing Kobe Bryant.

- Parasite absolutely CRUSHING the Oscars.

- Having a really, really good visit with my grandparents in March before all hell broke loose.

- Weinstein being convicted and sentenced.

[Everything after this point happened during a global pandemic.]

- Losing Grandmom. I was unable to attend her funeral and still have not had the chance to grieve this loss with my extended family.

- Losing my health insurance.

- A Zoom party for my Grammy’s 80th birthday.

- Losing Breonna Taylor. And George Floyd. And so, so many others. This is the first year I have really committed to understanding the current race-related issues this country faces and BOY, do we have work to do.

- The stress but success of orchestrating a safe family trip so that I didn’t have to go an entire year without seeing my brother.

- Losing my shifts at my primary job due to virus-related concerns.

- Countless other family happy birthdays over Zoom.

- My 60-year-old mother returning to work face-to-face with a student population that largely ignores all virus-related guidelines despite her working tirelessly for months this spring to offer UHS providers an adequate work-from-home option.

- Being diagnosed with hypertension.

- A nightmarish friend trip. Despite our best laid plans for a safe and healthy visit, Mother Earth decided to trap me 90 miles north of my best friends for 4 days. I eventually got to see them for about 12 hours and honestly, it was worth it. That is the only time I’ve gotten with them all year.

- Losing Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

- The selection of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

- Our sweet girl Clio being diagnosed with a seizure disorder and then coming down with a life-threatening upper respiratory infection.

- Learning that my grandmother would be voting for Trump in the 2020 election.

- The actual election.

- Losing Rooster, my sweet, sweet boy.

- Learning that my uncle has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

- Missing Thanksgiving with my extended family.

- Getting really excellent holiday gifts for my favorite people.

- Missing Christmas with my extended family.

- Safely spending some holiday time with my immediate family.

That is FAR from everything. But I don’t have the energy? Capacity? Time? to sort through everything.

Here are the things from this year that I am still currently surviving:

- A global pandemic! And all the associated chaos. With my asthma and high blood pressure and obesity, I am considered high risk and am still not able to safely return to my primary job.

- Hypertension! More on this later.

- Grieving Rooster. In the days after we said goodbye, I wrote a memorial that I will eventually share here. Psychology has recently analyzed data suggesting that losing a pet can be equivalent to losing a relative... I have never felt grief like this. It’s been over a month. I cry every night.

- Managing Clio’s health. She is still adjusting to her seizure medication, which she gets twice a day, and is still on medication to help with lasting symptoms of the respiratory infection. She is fussy about food and her weight fluctuates a lot week to week. She is also a feral rescue who has only ever been handled by me, my mom, and our vet. If mom and I are ever going to vacation together again, we will need to find someone who can manage catching and pilling her twice a day... no easy feat. Fortunately, at the moment, vacations aren’t really a thing for either my mom or I and I am working hard to approach these concerns in a cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it way.

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This year has been overwhelming. The last two months alone have been overwhelming. And they would’ve been overwhelming without the added spice of a global pandemic. The number of Americans we have lost to this virus has doubled since I last posted here in mid-August. Some time this week we are likely to reach a point where we’re losing 4,000 Americans per day. PER. DAY. This year has been overwhelming.

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There were some good things this year, of course. I am so, so thankful for all the time I got with my immediate family and the very brief but vital time I got with my friends. Fortunately I am only ever a text away from my closest friends and we are able to message pretty much every day. I am also extremely glad to have found a place in the fantasy enamel pin community. The family I’ve found in pin-land has carried me through some of my lowest points this year. I spent more time in view of the ocean than I typically do in a given year... even though much of that time was still riddled with anxiety. I did art this year. I read books this year. Some really important ones, in fact. If you read nothing else in 2021, read The New Jim Crow. I also got tattooed! I’m going to include those here because I think the significance of each reflects something interesting and important about all I have survived and am surviving this year.

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In January, I got my first Harry Potter tattoo! My favorite quote from the entire series is delivered by Hagrid during the Triwizard tournament:

”What’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does.”

I got that incorporated into a tattoo. In January.

Also in January I got a “Prisoner of Donuts” tattoo... because life just wouldn’t be manageable at all without donuts.

In March, I got a bird of prey carrying a book to represent one of my all time favorite poems, “On Thought in Harness” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The final lines of that poem:

“Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen. Depart, be lost, but climb.”

In July, I was able to safely navigate getting a tattoo that symbolizes the saga told in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. LOTR is my first and oldest fandom and the story is still so, so important to me today. The lessons I learned from Tolkien when I was a kid also carried me through some of my hardest moments this year.

Also in July I got a Plumpy tattoo. That’s right. Plumpy. From Candyland. If you haven’t played the game in a while, you may not remember Plumpy. He’s one of the first characters you meet on the game board... and one of the worst cards to see when you’re close to winning the game. You could be three damn squares from the finish line and pull the Plumpy card and back to the beginning of the board you go. Plumpy is a really great reminder that even when we have no choice but to lose ground, we can gain that ground back again. And hey, once you pull the Plumpy card from the deck, you likely won’t see him again for a good long while.

In October, I was able to safely navigate getting my second Harry Potter tattoo. Neville has always been one of my favorite fantasy characters and I chose to carry him with me permanently. His courage, despite so, so much bullshit, inspires me every day. I also got a nautical tattoo for my mom’s ancestors who came to this country and fought in the Revolutionary War. Just as my family has a long and proud history of fighting for what matters, I too will carry that banner, even if it looks very, very different in the modern age. My third tattoo of the appointment is a cuckoo holding playing cards, a nod to one of most important stories I’ve read: Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” This book has informed not just my personal journey with mental illness but my passion to work in the field as well. My final tattoo of my October appointment, less than a week before the 2020 election, is a weeping Lady Justice.

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This year has made me look critically at things I very comfortably ignored for a long time. I would hope that it has done the same for most of you. Very little if any of this year was easy for me... but the most important lessons are never easy to learn. I’ve spent this year more worried and more angry than I’ve ever been before... and all I hope to do moving forward is use that fear and that anger to make this country, this world, a better place. Miss me with your resolutions this year. Every single day we should prioritize surviving and treating others with understanding and active love. I worked hard to do that this year and I will continue to work hard to do that every day. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. And in case it wasn’t clear, I’ll be dragging as many of you as I can on this journey with me. If you really feel the need to make a resolution this year, resolve to learn. Resolve to understand. Resolve to read The New Jim Crow and then TAKE ACTION. Take action with your votes and your voices and your money. Resolve to act.

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This year wouldn’t let me escape it without being put on blood pressure medication, despite my best efforts to lower my blood pressure without it. Although I had gotten back down into a healthy range for a few weeks, RBG’s death and the landslide of utter shit that followed that completely wrecked all the progress I had made. I’m not happy about adding a new medicine to my regimen. I’m not happy about adding a new chronic diagnosis to my already lengthy laundry list. I did not expect 30 to look like allergy pills and three daily moisturizers and foot stretches and Metamucil and acid reducers and migraine medication and iron supplements and six prunes a day and chronic pain and blood pressure medication... but here we are. I’m exhausted from working so hard to be healthy just to have all that work not be enough. I feel very much like my body is giving up on me... and that is a feeling I am struggling with a lot right now. My soul is a vibrant but powerless passenger in a car speeding towards the edge of a cliff.

I’ll keep trying though. I start my new medication tonight. Hopefully it helps. Hopefully the side effects are manageable. I don’t really feel like I can handle much more... but I guess we keep going until we can’t.

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I have no expectations for 2021 to be better. I don’t have much hope for it to be better either. This vaccine will saves lives and that’s really good news. But a lot of other things will be difficult, will stay difficult, will become difficult. I’m going to try to keep fighting, and I hope you do too.

“What’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does.”

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Punk’d History, Vol. VII: Sick Tunes*

In 1977, when punk rock was coming to the attention of institutional politics and mass media, the music and its culture were frequently compared to illness. In an infamously priggish rant about the Sex Pistols, English MP Bernard Brook Partridge used the word “nauseating” three times in forty seconds. Even the tentatively friendly coverage the Pistols were getting in some venues in the American musical press was informed by the comparison. In October of 1977, a Rolling Stone cover story declaimed, “Rock Is Sick and Living in London.” Charles M. Young, the cover story’s author, insistently characterizes the Pistols and their punky kin as suffering the effects of some sort of physical malady. When he meets Paul Cook, he notes that Cook’s “skin [is] pallid” and “his hand is limp.” Malcolm McLaren has “a pale face”; his assistants at the Sex Pistols’ Piccadilly Circus office space “are also dingy and gray.” Young’s description of Johnny Rotten is spectacularly rife with the imagery of disease: “All misshapen, hunchbacked, translucently pale…the vilest geezer [Young has] ever met.” Rotten is a “sickly dwarf.”

It’s not surprising that music so rigorously focused on negation should be at least metaphorically associated with illness and decline. By now it amounts to obviousness to note that the mid-1970s Anglo-American historical milieu (during which punk suddenly became fodder for political hysteria and journalistic hyperventilating) was not especially possessed of health or vigor. In England and in the States, multiple economic recessions, seemingly countless governmental scandals and failures and a general sense of social malaise constituted the dominant structure of feeling and informed the cultural environment. But punk wasn’t only subject to comparisons to disease. Punk songs were also deploying the imagery and concept of sickness to effect a variety of responses to their times. Sickness became a symbolic weapon.

Few bands were more fascinated and freaked out by weaponized sickness than Dead Kennedys. “Chemical Warfare” was a mainstay in the band’s live set from its formation in the late 1970s. The song’s focus on militarized and terroristic applications of bioweaponry was exemplary of Dead Kennedys’ deep-seated dread for dark perversions of scientific research and the medical rationality of the clinic. “Chemical Warfare” seeks some satiric recompense: its demented lyric speaker raids an armory and unleashes mustard gas on a fairway “full of Saturday golfers”; the tune acquires an even more vicious, antic charge when East Bay Ray plucks out “Sobre Las Olas” as the gas wafts toward “The stuffed country club / Effervescent ladies, so carefree….” The bitter, sardonic humor is characteristic of Biafra’s desire to invoke violence, even as he ironically distances himself from it. From such a distance, one can more broadly claim just desserts: Who better to suffer from the effects of such insidious illness than those who have benefited from the weaponry’s production?

More frequently, Biafra would assume the guise of a corrupt apparatchik or evil undercover agent, doling out disease-laden punishment to enemies of the State and brainwashed rubes alike: see his speaker’s command to “Die on organic poison gas” in “California Uber Alles” (“organic” is a key element there); or “Trust Your Mechanic,” which observes, “TV invents a disease you think you have / So you buy our drugs and soon you depend on them.” Biafra gives those various anxieties a song-length treatment in one of the band’s most truculent recordings.

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The buzzy, muscular opening riff of “Government Flu” is as close to crossover metal as Dead Kennedys ever got, and the rest of the song is suitably breathless, matching the song’s descriptions of sickness. The band plays with razoring precision, a zippy sprint, as Biafra barks, “Got a head cold, got a chest cold, and it’s three days old / Goin’ on forever / Make you hazy, make you lazy, drive you crazy / For days ‘n days ‘n days ‘n days ‘n days and years!” Yikes. A dire prescription. But Biafra’s technocratic voice assures us that it’s all for a good cause: “Slip it abroad / Keep a-slowin’ down the USSR!”

The lyrics’ conspiratorial extremities oddly presage some of the crankier contemporary commentary on coronavirus. On March 13th, Jerry Falwell, Jr., joined the jolly morons on Fox and Friends and winked-and-nodded his way through a typically paranoid routine, speculating that North Korea and China had cooked up and loosed COVID-19 on the world in a plot to bring down the Trump presidency. There’s a weird symmetry to the way Falwell, Jr., and Biafra follow their visions out to geopolitical scales, especially given the frequency with which Falwell’s father was a target of Biafra’s wrath. History is always stranger than fiction.

California’s punk history runs wide and deep, and numerous hardcore and crust bands further explored the symbolic and political ramifications of Biafra’s fixations. Bay Area band Christ on Parade’s first EP, Sounds of Nature (1985), featured “The Plague,” a song that associated humanity’s presence on the earthball with biological malignancy: “Civilization’s a cancer… / People are only mindless cells / Spreading a terminal disease.” Band member Noah Landis would eventually move on to join Oakland heavies Neurosis, whose first LP Pain of Mind (1987) included the grimly titled instrumental “Geneticide” and a song called “Self-Taught Infection”: Scott Kelly sings, “Our world’s a disease / The germ is us.” A few years later, and some miles farther south in Orange County, crust band Dystopia added to the chorus on its excellent EP The Aftermath (1999).

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“Population Birth Control” delivers an apocalyptic elaboration of the symbols and themes: “Malignant cancer of the ecosystem / Gnawing at a mother / Children she loves / Cankered womb and body.” As the song progresses, the metaphors clarify: the “mother” is the earth, her “children” are humans and humans are a cancer. The song grinds and crawls and pummels away, like the machinery and industries it excoriates. Dino Sommese howls, “The tumors feed and grow / All the land turns to stone / Biodiversity reduced / From a parasite’s abuse.”

Of course, punk and crust bands didn’t invent these rhetorics and discursive maneuvers. Any number of SF novels—from Huxley’s Brave New World to Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz to John Brunner’s excellent The Sheep Look Up—have inventoried, gamed out and riffed on human technologies run amuck and their production of profound ecological collapse. But we should note that crust punks who are serious about their crustiness have always been an earnest bunch. They don’t just produce art; they live it, inhabiting real, material austerities: squatting, assiduously following a vegan diet, releasing music outside of capital’s mainstream markets for exchange. Even the more performative elements of the subculture that other folks might label with the awful term “lifestyle” have material consequences for consumption: not bathing frequently, wearing the same denim and leather for weeks on end, dreadlocks.

Soon after releasing the EP version of The Aftermath, the crusty boys in Dystopia would record a cover of Rudimentary Peni’s “Cosmetic Plague.” Much of Rudimentary Peni’s work can be thought of as an extended meditation on social alienation and psychological illness, and it’s all pretty brilliant. But a number of bands active in the English anarcho-punk scene that Rudimentary Peni drifted through engaged with disease in a more politically materialist fashion.

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“Myxomatosis” concerns a disease caused by a pox virus, which proves particularly devastating to various European species of wild rabbit. In the 1950s numerous national governments intentionally introduced the virus into their populations of European rabbits to curb species proliferation. Like many of their fellow anarcho-punks, Flux of Pink Indians were strident advocates for animal rights. The band was disgusted by the deliberate spread of the virus; they saw it as exemplary of Western modernity’s insatiable desire to control nature, to impose destructive forms of human will upon other critters: “Experimentation, vivisection, devastation, starvation, torture, war / All mindless slaughter are basically the same / Manmade oppression, manmade pain.” Perhaps the most effective refrain in the song is “Oppression stinks” (and “Myxomatosis” isn’t the first song in which Flux of Pink Indians focused on a corrosive smell). Oppression signifies the idea of a coercive, politically motivated behavior. The term necessarily abstracts, a cognitive action that helpfully sets parameters for a general category; less helpfully, the abstraction operates at a distance from the lived reality—frequently a violent reality—of the behavior itself. “Stinks” is a powerfully organic term. It invokes the piles of bunnies, riddled with pox and writhing, dying and rotting. It vivifies our awareness of the full force of oppression, of how it impinges on and damages and debilitates bodies. It’s horrific.

Another 1980s English anarcho-punk band, Subhumans, recorded numerous similarly themed songs: “Us Fish Must Swim Together,” “Pigman,” “Evolution.” But more relevant are the band’s songs that address illness. “Germ” is a song from the Evolution EP; Dick Lucas sings, “I play with your health, I destroy all there is / I’m the germ in your mouth when you give her a kiss!” He almost cackles with glee—it’s a typical punky demolition of conventionally saccharine sentimentalization of bodily experience. The song’s skepticism about the efficacy of “the National Health” indicates the band’s ideological opposition to government and institutionally dictated forms of normativity. In the spring of 2020, it’s hard to hear that skepticism clearly, when we are in dire need of nationally and internationally coordinated responses to massive public health crisis.

A glib response (powered by an impoverished notion of anarchism, all too common in some reactionary punks’ selfish appropriations of the term) to that need might be some version of “reap the whirlwind.” To briefly give that perspective an airing: late capital’s systems of production have indeed propagated uneven development and ever more efficient global interlinkage, as well as industrially scaled agriculture and fossil fuels consumption, all of which have issued in world systems and climatological conditions ripe for pandemic. The less glibly observed fact must be that many of the people who will suffer the effects of COVID-19 have not benefited from the operations of late capital. They suffered them, and they will suffer more.

Subhumans address those issues with greater complexity on Worlds Apart (1985), one of the best punk records of the 1980s. “Someone Is Lying” revisits themes and symbols that are familiar by this point: careless manufacturing of toxic, hazardous substances; the substances’ escape into the lifeworld; the working class’s disproportional immiseration, both by the mode of production and the diseases that spring from it. The crisp, brisk riff underscores the song’s growing anxiety. More stirring is Dick’s vocal performance in the song’s closing minutes. He repeats, ad nauseum, “These people are dying! / Someone is lying!” The band swirls behind him with growing intensity. People are dying. Someone is lying. In 2020, the scenario has loosed itself from the song and infected our reality. To be sure, the Real is stranger than fiction. Throughout the winter and spring, institutional powers worldwide have lied and obfuscated, always in rank self-interest, in ruthless effort to maintain their grip on power. It is sick, diseased, repugnant. And the lies grow from and exacerbate deep social problems.

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In England, in 1985, the song’s phrases gestured toward specifically English ideas, with specifically English resonances: “inbred snobbery,” “wipe out the ghetto,” “the civilized nation.” It seems that we are no longer worlds apart; Dick sings about a “British Disease,” but America in 2020 suffers strikingly similar symptoms. At the song’s crescendo, when Dick is diagnosing the illness, he shouts, “Ignorance is your disease! / Ignorance and apathy! / Ignorance and bigotry!” That turns out to be an apt depiction of a significant portion of the American citizenry, credulous boosters of a “PATRIOT law” (my caps), idiotically basking under the glow of fluorescents on the floor of Target or Whole Foods, whining about an unbelievable access to plenitude: “What? No fresh jicama!” It’s easier to bask and whine than it is to consider all of the crushing injustice and violence that have made that plenitude possible. Or to live in a way that struggles to fashion an ethical response.

Some folks are more vulnerable. They have no choice but to become intimate with those crushing forces. Try walking out into the Target parking lot and adjusting your vision. You’ll likely find a car somewhere along the fringes, its driver gorked out, needle hanging from a vein. Another victim of the American disease, another person in malignant, soul-destroying pain, trying to self-medicate. You’ll walk past, plastic bags bulging. “You thought this country was so great.”

Perhaps our new disease will provide a change in perspective. Current conditions suggest otherwise. At the time of this writing (22 March 2020), in spite of the callow cynicism, repulsive preening and empty macho pose of our newly self-declared “Wartime President,” the Trump Administration’s national job approval numbers are ticking up. Ignorance and apathy. Ignorance and bigotry. When does the disease become terminal?

* N.B. This essay was written at furious pace, at the close of the first week of social distancing as COVID-19 arrived in Philadelphia, PA. There are many, many punk bands and songs that address sickness that haven’t been included: the Germs, Flipper’s “Survivors of the Plague,” GBH’s “Sick Boy,” and so on. But the essay is not interested in offering any sort of survey or comprehensive account of punk’s symbolic treatment of illness—and “Sick Boy” is a thunderingly stupid song, anyways. Additional apologies for the essay’s fast-and-loose organization. Furious writing bears the marks of the psychological dissonance its writer (ahem) suffers. And angry words likely should not be prettily put.

Jonathan Shaw

#punk'd history #jonathan shaw #dusted magazine #illness #punk #subhumans #sex pistols #dead kennedys #christ on parade #dystopia #rudimentary peni

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ruthfeiertag · 4 years

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Random Ruminations on Depression

Preamble:

I want to take back the word ruminate. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains that the word “ruminate (v.)” dating from the 1530s, means “'to turn over in the mind,’ also ‘to chew cud’ (1540s), from Latin ruminatus, past participle of ruminare ‘to chew the cud; turn over in the mind,' from rumen (genitive ruminis) ‘gullet,’ of uncertain origin.” Merriam-Webster Online Gives the definition of ruminate as

transitive verb

1: to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly 2: to chew repeatedly for an extended period

intransitive verb

1: to chew again what has been chewed slightly and swallowed : chew the cud 2: to engage in contemplation : REFLECT

https://pixabay.com/photos/pensive-female-woman-window-staring-580611/

But psychology — and in general I have real respect and genuine gratitude for the healing and support psychology and psychotherapists provide; if I kept a gratitude journal, my therapist’s name would be on every page — has come near to ruining this apt word that perfectly expresses the way many of us need or choose to take the time to ponder and deliberate rather than hasten to judge or get embroiled in the consequences of an ill-considered decision. Psychology, as a field, has decided ruminate should mean obsessively thinking about whatever is bothering one, over and over and over…

I think one of the reasons this definition has become popular, not only among psychologists, but in the general public as well, is that we have such short attention spans and have come to prize speed over all else. We rush to embrace technology that robs us of our privacy, we don’t stay to watch the credits after a movie (unless there’s an added scene), we expect to know the results of every election before the votes are all counted. Take a breath, people. Being ruminative used to be a positive attribute, one that indicated one was a careful, thoughtful person, not inclined to fling one’s self pell-mell off a cliff. Now it is a weakness, a character flaw that indicates one brings one’s misfortunes upon one’s self because one can’t control one’s thoughts.

Join me in my mission. Let’s rescue ruminate. Start using it in its proper sense. Fling it with abandon into your philosophical conversations: “I was ruminating upon the meaning of life the other day and wondering just what 42 really has to do with it.” If someone tries to push you into making a snap decision, say, “You know, in order to give you the thoughtful answer you deserve, I need to ruminate on that for a day or two.” When next asked to describe yourself, pause for a moment, then declare, “I am an attentive, measured sort of person with a ruminative cast to my mind.” (Just don’t tell anyone you’re a ruminant. That will totally undermine our goal.)

And after we save ruminate, we’re coming back for you, enable.

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Every so often, the New Yorker slips a suggestion for an archived article into the Inbox of my e-mail. That how I came across Andrew Solomon’s article, “Anatomy of Melancholy,” that appeared in New Yorker’s January 12, 1998 issue. It’s a pretty harrowing description of the depths down to which depression can pull person, and of the biases that still pertain when it comes to admitting to others or to ourselves that we have a mental illness and, worse, might be so “weak” as to need chemical (or electrical) interventions. As I moved through the essay, I can upon this proffered bit of wisdom:

Accuracy of perception is not an evolutionary priority. Too optimistic a world view results in foolish risk-taking, but moderate optimism gives you a strong selective advantage. “Normal human thought and perception,“ Shelley Taylor writes in her 1989 book, Positive Illusions, “is marked not by accuracy but by positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future. Moreover…these illusions are not merely characteristic of human thought; they appear actually to be adaptive.” As she notes, “The mildly depressed appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than normal people. [They] clearly lack the illusions that in normal people promote mental health and buffer them against setbacks.”

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So — why are those of us with depression and accurate perceptions the ones who are mentally ill, while the “normies” with their illusions are the ones who are considered sane? Why are we the ones who are seen as less evolved? Am I the only one who thinks this assessment is a little bit off?

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In a recent car commercial, actor and apparent guru Matthew McConaughey ruminates (see how easy it is to just slip the word right into a sentence?) out loud about the process of identity formation. He muses

“Knowin’ who we are is hard — it’s hard. Eliminatin’ who you are are not, first, and you’re gonna find yourself where ya need to be.”

OK: first, shouldn’t the logic of the first sentence — the search for identity — lead to a statement about finding out who one is rather than where one is? I guess that’s what happens when one infuses manufactured sagacity into an advert for a vehicle. And never mind the lack of parallel structure in the second sentence.

But what I keep thinking is, “What if we, as is recommended by Mr. McConaughey, eliminate all the people we are not, only to realize there’s no one left?” That’s kind of who-where I keep finding myself.

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An ethical dilemma: At the recommendation of a friend, I picked up Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, by Daniel G. Amen. M.D. I haven’t read very far into it, but so far there are some sensible observations about the practicality of having one’s brain scanned for damage so one knows whether medical or psychotherapeutic remedies are most likely to be beneficial. However, on page twenty-nine, our friend the doctor discusses thing that hurt the brain and things that help the brain. Under malign influences, Dr. Amen notes that “even spending time with unhealthy people [is] bad for the brain.” OK: I can see how that can work.

In the next paragraph, Dr. Amen lists things that can boost the brain. This list includes the point that “In many ways, the best thing you can do for your brain is to spend time with healthy people. As we will see, they are contagious. I often say the fastest way to get healthy is to find the healthiest person you can stand and then spend as much time around him or her as possible.” That also makes sense.

BUT — and you may already see the problem here — let’s say I’m a healthy person. I know an unhealthy person, someone with, say, depression, someone who would immensely benefit from spending time with me. Yet if I do spend time with that person, I’ll be engaged in an activity that will be detrimental to my own grey matter. On the other hand, if I choose to protect myself by shunning the depressed person, I’m selfishly depriving her or him of my beneficial “contagion” and preventing that person from attaining the flourishing cerebrum she or he deserves. (Unless, of course, that person has been ruminating. In that case, she or he deserves all the melancholy that infests her or his soul. [That’s an example how NOT to use the word ruminating.]) I’m either allowing harm to come to myself or withholding aid from another, which makes me a pretty lousy human being, and knowing that I’m a pretty lousy human will depress me.

Now let’s imagine that I am the unhealthy person, and I know a tremendously healthy person, in whose salubrious presence I never fail to rally. I have a lot of time on my hands. I easily could spend days with this person and notably sharpen my dulled mental functions and ameliorate my debilitating mood. However, by latching on to this bloom-imparting individual, I will be causing harm to that person’s well-being and will likely disrupt her or his equilibrium. That would make me an insensitive parasite, sucking the life out of someone for my own ends, and being such a draining leech would make me feel horrible and depressed.

So what to do? I hate lose-lose, damned-if-you-do-or-don’t, caught-between- Scylla-and-a-hard-place options.

**********************************

And then Will Wheaton put this up on his Blog:

報復性熬夜

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which has a much more beautiful name in Chinese (the literal translation for revenge bedtime procrastination means “suffering through the night vengefully.”), is a phenomena unique to people who feel out of control in their daily lives, so we refuse to go to sleep early, to exert some control over our lives, and to enjoy some quiet time alone, when the rest of our people are sleeping.

I should confess, straight up, that I am, by nature, a night owl. It runs in the family. But I love both this concept and its name. Between the depression and the M.E. and the State of the Union, I’m having an increasingly hard time getting any sleep. I just wish being AWAKE YES I’M AWAKE YES I DO KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS OH ISN’T THAT A LOVELY SUNRISE? would wreak some actual vengeance on the conditions and people who are responsible for my near-insomnia.

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Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/fantasy-face-branches-woman-3317298/

I hope my ruminations provide some conceptual cud for your synapses, dear reader, to masticate at the pace of your choosing. And don’t forget: enable is still waiting for us to effect an heroic rescue, one worthy of our idiom.

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neriad13 · 4 years

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I finally sat down and worked out the mechanics and history of Marked plant powers in that story set in Pandyssia that I’ve been working on forever and I’m really happy with the result! =D

To clarify: the source of the rat plague, as marked on the official Dishonored map, is the center of a ruined city (Arouraíos Póli. Translation: Rat City) which was once ruled by a Marked king whose name has since been scrubbed from history. His ghost still dwells in the jungle and grants power to any who draw the Outsider’s mark on their hand.

When marking one’s self as a member of the Nameless King’s coven one gains the ability to:

Control plants, including both the stimulation of growth within (somewhat - they can’t grow a bush in five minutes, but they can make it happen in a couple of days) reasonable parameters and physical movement

Subpower: implanting a person with seeds or cuttings and stimulating them to grow under the victim’s skin and inside them. Grants the Marked complete control over the person’s movements. Long term use results in a plant golem with no humanity left to speak of. The golem will die when there is nothing left of the victim’s original body to feed on. Extremely taboo in Pandyssian society.

Offensive capabilities: manipulation of fast moving carnivorous vines to trip or ensnare opponents. Manipulation of poisonous spores and pollen targeting the opponent’s airways. Most Marked also use the former method to pull other people out of danger, do acrobatics the human body is otherwise incapable of and travel quickly through forested areas.

Other capabilities: stimulating the harvest to produce more of a bounty than it is capable of without assistance. Any garden tended by a Marked blooms with immense vigor.

Mentally tap into the mycelium network that connects all plants in the Pandyssian jungle

Subpower: Marked may use this connection to look through the eyes of other Marked. Canny Marked realize when this is happening and may be able to tell who is spying on them by the feel of the other person’s mind. Messages cannot be transmitted over this connection, but emotions can. Experienced Marked are able to block off this connection at will.

Subpower: Marked may use this connection to “see” things that are happening in other parts of the jungle. Works best within a range of several miles. A skill that improves with experience.

Subpower: ability to see the “echoes” of those who have died in the jungle and became imprinted on the mycelium network, whether animal or human. They normally present as semi-ephemeral beings who are caught in loops of what they were doing when they died, though there is an extreme minority of those who do not follow this pattern. The most well known of these is the golem of Arouraíos Póli, who has guided lost Marked out of the maze of the inner sanctum for generations. Newly Marked have difficulty distinguishing between echoes and living beings. They eventually learn to recognize their lack of shadows, sound and substance.

Drawbacks of being marked:

The echo of the Nameless King from which power is drawn exerts a profound influence on the minds of those who have been marked. He is a caught in a loop consisting of the sacrifice of the person who betrayed him and the subsequent unleashing of the rat plague upon the world. This loop is imprinted on the minds of the Marked and while they are marked, they are continually drawn to Arouraíos Póli and into this loop themselves. This is why candidates with strong mental fortitude are chosen to be marked and given extensive training in resisting the lure. Even so, most Marked do succumb to the pull of the Nameless King eventually.

When the person whom the Marked has designated as ‘the betrayer’ is chosen, that person’s stomach becomes a vessel of the rat plague and their sacrifice almost always results in the death of the Marked. The rare ‘betrayer’ who has broken free before being sacrificed gets horribly ill but is able to live a normal life if treated with King’s Mercy (also known as Plaga Perrit, a common remedy against the rat plague in Pandyssia) soon enough. If the sacrifice is successfully carried out, a wave of plague rats are released into the surrounding jungle.

The Tradition of the Marked in Western Pandyssia

by Dr. Kathryn Derring

Every village has at minimum, one Marked within its borders. Their duties are to prevent the jungle from encroaching on the village, protect its inhabitants from injurious flora and fauna, keep watch for danger coming from the depths of the jungle, ensure that the harvest is good and when needed, to guide people safely through the jungle. They are financially supported and treated with reverence (which is not untinged with fear) by the village in which they live.

Candidates are chosen and trained as children, preferably by the village’s current Marked. If the current Marked has died suddenly or given into the Nameless King’s lure, this duty falls to the village elder.

Traits looked for are willfulness, confidence, mental strength and strong emotional bonds, whether with friends or family. All genders are considered. A child and their family are free to refuse the appointment, but there is often significant pressure from the community to accept if the village has suddenly found themselves lacking a Marked to protect them. In these circumstances, a Marked from another village may be summoned to fill in the gap while the child trains.

The training consists of long hours of meditation, practice in emotional regulation, study of the local wildlife and combat training. Another important part of their education is helping out around the village wherever they can. The reason for this is that it encourages the child to form stronger bonds with the people they’re training to protect. The stronger the interpersonal bonds they have, the better they’re able to resist the Nameless King’s lure.

Traditionally, the child is ready to be marked when they reach 15 years of age, though their training might go on for longer, should their mentor deem it necessary. The ceremony in which they are tattooed on the hand of their choice coincides with the planting of the first harvest of the Pandyssian New Year (usually within the Month of Nets, according to our calendar).

In the week that follows the newly Marked is given a special hut to rest in, the village healer pays close attention to them and friends and family are encouraged to keep them company at all hours. The ability to see echoes (quite possibly of their deceased relatives) and the pressure of the Nameless King’s compulsion are difficult things to adjust to. It is not uncommon for the newly Marked to fall ill after being marked or suffer some sort of emotional breakdown. It is during this stage that candidates who were not fully prepared for the role most often try to kidnap a person they perceive as having wronged them and take them to Arouraíos Póli for sacrifice.

In this scenario, if the Marked cannot be made to see reason, they must be killed. This is an exceedingly dangerous prospect, as the powers of even a newly Marked are considerable. It is likely that the Marked and their hostage will escape into the jungle, never to be seen again.

Should the worst happen, the Marked’s mentor loses considerable face in the village. Village elders have stepped down because of circumstances like these. Marked mentors often pay restitution to their student’s family and that of their hostage.

But, should the newly Marked come through that week having adjusted to their new reality successfully, they take on their full duties as the village’s defender and the cycle begins anew.

Most Marked succumb to the lure eventually, as their will erodes over time and the bitterness of living in a continent so dead set against life itself builds up inside them. The villages they live in know this and are careful to treat the Marked with utmost respect and do their damnedest to stay out of disputes with them, lest they end up becoming a sacrifice. This can end up breeding a whole different type of resentment which well trained Marked are coached to avoid.

Some Marked see their death in Arouraíos Póli as their destiny and plan ahead for it. Some, instead of a person, take a thing which has wronged them and symbolically “kill” it in the inner sanctum. A faulty weapon which caused the death of a loved one. The parasite which destroyed a harvest. The fortune which caused a bitter family dispute. One man cut off the fingers of his marked hand which had failed to defend his village from the plague of biting insects that killed many of his charges.

But how are all these stories known, if Arouraíos Póli is the place the Marked go to die?

Because these are the ones who came back. When the ritual is complete and the Marked still lives, the compulsion ends, its conditions fulfilled.

Only those who are strong enough to destroy the parts of themselves that hold them back are able to return.

On Temporary Marks

Anyone with a stick of charcoal or a pot of ink can mark themselves with the greatest of ease. As far as power is concerned, the material with which one draws on their hand makes no difference. Mud works just as well as painstakingly drawn tattoos.

The difference is that when the mark is washed away, so too are the powers lost. A common thought is that a village in danger might be better served by having multiple Marked on hand who are able to wash away their powers once the danger is passed.

This is generally regarded as a spectacularly bad idea by most competent village elders. Without the proper training, marked villagers are at a heightened risk for succumbing to the Nameless King’s lure and harming their neighbors in the process. A village very rarely has the resources to train multiple Marked, let alone Marked who would only be Marked part of the time.

Thus, there is a long ingrained taboo in Western Pandyssian society against marking one’s self, even in jest. Bedtime tales of naughty children who did just that and then vanished into the jungle never to be seen again abound up and down the coast.

Then there is the other type of story - the ones about travelers lost in the forbidding jungle, on the verge of death from starvation, injury, poison - who mark themselves in a last ditch effort to preserve their lives and are then guided to safety by the ghosts of their ancestors.

Not all of them are bunk. In 1799, a group of woodsmen from New Cullero found themselves lost in the depths in the jungle for weeks. When things became dire, they chose the one man whose will had not yet broken to mark himself. He was able to tap into the mycelium network and find the path that would lead them out. He reportedly suffered no ill effects before or after the mark was washed away.

The lesson here is that some people, without training, if the matrix of their personality is one capable of overpowering the compulsion of the Nameless King, are perfectly able to wield the mark for a short while.

But the stories concerning an unprepared Marked murdering their rival, themselves and the village the resulting plague of rats overtook are by far the more numerous of the two.

#dishonored #pandyssia #fanfiction #A thought #Only those who are strong enough to destroy the parts of themselves that hold them back are able to return #aaaaaaaaa #that's it #that's the entire story #it took me half a decade to figure that out

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listoriented · 5 years

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The Cat Lady

cw: suicide, mental illness

The Cat Lady is a sidescrolling horror-adventure game. It contains: long sections of dialogue, item-based puzzles, jump scares, slow-moving character animations. It was released in 2012. It was made by Harvester Games, an independent studio from Poland. Apparently a sequel, Lorelai, was released earlier this year. Curiously, three out of the last five games now have been made by different Polish studios.

The protagonist/Cat Lady in question is Susan Ashworth. Susan is a forty-year-old woman who lives in an apartment, more or less fully alone aside from the occasional company of stray neighbourhood cats. Susan is suffering from severe depression — the game begins with her attempting suicide. She ends up in a limbo realm where the French-accented ‘Queen of Maggots’ tells her to go back to the living realm and kill five psychopaths (“parasites”). So she does, kind of, but the subsequent quest to do this is very mixed in with Susan’s own path to recovery.

The Cat Lady is a perplexing, frustrating, interesting patchwork mess of a game. I don’t know what I think of it. I don’t know whether to celebrate its relatively (to most other games) thoughtful depiction of mental illness or discuss how this is still overly enmeshed in problematic depictions of violence. I don’t know whether to commend the game’s partial unwinding of the lonely cat lady trope or to reflect on how it reaffirms this idea of depression as something that makes someone act like an arsehole to everyone around them.

The whole game is kind of like this. It uses surrealism and unreliable narration to imply discursive thinking into the altered states of perception produced by mental illness, but then it seems to narratively validate these altered states because the plot of the game involves murdering, and getting murdered by, serial killers and psychopaths. It has lots of overbearing, superfluous dialogue, mixed in with some genuinely thoughtful and insightful moments – which it then undercuts, again, with ridiculous violence. For example! The first time The Cat Lady made me think, oh, maybe this game is actually going to take this subject seriously, was in the second chapter when Susan talks to a psychiatrist and it gave you these dialogue options of, like, talking seriously about your past, yay, the game is making the implicative link between trauma and illness, maybe there is hope! And then….. and then the psychiatrist MURDERS YOU because he is A SERIAL KILLER.

And it’s just like. What?

I think, in a vacuum, this sort of tonal rollercoaster would be fine, if this was one game among many that explored different depictions of different kinds of experiences of mental illness – sure, that would be totally valid. The Cat Lady has one of the more interesting explorations of mental illness I’ve seen in games. But this is both a medium that is very prone to violence, and one in which mental illness has largely been tied with the motivations of evil boss characters, in much the same way that we often look for it as the motivation for crimes without necessarily trying to understand the social underpinnings that go into it. Video games have been more likely to stigmatise mental illness rather than engender understanding. Working with this background, continuing to tie violence to mental illness poses an associative problem that, through its spectral depiction of surrealism, it never really shakes itself of – it doesn’t work hard enough against the pre-existing tropes, basically. But that isn’t to say it’s wrong, only that I don’t know if it can be categorically declared ‘a success’. Like, sure, I get that maybe it’s meant to be read as allegory, or maybe we’re meant to appreciate that not knowing what is real is indeed one of the game’s core points about depicting mental illness – but then, the logical leaps it makes are so large, it frequently undermines so much of the sensitivity in its world-building. It’s hard to find much to hold onto, or know where to orient ourselves to parse what these depictions of these themes are saying.

It’s all over the place in so many ways. It starts poorly – the first two chapters are the weakest – but I liked it better the more I played of it. Some of puzzles are a little infuriating, though I ended up enjoying how they played out more often than not, particularly once I’d picked up the rhythm of the game’s thinking. The voice-acting is extensive though not always convincing. The penultimate chapter has a neat sleuthing layout that really slinks into a cool, elaborate whodunnit puzzle. After the chaos of the first two chapters, I liked the way the game built up through the middle, reorienting around depictions of Susan’s apartment and the warmness of the little moments like having coffee and a cigarette on the balcony. I appreciated the morose, mostly monochrome pallet with sparing and smart interjections of colour. I liked the way the art feels cut together, lo-fi but intricate. Some of the jump scares are pretty good.

It’s…I don’t know. I feel like I’ve mostly read positive things about it, but I can’t get totally on board, nor do I really have the time/energy to more coherently unpack why I think it doesn’t always deal with its heavy subject matter that well. Maybe it’s an angle thing. If you’re asking “does it have a good depiction of depression for a schlocky horror game?” then yes. But remove the genre requirement, then no. Everything is relative.

update 9/10/2019** Some people have already discussed The Cat Lady with regards to representing mental illness with a bit more clarity and nuance than I have. Sarah Stang (2018) at First Person Scholar discusses The Cat Lady alongside Fran Bow and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, acknowledging that while these depictions have shortcomings, they represent a comparative step forward for games:

The particular strength of all three games discussed above is that they feature female protagonists with mental illnesses and emphasize healing rather than curing. In Fran Bow and The Cat Lady, the clear message is that people with mental illnesses can help others and themselves, can overcome adversity and live with trauma, and can form meaningful relationships.

Stang links to a couple of other articles that give a reasonable background on the problematic relationship games have with mental illness. Sarah Nixon in 2013 gave a concise rendering of how horror games particularly tend to use and stigmatise mental illness. Aaron Souppouris (2015) looks at particular mechanics more extensively in discussion with a clinical psychologist.

I also liked Eric Swain’s short and sweet take in 2015 (from ~5 minutes in), on a critical distance confab postcast in discussion with Austin Walker in 2015. Swain described the game as Freudian studies “through a 2000s nu-metal aesthetic”, noting how interesting the game looked and also the nice balcony scenes, but mentioning that it was hard to know what the game’s creator wanted to say about certain sensitive topics. **

Duration: Eight hours.

When/Why: A few years ago I was friends with a guy named John. We were in a book club with a bunch of other ex-classmates from uni. John also liked playing Dota, during the period of my life where I, too, was on that horse. I played Dota with John and his friend a few times, and was shocked at how angry and rude he was in game, this everyday fairly polite and thoughtful guy. Anyway, at some point John mentioned or recommended The Cat Lady in the context of a discussion at book club, which is, I think, how I came to buy it in a steam sale in early 2015. I played it for a bit but found the physical slowness of the game too patience-testing at the time, given that at the time I was, as mentioned, addicted to the dopamine gambit of Dota. When I later mentioned this – my inability to get through the first chapter of the game he’d recommended - to John, he agreed that it was “a bad game”, further confusing me as to why it was brought up in the first place, and indeed I’m not sure if John has actually played it, seeing as it doesn’t come up as something that exists in his steam library, or at least, on the steam account of his that I’m friends with. So, that’s the long story as to how this game came to be here. But why else do you read this blog?

up next is Cat Quest

#game78 #the cat lady #harvester games #games of poland #games of 2012 #horror #depression games #adventure games #sidescroller

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butterychaoticduck · 6 years

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Cycling between anxiety and depression

if you get the patience read this, if you go through the same things, feel free to hit me up, i’m interested in starting a convo on this.

A detail i have come along to realize about myself, is that i cycle in between anxiety and depression. i have no idea if there is a specific diagnosis for this, if it is simply just, i have both and they sometimes overlap and other times appear separate. I was wondering if anybody else is like this. This is not just, one day i am anxious and the other day i am terribly depressed. I have always lived with these two very different emotional states, and they come in waves that sometimes i can’t even predict or control. my therapist has always treated me as being someone who suffers from generalized anxiety, but for some reason i have always known there as a bit more to it. Thing is i hid my depression out of shame, and surely i wanted to do the same about my anxiety, but it is such a more violent and unpredictable state, that sometimes it would just burst out and i could not control it.

So it usually starts with an outburst of anxiety, if i was to put it in the perspective of my worst i would wake up every morning with an impending sense of doom and i would go along my day hyper aware of every single thing around me. My brain can’t stop at those times, it thinks about every single thing that most people do not think about, and then worry about specific thoughts and details of said thoughts, and even in the peace and quiet of my own bedroom i would freak out, burst into tears, have a panic attack, you name it. And usually this general state would go on for a significant amount of time, especially if i was expecting something to happen.

And then that nervous state would either be disrupted by an outer influence, or it would shift on it’s own into, not what i would call the polar opposite, often i would still feel anxious, but it would mostly just shift into depression. and in those times i would just not care, i would wake up not with a sense of doom, but i would simply remember who i am and i would hate it and want to disappear. So there i would go into a period of time where i was mainly depressed.

i will get anxiety about getting depression and then i will get depressed about having anxiety. First i thought that i either had one or the other, and then i would have a smaller percentage of the other illness. Then i thought, well i must have both, but they’re completely separate, and you are just weird like that. But it never felt quite right, and the more i get to know about myself, the older i get, i just believe that they are sort of interchangeable, or even connected in some way. hell, it might even be the same thing. I know one person can be diagnosed with several metal illnesses, but i mean, i only have this one brain, would it not make more sense, since these problems seem to have the same origin, it is not something that i have developed from any particular trauma that i remember, i do have traumas and i have mental consequences and tel tales of said traumas, but analyzing my behavior, even that is separate from my anxiety and my depression.

i mean what am i supposed to say, “oh just let me list all of the things my brain has decided to fuck up on, lets see, anxiety, depression,anorexia AND bulimia at at least one point, technically also orthorexia for around a year and a half, very very likely ptsd from serious abuse, but that’s separate from the other things, have i told you i also get body dysmorphia? oh yeah chronic panic attacks and i get easily addicted to things”.... to me it just seems like i am some sort of grocery list. At one point i started to worry if i was thinking about all these things i had, if i was not just a hypochondriac or an illness collector. Which is completely idiotic, i’ve been diagnosed and treated for all of the mental illnesses above, it was never something that i made up in my mind.

But with a certain amount of psychological knowledge (i mean 8 years of intense therapy gets you some skills in at least understanding what the heck is going on) I ended up to the conclusion, i am neither going to restrict myself into one single problem, neither am i going to list every single problem in the book.

so let’s synthesize.

I have a restrictive eating disorder, it shifts and adapts as the circumstances of my life appear, like a parasite trying to resist medication; reasons: biology with a gymnastics background and a perfectionist head

i have at least a mild to moderate form of ptsd, it is fairly recent and it is yet to be completely understood by my treatment teams at it’s fullest extent;reasons: I am a rape victim but previous to that i endured abuse from several “sources”, which built up and eventually burst when a more major event happened.

And then i have anxiety and depression. It show up as mutated sort of mental illness. almost like a bipolar individual (which i am absolutely not); i cycle between these two states as if one caused he other, or just, i have both and my brain gets too tired from one thing and goes to the other thing, or depending on the situation it will react accordingly, but it always has a tendency to find a way to get depressed or anxious and then i am more likely that in a span of a few weeks of that constant feeling, or even months, i will change into the other state, or into normality.

any thoughts?

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psychic-echo · 6 years

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Yugioh Theory: Mai’s Dark-Side

Okay, so hear me out. Might sound stupid, but I have a theory that Yami Marik wasn't completely destroyed by Marik upon his surrender to the Pharaoh at the end of Battle City. In fact, it might be possible for Yami Marik to be partially responsible for Mai's turn towards the Dark-side during the Doma Arc; in more than a PTSD Nightmare fuel sense.

(Longer version after the break)

So, as stated above, the theory revolves around Mai's personality change in comparison to where she was when she drove off into the sunset at the end of Battle City, and when she comes roaring in as a bad-ass biker babe only 7 episodes later at the start of the Doma Arc.

Mai's motivations as to why she is now a rival of Yugi & co., and has given into the power of the Orichalcos and turned to the dark side, seems a little baffling. Mai is said to want power and become a stronger duelist, but is also suffering from post-traumatic stress and possibly other psychological disorders (Anxiety, etc.) by the mental torture she had to endure in the penalty game imposed on her due to her loss to Yami Marik, in the Battle City Semi-Finals. She thinks she's abandoned by her friends, who no longer care.

To quote her exactly on her motivations: "You've never been an outsider like me, All alone. Duel Monsters is all I have, and after the battle city tournament I set out to become the best. I dueled against chump after chump to improve my dueling skills. I needed to make a name for myself. Even though I won match after match, I didn't feel any stronger as a duelist. In fact, I felt worse, and I certainly wasn't making a name for myself. Not long after that the nightmares began [....] Every night it was the same dream. I was weak, and no one was there to help me! I was at the end of my rope, scared, lonely, pathetic, and my so called friends were no where to be found. "

Well, yeah it's understandable she's fed up with not being considered being in the same league of Duelist or as well recognized as Kaiba, Yugi, and even Joey. It's also understandable she's still traumatized from the events of Battle City, to the point she's convinced herself that she doesn't belong with them, and they don't care about her.

After all; part of the Shadow Game she played in involved her friends being erased from her mind, and her penalty game involved showing her an illusion of her friends being happier and better off without her, completely forgetting about her.

Mai's final scene in Season 3 she exchanges farewells with Joey. She appears to acknowledge the fact that Joey actually does care about her and consider her a friend; and she tells him that the feeling is mutual and she considers them to be friends as well. It's a sweet scene and feels more like a send off to Mai, and the conclusion of her character arc.

That's because in the Manga, Mai's character arc ended with the Conclusion of the Battle City Arc. She is never seen again throughout the rest of the Manga. But of course, that's not the case in the Anime; as she was brought back in season 4 (which was not adapted from an arc in the Manga--as the arc bridging the gap in between the Duelist volumes, and the Millennium World Volumes of the Manga was the 5 volume series Yu-Gi-Oh R, which people tend to forget as being a thing. Though I can see why Yu-Gi-Oh R, was never adapted into Anime; but that's for a future discussion.)

Mai's return as a character, and an antagonist seemed mostly for character motivation for Joey as a secondary protagonist character; giving him more of a mission and reason to be there than just as moral support for Yugi and the Pharaoh. His purpose in this battle against evil, aside from the standard "I promised Yugi I'd help him face whatever evil there was"; becomes more of a rescue mission, repeating a lot of the same steps from the Battle City Finals: showing Mai that she has friends who care about her. Though in the process Mai's motivations for being against them feel more like the writers forgot, or rather, undid, all the development in the past three seasons. But also adding the "inadequacy as a Duelist" subplot--which doesn't get focused on quite as much as the "friendship" thing, or this weird "Love-triangle" subplot between her, Valon, and Joey.

Even when Mai defeats Joey, and the Seal of Orichalcos takes his soul, freeing Mai from it's influence as she sees Joey cares about her enough to risk his own soul. She sees that what she had convinced herself of was wrong:

"I was angry and confused and I blamed all my loneliness on you. So I tried to get rid of you. How could I be so selfish? You're the only one who ever cared about me. You're the closest friend I ever had and how did I repay you? By leaving you for a mad man who promised me power."

That's all fine and good, except now this make time number two that Mai has repeated this arc. Blaming Joey for her loneliness, and her problems, and why her victories seemed to be meaningless and empty. Literally they have the same exchange as the end of Season 3, just done slightly different (with Joey being unconscious). Mai acknowledging Joey's friendship and how much he cares about her and what happens to her, that he was willing to lose everything just to save her.

"Okay, but now....aren't we supposed to be talking about Yami Marik being partially responsible for this relapse and influencing Mai's dark personality, under the power of the Orichalcos? You've yet to actually explain where he fits in to this. All you've done is sort of highlight the baffling writing in Season 4 in regards to Mai."

I'm getting to that. Just needed to establish that we're given the reasons why Mai joined with Dartz's organization. She felt weak and that her friends had abandoned her. She was desperate and miserable. But when Mai left at the end of season 3, she didn't seem like what she was now coming to understand and see would be something she would forget about anytime soon. I'm not sure if it's ever stated how much time passes between Battle City and the events of the Doma Arc, but it's seems like enough for Mai to win a number of tournaments; and have a number of reoccurring nightmares, to be at that point where she's desperate and feeling hopeless right before she encounter Valon, and begin working for Dartz.

So, the main theory; Yami Marik is responsible for Mai's turn to darkness in more than just the memory of their duel and his torturing of her being the source of her PTSD. He may actually be present in Mai's mind and is helping influence all these things. Even if she, and no one else might know.

But we're going to set Mai aside for right now to talk about Yami Marik for a bit, but don't worry these two paths are gonna converge, but I'm sure before I even get to that point. You'll see exactly where Yami Marik fits in to Mai's darkness and backwards progression. If you haven't already and are screaming at me right now to make the point.

We know from what we've seen, Yami Marik was created after Marik's initiation as Tomb Keeper, from Marik's hatred, anger, sadness, among other negative emotions. He's been shown to influence Marik's personality, so it isn't too much of a stretch to say that plenty of Marik's motives and actions as an antagonist were influenced by Yami Marik as a play to gain more power, to eventually become strong enough to possibly over come the suppression which the ritual Odion performed on his face as a sign of solidarity to his little brother, without having to have Odion fall unconscious.

Yami Marik gains power and a greater influence on Marik, through Marik's own actions and emotions and through the pain he inflicts on others; like a vampiric parasite he feeds off of misery, darkness, desperation, hopelessness and evil and negative energies. They sustain him enough to remain present in Marik. He messes with Marik's mind and emotions to keep him miserable and fueling his hatred, just as Marik screwed with the mind and emotions of others through the Millennium Rod's Power.

The idea to use the Millennium Rod's power in this way on others probably came from Yami Marik himself. His influence over Marik has grown in the past few years since the death of Mr. Ishtar. It's become strong enough now that Marik's personality has changed and become this revenge driven, scheming evil master-mind. Of course this greater influence is from the benefit of the power of the Millennium Rod and the shadow-magic within it. He feeds off of the power of the Shadow Realm and the suffering of his victims (including the Rare Hunters he controls, as many of the Rare hunters he's possessed, Like Arcana, Lumis, and the Exodia Rare Hunter, have all been shown to be fearful of him appearing in their mind and taking control of them, when they've failed him.)

(The fact that Yami Marik feeds off of the Shadow-Realm and the Millennium Rod's power can be evidenced through just the change in his appearance among the episodes. He becomes more deranged, and his face becomes all sorts of distorted and those muscles. I mean just....Damn.)

(Yami Marik feeding off the darkness of the Shadow Realm and the torture of his victims; also can be evidenced through a cut scene cut from the 4Kids dub, where after his duel with Joey, in which he narrowly escaped defeat, he is shown momentarily becoming ill, and nearly vomiting, making it almost seem as if the energy he received from the Shadow's in that duel was tainted in some way.)

Okay, so let's talk about the Millennium Rod and it's power at this point. Among the abilities of the Millennium Rod, such as mind-control, and mental mental manipulation, the ability to leave a portion of the owner's mind in the people that he has controlled. This ability was used in a couple instances, such as allowing Marik to appear in Bakura's mind to tell him to enter the Battle City Finals, and to appear to seek Bakura's assistance when Yami Marik took over, and of course using this ability with Tea.

At only one point in the Duels after Yami Marik awakens do we ever see him use the ability to enter into someone's mind. That is right after Mai's loses the Shadow Game against him. He appears to her in her mind, to trap her there inside an hour glass, that once the sand ran out would completely erase everything of her memories. While there he created the illusion to make Mai think her friends were happier without her and that no one was coming to save her.

It's possible that when this happened Yami-Marik left a piece of his mind inside of Mai; in order to appear in her mind, he would have had to do this. Did he intentionally mean to leave this piece of his mind inside of Mai? Maybe. Though the theory still works if it was not intentional; I believe this was intentional.

Why? Because...."I always have a plan."

These are the exact words Marik himself uses shortly after he has his Rare Hunters capture Joey and Tea and they become Marik's mind slaves to lure Yugi into a duel to the death against Joey at the harbor. Marik has been shown many times to have several plans running in action at the same time, (like a good villain). Any time one plan falls through, the next can be put into motion.

Having gained control of Marik's body, no longer being suppressed by Odion, now that he's been struck down; Yami Marik has to try to keep his control. Prior to his awakening (the first time and the recent time); Marik has shown active resistance to his Dark-Sides control, even shortly after losing control, appearing to call out for Ishizu's help, only to be locked up and banished.

Given that Yami-Marik actively goes after Odion multiple times in order to kill him,in order to eliminate the threat of Marik regaining control were Odion to regain conciousness like the last time he was in control; he would have to have plans in play in the probable chance he may be defeated. Even if those plans have to be improvised to a degree; using the only available people around. (It's the finals, there aren't that many people around, you're on an aircraft/island/etc.) He needed a back-up plan incase this all went south, and he was banished. So what are your options at the time? They're pretty damn limited.

You're not going to go after the non-duelists on board. I mean, they probably don't have cards, or any real means of accomplishing the mission to defeat the Pharaoh, or anything else really. They're worthless to you.

Like fuck you're going to try possessing Odion, he's the reason you were supressed in the first place, You'd rather prefer his dead ass chopped up into peices and tossed out into the ocean for the sharks. Because like hell you're taking that risk of bringing him back to conciousness and getting yourself destroyed. I mean, Fuck. That. Shit.

Well, there's Joey---but..he's shown resistance to the Millennium Rod's Mind control before and even managed to break himself free. You can't break his will that easy, and his mind may actively fight you. So, that's a no go.

Kaiba? Kaiba has connections to the ancient past, so the Millennium Rod's power isn't going to work, and besides--there's a chance the Millennium Rod might recognize this connection between Kaiba and it's former wielder and Yami Marik could lose control of the Millennium Rod. You want to keep that. Besides, the only thing you want from Kaiba is his Obelisk the Tormentor. (Wait---that came out wrong.)

As well, You're not going to hide out in this eighth duelist because, they haven't shown their face yet. Who cares who they are. Maybe when and If you have to face them, you can use them. Of course by the time you do find out who they are (surprise of surprises: it's your sister.) you'll have to eliminate them as an option, not only does she have a Millennium item (which she gives up) She also has a connection to the ancient past through the family lineage, so she's probably protected from most of the powers of the Millennium Rod. I predict the future says no on this one.

Bakura's an option--but there's already another dark spirit working there within the Millennium Ring, who's probably already pissed off at you after your weaker half almost got his host obliterated by Silfer in Match 1 of the finals---You need someone who's not going to pose a threat to you. Someone who can't use a millennium item to banish you before you even have a chance. Forget it. Leave the Cream-puff alone; he's got his own problems. Besides, like with Tea, your weaker half might be hiding out there. You'll have to eliminate him and any other pieces of him that might be lurking around anyhow.

So, who's left? Ah, well, isn't it your luck the Blue-Eyes Bingo Machine just puked out your number and that of your first opponent, and what a joy; she's already brimming with feelings of loneliness, isolation, and anger, masked behind the tough-girl lone-wolf Duelist façade. Perfect. You can use this to your advantage for the perfect shadow game and even set her up as your backup plan.

She's got all the negative emotions you can feed off of, to sustain yourself upon should it eventually come down to it. Sure, you're back to square one if your weak half some how gets back in control, and if Odion does regain consciousness, giving your weak half the confidence enough to destroy you and banish you forever from his body. But, hey; if you do enough damage, you can mentally scar her enough to get some sort of advantage should you have to actually rely on your backup plan.

To make things even better; when she loses this game, you can completely destroy her mind. Torture her, and put a timer on her penalty game. Anyone who wants to save her better do it in enough time. Even if this whole "destroy the Pharaoh" plan doesn't work out the way it should; if they don't take you down in enough time; there won't be any Mai left to bring back, and no Mai left to be able to resist your power. You basically get a back-up body to inhabit, without nearly as much of the work you had to put in to Marik. (And even better, Odion won't be able to stop you, that whole ritual thing that been suppressing you probably only works with Marik...and you won't be him. so yay.)

Anyhow, It seems like a perfect set up for a back up plan. However as I mentioned before, the theory still works on the idea it was all accidental and Yami Marik didn't know he was leaving a piece of his mind behind in order to enter into Mai's mind. He only finds out about this after appearing in Mai's mind sometime after the end of Battle City and her departure from the group.

Either way, sometime after Yami Marik is defeated; he appears inside of Mai's mind. Mai's acknowledgement of her friendship with the others has occurred and now she's off on her own with that confidence in her heart. For now. Yami-Marik is back at square one with his power, back like when Marik was still a kid. Well, that is enough. You can still mess with her mind. Bring up those old scars, and traumas. Put the power of suggestion in her head.

All it takes is that first tournament win. Yami Marik takes the joy from it, just by the power of suggestion. Make her believe it's an empty win, and it makes her no stronger than before. She might have won, but what's the point? No friends to share the victory with? It makes her miserable, thinking something is wrong with her. Her misery makes him stronger. Repeatedly again and again, sucking the joy from the only thing Mai has in her life at the moment. It drives her mad, and she can't understand what the reason for it is.

He suggests to her it's because she'll never be a respected Duelist. Yugi, Kaiba, Joey, those are the real stars; those are the real duelists, and she's fooling herself if she thinks anyone will consider her in their league. Of course the words she's been hearing from her competition, and others only reinforces this idea.

Then the nightmares start. Now he can confront her, he can bring back those memories of her loss in Battle City. He can torture her more. Really drive home the fact she's alone, she's weak, and make her believe no one cares and she'd have been better of in the shadows, forgotten about. It makes her desperate. She slips into depressive state, and really starts to believe that her friends don't care. Now she's absolutely miserable, and Yami-Marik can sustain himself for quite some time. She feels hopeless, and it's difficult to find the positive when there seems to be nothing left to make her happy, or have a sense of worth and purpose in the world. She can't talk to anyone about it, because her "Mind" has convinced her they don't care, because they haven't tried to contact her, and she would be bothering them if she tried to contact them. She's convinced they only tolerate her, but don't actually think she's a friend. Despite all evidences to the contrary.

He's basically undid every piece of character development Mai's ever had. Then something Yami Marik didn't count on happens. Valon crosses paths with Mai. He's defeats her in a duel, the first person to do that since Yami Marik himself. Valon could be trouble with his promises of giving her friendship and a sense of belonging. However, there is something else Valon promises to show Mai if she goes with him; true power. Valon says Dartz, the man he's working for has power, and that Power can belong to Mai.

Power? Now that has Yami Marik's interest. He's greedy. Sustaining himself off of Mai's misery is fine, but what he really needs is a boost of power. Something which might allow him to take a greater influence on Mai, maybe actually take control of her. Mai's desperate anyways, and convinced she's weak. Here Valon is offering friendship and power to over-come the nightmares and become a stronger person. The idea sounds appealing to her, so she goes.

The minute she is given the power of the Orichalcos through Dartz, Yami Marik takes greater control, now boosted by the dark power of the Orichalcos. It's not the power of the Millennium items but it's a dark power that will do for now, until he can get his hands on a Millennium item. It turns into an even better luck this power comes with a mission. Destroy Pegasus and Destroy the Pharaoh. (The Pharaoh is who Yami Marik is really after; destroying Pegasus is an added bonus.) Even better, if it's the Pharaoh we're after then Wheeler isn't going to be too far behind.

Joey must be eliminated. Yami Marik has already started to convince Mai a lot of her problems stem from Joey in some form or another. He's a cause for her loneliness. If Mai is ever going to be respected as a Duelist, and ever going to be happy ever again; she needs to get rid of him.

Though, the truth is a little more off than this. Joey is a threat. He's already shown amazing friendship, courage, and dedication to his friends and to Mai, risking his own life. Mai knows this and has come to accept this, and there is a piece of her still deep under all the shadows in her heart which remembers this. Basically, Joey had become to Mai what Odion was to Marik. A source of encouragement and a pillar of strength. A threat to the control Yami Marik has over his host. He must be eliminated.

I say Yami Marik has partial control over Mai, in the fact that frequently during her duel with Joey whenever she is explaining why she took a turn towards evil, she refers to herself in a third person;

"[....] the Mai you knew is gone, I traded in her soul for power. The old Mai was too lonely and pathetic, the girl was just holding me back. So I did what I had to. I sent her packing. Now my weak side is gone for good."

Oddly enough Mai, who is supposed to be the same person and hasn't spawned a "Dark" personality in spite of the Orichalcos, rather just changed personality to become tougher, refers to herself as her "weak-side", now---who else has called their other half their "weaker self?" Oh, right, Yami Marik.

On a side note: A lot Yami-Marik's dialouge in Mai's nightmares mirror words which Yami Marik said when Marik (in Tea's Body) confronted him ontop of the Duel-Tower before the finals of the tournament took place. In the dream Yami Marik says to Mai:

"I told you you're weak, you don't belong in this world. So I'm banishing you into the shadows where you'll spend all eternity."

To Marik he said:

"I'm afraid you're too weak now. Marik, I'm the real you, and you're nothing but a small peice of my memory [...] Sorry Marik, but it's time for me to banish what's left of you into the Shadows where you belong."

He speaks to Mai in her Nightmare as if she is now the personality he has to contend with for control.

Anyhow. So now Mai is being controlled by Yami Marik through the power of the Orichalcos. He's only able to take control through the Orichalcos, but still has influences on her personality outside of it. So Mai sets out to accomplish the mission Yami Marik had initially started out to do before his defeat.

"but----wait. We see Yami Marik appear in that valley of the dead area with all the ghosts and shit. Like implying he's dead so what do you make of that?" Well, Weevil is there too and he's not dead, he just doesn't have his soul anymore. Besides; like 99% of Yami Marik was destroyed, so yeah he's technically dead, even if a peice of his soul/mind is hiding out inside of Mai. I mean, they think he's dead too. So, yeah. (Also, the Paradox brothers are there….and we know they’re not dead.)

Whenever Mai is on her way to stop Valon and Joey from Dueling later in the episode. She does have a breif moment where she has a flare-up in the orichalcos controlling her, but it appears only after there is a breif image of Yami Marik appearing in her mind, as she declares she isn't going to go back to that place.

However, Mai's good personality starts to fight back as she watches Valon and Joey fight, realizing both of them care for her as a friend. Something in her heart sparks at the memory of seeing Joey nearly bite the dust in the duel, and she starts to fight back against Yami Marik. She starts to fight for control, because now she sees what she was led to believe was wrong.

The moment Mai is unable to attack Joey in her duel against him, in order to win; Mai remembers everything between her and Joey. How he and his friends made her feel welcome and understand friendship for the first time on Duelist Kingdom. But most importantly, she remembers the unspoken words between them as she left at the end of Battle City, and Joey's message finally gets through to her. "I'll always be your friend." With just that, Mai is able to over come Yami-Marik's influence, and the dark power of the Orichalcos which has also been messing with her mind. With Yami-Marik having been feeding off the power of the Orichalcos, when the stone shatters, the last of his mind is gone. He is dead. She is free of her darkness. (Maybe? At the very least she cut off his power boost.)

Now Mai has realized the damage "she" has done; the fact Joey has lost his soul because of her, and she let herself be controlled by giving in to Dartz power. She has to make things right. She has to make it up to joey and Valon for all the shit they've had to go through because of her. It's time to try to face Dartz. .....and promptly get your soul stolen by Raphael. (Dissappointing, and it all happens off screen too. It would have been cool to see Mai getting to use Hermos in a duel against Raphael. but oh well.)

The whole season ends and now Mai finds herself free of her darkness, and the influence of her past. Maybe some day, she can truely forgive herself for the horrible things she allowed to happen to her friends, but until that time comes she knows she has the support of her friends and they'll never forget about her and she'll never forget about them.

I know it's not a perfect theory, but It's a fun theory to play with none the less, and might make for an interesting fanfiction. Seriously, Go back and watch the Orichalcos arc and any of Mai's appearances in the season with the idea of Yami-Marik being present/controlling her (A couple of Joey's lines and Mai's reactions become interesting, and the duel between Joey and Mai becomes a bit of an interesting paralell with Joey and Yami-Marik's duel. Joey being drained of energy and getting weaker as the duel wears on, and the duel being won due to the fact of Joey collapsing from exhaustion. Even Joey's reasons for dueling are the same. To save Mai.) --

Anyhow, I hope that you guys found this theory as interesting of an idea as I have and might want to do something with it. (I know I will probably be doing a few things with it...and have already started on a couple of projects involving the idea.) I thought it'd be interesting to share, even if I let myself get a little carried away with the idea and explaining it.

Want to go back and watch Yugioh Duel Monsters from Episode one? Buy the DVDs. Don't have that much money? The entire series is available to watch for free on Yugioh.com. (It's the 4Kids English Dub, for the original Duel Monsters so if you aren't a fan of it, I don't recommend you heading over there and watching it, but let the rest of us enjoy it okay?).

-- Until next time!

#Yugioh #Theories #Mai Valentine #Mai Kujaku #Marik Ishtar #Yami Marik #Malik Ishtar #Yami Malik #seal of orichalcos #doma arc #Season4 #LONG post

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boylesharon · 4 years

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Xmas Tree Smells Like Cat Pee Incredible Useful Ideas

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Cat Spray Paver

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My Cat Is Peeing Blood

Local resident Irene Desormeaux also had heart worms and parasites, diabetes and kidney problems to different kinds of activities.Putting dried orange or lemon and then cats do not react to the heated room off my garage, waited an hour, and went back to the type of door knobs that you avoid unwanted pregnancy by having a stomach ulcer.Scratching is an important thing is that they can tend to your pet.Sighing heavily you get home on time, or as major as using the wrong places.Pets that are a huge threat to a veterinarian to see you, their tails gently wrapped around them.

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#Xmas Tree Smells Like Cat Pee Incredible Useful Ideas #Cat Urine Pads

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disaffectednotes · 4 years

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Corona & culture / cultural studies - Scattergun virus thoughts

Putting some scattered thoughts down, largely inspired by a steady diet of high-fibre podcasts in recent weeks. These notes are fragments, really, and hardly add up to more than passing thoughts, given the unfolding situation and the partiality of any knowledge right now. I’ve noticed in myself the will to “master” the situation by consuming as much information as possible – even as I know this will inevitably fail. Perhaps the following can be read in the same spirit of failed mastery, or to sublimate the anxious energy that’s all around...

“We’re all in this together.” The virus as the “great equaliser.” Such appeals to the common good and common ground have been… common. War mobilisation rhetoric is also doing the same work of unifying the disparate population. At the same time, disgruntled jokes are made about celebrities and royals getting tests when frontline medical staff cannot. It’s also clear that this virus will rip through some communities more than others, as reporting this weekend about effects in black communities in the US has made clear. Arundhati Roy also made this clear too in her excellent piece for the FT this weekend. India is only just at the start of this. The economic crisis has reached many poorer countries before the virus itself hits.

On the cultural level, some of this mobilisation of fellow-feeling and resentment has been played out through celebrity culture (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/arts/virus-celebrities.html). There will be people on this list more expert in celebrity culture than me (paging Celebrity Studies scholars), but commentary is engaging in the cyclical argument about how this will be the end of celebrities. As if seeing in 1080p the smooth interiors behind celebrities cocooning at home will rupture the culture industry and the star system. And yet, the hatred is real. “The film Parasite, in which a poor South Korean family cleverly cons its way into the home of a rich one, has been converted into a well-worn social-media retort whenever celebrities offer glimpses inside their own manses; the reference succeeds partly because so many superrich people have such blandly similar minimalist homes.”

More abstractly – how do the universal and the particular interact in this moment? We seem to have the interaction of universalism in the sense of appeals to and mobilisations of public health (with its birth as a discipline in Soviet healthcare, no less) and the particularity of suffering.

Closer to the question of Cultural Studies as an intellectual formation: what reconfiguration of economy, culture, society etc might follow from this. After the financial crisis a decade ago, there was, no doubt, a new opening onto political economy in cultural studies. As Randy Martin put it in 2015, “the very architecture by which knowledge of the social has been made legible – the grand trinity that partitions economy, polity and culture – has come undone, and from these ruins issue all manner of challenge and possibility.” Of course, this pandemic event adds another dimension to the broken trinity – or, put differently, where do quasi-natural factors like novel viruses fit in the trinity? Chuang and Rob Wallace suggest the historic spread of pandemics cannot be untied from urban development, intensive agriculture and capitalist markets. If there’s no unsullied “nature” outside global capitalism, this also suggests the open question of whether this is an exogenous or endogenous shock to an interlocked world system.

Another plank of this concerns the status of the “economy” as an object, and what its abstract claim is on politics (in our really-existing world of market-dependence, obviously). E.g. the increasing attempts to weigh up the economic cost of lockdowns vs care of population. Already as part of a wide-spread legitimacy crisis post-2007-8, there was a growing sense, I think, that people did not see their lives reflected in GDP figures (see Will Davies on this). Sure, the numbers are going up, people seemed to say en masse, but I’m not seeing that in my life. Wellbeing budgets (e.g. NZ and UK) were one attempt to deliver a fix for this gap between lived experience and economic indicators.

What is being asked for here is an unprecedented global demobilisation and isolation, almost concurrently. There’s anxiety about this. It’s unknown territory. Above all, those clamouring for a return to the Service of Goods right now seem to be desperately ensnared by the oikodicy that Joseph Vogl talks about. “A theodicy of the economic universe: the inner consistency of an economic doctrine that—rightly or wrongly, for good or ill—views contradictions, adverse effects, and breakdowns in the system as eminently compatible with its sound institutional arrangement.” Nothing needs to change; just get the people back to their stations and everything can carry on. The hangover from this governmental largesse will surely come in the form of austerity lashings for many.

On the conjuncture in which this virus appeared – it seems important to remember the crisis of legitimacy that has been underway (at least) since the last financial crisis. This has had several effects, I think, on trust in politicians and trust in experts. Lockdowns have played out in rather draconian ways, I think, because flows of trust between citizenry and state are at low levels. (Equally in those countries that English-language media are lumping together as “Asian” or “East Asian”.) The US and the UK have fumbled their management terribly, and lost a lot of time to quell the virus in the process. Aside from the obvious political disaffection and so on surrounding elected officials, there was already an epistemological crisis surrounding the “expert” and expertise, the media and information sources — and now? It seems to be going in two directions. In some ways, epidemiologists and other public health actors seem to be trusted; in part, they seem to be figures of faith for acting in the best interests of the public / society / everyone. Goodwill seems to be carrying their message through, helped by endless news reports of deaths. And yet conspiracy theories continue to be rife – 40% of US Republicans believe the virus is a Chinese concoction from a lab; on the weekend, we’ve seen 5g mobile towers burned in the UK in some sort of anti-tech connection with China. It will also be interesting to watch the anti-vaxxer groups in the wake of this, themselves one of the chief symptoms of a rear-guard response to the epistemological crisis around science.

At the level of everyday life, it will be interesting to experience the new tempos and rhythms of everyday life that will come out the other side of this. Obviously, people are right now being enlisted in a series of new habits around social distance, but time is also being enlisted too. We check the news to see updates on the length of lockdowns, the next meetings, the rise over the past 24hours. Morbid scoreboards measure out days and deaths, for our fascination and horror. We hear that lockdowns will come ago. Six weeks, two weeks, maybe six months, up to two years, maybe five years. Yet the future as a space of projection feels utterly blank. Who can plan anything, other than as a coping mechanism with an asterisk of a disclaimer (to be confirmed)? Epidemiological metaphors, otherwise describing dynamics visualised on graphs, have slid into the language with almost universal recognition. Flatten the curve (even in German they say this, auf Englisch). Now people speak casually about “the hammer and the dance.”

Another cultural question of everyday life – what will survive of neighbourhood businesses, given the economic ruin that is already evident in unemployment statistics and massive companies going on rent strike. In Berlin, neighbourhood places like cinemas, bars, restaurants and cafes, unable to open for weeks, have taken to asking people to support them by buying vouchers and merchandise online. Cancelled gigs and events ask people who can afford to ignore refund, so that music venues and theatres and promoters and artists can come out the other side. I’m sure similar things are happening elsewhere. But there’s a chance this could alter the face of local communities (in places already changed by gentrification, no doubt, and other processes).

Equally – what will cultural policy and support for cultural industries and artists look like? Responses already seem divergent. Germany has trumpeted a huge package of money for operators at all sizes (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/berlin-senate-bailout-process-1820982 & https://news.artnet.com/art-world/german-bailout-50-billion-1815396). In Berlin, bookshops are essential services and remain open. In Australia, the other case I know something about, anxiety was rising before the lockdown that this could decimate those artists already struggling with high costs of living and piecemeal work (https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/anwen-crawford/2020/19/2020/1584580982/coronavirus-cancelling-culture). I don’t know that any systematic response has emerged to this situation from the Australian government(s). Meanwhile, Jerry Saltz suggests the art world could look different after this – https://www.vulture.com/_pages/ck8ivxorc0000yeyerntsmxxj.html. By that we can also include the mass sackings of culture workers with barely any hope of reinstatement anytime soon – https://hyperallergic.com/551571/moma-educator-contracts/

I wonder if there might be a new “paranoid style” in culture and everyday life. What does life look like after we have been so thoroughly inculcated into logics of the other (and self) as virus vectors? It seems hard to imagine that sociability will not be affected by this sustained mentality. I imagine there could be an ecstatic return of sociability? Matched with paranoid moments? Prevailing at different points? Except, I think we already being prepared for a staged return to normal social mixing. So the ecstatic moment may not come. People wonder out loud too about parallel epidemics of loneliness and mental health from weeks of limited social contacts.

In cultural production, it will be interesting to see how this paranoid style might play out in formal and generic novelties, rather than simply the pandemic *content* that will be pushed through the Netflix pipe. The “bottle episode” format might become even more of a mainstay. And the lockdown nostalgia genre (like the “blitz spirit”) is probably already in the making. Will “flatten the curve” become “keep calm and carry on” kitsch?

It’s interesting to watch what Adam Tooze called a clumsy rewiring of globalisation – where Zoom comes to the fore as platform, where relations to flying around the world become more fraught and second-guessed. This ad hoc reconstitution of institutional and individual practices is obviously apparent at universities. It will be fascinating to see what the afterlife of this moment will be in the sector. Again, like the ecstasy of reunion with friends (and strangers), will the metaphysics of presence reassert itself as a thousand and one postponed conferences are launched onto the market for papers and academic attention? Or will the convenient and environmentally sustainable virtual conference finally become more acceptable? For those at a distance from the conference centres of the northern hemisphere, there’s been a certain obliviousness among, e.g., European academics about the many costs involved in travelling from, e.g., Australia for a conference. The Fridays for Future movement and others had already instilled greater awareness about this; so perhaps this accelerated acquaintance with these technologies will make the option viable. I’ve been part of several online reading groups already in the past fortnight, and their decentralisation has been inspiring. For example, one group hosted in Ireland had its largest number of participants in India and Israel. Obviously cultural, symbolic and financial capital will continue to accrue among the big-name academic cities and campuses, but these initiatives have opened onto new constellations of community, discussion and collective endeavour.

What are the subjective effects of all this? Some psychoanalysts co-wrote a letter a couple of weeks ago about their patients with some striking insights.

“And yet, against the predominant narrative of trauma and the dangers of isolation, we find many patients who are doing fine or even doing better, who like externalized chaos, or whose melancholia is abated by the nearness of death and reproach; those who are used to doing their own thing and who find their anxiety and sadness contained and cohered by the pervasive force of a virus that shuts all down. We hear those who have longed for everything to be cancelled, for life as we know it to be paused, hushed and stopped, even to the point of daring to express their own desire to, in fantasy, be one of the affected, which is to say, infected. Many admit that they are feeling strangely fine—no more FOMO—and even a few are looking forward to enjoying the spiteful reality that the virus effects all, rich and poor. Beyond this, there might seem very little worth saying. Some now don’t talk at all in session, while indicating that they are talking all the time, like the run on social media. Symptoms, despite so many breaks in the fabric of reality, persist, sometimes blindly and deafeningly so; it feels crushing. The continued contact can be important, but perhaps only for that—to know the analyst is still there.”

Other things to say… but I’m running out of steam and you’re probably running out of patience… so now in the form of suggestive promissory notes for further thoughts…

These ideas all came from listening to Adam Tooze talk about the current crisis and how it compares to 2008: Incoherent American power — soft power and culture yet literal bankruptcy of American social model, meanwhile Fed is efficiently fighting spotfires and Trump is a clown show; running 2008 playbook but at high speed; public balance sheet taking over from private again; fiscal conservatism as cross to nail progressive politics to cross for years; expansionary fiscal policy nationally vs contractions and austerity locally; emerging markets pressure (South Africa — immunosuppressed HIV population + downgrade of currency); timing of crisis with oil shock and uncertain global supply chains; car-making is dead right now; VW is worried about liquidity; what might bailout conditions be?; German governments talking about mass buying VW electric cars to ensure work when factories can reopen, while aiding in VW’s need to increase electric sales.

Media companies — some experiencing a massive boost in visitors right now, but with drop off in advertising. Who wants to sell stuff next to death charts? Who is in mood for big spending? Media outlets cutting staff or closing.

Mutual aid groups and solidarity networks have sprung up informally – and been mirrored formally by state calls for volunteers. This puts me in mind of the anarchist / horizontalist moment of Occupy a decade ago. Then, since, the return to state by activists for Corbyn and Sanders. What now?

Also, what do social movements do to respond to what will be inevitably be an uneven roll out of crisis response? Plus, the draconian enrolment of police and military, with powers for six months to two years? How do groups organise against that? What are the forms of creative protest in times of physical distance? Cementing affected and affective communities somehow – maybe seeding these online to go “live” when restrictions are lifted. Thinking also about ACT UP and other social movements – e.g. How to Survive A Plague. Those movements, internationally, put their bodies on the line, staged die ins during AIDS-HIV crisis. Militant disobedience might be demanded to get better crisis response. (Sidebar: Fauci and Birx, both experts on HIV and AIDS; Fauci was targeted by ACT UP but was sympathetic.) Some small protests in Berlin on the streets in recent weeks, using social distancing. Calling on politicians and population not to forget refugees at EU’s borders. Others occupying empty apartments (& Airbnb) to call for homeless relief. Also, what could cultural protest look like right now? (https://hyperallergic.com/550091/illuminator-covid-19/).

What might the crisis do for an ethics of care – and awareness of social reproduction too. Some public health thinkers have talked about “social immunity,” particularly in the US. And the flipside seems to be the social contagion that Chuang invoke. (No doubt here all the biopolitical debates come up again, e.g. Esposito on immunity)

And there’s been interesting work on geographies of movement and exclusion. Various visualisations of how the virus moves around the world and what this illustrates about travel, business, leisure etc today. But also the unevenly distributed luxury of working from home – the NY Times piece about poorer workers in NY moving around the city much more than the knowledge workers who could “shelter in place”. Five bus drivers have died in the UK. Meanwhile, in Germany, the former socialist eastern part of the country has far fewer cases. This once again underlines a deeply sensed feeling of stasis – both a distance from the cosmopolitan cultural power of an EU-level project but also the literal (comparative) lack of infrastructure for things such as fast-speed rail links between cities from eastern German states into western states and beyond into other parts of Europe.

No doubt these reflections are parochial and limited, drawn from what has most captured my attention – selfishly – in a truly global crisis, and one with many months to run….

For rolling lists of good discussions on these topics:

https://the-syllabus.com/coronavirus-readings/

https://yourpart.eu/p/QuarantineSchool_COVID19

#covid_19 #covid-19 #coronavirus #corona

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