#especially cause the dude does in fact value human life | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

edoro · 1 year

Note

dunno if you're particularly into the series at all, but if so, I'm curious about your feelings on the sibling/familial dynamics in gravity falls

oh anon, i was very into Gravity Falls! i have three fics published to my main ao3 account and a hidden disused tumblr full of spicy problematic shipping fics because i am who i am.

i think they're really good! there's a lot going on there. i like the tension between Dipper and Mabel, how one of them wants to grow up too fast and one of them wants everything to stay the same, and the way they clash and argue but are ultimately always there for each other. they clearly love each other a lot and have a far more supportive and functional family structure than the Stans did, but they still have their issues.

Stan and Ford meanwhile are an on-fire garbage can and i love it. these two are soooo fucked up. these twins have every single issue. love their wildly dysfunctional and abusive upbringing (cannot BELIEVE a number of people sincerely argued that their dad was not abusive lmao) and the way they both project so bitterly onto each other. love Stan's clingy codependence because he doesn't feel like he has any value outside of being attached to Ford, and Ford's simultaneous enjoyment of having a built-in scapegoat and hanger-on and someone to feel superior to AS WELL AS being smothered to death and wanting to just escape and create his own individual identity.

i love how messy and difficult the Stans' relationship is too even as adults, like, how they just can't let go of all the pain and wounds of their childhood or all that deeply held resentment towards each other. i have to say that insofar as i'm on anyone's 'side' here, it's Stan's; i understand Ford intimately, and get exactly why he felt and thought the way he did (and does throughout the series), but he's an asshole who scapegoats Stan as the cause for every single bad thing in his life because that's easier than examining 1) the larger systemic factors 2) the role their Entire Family Dynamic played in it 3) his own responsibility and also 4) the fact that while what happened with the project and his dream college chance sucked, for sure, having to go to a shittier school and work hard is... idk just not that fucking bad lmao.

like sorry dude but the pain and trauma of having to attend a second-rate college and really devote yourself to standing out does not compare to being kicked out of your home at 17 and made homeless, and it's something that tons of people deal with, and frankly i think a huge amount of Ford's anger about that imo is based in the fact that he feels like he's better than that and deserves better, and has spent most of his life seethingly furious about the fact that the world around him does not recognize his talent and superiority.

(which is very much a coping mechanism for feeling like the only thing he has going for him IS his intellectual abilities - nobody values anything else about him, and it feels like his only way out of a future of grinding misery, so of course he retreats into self-obsessed misanthropy. i understand it very well, but i have enough distance from my own period of Being Like That to recognize that it's a selfish and assholish way of viewing oneself and the world, lmao.

and to be clear i'm not bashing Ford here, i think he's a lot of fun and an excellent character and very relatable - he's very human, and i love that. he's messy and kind of shitty and struggles to be better, and it's extremely understandable.)

i think the way that we see Stan recreate his own childhood dynamics with Dipper is interesting too... the way he treats the twins is very, idk, i guess it's a very familiar sort of pattern to me. Mabel is a girl so he can form an emotional connection with her, that's safe, and she can be his silly special princess who he loves and spoils, but since Dipper is a boy, they can only connect through the Rituals Of Masculinity, which especially in Stan's case are extremely toxic and damaging.

so Stan ends up perpetuating his own abuse on Dipper, albeit less severely - i 100% believe Filbrick physically abused his kids, and i think sometimes Stan might skirt that line, but i don't think he'd ever raise a hand to either of the twins. he is absolutely emotionally abusive towards Dipper, especially earlier on in the show before they kind of reconcile in terms of Dipper thinking Stan hates him.

that's just really interesting to me! i always love that examination of like, how this sort of thing echoes down generations. you can see the fingerprints of Stan's father in how he treats both of the twins, the attitudes he brings towards them...

also Ford is like, wildly irresponsible lmao. the whole thing where he starts like, taking Dipper into his confidence and having him keep secrets and trying to get between him and Stan and Mabel... like i don't think he's doing it on purpose or has malicious intentions, he's just lonely and kind of stunted and really likes this kid and sees himself in him and is not really able to look past that self-projection to who Dipper actually is and how they're different, but oh man.

(the potential for writing it AS deliberate grooming is off the charts tbh. i'm still waiting for someone to come up with that fic because there's just a lot of potential there.)

so, anyway, tl;dr is that i think the sibling/family dynamics in gravity falls are really good and complex and layered, with a lot of pain and tragedy in there, but also a lot of love and striving to do and be better.

#gravity falls #abuse #csa (briefly implied)#asks

25 notes · View notes

in-tua-deep · 3 years

Note

Oooooo the red bock au sounds so interesting! Does Five caught himself thinking of his brothers just as numbers and weapons like Reginald talks in his book? Does he read Vanya book to remind himself that they are still human even though he reads it through lens of someone hurt by them all? And I feel like the handler would know either way about the books but o it's so much fun to see five being paranoid

I think having both books and both perspectives reminds Five that... he’s getting some very biased accounts of his own siblings. I think that when he’s still young, he writes down as many memories as he can remember because... he starts to forget, at some point.

Vanya’s book talks about how volatile Diego and Luther’s relationship is, and so Five writes down the time Luther and Diego teamed up to toss Five off a balcony when Five kept switching the pens in their hands with pipe cleaners during a lesson (and he will maintain until his dying day that he was just practicing his control, c’mon guys!)

when Reginald’s notes call Allison an “insufferable, narcissistic creature,” Five remembers Allison bribing him to cause trouble and distract Reginald so that she could use the microwave unobserved to heat up some water bottles as makeshift heat packs for Luther’s sore muscles

when Vanya calls Ben “easily manipulated,” Five recalls Ben arguing theories with him at 2am after one of Ben’s training sessions where Ben almost flipped his bed when Five jokingly suggested that he could use the horror’s tentacles to bounce up and down like a pogo stick before Ben tackled him and tried to beat Five to death with an encyclopedia of sea creatures (affectionately)

I think having Reginald’s journal actually helps in a lot of ways, because Five automatically autocorrects literally all of Reginald’s thoughts to be like, mostly inaccurate and much harsher than they need to be. So when he reads Vanya’s journal he also autocorrects and is able to recognize that it is a very biased and somewhat harsh view of his siblings

(he doesn’t distrust them as much as he does in canon, with only Vanya’s harsh words to cling to with no reminder that they were all raised by a man capable of unfathomable cruelty, no reminder that authors can be oh so biased)

outside of his equations, there’s notes to himself written in the margins of Vanya’s book. Sometimes they’re just small, pointing out that Klaus had fought to include Vanya in trap week (Klaus then proceeded to team up with her and managed to catch Five in a snare - he actually still has a scar around his ankle from his upsidedown thrashing before he managed to steal one of Diego’s knives to cut himself down) or pointing out that Luther’s chilly attitude when they were ten was probably the result of Vanya outperforming him in every standardized test they took because of Luther’s ridiculous inferiority-superiority complex

at the very least he has comparison, because Reginald’s book calls Klaus an absolute failure while Vanya’s book called him “sweet, as a child at least”

As for the Handler... she’s aware that he has Vanya’s book and a red notebook, but I don’t think she actually knows what’s in the red notebook! Reginald was notoriously secretive, after all

So the Handler assumes that the red notebook is where Five keeps his time travel equations because aw, he hasn’t given up! how cute!

She makes an assumption that, logically, makes sense. Of course Five is still trying to figure out time travel, no matter how much he denies it! Of course he’s writing the equations down! What a silly boy, thinking that he could hide this from her, of course she knows about his little plans to save his siblings ;3c

And because she’s so powerful and knowledgeable and one step ahead all the time, she makes an assumption and assumes that it is fact. Because she’s so smart, of course she isn’t wrong! She’s had Five clocked from day one!

(The Handler thinks she has Five all figured out, a creature so based in sentiment. Why would he carry a book around that details the torture his siblings went through? He hates his father, why would he ever carry around his father’s notebook! The Handler has a fatal flaw, and it is that she doesn’t understand loyalty and sneers at sentiment and those are two of Five’s most powerful driving factors. Five lives for his siblings and would die for his siblings, almost his entire life has been dedicated to saving them. Not the world, just his family.)

(She understands that Five considers his family to be exceptionally valuable, but doesn’t comprehend that Five is 100% willing to die for them should it come down to it. Why on earth would anyone value something like siblings over their own life? Absurd. I genuinely believe that the Handler thinks she could get Five to betray his siblings with the right leverage, and so she fundamentally does not understand Five as a person)

To be fair to the Handler, the whole academy’s morals and just. completely and utterly fucked. Luther condemns the murder of innocent civilians even if it would save the planet but doesn’t blink an eye at killing the ‘bad guy’ Commission agents. Diego stabs criminals as a pastime while still holding himself at a moral high ground for saving people, despite the fact that too many criminals are forced into crime by unfair circumstances. Allison used her powers to bolster her career without even blinking but now refuses to use her powers at all because of the manipulation of one (1) child, not even against ‘bad guys.’

I mean. Vanya wrote an entire salt book without consulting her siblings that had lasting impacts on at least one of her sibling’s career in the public eye and potentially impacting her siblings relationships with everyone who had every read the spark notes on her book, without the opportunity for reprisal. Publishing your entire family’s dirty laundry as personal emotional catharsis is... kind of a dick mood, lets be real. Especially when you were all abused children raised in an environment of excessive violence and rigid structure.

Like yeah, of course Allison is good at manipulation and lying - she grew up with an abusive and over-controlling father. She probably lied as easily as breathing about where she’d been, who she was with, what she was doing, etc. The only privacy they got in that household was what they seized with their own hands and carved out for themselves! Is it fair to say that Allison’s superpower is dishonestly?

Is it fair to say that Klaus got crueler as he grew? He was tortured and turned to drugs as an unhealthy coping mechanism, and then he sat down at a table and looked at all the other little kiddies who did not get locked into a crypt overnight. In fact, there was one child who never got any extra training at all! Can you imagine the jealousy? The bitterness? Klaus might have been exceptionally cruel to Vanya as a teenager, she had everything he wanted and dared to complain about it. Can you imagine listening to someone wistfully wish they could join in on missions when you know that the cost for doing so has been carved out of your soul?

My point is, none of these little bitches have anything that resembles a sane moral compass. They’re unpredictable as fuck! It’s like herding cats! You never know what they’re going to do next! Oh? Are they going to investigate in any logical pattern? No, because Diego just remembered Patch exists and helping her print flyers for the annual police ball is more important than saving the world or whatever lol

Luther is over there investigating the moon! The moon! Meanwhile Allison is breaking and entering her sister’s student’s house because she got shady vibes off of him one time and she has never heard of a proportionate action in her life.

Meanwhile Vanya is going through the phone book trying to call up psychiatrists who have any familiarity with whatever fucked up meds Dad put her on because like, she would like to Not Be On Them (fuck you dad) but also understands that danger of quitting cold turkey something you have been taking for years and would like a professional opinion on how to safely decrease and eventually eliminate her usage, thanks (Klaus is hanging over her shoulder pointing out the ones who will sell you non-prescription drugs for a price and Vanya mentally crosses those ones off of her list to call)

Five is probably joining on the breaking and entering because Allison promised she would sweet talk to eye dude if he did her this solid

(Five complains at length about how investigating the apocalypse should not be a solid because she would 100% die as well if the apocalypse came to pass)

#the red book au #plus like. some thoughts and opinions lmao #look Vanya's book was healing and cathartic for her #does that mean it should have been published?#FUCK NO #it's biased as all fuck for starters and could genuinely impact her siblings jobs and relationships #anyway the hargreeves are all cats #they do their own thing regardless of what they should be doing #their orders of priorities are fucked tbh #what do you mean vanya's job isn't equally as important as saving the world?#she has to pay rent somehow five !!#klaus is down to go threaten a seedy dude but can they investigate dad's will after pretty please?#maybe there's a clue! or numbers about inheritance!#if dad disowned them then diego is forging the will tbh #not because he wants the bastard's money but it's the PRINCIPLE of the thing #Anonymous #long post #far tua long

135 notes · View notes

vodkassassin · 3 years

Note

My dude, my gal, or maybe nonbinary pal (just to be sure, don't know your pronouns) you gave me the light, you have opened my eyes. All this ships I didn't know I needed and now can't get enough of. Your writing is a DELIGHT. For a prompt, how do SQH's disciples see him? What about the demons under MBJ? That one shot of LQG getting jealous of MBJ in which the underling backs away slowly means this isn't the first time that has happened right?

Thank you so much! It really makes me happy to hear that people enjoy reading my stuff. It’s half of what makes writing it so enjoyable for me. Another part I enjoy is how I seem to be dragging all you poor fools down with me into my shipping abyss of rare pairs. God bless.

I went with the demon perspective! Might do a disciple perspective next time? Idk. @quiensecomioelpie

—

As an agent of the Northern kingdom, Mao Liang is required to attend strategy meetings whenever they are present within the palace. Regardless of whether they had just returned from a long, grueling mission in the field only the day before, or not.

Luckily, there’s never that much attention brought to them, and Mao Liang is never expected to share their opinion or thoughts during the meeting, only directly to his majesty and the advisor afterwards. A relief, because if Mao Liang had to speak to the dozens of generals and high ranking soldiers and fellow agents that stand around the colossal, war room table alongside them… Well, that’s a crowd, isn’t it? If Mao Liang was forced to publicly speak, they might actually die.

Someone who doesn’t seem to ever have a problem with addressing a crowd of demons, though — be they gruff soldiers or generals or a glowering, looming king — is someone that is worth admiring.

Lord Shang pulls his furs around his shoulders more tightly, attention directed almost entirely on the maps sprawled out over the table they’ve all gathered around today. His head tilts toward the side just slightly, like a predator whose eyes have zeroed in on his prey, and Mao Liang has to fight the urge to shiver at the sight.

The odd twitches that they see in their fellow demons tells them that they, too, experience the same unease, so at least they’re not alone in this.

It was an odd thing, at first, to fear a human — much less a cultivator. In the beginning, as Lord Shang was just ascending into his climb for power in the Northern Kingdom, it had been something Mao Liang had been almost offended by. Just as any demon in their right mind would be, faced with such a slight, twitchy little thing, whose eyes rove to and fro as if they are a frightened animal. It screams of weakness, to any demon eyes.

Any demon that doesn’t already know better, at least.

Within the decade, however, it became clear that this feeling did, indeed, have its place in Mao Liang’s heart. That they were not experiencing a falsity. That Lord Shang, despite his diminutive appearance, is deserving of this respect, and not just because his majesty is so fond of him.

Not only is the cultivator powerful — Mao Liang still shudders in remembrance, whenever there is a storm in the sky strong enough to birth lightning — but he is conniving. He is intelligent to a terrifying degree. He is scarily efficient, productive, and reliable.

When Lord Shang says something will be done, it is done.

When Lord Shang says changes need to be made, they are made, no matter how many voices make their dissent known (nor how many idiots have, over the years, attempted something much more underhanded — they all fail, each and every one of them, and eventually the attempts were fewer and fewer, before just completely grinding to a halt).

If Lord Shang decides you are not fit for a position….

Well. In the beginning, he’d have just taken care of it himself. Through varying means, all of them increasingly terrifying, according to the rumors Mao Liang has heard over the years. Now, though…

Now, if Lord Shang decides someone has to go, the king himself is ever so obliging to make sure that it happens, often post haste.

So much power in the palm of a single person, even if he is an immortal master — it’s awe-inspiring.

So, Lord Shang indeed deserves the respect he commands from the heart of every Northern demon, and even those beyond their borders. However long it had taken them all to realize (and then accept), the state of the kingdom in recent years has been thriving more than it ever has in the past. Things haven’t been this good since perhaps the early golden age of the current Mobei Jun’s great and mighty ancestors. And they all know exactly who to credit that for.

“Here.”

Mao Liang startles, gaze snapping down to the map and zeroing in on where Lord Shang’s dainty (and deceptively powerful, mustn’t forget that) finger is tapping on an outlined enemy outpost.

“Eliminate them, first.” Lord Shang says.

“Ah — my lord?” One of the generals hedges awkwardly, tone coming out rather flat in his attempt not to offend — as it happens with most demons, their accents when speaking the common language does not leave a lot of room for niceties and polite speech. It’s caused a lot of scares with Lord Shang, where the demons under his attention are never certain if they’re about to get banished from the kingdom or executed by the king (which would be a mercy, certainly).

Mao Liang winces, covering it up by clenching their jaw tightly and eyeing the general who spoke from the corner of his eye, as Lord Shang turns his attention directly upon him.

The general is standing ramrod straight, shoulders stiff and brow pinched, when the advisor’s aquamarine gaze cuts to him. The demal shouldn’t have spoken up at all.

“What is it?” Lord Shang asks, pleasantly. Mao Liang feels a shiver wrack their spine.

Lord Shang is always pleasant, right up until he isn’t. It’s when he isn’t, that one has to watch out for oneself. But it’s ever so difficult to know when that caution is required, because Lord Shang is unpredictable, in a sense.

It takes a lot to truly and irreparably offend the honorable advisor. The last one who had…

They’re still scraping the poor guy’s innards off the wall of that conference hall, Mao Liang is pretty sure.

“That outpost…” the General begins, haltingly. He eyes the peak lord hesitantly, searching the neutral mask for any sign of displeasure, before continuing. “It’s not very important in the grand scheme of things, my lord. The enemy does not particularly value it. To expend our forces on its destruction would, I believe, be a waste of our resources at this time.”

There. Succinct and to the point. Mao Liang cranes their head around to peer at the advisor, who stands at the head of the table.

In the shadow of his majesty’s great bulk and dark glower (which is currently directed at the silently sweating General, poor demal), Lord Shang looks so much smaller than he actually is. Almost breakable. Non-threatening.

Mao Liang has never heard a more hilarious joke in their life. Non-threatening, their ass.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” And oh, there is cheer injected into the advisor’s voice, now. Mao Liang watches in fascination as the general visibly cringes. “Ah, but that’s where you’d be wrong, General Peng! You see, this particular outpost actually is rather important, especially to our enemy. They’d just like for us to think that it isn’t. The larger outpost, here?”

Lord Shang sweeps his hand across the map to the larger outline that’s much closer to the Northern borders.

“That seems more of a threat to us, just like you pointed out earlier. And I agree, it does seem that way — however, this larger outpost is only a decoy. A red herring, if you will. It’s larger and more heavily manned specifically to distract us from this smaller outpost over here.”

General Peng flinches minutely, having his own contribution to the meeting so effortlessly and nonchalantly thrown back into his face as only an incorrect assumption rather than a logical deduction. He doesn’t speak, though, even to ask the advisor where he’d gotten such information from.

No one ever asks Lord Shang how he knows something. Everyone knows that if Lord Shang knows something, then he just knows it, and you are to trust it, because he is never, ever wrong.

It is frightening enough, having the advisor of the king know your name, personally, without you ever having introduced yourself to him. Small, meaningless facts about you, the names of your family, where your clan ancestral ritual grounds are (something that no demon tells anyone outside their own clan, upon pain of death. And having that just thrown out there in casual conversation? Terrifying.). What you had been doing, while undercover, just the week before….

Mao Liang’s first meeting with the Peak Lord Shang had been memorable, to say the least. They had come out of it with a very, very healthy fear and respect for the man, of course. Ask any demon in the Eternal Winter Palace — hell, any demon in the damn kingdom itself — and they would tell you the same.

“It’s this outpost we have to worry about.” Lord Shang is saying, tapping once again on the smaller outline. “It’s the center of their operations. Everything that actually matters is hidden underneath it. It is absolutely crucial that those of you in the field ensure that it will no longer be a problem. You should take, I’d say, around three platoons.”

Mao Liang glances down at the outline. The outpost is tiny, nestled into the belly of a valley. Just looking at it, they would guess there are only perhaps a thousand demons in total guarding the place. Sending in six thousand soldiers to take it out is a bit of overkill.

But, then again, if the real operations are all happening underground, concealed….

General Peng’s lips thin into a pale line. Then, the demal nods in acceptance. “If Lord Shang says so.”

“I do,” Lord Shang says, quietly, not even lifting his gaze back up from the map, staring down at where his own finger is pressed to the outpost.

General Peng’s entire face goes pale.

Before anything else can happen, like Lord Shang going completely silent and unhelpful (It’s happened in the past, Lord Shang deciding that they no longer required his advice, if they were so certain of their own (always subpar) intelligence on the matter. His majesty’s ire, in response, had been absolutely brutal on everyone even peripherally involved. Mao Liang had been lucky enough to not have been in attendance at that particular meeting, but they’d heard stories.)— before anything like that could happen, the king himself decided that enough is enough.

Mobei Jun shoves off the table and sends them all a sharp glare.

“Well,” his majesty says, powerful voice expanding into the air and filling the cavernous war room like it was something material. “You have your orders. What else do you want? Get out.”

As they all scramble to their feet and head for the door, Mao Liang is at the forefront. They hate tactical meetings. They’d rather be on the field. Or in their quarters, sleeping. Or in their quarters, reading. Anywhere that other people are not. This meeting has already drained their meager energy levels to almost nothing. It’s nap time. It’s nap time.

“Mao Liang,” Mobei Jun’s voice calls, and they fall to an abrupt stop just before the doors. “Stay behind.”

Demons, generals and soldiers and even fellow agents, stream past them, and they quietly despair. Fuck! They’d been so close!

They turn, and step back to the table. They execute a bow, working to keep any expression off their face entirely — especially when Lord Shang smiles at them. Oh, ancestors.

“There’s a mission that requires the best counter-intelligence agent that we have,” Lord Shang begins, as flattering as ever, and Mao Liang knows immediately that they’re in for a lot of work. Dammit. “Here, follow me. There’s no reason to do this in such a drafty, echoing hall. I’ll debrief you on the way to the kitchens.”

Ah! Mao Liang hasn’t eaten since yesterday! And from the glimmer in Lord Shang’s eye as the man smiles, he knows it too.

Another thing about Lord Shang, that Mao Liang particularly admires, is how the man cares, despite everything else. If you ever work directly underneath Lord Shang, you can always be absolutely certain that he will look out for you.

In the Northern Kingdom, there is no place safer.

#svsss prompts #shang qinghua #mobei jun #scum villain's self saving system #demon realm #war strategies #demons #demon spy OC #vodka answers #vodkassassin fanfiction #quiensecomioelpie

122 notes · View notes

crystalkleure · 3 years

Photo

Haha hey remember that post I made awhile back, speculating on what a bad idea it might be to fuse dead things in the godless Frankenstein fossil machine

Meet White. He is a reanimated corpse. Two of them, actually. Or more like 1.5. [And I whipped up this half-assed partial reference sheet in one night instead of sleeping, so don’t look too hard at the chickenscratch lineart and visible guidelines, and kindly ignore the total lack of shading as well as any other messy jankiness.]

White is a product of me wondering not only about what happens if you NecroFuse a human with a Pokemon, but also what happens if you make it even worse and specifically fuse that human with a Pokemon capable of mega evolution. Because canon seems to imply that mega evolving is at best deeply uncomfortable -- and at worst outright agonizing -- for whatever creature is going through it.

Character Lore under the cut. Lots of text:

White is one of actually multiple undead guys who got mashed together with bits of dead Pokemon. They’re science experiments, so they've got the dex numbers of the Pokemon they're spliced with tattooed on the backs of their necks, and those numbers were treated as their names In The Evil Science Lab.

In his Original Life, White [and some of his buddies] got gored to death by some escaped Horrible Fucking Monsters that were accidentally [...and then not-so-accidentally] created via Two Pokemon At Once In A Fossil Resurrection Machine, because hey, it is SUPER easy to think you got Just One Thing's Bones from an excavation dig but then later you realize that Some Of Those Bones were from something TOTALLY different that just died in the same place. It happens. So, some Fossil Scientist People accidentally resurrected an Abomination, realized they fucked up pretty fast...and then started wondering if they REALLY fucked up or if this is Cool, Actually. And then the team of Science People split into two Morality Factions, with one half being like “This is unethical as shit, we need to make sure this doesn't happen again because it's not natural so who knows how this poor fucked up creature is suffering” and the other, cooler half being like “WE NEED TO DO THIS AGAIN RIGHT NOW BECAUSE SCIENCE. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES HOLY SHIT.”

Cooler group splits off from the Horrified Group With Morals, and they promptly use their Science Knowledge to Construct More Machines and Make More Monsters. Doesn't take too long for them to realize, however, that Abomination Pokemon are stupidly hard to control, because not only are they suffering, their masters obviously don't care for their wellbeing, so Revolt Inevitably Occurs and they escape to wreak havoc upon the nearest congregation of townspeople. They promptly maul some people to death at a nearby local rock concert, scientists chase after them to clean up the mess, realize “Oh Shit, Manslaughter Charges Impending”, and then realize...

Science Guy 1: “...Hey, what happens if you put a dead person in the fossil machine?”

Science Guy 2: “Hey, people probably listen better than Pokemon. We can, like, TALK to people.”

Science Guy 3: “Lads, I got a stellar idea just now. And we got plenty of Dead Guys to start with right here! Great way to hide the bodies too, probably.”

This goes approximately as well as you would expect, and precisely as ethically. A smashing success!

However, because they Fucking Died, the reanimated Newly-Monsterized dudes do not remember shit about who they were pre-resurrection. They're not technically even the same people, they’re more like clones. They've been remade. So, all they know now is Science Lab Life, and they have no initial attachment to eachother aside from "that other guy is also a Science Experiment Person just like me, so Same Hat @ Labrat Neighbour ig", in spite of several having been friends or even family prior to death. They also just...don’t know/remember things in general. They are fresh blank slates. And to a morally-bankrupt team of scientists, that’s perfect! They can train these guys to behave however they please!

...However, people might be People Instead Of Animals, meaning they can be Reasoned With And Manipulated And Coerced far better than animals due to their far better communication abilities with the Science People, but...there is Still A Problem in the sense that Holy Shit, A Person Can Only Take So Much. You can only treat someone as "Experiment [number]" for so long, blatantly putting no value on their life outside of The Value Of Scientific Research, in spite of literally basically needing to raise them like a normal child due to the Lack Of Memories issue. Eventually they're not gonna be able to take that anymore and they are gonna Fucking Leave, too. And they’re gonna be much harder to track down than the rampaging Pokemon were. Impossible, actually, once they’ve ripped out their tracking chips.

So then there's just these monster dudes, who don't actually know what they are because they weren't ever told anything more than necessary to get them to cooperate with Tests And Experiments, just Escaped Into Civilization and having NO idea how Anything works. Fun! Especially considering how, at first glance, these just look like Normal Dudes. Their monster bits either aren't apparent or just look like funky body modifications.

They've also got Science Things in them and they Don't Know What The Fuck Those Things Even Are. They've just got these little Devices in/on their chests, and they were never informed of the exact functions of them because there's no reason to explain to the experiment What Is Happening, just that the experiment needs to Hold Still and Cooperate and Now Do This, Now Do This, Now Do That, Good Job That's Enough For Today, etc.

Those devices contain both key stones and mega stones.

If you were a Mad Pokemon Scientist, you would most certainly be interested in the mega evolution phenomenon. What would YOU do if some of your Undead Fusion Experiments happened to be spliced with bits of Pokemon known to be capable of mega evolving? You’d kill two birds with one enigmatic set of stones, that’s what you’d do. Your Frankenstein Experiments can even TALK to you and tell you exactly what they are experiencing when you run tests on them! It’s perfect!

So, if a rock-bearing monster’s heart rate goes too high, part of the little device, which is a barrier between one type of rock and the other, opens up and Exposes One Rock To The Other Rock. Which exposes the monster to the Rock Energy Reaction. The greater the stress, the higher the dose. And I’m sure you can see the snowball effect that’s gonna create, at least the first time or two.

They were INTENDED to eventually be made to Physically Fight With Eachother to gauge the effects of The Rocks™️ when the Guys With The Rocks are under Stress and need to Do Some Self-Defense. The Science Squad was basically trying to suss out the Actual Purpose of mega evolution. Because mega evolution is weird -- it puts ENORMOUS stress on the body of whatever is undergoing it, so the hypothesis was that its true power is probably drawn out best via a perceived life-threatening situation, like it’s a type of hysterical strength, because what else would cause a need for that kind of ability. And aren’t ethics a bit overrated?

So, there’s our premise. White is just wandering around without any particular purpose outside of never ever going back to Science Hell, and he has no clue what the funny little doohickey buried in his chest does until it activates one day and absolutely fucks him up [...as well as everyone around him. Mega Absol radiate an Aura Of Sheer Terror that can literally scare people with weak hearts to death if they’re not careful.]

And now, some Miscellaneous Character Info:

The bit about Lots Of Death happening at a rock concert specifically was important. White was actually the vocalist of the band that was playing. He doesn’t remember that now, but he still loves music and has the same strong vocal cords. And THAT is important because White is partially an Absol now and Absol naturally learns Perish Song. These Fusion Monsters are absolutely capable of using Pokemon moves, though whether they’re aware of this is a different matter entirely. Imagine what happens when they end up tapping into those abilities accidentally.

That band was a relatively-unknown little local band. White was by no means anywhere near famous. Very few people even realized he was gone, and most of the ones who would have noticed also ended up Equally Unalive.

That black stuff between the belts on White’s arms is mesh. Like, stocking mesh. It gets Ripped The Fuck Apart when he goes Mega Mode and his arm fur gets Extra Spiky. Hence one stocking being a bit tattered in that reference pic. He frequently has to replace those things, they are fragile.

“How did White get his name if he doesn’t remember his original name and didn’t have a real name in the lab” I am glad you asked! Post-escape, he eventually encountered a situation where someone asked him what his name was, he bluntly told them “I don’t have one. I am #359.”, they said “Well That Is Not A Name, I need something proper to call you”, and he was just...Super Apathetic. So, the other person picked out the name “White” just based on the fact that White’s hair is white, and he just shrugged and rolled with it.

As you can see in my Incredibly Quick And Rough Sketches, the backs of White’s shirts are open to accommodate that huge amount of fur that bristles out into false wings when he goes Mega Mode. Because his Actual Normal Hair is relatively long and overlaps with that fur, it blends in with his Actual Normal Hair and doesn’t look too odd [when it’s down]. Probably mostly because nobody’s expecting it to be anything OTHER than Perfectly Normal Hair That Just Happens To Be Very Long.

White does not particularly like violence. White does not want to beat you up. He will, though, without a bit of hesitation, if there’s some logical reason he feels like it’s the most practical course of action. Being essentially raised by Cold, Emotionally-Sterile Scientists With No Care For The Wellbeing Other Living Beings uh, tends to affect a guy a little bit. White has a bit of an internal dilemma regarding “It would be efficient for me to just Harm This Other Person to defuse the current situation, because attempting nonviolence will be overall more risky somehow” vs. “Holy shit it feels bad when I hurt people. Why does it feel bad when I hurt people. Is it...SUPPOSED to feel bad when I hurt people?? No one ever felt bad for hurting me.” He Figures Out How Empathy Works Eventually. He is a good guy at heart. He is a Monotone Snarker, but not actually Cold or Malicious at all.

If an Absol can do it, White can probably do it. He has incredibly keen senses and a STRONG ability to Detect Impending Doom. He has exactly the amount of Supernatural Absol Powers you would expect. He is also stupidly physically strong, way more so than he appears to be.

White can’t punch people. Look at the fist he’s making in the pic, he’s doing it wrong. If you punch someone like that, you WILL break your own thumb. That’s not a Revving Up To Sock Someone pose, he’s just tense. He’s using his thumb as a buffer between his long-ass Sharp As Fuck claws and the flesh of his palm. If White tries to punch anybody, or just makes a proper fist at all, he will impale his own hand on his nails. Like, all the way through. He CAN slash straight through things like metal and bone with those claws, though.

White...is unsettling. Completely accidentally, and unknowingly. He just radiates an Aura Of Intimidation [...or Pressure], even when not in Mega Mode, that scales depending on his mood. Just being near him tends to put people and Pokemon on edge. Thus, he’s generally avoided.

The latter point is especially unfortunate, because White’s preferred method of Socializing and Bonding is to just kind of quietly hang out in the same room as whoever he is trying to Socialize and Bond with. He just wants to, like...chill out Near A Buddy and watch a movie and share a bag of chips or something. His social skills are predictably not good.

#DO YOU LIKE MY TOTALLY NORMAL GUY #HE SUFFERS #He's pretty though and that's what actually matters here right #I need to draw the other Totally Normal Guys sometime too. White is Part Of A Set.#Pokemon #CK's art #OCs #I have Long Pointy Fingernails myself can you tell

12 notes · View notes

linkspooky · 4 years

Text

Hawks and Chisaki: Birds of Prey

There are a lot of takes of Hawks’ actions in the past few chapters lacking nuance. People either seem to want to claim Hawks has no choice in his actions whatsoever due to being a victim of the system as wel, or claim Hawks is only capable of betraying Twice because he’s a sociopath who doesn’t feel any attachment at all. In order to help elucidate the nuance behind Hawks’ actions, and to illustrate that someone is capable of being both a victim of the system, and also choosing entirely on their own to do bad things that perpetuate the system. They can simultaneously be a victim of the system, and a part of that same system. There’s a difference between a bad victim (a term used to compare the experiences of two victims, and try to dehumanize certain people’s reactions to trauma because they’re not acceptable or easy to digest) and a victim who does bad things.

Hawks is still a person. A person choosing to do bad things. So to explain that let’s compare him to Chisaki. Hawks already shares several things in common with Chisaki, but this isn’t just my comparison the story itself draws comparison between the way the both of them exploited Hawks.

1. Sinners of the System

Chisaki and Hawks are both foils. Even if Twice had not pointed it out that they were both people who took advantage of his trust, the two of them are both foils by virtue of both being Shigaraki foils. They are both vulnerable children who were taken in and raised by their respective institutions. Chisaki was raised by the Yakuza, and Hawks was raised by the hero commission. They are also both victims of the system who have a grudge against their respective systems, and want to take drastic actions to reform them.

They’re people who take the number two slots in their respective organizations. Chisaki isn’t truly the head of the yakuza, he’s just acting in the boss’s stead because the boss is currently comatose. Hawks is the number two hero. Despite their ambitions both of them technically act as subordinates instead. Hawks considers it his job to produce the number one hero, and no matter how high he is in the rankings he’ll always be following the orders of the hero commission. Nobody recognizes Overhaul as the true leader just the replacement while the boss is sick.

They’re also characters defined by their extreme amount of dedication to their cause. Their determination is so strong it becomes a dangerous trait for both of them because neither of them can hit the brakes. They always go too far with no restraint for what they think is the right thing.

They also both share a bird motif. Hawks and Ravens have an important trait in common, both birds are known for their tendency to eat carrion. That is they will scavenge carcasses that have already been killed either by other predators or other circumstances. They both hunt roadkill. Chisaki and Hawks are both disadvantaged people who target people who are similiarly disadvantaged, and therefore perpetuate the dehumanizing system that they themselves were raised as a part of. They were taken advantage of, and now they take advantage of others in a similiar manner. This is why Twice makes the comparison, this is why both of them exploit the guy in the league who is far too trusting of others.

Yes, Chisaki is a bad person. He’s done far worse things than Hawks will ever do. However, Chisaki doesn’t do bad things because he’s a psychopath or a person lacking any empathy at all. He was raised in incredibly similiar circumstances to Hawks, and because of that they both show similiar symptoms of their upbringings.

I’ve seen a lot of people blame Chisaki for being a bad egg entirely, instead of looking at the environment that raised him. The problem with Chisaki is not that he turned out differently from what the yakuza boss wanted him to be. The problem with Chisaki is that he turned into exactly what he was raised as. He is the perfect tool for the Yakuza. His entire existence is devoted to continuing the yakuza’s existence at any cost.

Just look at the way the rest of the Eight Precepts of Death act. They are people who have no value at all besides their use to the yakuza. Chisaki was most likely raised in a similiar way. He was someone taken in and raised not as a child, but as a tool to the mafia with no value to his own life. The old man had no problem using him as a tool for violence. Then he acts surprised when Chisaki acts the way he was raised, as a person who only cares about the interests of the yakuza to the sacrifice of everything else.

Chisaki was raised by the yakuza system since childhodd and because of that he embodies the worst flaws of the Yakuza and organized crime. He's violent because organized crime is violent, he takes advantage of the weak and disadvatanged and uses them only to forward the interests of the family and his own crimminal empire because that is the way organized crime works. Chisaki simply has no pretense. He’s a violent man in a violent system. He shows the system for what it really is on the surface, instead of hiding behind ideas like honor. He’s not bad because he’s a bad yakuza. He’s bad because he’s a perfect yakuza, he turned out exactly like his boss intended to raise him, the boss was just deluded about how the yakuza acted. If you raise a child like a tool they’ll turn into a tool at the expense of all else.

Chisaki and Hawks are both children who were taken in by the system, and because of that they literally have no identity outside of the system they were raised in. They literally both discard their names. Chisaki hates being called Chisaki, and Hawks is surprised someone knows him by anything other than his hero name.

They are also both people who were taken advantage of specifically because of their quirk. Chisaki has a powerful quirk that can reform and distinegrate people at will, whereas Hawks has a quirk that makes him extremely efficient for rescuing people as a hero.

They’ve both been reduced entirely to their use to others. Hawks was trained to save others at the expense of himself. Chisaki believes the most important thing is that the Yakuza’s dignity be protected. They were both raised to believe their most important value was their utiliatrian use to others. They are both stripped down as people and only defined by what they are capable of, especially in regards to the power of their quirks.

Children who are not raised in healthy environments in their developing years have trouble developing into fully rounded human beings. They have several developmental issues, especially when it comes to their identity and ego. Hawks and Chisaki have difficulty being independent and making independent decisions because so much of their lives were out of their control. They only exist inside of the system. They can’t imagine themselves as independnet, fully developed human beings who are entirely self-reliant and capable of making their own decisions outside of the system. They only exist inside the system. It’s all they know. Which is why they ultimately make choices to perpetuate the system. It’s the only thing they find identity in. Hawks chooses to protect the hero system, Chisaki chooses to cling to the Yakuza, because they don’t know who they’d be without it. Even though both systems are clearly flawed and antiquated they both make choices to protect those systems in order to ultimately protect themselves and the only places they’ve ever had to belong.

Chisaki’s actions psychologically are those of an orphaned child trying to protect the only home he’s ever known. Even to the point of completely destroying and taking advantage of another orphaned child.

Hawks despite all his scheming can’t imagine a life where he’s not a hero, even though he’s never allowed to be anything outside of a hero even in his ideal world he’s still a hero, he’s just a hero with some time off.

Chisaki can’t be anything other than a yakuza. Hawks can’t be anything other than a hero. They are both capable of inhumane actions because they don’t define themselves as human beings, but rather as tools who are committing their actions for the sake of other people.

There are ultimately very human rationales behind inhuman actions. It’s important to understand that these characters while they do not see themselves as human, are still just dudes. Hawks is a dude capable of choosing, Chisaki is a dude capable of choosing, the choices they make are in reaction to horrible circumstances but they are ultiamtely their own.

2. Projection

So now that we understand the circumstances that led to Chisaki and Hawks’ ratoinale, we now can explain the rationale behind their choices. Remember, Chisaki and Hawks are both people who only know their existence within the system. Hawks only understands a life within the cage being protected by the cage, even though the cage is ultimately something that restricts his freedom. They’ll alway choose to cling to the system with their current world views, until those world views are disproven or broken.

Hawks and Chisaki are both characters who feel inferior, less than human. They’ll always feel lesser because they were raised to feel lesser. They weren’t raised as individuals but rather raised to be completely dependent on the people who want to control them.

Hawks’ deepest subliminal thoughts are about how he’s never going to be enough to put people at ease. Hawks is a hero considered a prodigy, and he always prioritizes saving others above everything else to the point where every single one of his feathers is dedicated to it. However, what kind of hero does Hawks believe in the most? A hero who believes in strength above everything else. Because that’s the kind of hero that the hero system says needs to be the number one hero. Despite the fact that his philosophy as a hero is the opposite of Endeavor’s, he puts Endeavor into the seat of power because the system has told him that Endeavor is the ideal.

Chisaki and Hawks are people who feel inferior and rely on a psychological mechanism called projection to deal with those feelings of inferiority. This is the main reason for Chisaki’s germaphobia, he believes his own quirk to be monstrous but rather than confront his own feelings of inferiority he projects it onto other people (Eri, etc.) and believes that everybody is sick.

Psychological projection is a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

It’s a way of denying the problems you feel within yourself by instead assinging those problems to others and blaming them instead. Chisaki’s not sick, his quirk is not wrong, the entire world is sick with the exception of him. It’s a mechanism for avoiding among other things guilt. If Chisaki makes Eri out to be the true monster than he’s able to avoid the guilt for his own actions.

We see Hawks do the same thing with Twice. His actions are heavily introduced by projection. That is, rather than talking about Twice he’s actually talking about himself several times.

Hawks says that the ones who don’t give up, the ones with wills of steal who need to be put down. This is Hawks talking about himself. He knows that he’s doing something wrong right now, but can’t stop himself. Rather than confront his own actions, he puts the blame on Twice. Even though Twice is the victim and Hawks is the perpetrator, he makes it out to be Twice’s fault for resisting him.

Even the “chance” that Hawks offers to Twice is entirely projection based. Hawks is not offering Twice a chance because he cares about Twice’s wants and needs as a person. Hawks is doing it entirely to relieve his own guilt, for personal reason, because he likes Twice.

If Hawks actually listened to what Twice wanted, he’d show more care or regard to his friends. However, Hawks doesn’t want to help Twice, he wants to help himself.

Event he offer he makes is not what Twice wants. It’s what Hawks thinks is best. He offers Twice the chance for conformity. He offers Twice the chance to go through what Hawks himself went through as well. A chance to be reintegrated into society and useful for others.

Hawks has projected his wants and needs onto Jin entirely as a person. To the point where he doesn’t even listen to what Twice wants, and shuts out all of Twice’s attempts at arguing back with him.

In Hawks’ narrative, in his point of view to the world he’s being a good person and offering Twice a helping hand, but when Twice disagrees Hawks just ignores him. Hawks is making a choice here not to confront himself and instead rely on projection. Hawks. Chisaki. They both continue the cycle of abuse. They themselves are reduced to tools by their respective system, and because of that they also tend to see other people as tools and strip them down to just what their use is. That’s why Chisaki’s way of saving others is telling them that he can make use of them. That’s why Hawks’ way of saving others is telling Twice he can be useful to society again.

They both have taken advantage of people like Twice and Nemoto who just want someone they can trust. They both ultimately choose to kill the people who’ve chosen to trust in them.

And it’s because they as people ultaimtely don’t trust anybody. While Hawks and Chisaki are victimizing people who are in similiar disadvantaged states as they are, they are utlimately victims. They’re pitiable. If Hawks failed, if Chisaki failed, the Heroes Association and Yakuza would juts abandon them. They take advantage of people who have nowhere to go, nowhere else to belong, but they themselves are people with no one in this world either.

Hawks is someone who has genuine difficulty reconciling the two sides of Twice. He knows Twice as a person who genuinely trusts in his friends and just tries to make the people around him happy, and Twice who is capable of summoning an entire and is struggling between reconciling both of them. He ultimately chooses to just treat Hawks like a threat instead of a person, and that’s when Hawks just falls back on what hero society taught him rather than trying to change his view point.

The same way that Chisaki is the embodiment of the worst sins of the mafia, Hawks becomes an embodiment of the sins of the hero system. He sees a person crying and begging for help right in front of him, and rather than choosing to save them, they choose to kill them as a villain. Hawks becomes someone equally violent as the villains he is fighting against.

Hawks’ actions are deeply personal. He wasn’t told to kill Twice, heroes aren’t supposed to kill, he came to that decision all on his own. He also is someone with a deeply personal connection to Twice who is struggling over his deision. He’s not acting eficiently as some kind of super spy. He’s desperate to prove that his narrative his way of seeing the world is right, however the framing of the narrative disagrees with Hawks’ actions.

If Hawks was doing the right thing he would not be attacking someone who is begging and crying for help. He would not have finished Twice by stabbing him in the back the universal sign of betrayal. The narrative has outright said that Twice is a good person. Twice himself even rejects everything Hawks says about him and declares it to just be a projection. Twice in the end chooses not to see his life as bad luck. Hawks is not in the right here. He’s not right about literally anything. He’s critically failed to understand Twice as a person, and chosen violence over trying to help a person.

Say what you will about the desperation of the situation, but these aren’t the actions of a hero who saves people. They’re the actions of one victim screwing over another victim. Hawks embodies the worst flaws of the hero system. He considers people who are already damaged, Best Jeanist, Twice, to be acceptable sacrifices for the sake of the peace of everyone else. This is not because Hawks was ordered to do so. It’s because Hawks sees himself that way as well. What’s really sad ultimately, is that Hawks sees himself in Twice.

Hawks is ultimately a victim of the system too. He makes himself do these horrible things because he thinks he has to sacrifice himself. He’s equally as epxendable as the way he treats Twice and Jeanist. He views himself as expendable, and comes to see other people that way. It’s ultiamtely sad that Hawks chooses to stay in his cage forever, because he doesn’t think he deserves the freedom that Twice has. That he chooses the system that has abused him over and over again, rather than the insecurity of trusting Twice. He sees himself as so lowly, and expendable a person he can’t accept Twice’s offer of friendship. The world has denied Hawks’ humanity time and time again, and now Hawks has chosen to deny himself. The hero system locked Hawks in his cage, but ultimately Hawks also chooses to stay locked in the cage because he is afraid of what is outside of it.

He is choosing to sacrifice himself. However, the problem arises when Hawks decides to sacrifice other people along with him. Hawks is not the perfect self-sacrificing he sees himself as. He is ultimately incredibly imperfect and just as capable of doing bad things as the villains. It doesn’t excuse his actions because he’s a hero choosing to do bad things to a villain. The fact that what Hawks is doing isn’t justified, that it’s his own choice that he struggled with, is what makes him shine so much as a character.

#hawks #takami keigo #chisaki kai #hawks meta #lov meta #league of villains meta #jin bubaigawara #mha meta #my hero academia meta #league of villains

520 notes · View notes

evilelitest2 · 4 years

Note

Why do fascists hate capitalism?

Good question. About half the reasons they hate capitalism are the same reason most leftist do, bad people are still likely to be annoyed at a bad thing that hurts them. Here are the other reasons

1) Fascists don’t believe in social mobility. Capitalism core tenant is “social mobility’, that somebody can work hard and become a billionaire, blah blah blah. Now this focus on social mobility is and always has been mostly a lie, but even rhetorically capitalism values the notion of social advancement. fascists do not, in fascist ideology, your birth determines your place in the world, and is part of a “natural order”. The only way to improve yourself is through war, and even that is more fulfilling your existing destiny rather than creating your own. Thus Fascists despises any form of social advancement outside military leadership, which is a major reason why they hate liberalism, socialism and communism, but its also a reason why they hate capitalism (though they usually prioritize the left wing ideologies first). This is even more true for them when somebody they think is “inferior” advances ‘above their station. Fascists aren’t aristocratic, but they hate capitalism for much of the same reason that the feudal aristocrats and monarchs hated it. It brings change and challenges the caste system

(Speaking of which)

2) On that note, capitalism is rarely…ideologically racist. Now capitalism is racist, it promotes and enforces existing racial hierarchies, and much of the damage of colonialism can be laid at the feet of capitalism. However capitalist ideology rarely buys directly into blood purity or “The Volk” style race theory that fascists so love. Capitalism in the US makes it super difficult for a black man to advance compared to his white counterpart, but if a black man does manage to become a billionaire, capitalism is basically cool with it. If you look at a demographic breakdown of the 1%, it is mostly old white men (and almost all people who at least partially inherited their wealth) but it also includes a lot of non white people and women. its a minority and many of them come from dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, China ect) but the ‘richest people in the world club isn’t entirely monochromatic. To leftists, this doesn’t seem especially impressive, but to fascists it is way too much diversity. Because capitalism is at its heart…amoral, the system will keep going even if the 1% are majority non white, gay or women, but to fascists that is terrifying. they barely tolerate capitalism because the ruling class are mostly straight white dudes, but the thought of the ruling class not overlapping with their belief in racial science to them is terrifying

3) Capitalism is ultimately an amoral system. It doesn’t really believe in a larger ideology beyond “make a fuck ton of money” and “innovate…somehow.” It does evil things because it believes that doing so will make them money, if doing the right thing will make them more money, they will. Capitalism is just an utterly mercenary ideology, and will gladly pretend to support progressive causes if it turns a profit. Again, leftists (rightly) aren’t big fans of this, but fascists hate it for the same reason we do honestly.

Like you know the whole “Woke capitalism” thing that gets leftists worked up. its doing something good but you know they don’t care and so they will abandon us the moment they feel like they can get away with it and all that. That is how fascists feel about the racism in capitalism, they like it but because it is not ideological, they don’t trust it.

Again this seems weird to leftists, but yes, fascists don’t like capitalism because it isn’t racist enough. We tend to interact with capitalism more than fascism, so people often don’t realize how much worse it can get

4) Capitalism doesn’t care about the spiritual, except as something to sell. ironically for all the hatred capitalism and communism have for each other, the two ideologies actually share a lot in common, they are super secular, materialist, and basically assume that everything in the world is nothing more than simply products. Communists and capitalists disagree on what should be done with these goods, but neither of them believe there is anything beyond this world.

Fascists utterly reject this world view, they hate it, they hate it with a thousand suns. I know that there current image is a sort of ironic racism chanboard nonsense, but in terms of their actual beliefs, Fascists take everything super seriously. The entire argument of Nazism is that they value symbols more than actual human life, and they are fiercely attached to various “spiritual” political issues even if they are officially atheists. I mean capitalism doesn’t give a damn about “degeneracy” because it isn’t actually a material thing, its just an aesthetic preference, there is no like “measurement” of degeneracy. same goes for honor, the family, purity, and their approach to art, fascism is in many ways about finding meaning in otherwise mundane things. So at fascist rally to them is this transcendental almost religious experience, while a capitalist would be more It interested in trying to find a way to make money off it. Fascism is a highly Romantic movement, which doesn’t play well with the cynical wordy perspective of capitalists, who believe in nothing.

Fascists also dislike aristocracy, but they love the myth and romance that is necessary for aristocracy and monarchy. They basically want aristocracy of the skin.

5) Fascists kinda…hate the idea of money. Like Capitalism emerged from the merchant classes and is basically came about with the argument “all of your aristocratic concerns over honor, titles, and god are stupid, what matters is who has the money and how you use it” And Fascists just hate that worldview, one of their defining traits is their love of war and conflict, in fact fascists prioritize war over almost everything else. It has been noted by smarter men than I (I recommend Ur Fascism) that Fascism is basically a death cult, they want effectively an endless war that they can die gloriously in destroying their enemies.

Consistently by the way, fascists will prioritize destroying the people they see as inferior over securing their own material best interest. Hitler probably could have run his dictatorship in Germany on his own for quite a long time and lived in luxury, but he wanted a giant war because that is what they care about.

in fact actively seem to indulge in self destructive short term ideologies. The Nazi economic policy was an absolute joke, with the economy serving as nothing more than something to keep the war effort going. Stephen Miller, the most fascist like person in trump’s administration, is hyper fixated on a brutal immigration policy, even though it actually hurts the economy. Fascists oppose freedom of movement and free trade, even though those are policies neoliberal capitalism supports. The reason is that Fascists value the preservation of “The Volk” over profits, and would rather their people suffer than have to live alongside other races (these people are deeply stupid)

6) Fascism doesn’t enjoy having fun. I know for most of, our experience of capitalism is misery as we work, to earn the right to work, to earn the right to give, ourselves the right to buy, ourselves the right to live, to earn the right to die. However the way that capitalism sells itself is basically “buy lots of shit and that will make yourself happy”.

Fascism doesn’t really…like being happy. As i said before, they like war, they like conflict, they like having an enemy who they can destroy. To fascists, what matters most is how you kill and how you die, rather than enjoying life. Fascism is about fetishistic death. Pink Floyd was right that Fascism is almost a form of intellectual suicide.

If you look at Japanese fascism, there is big fixation on aesthetic purity focus, with the only thing mattering being conflict

7) Capitalism tends to value the urban, the industrial, and the technology, while fascists, like the Confederates before them, are enamored with the rural and the pre-industrial. This might seem surprising, but there are a lot of fascists who are into environmentalism, Nazis Germany was one of the first states to pass laws banning animal cruelty and limiting smoking. Fascists are really into this sort of “Clean earth, clean people’ aesthetic which always serves as the breeding ground for cruelty.

8) Capitalism tends to be leery of state control and fascists are all about that shit

9)Finally….we need to be frank. A lot of the ways we talk about anti capitalism actually can fit really nicely into the antisemitic narratives that so dominated fascist thinking.

so the Marxist says

“Hey the entire world is controlled by a tiny elite of rich greedy parasites who are making us fight each other in order to benefit themselves”

And the Fascist says

“Yeah….they are Jewish”

its actually really hard to depict the rich as a class without accidentally wandering into anti Jewish sentiments, because the last 2,000 years of anti Jewish racism has been about creating conspiracy theories where they secretly control the entire world. A lot of what fascism does is taking existing issues of capitalism and being like “oh yeah…that is the fault of the Jews. Or migrants/African Americans/Muslims/feminists ect. Gamergate is a good example of this, they are pissed at corporations, but they blame feminists rather than you know…the inherently predatory nature of capitalism. Many of the things we don’t like about capitalism are things they also don’t like about capitalism. This is a major thing they do in terms of recruiting, they focus on getting people pissed at capitalism but then make it be secretly run by Jews rather than you know..Jeff Bezos.

(nazi properganda and below are soviet Images of capitalism )

(and sometimes both)

This is why btw, I am less anti capitalist than most leftists, because talking to fascists makes you appreciate things about them. Hitler was destroyed by both a communist dictatorship and a capitalist democracy working together.

Its worth noting that while fascists do hate capitalism, they hate socialism a lot more, and tend to ally with capitalist to kill leftists, as we see from the Weimar Republic. Fascist are often ok with certain types of corporate authoritarianism, but in the same way the left can be ok with somebody like Obama.

(Frank Miller’s Batman is if Libertarian and Fascism had a baby)

The lesson I would take from this is that just because somebody hates the thing you hate, doesn’t mean they are necessarily your ally, they might in fact be even worse. Yet another reason to distrust the dirtbag left

#ask EvilElitest #Fascism #capitalism #adam Smith #Communism #Marxism #Nazism #Political theory #Liberalism #Imperial Japan #Nazi Germany #Fascist Italy #Alt Right #Gamergate #Dirtbag left

83 notes · View notes

asocialoverthinker · 4 years

Text

I already see hating myself for writing this and @finefeatheredgamer I apologize in advance if it's too.. idk personal, but your vent post hit too close to home and I haven't really been able to stop thinking about it today, so I'm just going to leave this here since the comment section is too small for my too talkative self:

I don't want to give a lecture or pretend like I know what you're going through or why but given I saw too much of myself in that post and I clearly have boundary issues (🤦) I feel like I have to give some, call it advice or a look at my way of dealing with this sort of.. idk mood?

When it comes to the good ol' imposter syndrome, there are times when I feel like shit about everything I've done, no matter how much I've accomplished or been told I've done well; I keep thinking that it's just a matter of time before people "figure out" I'm not as good as they think and will just move on to others who are worthy of their time and attention. That's BS. And I know it is, but it doesn't stop my mind from reminding me of that fear every other day. What does help, however, is taking up any simple, mundane task you can think of that's preferably not people related: reorganising my desk, throwing out old clothes, deleting unnecessary screenshots off of my phone because I'm a meme hoarder and I'm working on it. 🤦😂 Basically, anything that gives you a sense of accomplishment, as small as it may be, without needing anyone's reaction or opinion. Do something for yourself that, as ridiculous as the task is, can make you feel good and make you feel like you've got control over your life and that you've done something *right*, without a doubt. Soon, that feeling will pop up when you do something that you're anxious about and make the IS a little more bearable. (And I know this doesn't do much when you've convinced yourself otherwise but dude, you really are awesome at your writing and art so no, you most definitely aren't bad at everything.)

As for the people around me and their perception of me, along with their willingness to interact with me and in what way.. *sigh* ... There's something that I keep trying to make myself remember and that's the fact that.. we're all different, we all have different upbringings, different personalities, needs, views, attachment styles, etc. All of that results in everyone having different expectations, triggers and way of interacting with others and showing their affection.

That means, IMO, just because someone doesn't have the same view on say friendships as I do, that doesn't mean they value our friendship less than I do if they idk call less often or don't pick up on everything I'd want them to. I talk a lot, I text even more, I often feel like I'm overwhelming and I've even had a moment with my now best friend (a chill, quiet introvert whose every word is worth as much as gold, given how little they talk, especially compared to me 😂) when I've asked them, years ago, why they were friends with me (an ENTJ btw) since I was so obnoxiously loud and talking their ears off. The answer? "I like listening to you, it's fun". In their mind, we were having great time together, while I drove myself mental thinking I was suffocating them.

(Fuck, where was I going with this... Right!) Point is, relationships of any kind are a two way street and affected by both parties and what I've realised is key for them to work is to figure out what you are and aren't comfortable with and communicate.

If you're angry or upset with someone, you can't wait for them to figure it out on their own. Anger (when it's healthy ofc) is a cry for change and channelled properly can result in a conflict with whomever it is that's upsetting you that's going to result in either your relationship growing and changing for the better.. or falling apart which, tbh, if it's causing you distress, it's bound to end anyway.

I've already written far too much so I'll try to cut it short.

People are as complicated as they are simple (fuck that sounds so stupid but I'll try to explain what I mean). You (I'm talking to the both of us, leaving this as a reminder for myself too) can't really affect the way people perceive you or what their natural behaviour is like. You need to figure out what works for you when it comes to human interaction and look for it, but also accept that we're all virtually bound to disappoint each other in terms of fulfilling all the expectations people have of us. As my friend likes to say "if we were all the same and behaved the same way and believed in all the same things, the world would be a very boring place". So don't let your mind overthink every interaction, every relationship, every conversation you've ever had or every mistake you've ever made or someone else has made.

Do people enjoy being around you? Do they want you around? If you're unsure, ask and please remember this: whatever the answer is, it's not just defined by you or caused by you.

Some people are idiots that will treat you like shit no matter how awesome you are. That's not your problem, it's theirs and you're better off without them.

Some people have their own issues and reasons why they behave certain ways and even upset you, yet those reasons have nothing to do with you, so again, they're not your fault.

Some people just don't click well with you, it sucks sometimes but hey, that's life.

Some people are clueless and unaware of the fact that they're making you upset and need to be told that because, no matter how much they care, they could still be causing harm without knowing it. Hell, I'm writing this with the best intentions and could be doing something that doesn't sit right with you and for that again, I'm sorry.

That all being said, I do believe that as different and complicated as we are, deep down we're also simple. (In general, most of us anyway) We want to feel good, we want what works for us and we don't stick around in situations or around people that we don't feel like they are meaningful to us in any way. All in all, you do your part, show the people you care about how much you do, communicate with them and be honest about the things that upset you and finally, let them be responsible for their choices and behaviour too: they wouldn't be with you, whether it's a friend, a partner, a stranger on the internet enjoying your work, if they didn't want to. As for the people who leave, hurt you or cause you anxiety? Fuck 'em, you're better off without them.

.... I said I'd keep it short, didn't I? Oops. *Sigh* I've probably definitely rambled too much but I hope my sentiment was clear. Sorry if this was too much and feel free to ignore it, but I wish it helps you remember that you are great and capable of working through the shit that comes your way. 💜

14 notes · View notes

peripheralsanity · 4 years

Text

Porter Infodump

Since an anon asked my friend @steakbatter about Porter I’m making him a post! Porter Mikado is an OC I’ve had for years as a human but recently decided to make into a fantroll as well :)c More info under the cut!

As a fantroll he’s a fuschia-blood, and as the blood-colour suggests, he’s destined to become emperor. But he isn’t exactly fond of that fate, in fact he hates how much responsibility is pushed onto him without his consent. He’s not the type to act out and resist though, nor does he know what other options he has, so he spends his time living up to expectations while also feeling like he’s aimless in life waiting for death. He’s forced to grow up very quickly and never really learned how to be carefree or relax.

Porter has very strong self-discipline - he’s the opposite of impulsive. He’s ridiculously good at suppressing his own desires and feelings for the sake of more important matters, like responsibility. He’s also excessively harsh on himself, used to placing higher and higher expectations on himself because that’s how he thinks he should be, as someone with so much responsibility he has to keep trying to be better. He can tend towards being self-sacrificing - if there’s something to be done and he decides he needs to sacrifice himself (and only himself) to achieve it, he’ll do it. He’s more concerned about results than the process, and will very easily do something self-destructive to achieve results. This is especially if he decides nobody else will get caught up in it, because he also hates involving other people. As an emperor he frequently locks himself up in his study and overworks himself. He really needs to learn how to be a bit more selfish and value his own life more.

He’s also very concerned about image, e.g. he has the ideal image of “what a good person/emperor” is all mapped out in his head and constructs his self towards that image. He’s anxious about his flaws (that don’t fit that perfect image) being exposed and tries very hard to keep hidden whatever he doesn’t want to show people or isn’t ready to show people. It can be something as minor as wanting to sing but only humming whenever he’s sure nobody can hear, because he’s not confident in his skills. He hates attention and large groups because he has the habit of tailoring his image a little bit for every individual he interacts with, and it’s impossible to satisfy everyone if there’s more than one person. He’s got an oddly mysterious aura around him, by which I mean he can give you information about himself in a way that makes you feel like you know a lot about him yet know nothing about him at the same time. He’s not exactly conscious of this.

But at his core he’s a somewhat lonely person and a real sweetheart. He looks cold but cares more than he lets on, and likes showing how he cares subtly, like taking note what people like and what they care about and bringing it up later. He’s very attentive of how other people feel, and knows how to place himself in someone else’s shoes, even if he disagrees with them. He’s not the best at being overtly affectionate (nobody’d guess this dude’s actually kinda shy), so he gets really touched at someone being affectionate towards him or thanking him/genuinely appreciating what he does.

Some miscellaneous stuff:

- He prefers helping over being helped (it makes him feel like he “failed” when he can’t handle something on his own, like he should be better than this), as well as giving over receiving.

- Kinda bad with directions. As a human he has forgotten where he parked his car more than once. One of the first things he’d make in sburb is a GPS.

- Impressively immune to manipulation, he knows bullshit when he sees it like 90% the time.

- Won’t make promises he can’t keep, because he can’t stand letting people down.

- He’s not an outdoors person. Naturally, he prefers cats over dogs, ‘cause they don’t need to be walked.

- Overthinks habitually because he’s always trying to consider all the possibilities when problem-solving.

- Is aware he has nice looks.

- But self-conscious about his height (173 cm as a human, maybe taller as a troll), except he can’t and won’t wear heels to compensate. He thinks they’re impossible to walk in.

- He likes to swim when he wants to sort his thoughts out. Water muffles outside noises. [Only as a fantroll]

Plot relevant stuff if you’re into that

As a grubling Porter makes an unexpected friend named Jaysen, who is batter’s son. Jaysen quickly becomes an important person in his life, but vanishes after a certain incident. Porter tried to look for Jaysen without success. He eventually accepts that his best friend was probably dead.

Porter’s lusus ended up killing the empress and he was whisked away to become emperor before he had time to grieve. Scared, alone, and suddenly with a bunch of responsibilities he never asked for piled onto his shoulders, he distracted himself the best he could by dedicating himself to his duties. He tried very hard to become a good emperor, often overworking himself way too hard and not knowing to stop (unless someone made him). Drowning himself in work was a very good way to ignore his more personal thoughts though, and so he often turns into a pure work-only machine.

Sweeps later he’s a cold and hardened emperor now, still wondering what could have been.

EXCEPT Jaysen’s not dead and is in fact plotting a revolution, and the rest of that’s gonna be batter’s to explain cause he’s not my OC (shot

Whatever AU though, he always loves Jaysen very much.

#porter mikado #jaysen anghes #fantroll #oc

52 notes · View notes

lunasantcs · 4 years

Text

hi hi! it me, leonie ( mariangels mun ), with my second muse luna! unlike mari who’s a total lawful good, luna is more of a mixture of chaotic good and chaotic neutral who’s very much just starting out in life because her mom’s a cray cray rich lady. more on that below, pals. feel free to leave a LIKE and i’ll come to you for plots! OR! feel free to message me on discord at ( emeravdes#9932 ) since i’m not in the gc bc i get overwhelmed very easily. thanks for coming to my ted talk & feel free to read this ridiculously long essay i’ve come up with. <3 @frostfordstart

TW: MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE

full name: luna raquel santos

nicknames: lu, lulu or raquel (but only her grandparents call her that bc they hate the fact that her parents named her luna lol)

birthday: april 30th

current age: twenty six

sexuality: bisexual, panromantic

personality (+): benevolent, adventurous, free spirited, appreciative, energetic, fun loving

personality (-): sheltered, reckless, outspoken, stubborn, envious, attention seeking

luna was born and raised in frostford to yuliana and marcos santos - both of which are of brazilian roots but their families have been living in the us for decades. her family is rich rich and it stems back for a few decades. don’t ask me how they made their fortune because i actually have no clue as of right now. we working on it.

she was the youngest child and only daughter to yuliana and marcos which meant that she was instantly their pride and joy. their princess. their doll.

she has two older brothers - jax (32) and santiago (35) - who love their little sister to pieces and have never really been a big fan of the way their mother treats luna,

INCOMING MOMMY ISSUES

yuliana was the kind of girl that wanted to be in pageants growing up but her family never allowed her the chance because they valued education over anything that had to do with glamour despite having the money to blow on the fancy aspects. so! the moment yuliana found out that she was having a daughter, she was ECSTATIC. she could finally get to live the life of pageants that her parents robbed her of and she was thriving.

so comes my baby luna

from the moment she was born, her mother had her in fancy dresses and from the moment that she could walk, yuliana made sure that her daughter could perfect the pageant walk before she could perfect walking like a normal human being. if she did something right, she’d drown luna in affection. if she did something wrong, she’d scowl and tell her to do it again. often times this resulted in her crying - especially when she was still a toddler.

over the course of her childhood, she continued with the pageant life and slowly it became something that she lived and breath. she felt like it was the best way to connect with her mother and a part of her really did have a love for the whole ordeal. for a while. by the time she was eight, her mother essentially had the picture perfect pageant girl and she’d completely forgotten that this girl also needed love and a mother to help her through life.

but her dad? a sweetheart, a gem, the most affectionate dad that she could have ever asked for and she loves him to pieces. calls him every single day. or texts. santos fam group chat is her, marcos, jax, santiago, and her maternal grandparents. ANYWAYS! WE CONTINUE!

despite yuliana’s instance that her kids go to private school, her parents convinced her to just send her kids to public school because it would offer the kids a chance to actually get to know people around town that weren’t in their parents circle of rich idiots. this was luna’s saving grace. in school, she made genuine friendships and she finally found a sense of comfort.

not that that lasted long because yuliana was instantly up her ass telling her that those kids from school weren’t real friends and that she had to focus on her priorities aka pageants. only pageants. always PAGEANTS. so... that’s exactly what luna did.

can you tell that her mom is a demon yet? ‘cause we got more!

moving on to high school! things were essentially always the same. luna would go to school, live her life, make some friends but eventually she’d lose said friends because of her mom or because luna put up a wall since she knew that she’d lose them anyways.

she was in a car accident with her older brother jax when she was sixteen which resulted in her missing a pageant which made yuliana BIG MAD.

it was in her senior year of high school that yuliana set luna up with one of her friends sons and essentially forced her to be in a relationship with someone she had no connection w/at all.

she dated this person for a while (again, to make her MOM happy, not herself) up until her mother started talking about getting married which was when luna was like LOL ABORT MISSION and broke up w/the dude. did she like him? sure. but she wasn’t going to get married after high school. no thanks.

yuliana, naturally, was furious. got mad. was mad for a while. oscar the grouch mad 24/7.

THEN CAME COLLEGE! LUNA WAS FINALLY FREE! well... not really because her mother picked her school for her as well as her major; columbia university with a major in business. why? because she knew people who worked at the school that would be able to keep an eye out on her daughter.

SOMEHOW? luna still managed to find a sense of freedom the moment she stepped foot onto campus and was away from her mother. she was studying something she hated but she finally could live a life where she didn’t feel like she had to constantly please her mother or worry about falling out of line. it felt amazing.

this was where she discovered hook ups and friends w/benefits and BOI OH BOI was she thriving!

it was in her senior year of college that she had a long talk with her grandparents about what she wanted for herself and where she saw herself going. they wanted what was best for her and that meant getting her out from their own childs clutches who only saw luna as someone to parade around. it took her a while but the words from the talk stayed with luna until she was twenty two and she finally stood up for herself and told her mother NO MAS.

yuliana was like BITCH WHAT but luna was like YOU HEARD ME even though it was a bit less... blunt that i just made it seem.

at twenty two, she stopped competing in pageants and went off on an adventure to europe with her grandparents. her grandparents were really only with her for a month as they settled them into a nice place in italy but after that, she was finally happy.

she lived in italy and traveled around europe until she was twenty five which was when she moved back to frostford because she missed her grandparents, dad and older brothers. when she moved back, her grandparents helped her find a cute little home and she even got herself a red husky named kida - since she’d never been allowed to have a pet before in her life.

her dad still gives luna anything and everything she could ever want bc we stan a man who watches out for his child but luna also wants to make a life for herself outside of her parents money so she went and got a job. it was harder than she expected but she finally was willing to get one thanks to june diaz so now she’s a waitress at the whole enchilada and has been since she got back a solid year ago.

did i mention she’s been back one year? i feel like i should have mentioned it somewhere above but oh whale.

her new found freedom (its new even after four years OKAY) has also left her with a bit of a reckless streak. she is, in fact, a lot to handle at times and there’s other times where she falls back into that docile behavior her mom basically morphed into her. so... yeah!

FUN FACTS!

she wanted to be a cheerleader in high school but her mother was like NOT ON MY WATCH YOUNG LADY

her very first shift working at the whole enchilada resulted in her accidentally dropping a customers food on the floor and getting yelled at which resulted in her hiding in the bathroom to cry

she’s fluent in english, portugese, italian and french

she’s a flirty drunk which means she will probs try to get w/you if she’s drunk. unless you’re taken bc she knows her boundaries and she says NO to taken men.

anything she does regarding men is mainly to spite her mother bc she doesn’t really think she’s capable of falling in love. thanks to her mom basically making her feel worthless all her life :)

she’s a harry potter nerd and spiritually identifies as hufflepuff with slytherin tendencies even though pottermore told her 12 times that she is, in fact, a gryffindor. but she refuses to accept that. nope. not happening.

her hair is currently dyed a lavender purple. it’s almost always lavender purple. just assume it’s that color 24/7 lol.

CONNECTIONS!

i put together a wanted connections page for luna but it’s probs gonna get reworked like... two more times because i’m a perfectionist and am obsessed with providing too much detail. too much for my own good imma be hoe-nest. but feel free to hit me with anything! KTHNXBYELOVEYOULOTS<3

#about.#intro.#abuse tw

4 notes · View notes

morlock-holmes · 5 years

Text

This anonymous article from the Washingtonian, (Which is apparently... a magazine? Of some sort?) “What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right “ was being reblogged on my dash a few times and looking at some of the notes a lot of people were calling it propaganda without saying which side they thought it was propaganda for.

I think a LOT of people were so swayed by the “One Concerned Mom Speaks Out!” tone of the thing that they kind of missed the actual narrative.

I mean... If anything it’s kind of propaganda in favor of the alt-right, isn’t it?

Here’s how the author of the piece sums up the inciting incident in the story:

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s [The author’s son] mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.

Later there’s more, but basically the school authorities double down, Sam’s parents decided that if the authorities were that cruel and insane Sam needed to be in another school, and so they transferred him. Sam then starts getting into 4chan and reddit alt-right communities, who explain that what happened to him happened because of feminism gone crazy.

So, as a slight aside I have always thought since I was in high school myself that this kind of zero-tolerance, authoritarian crap is particularly cruel to inflict on growing children. A boy Sam’s age is trying to differentiate himself, see himself as an individual, and the authorities come in and go, “It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter why you did what you did, we will never care about that, we see you as a type and there is nothing you can do to convince us otherwise.”

This message would be incredibly dispiriting to anybody, but particularly to children.

Contrast, meanwhile, his experience on Reddit:

Soon Sam stopped trying to convince me to join his brave new world. He was so active on his favorite subreddit that the other group leaders, unaware that he was 13, appointed him a moderator. Among his new online besties, this was a huge honor and a boost to his cratered self-esteem. He loved Reddit and its unceasing conversations about the nuances of memes—he seemed in love with the whole enterprise, as if it were an adolescent crush.

...

Eventually, Sam had to give up moderating for the most practical of reasons: Eighth grade ended and he was packing for sleep-away camp. He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid.

Sam and I both laughed about the absurdity of the situation, though he admitted he was nervous he’d be exiled from moderating. I asked him to read me the responses to his message. They were all of the “Dude, you’ve got to be kidding me” variety—one of their most sophisticated and reliable colleagues was a middle-schooler heading off to Jewish summer camp!

Later, it was my turn to be surprised: They all contributed to a going-away gift for Sam and mailed an emoji-themed fidget-spinner to his bunk address.

Faced with new information that Sam has broken the rules, his school imediately brands him a predator, threatens to arrest and expel him, and responds with undisguised hate.

Faced with new information about who Sam is, his alt-right buddies are shocked, but then reiterate that they still care about him and value the contributions he has made to their community, and get together to express that to Sam.

I’d like to make a little list of what Sam gets from the alt-right in the narrative:

A group of people who have shown that they will support and value him, even if they find out new things about him.

People who listen and care about what he has to say

An explanation of what, exactly, happened to him and why.

Ideas about how he can protect himself and others from having that happen again in the future.

Allies and support for enacting those ideas.

His parents, by his Mother’s own admission in the article, were only able to provide fumbling efforts to provide protection from that particular school’s administration. His parents and their politics were totally ready to say that taking all that stuff about cucks seriously was pretty weird and dumb, his mother is totally ready to counter any statistics his alt-right buddies might have, but is completely and utterly unequipped to provide any of the other stuff I listed up there. There’s a moment where Sam explains to her what he and his friends think happened:

Sam pledged fealty to the idea of men’s rights because, as he said, his former administrator had privileged girls’ words and experiences over boys’, and that’s how all of his troubles had started in the first place. I’d never in my life backed the “masculinist” cause or imagined that men needed protecting—yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.

The mother’s politics didn’t actually equip her with an alternate explanation of what happened; rather, she has to concede that his explanation makes sense, and having conceded that has no idea what to do with herself.

In fact, as the article ends she is only vaguely starting to come to grips with the fact that Sam needed the kinds of support I listed above:

“All I wanted was for people to take me seriously,” [Sam] repeated matter-of-factly. “They treated me like a rational human being, and they never laughed at me. I saw the way you and Dad looked at each other and tried not to smile when I said something. I could hear you both in your room at night, laughing at me.”

I struggled for a moment because I wanted to tell him that wasn’t true. But I couldn’t deny his accusation. Behind closed doors, when my husband and I thought our children were asleep, we had often vented to each other about Sam’s off-the-wall proclamations and the bizarre situation we found ourselves in.

So I told Sam simply that I was sorry for making him feel bad.

I still think about his words a lot, especially when alt-right figures headline the news. But mostly, I wonder how I could have tried so hard to parent Sam through this crisis and yet tripped up on something as basic as not making my own kid feel small.

By the end of the article Sam is disenchanted with the Alt-right through, well, it’s not totally clear. The author of the article, by the end, seems to understand that Sam needed at least some of the things I outlined up there, but it’s not clear to me if she views the fact that her own politics were completely unable to provide them as an actual problem.

In fact, it’s not clear to me what she believes her politics are actually for. I know, I know, it’s not a philosophical article, but the question of “How much power do public school administrators have over their charges and what can parents do to counter them” is a nakedly, inarguably political question; after all, it’s about how a state-run institution should be run. And rather then turning to her own left-wing beliefs to contextualize and fight this decision, her solution is that her family has enough money to put Sam in another school.

Now, I’m not criticizing this decision, I think it was probably difficult, even brave. But it’s noticeable that her left-wing, non-culty politics don’t seem to have much to offer the next Sam, a Sam whose parents might not have private school tuition sitting around in their bank accounts.

In fact, she seems to regard the fact that Sam’s alt-right buddies were able to offer up compelling narratives and give him hope of implementing a solution and reasserting his self-worth as, well, cheating. Isn’t that cult-like behavior? Politics aren’t actually supposed to help the Sams of the world contextualize the things that happen in their lives, and when they do, it’s awfully sinister.

This seems to be part of something that has heavily infected the American left. It’s a kind of unspoken philosophy that says, “Politics is for solving major problems, the rest should be handled elsewhere.”

Even when a question overtly connected to Mom’s politics crops up in their life, her politics have literally nothing practical to offer any of them. Her left-wing politics are correct it doesn’t matter if they’re helpful.

This is what I keep trying to get at when I say people are missing the point with Jordan Peterson. Yeah, a lot of what he says sounds factually rickety to me as well, but, well, when I spend every day wondering why I can’t seem to get my life together, simultaneously dreading it AND feeling like there’s no point in trying to change, how does having a more correct view of lobster biology help me out with that?

I mean, I’m not saying it can’t, I’m saying people won’t even connect the two. Look at the reviews of 12 rules and people will usually grudgingly admit that his self-help advice might be useful, but really, it will tend to rile up exactly the wrong kind of person, and anyway, what does any of this have to do with politics?

This is what I keep trying to get at about effective altruism, as well. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s that by its very nature it will never be about providing me, personally, with any help, because it’s focused on stopping rogue AIs and mailing out malaria nets, fine causes but notice that, while Rationalists see “How can I stop a super-intelligent AI from destroying us” as a solvable problem “How do I make the kind of friends who will spontaneously check on me if I sound like I’m sick?” is completely insolvable.

To the extent that my existing faculties haven’t already made it happen, unfortunately there are no clarifying frameworks or advice better than, “Well, it’s hard.”

Rationalists are better about this than generic leftists but I also feel like that’s a low bar. Answers to the question “What can I do to concretely improve my life, and, for that matter, why should I even bother, what’s the point?” are becoming ever more disconnected from left-wing thought, and most of the concrete attempts to answer these questions are coming from the right.

I actually don’t think this is good, incidentally.

#politics #rationalism

137 notes · View notes

fantroll-purgatory · 4 years

Photo

@theshieldswordandcrown

I’d like it if you guys could look over my tea man for me! (Art by my friend lythaeriahomestucks. I haven’t made him a sprite yet.

Oofadoofa it’s been a while. Hi I hope your roleplay group is fun!

World: Alternia, but the draft is a lot further off than in canon, because none of my group is interested in roleplaying interstellar space battles or politics, especially considering the amount of setup that would have to go into making deep space believable. Though I think Friendsim’s stated they’re dragged off planet at 9 sweeps, so he’d still have a little time before getting dragged underground anyway.

Name: Oolong Matcha. Yes, they’re both types of tea. It started off as a quick joke, but I’ve grown to love it. Not only is matcha green, like his blood, but he’s a gardener, and really enjoys tea.

Mmmmm I mean joke trolls are famously canon in Homestuck. See: SWIFER EGGMOP or the salt and pepper shaker troll BUTTT mmmm. I feel like naming a character based at least partially on Japanese monks Oolong would deserve some side-eye. But I like the matcha bit! So let’s see…I like him being a gardener since monastic gardens were very much A Thing, and one of the famous still-extant ones is at Rievaulx abbey, so maybe we give him RIVULX, which sounds sufficiently trollish and is obvious enough for someone to get the reference.

Age: 9.69 Sweeps, or 21 Earth years.

Theme/Story: He’s partially themed after monks, specifically Irish and Japanese, which was originally an excuse for his bald head, but ended up influencing his clothing, calm demeanor, and lusus. I was also, oddly, thinking of 4chan – not maniacs like /pol/, but just average people who don’t get out enough, like to chatter about anime or cooking, and generally act like a bit of a dipshit. Fatherhood is definitely a theme with him as well – he’s already a father figure to two other trolls.

Hmmm. I like the broad concept, but I think we can tighten up a little on the “monk” theme by expanding it. Review Goals: General overview, classpecting advice, filling in missing details like fetch modus or lunar sway, etc.

Strife Specibus: He greatly prefers to snipe threats before they reach him, but if he’s forced into melee, he’ll grab a pipe and go berserker nuts. He takes satisfaction in neutralizing threats, especially if he’s protecting someone or something. He’s not averse to talking things out, but dislikes putting others on the line.

Hmm. None of that is a strife specibus, though I suppose you’re going for riflekind and pipekind. Generally void players use fistkind since it’s the absence of a weapon, but if you want to give him another option besides hand-to-hand melee may I suggest poisonkind? He could use something from his garden, like monkshood :3c. Or if you want to give him a melee weapon he could use the sansetsukon per the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which would double as a symbol reminder since he could arrange the segments in a backwards s. Fetch Modus: ;;3;; I have absolutely no idea.

What about a clue modus where the items are obscured but contain details describing them? With the caveat that some of them will have similar color/taste/textures listed. I think this might be fun because there are actually *two* famous detectives with the last name Monk, Adrian Monk and William Monk.

Blood Color: Jade.

That works great, especially with Friendsim’s reveal that many jades are indeed monastic/cloistered.

Lunar Sway: Not sure.

Given that he’s a monk and you have painted him as someone unlikely to cause conflict or rebel against the system, I think he’d be a Prospit dreamer.

Title: Knight of Void, someone who exploits what little secrecy and irrelevance he has for all it’s worth. He was first conceived as a Bard, to fit into a fansession, but I eventually decided it didn’t fit what the character had developed to be.

Symbol and Meaning: I made it up, and it doesn’t have a name. It’s an infinity symbol, broken in the center - like this, but flipped 90 degrees clockwise. I guess it could tie into his aspect by…destroying infinity, I guess, but I really haven’t put that much thought into it.

If we’re going by the EZ, he would be Virittanius, the Deliberate. Which I think fits him quite well! It also looks like a further corruption of the sign you gave him, so I may toy with that a little in the redesign. Handle: I feel like I might have given him a serious handle at one point, but if I did, I forgot it, so for now, it’s oolongMatcha. Just his name. Considering his classpect and desire for secrecy, this makes about as much sense as a rain barrel made out of crackers, but I’m not sure what to give him.

Since his new initials are RM, maybe revenantMyiopsitta. Revenant, of course, to hint at the fact that he’s part of the blood caste most commonly associated with rebirth after death, and Myiopsitta being the genus for two types of parakeet: the cliff parakeet and the monk parakeet. So we have his true identity as well as the unusual nature of his hive, both concealed in plain sight. Quirk: he types in all lower case and likes putting his horns in his emoticons! ’:) Maybe doing it like (:; would make more sense, as it’s his right (our left) horn that’s busted.

I like it! Depending on his redesign you may also want him to uƨe backwardƨ ƨ’ƨ to mimic hiƨ ƨymbol.

Special Abilities: Supreme Dadliness. Jokes aside, he’s a crack shot, even with his impeded vision, and has been successfully flying under the radar his whole life.

If you still want him to be a crack shot even with the changes I suggested above, maybe he uses blowdarts to poison his enemies from afar?

Lusus: His father is a MASSIVE white snake; I was thinking some kind of constrictor. Personality-wise, he’s close to a prototypical 50s dad. He’s a safe haven for his son and those his baby cares about, and is exceedingly patient, to the point of letting a small child fingerpaint on him. He’s also willing to carry Oolong in emergencies, though I’m not really certain that would work in real life, movement-wise.

I feel like the snake can be a little overplayed as a lusus. If we want to give him something similar to a mother grub as a jadeblood, why not a massive butterfly based on the monk/dusky friar? It also gives you the mechanics for how his dadderfly would carry him around in emergencies.

Interests: He used to spend a lot of time alone on the internet - I originally conceptualized him as a very lonely NEET, to the point he had to find his wallet to remember his own name - but has become more adventurous and friendly, spending more time with his girlfriend and friends (and he has friends now!) He’s very proud of his garden and fruit trees, some of which are rare, difficult to grow properly, and/or dangerous (offering more security).

Huh! You don’t explain *how* he goes from isolated to friendly, but I’d hope that gardening is a way for him to reach out to others since it’s a hobby you can commit to on your own but bond with other hobbyists.

Hive: He lives out in the woods by himself, though not so far from other trolls that he can’t take the day to go shopping or see his mate. His hive is surrounded by his garden on all sides, and has a very visible path down the center (making it easy for him to see anyone approaching, and shoot if they’re a threat). Trees surround it, and dangerous plants are strategically placed to make going through his garden unpleasant at best (it also makes weeding a pain, but he thinks it’s worth it). His hive is especially unusual in that the porch is raised up to the second floor with large poles, and you have to use a ladder to get up to it (unless you’re snakedad, in which case you go up the poles). He has a remote so he can let it down from the ground, as well as access to it on the platform, so he can let people up himself. I don’t think the ground level has a door. I’d be happy to submit pictures, if you want.

Feel free to show us pictures, but I like the concept a lot!

Appearance: Tall and rail-thin, excepting his oddly curvy hips. (I figured due to jades being majority female, developing jade males might be exposed to more than the usual amount of estrogen and androgens. Also I’m way more used to drawing women than men and his initial outline was a gal for like ten minutes.) He shaves his head bald. (This is because A) I didn’t want to bother trying to figure out men’s hair - I almost never draw dudes - and B) he’s partially themed after monks, who often shave their heads. I don’t remember why he says he does it.)

…man, I’m gonna take issue with the way you phrased this description. There’s a lot of gender essentialism going on in your explanation there, and given that a number of us mods are trans and nonbinary I feel obligated to point out a few things:

1) Trolls are bugs. They’re not even mammals. They aren’t exposed to androgen or estrogen or any hormone to give them a certain body shape. It is quite heavily implied that when the mother grub gives birth it is to a bunch of larvae.

2) I know that Homestuck lore has given us largely jade girls and one jade trans guy but that’s no reason to assume that jade men are broadly more “feminine” by default in *any* dimension

3) Even if trolls *did* work like humans, it rubs me the wrong way to see someone talking about a man’s “oddly” curvy hips like I’ve got guy friends both trans and cis with wide hips and the only reason to remark on it at all is because We Live In A Society that forcibly genders people in relation to physical characteristics.

…So I am otherwise taking your description at face value. ______ Matcha is tall, rail thin, with curvy hips and a bald head. I will probably add some little fangs, per the Alternian fashion guide.

He wears leggings (unless it’s very hot) and long tunics or robes, usually tan, with his symbol emblazoned on the breast. He goes barefoot if he can. His right (our left) horn is broken, due to an accident in his youth (I think he fell onto something?), amusingly improving his vision, since his unbroken left horn points in front of his left eye, obscuring it somewhat. His face could almost be described as delicate, and his default expression is calm.

I don’t knooooow that tan is a color trolls wear all that often in Alternia, so I will see how I can rework that in the redesign. I get him being barefoot, but I may give it a shot spriting him monk shoes for if he wants to go on an outing. :3c For his broken horn…hm. When we see trolls with physical damage, it is almost always something more significant than just “childhood accident” (see: every troll in Homestuck except Equius who somehow had like 3 simultaneous accidents?). I have an idea for his horns that I will get to in the redesign, and I will probably add a hook to his front horn, both because it’s a jadeblood trait and because it seems suitably horrifying to constantly have a sharp implement millimeters from your eye.

Personality: Oolong is a nice, fatherly young man, well regarded by most he meets. He really really likes tea. He has a beautiful, dangerous mafiosa matesprite in a rustblood named Andora Ingenu, and they adore each other. He’s also taken on the substitute dad role for an adorable young fuschia who lives in the swamp near his forest, Lillie Waters, teaching her how to cook (and keep her tools clean) and rescuing her from other fuschias. He’s very protective of his and his loved ones’ privacy and safety, and spends a LOT of his time in the massive gardens around his hive, of which he’s deservedly proud. He is very good at being sneaky, and sometimes takes the time to run around seeing what he can get away with, especially in the realm of snatching seeds up for his garden. He sells whatever plants he can grow for money, especially fruits and vegetables, but he doesn’t really enjoy sales. He doesn’t put a lot of stock in blood superiority, but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He’s oddly well adjusted for someone who spent most of his life alone.

I like this description! Also looking at his close compatriots, it looks like I can swap the tan in his design for rust or fuchsia. We already see jadebloods wearing a fair amount in the red/burgundy/purple spectrum, so it should fit right in with the others.

Land: I don’t remember if I’ve come up with one. If I did, I feel like it may have heavily wooded areas, dark and tangled and difficult to navigate.

Hmmm. What about Land of Rough and Reflection (LORAR)? Covered in rough terrain, with pools to contemplate oneself. Unbeknownst to your troll, there are switches at the bottom of each lake (deeper than he could ever hope to dive and hold his breath) that must be flipped to drain the lakes and free the consorts from the underwater caves in which they’ve been trapped for generations. His land would initially seem completely empty and without guidance, and it neatly parallels his own situation before he began to socialize.

I hope you like him! :) I’d love to see what you guys think of him.

He’s certainly an interesting troll, and I hope I’ve helped by way of sharpening up on his theme! Let’s move on to the redesign.

Top to bottom as usual!

Hair - I gave him some stubble courtesy of fan-troll (I have never managed a post without plugging fan-troll/tajazzled’s sprite sheet and I’m not gonna stop now)

Horns - I wanted to make his other horn sort of…curve away from his head so it looks like his symbol from above?

Eyes and brows - they didn’t change but big ups to fan-troll for giving me bases to modify!

Mouth - this is a modification of Sollux’s mouth but I gave him lil fangs and a little lower lip definition

Robes - I just modified some of Kanaya’s robes, appropriately enough! I decided to go for a red/pink shade that was between rust and fuchsia so he could fit in while subtly broadcasting his allegiance

Shoes - they’re John’s but with buckles! :B monk shoes

Aaaand that’s about it for my critique! I hope this helped!

-TR

#jadeblood #submission #oolong matcha #oolong #matcha #theshieldswordandcrown #rivulx #rivulx matcha #review #redesign #tr review

4 notes · View notes

idyiiicsoiitude · 4 years

Text

𝓣𝓸 𝓘𝓷𝓯𝓲𝓷𝓲𝓽𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓫𝓮𝔂𝓸𝓷𝓭.

it started when…

it started when it was about to end.

I didn’t have any plans on joining an agency, or so I thought. the year of 2019 was fast approaching, and I was eager to start it. I was pumped up to know if something had changed in me because I felt it – I felt the change, yet at the same time I was too afraid to take a leap of faith. for so long I’ve asked myself if there is something with me – do I need to do something? or do I just simply take a pre-requisite to finally enjoy life, and love as it is. but everything took a big turn when I joined one certain agency that caught my attention. I mean not to be dramatic or anything but I really felt something pushed me to join aftercare, and albeit the fact that I was scared, I took a risk – a risk that will probably change my life forever. changes, they might drive you half-insane, but it’s also killing you to stay the same, so all you have to do is to believe that everything is going to work out in the end, maybe not now, but someday. and then I met you, and that was the change. you are the change.

I didn’t plan to stay, but you came along and I found a reason to. we instantly clicked, thanks to our weird and crazy senses of humour. I found a close friend in you and I didn’t want anything to change between us, not until feelings got involved and I got so confused. I wanted to stay away from you; relationships scare the shit out of me, I was afraid of commitments, I was afraid of love for it only leaves me broken in the end. but no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t. days passed by and my feelings for you just intensified. wanna know why the j-dude ghosted me? simple. I couldn’t bring myself to like him, to like him half as much as I liked you. one night he said: “I’m going to steal you away from doyoung,” to which I replied with: “you sure about that? how can you be so sure I’m going to choose you.” that night he didn’t reply, and the next morning he’s gone. I told you about it, I told you “hey, he ghosted me.” I didn’t feel sad at all, if anything I was happy. happy that I wouldn’t need to go through the pain of rejecting a person again. after all, I’m not someone who enjoys hurting people’s feelings anyway even when they enjoy hurting mine. be it consciously or unconsciously. when I told you about it, I was hoping to fish a certain emotion from you. you did, and I was happy.

I wanted to tell you how I feel, though at the same time I didn’t want to ruin our friendship. I mean it was obvious that you felt something for me, it was obvious that our feelings were mutual. but you also told me you weren’t looking for a relationship so I swallowed my feelings and kept it in. hidden somewhere only I know. I was contented with how things were between us, until I wasn’t. I wanted something more, so that one fateful night when we fought I wanted to pour everything out because I was so close to suffocating, and even though our talk didn’t turn out how I pictured it inside my head - I was glad that it happened.

our love got deeper, and not gonna lie as it went on true feelings got involved - not that true feelings weren’t involved in the first place, but you know what I mean. times when we were both so confused about everything, times when I wanted to give up on you because you kept on pushing me away even though I only wanted to be there for you but you were so headstrong about your beliefs and views, times when all I wanted to do is to get away from everything, but each time I imagine my future— you’re a part of it. it’s just impossible to picture a life without you, it’s impossible to be without you, and for the lack of better words I am more than happy to be stuck with you.

love is not a walk in the park, nor it is simple, and life does nothing but to make it harder. love is a conscious choice you make every single day. and you, you are that conscious choice that I make every single day. “don’t expect someone else will love you when you don’t even love yourself.” they say. to which I was stuck with this bullshit of a saying for such a long time. thought no one would love me because I couldn’t even bring to love myself. thought I’d be forever alone. but you, you waltz into my life and changed it. loving someone so much you sometimes forget you hate yourself for once? yes, the best feeling in the world.

do you realise how painful and difficult it is to know that someone you love doubts themselves so much? how sometimes you have no idea how to be there for them - thus you watch them crumble with your own two eyes? the pain is otherworldly, it’s something that seeps through the bones and leaves you numb if you let it get to you. it can cause self-doubt, it makes you question your own worth, and sometimes the value of their love for you. and truth be told sometimes I feel that sometimes I experience that. because if someone really loves you for who you are, you have to use that as a fuel to love yourself as well, right? but I was wrong, and you taught me that. for you taught me how to be understanding, patient, and kind. you taught me how to stop and listen carefully. you taught me how to be more open-minded about things, and you taught me how to cherish each and every day. you taught me a lot of things, and I know you do not hear this enough from me, but really, thank you. thank you for existing, and you for being you. you’re trying, and that alone is enough. you’re perfectly imperfect.

I am sorry if the world is too harsh on you, I am sorry that you spend every day waking up to a terrible nightmare, I’m sorry that people weren't kind enough on you, and I am sorry that you couldn’t bring to love yourself. but despite that, I love you. and I will always do. I don’t have any intentions to harm and hurt you. and if you get hurt with the words that I say, I’m sorry, I am only human, and I have limits. but that doesn’t mean I love you any less. because no matter what - my feelings for you won’t change. life is beautiful, especially since you are in it. you can lay all of your problems on me, you can share all of your fears and inner thoughts with me, you can cry on my shoulder and scream against it if you no longer can handle everything. do not suppress anything, for it only worsen the pain. I only am not here to share with you your happiness, I’m also here to share with you your sadness. I’ll be here through it all. you’re not alone, never will be. they may turn their backs on you, they may pull a trigger to your head, but always know that I will stay. through thick and thin. in this ever-changing world, I will be that one constant in your life. for better or for worse. I don’t have any intentions to give up on you, so please don’t give up on yourself too. you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. just look at you now. you survived the harshness of yesterday, you’ll also survive today, and tomorrow, and every day. you are not a failure, nor a disappointment, you’re unique, you’re brave, and you’re one of a kind.

I wouldn’t trade you for anything in this world. I love you.

yours, yuki

#26日06月2020年.#21.#keepsakes.

1 note · View note

astrologista · 6 years

Text

(@chiscribbles4smiles and @starxapple with this post compelled me to want to dig this mess up from my drafts........ i wasn’t gonna post it because as a Psychological Analysis I think some of this is definitely REACHING......... or iunno....... i wrote it a long time ago when i was In A Mood but i can prove that Varian needs a mom using psychological evidence so deal w/ it y’all)

(This is a very speculative analysis but if you like those, read on.)

So if you notice how Varian reacts when he sees his father frozen in the amber, his initial reaction is disbelief. He's saying "no, no, no" over and over, hoping it's just a nightmare, that if he voices his denial enough, he'll wake up and this won't be real. He's refusing to believe it's real, begging for it to be undone, that if he just doesn't acknowledge it in these first moments of shock, maybe it'll all just go away. But seconds tick by and his dad doesn't answer him, only silence does. It slowly starts to sink in for Varian that this is real and no one is coming to help him or clean up the mess, not this time. On the subtitles Varian actually says "Dad!" and then when that doesn't work, "Daddy..." His voice changes a bit, too, becoming higher and more childlike, and choked up with tears. Which, if that don't break your heart, I don't know what does. In moments of extreme stress and trauma, it's not uncommon for children or teens to regress a little so that they can feel a little safer by returning to an earlier frame of mind. Varian desperately doesn't want the weight and responsibility of this situation to be on his shoulders. His dad has usually tried to bear the brunt of the blame for his mistakes. But even though his dad's not able to do that right now (ironically tragic), Varian still goes into this mode of regressing and responding with uncontrolled tears instead of immediate anger at the Princess. He's tired, he's given everything he can give. He really does sound like the terrified child that he is at that moment. He doesn't know what to do and would very much like for someone to show up and hug him, tell him everything will be ok and help him fix the problem.

But let’s like, consider this. It can be said that children move on from their mother's guidance to their father's once they reach a certain age. Mothers are the first teachers, who provide the basis for sustaining and prolonging life. They teach you how to eat, provide the nutrients, and take care of your physical hurts and just calm some of your fears as well, and SO much more, giving you the basic primer on how to live your life. It's not that hard to make your Mom proud as long as you're good to her and learn how to use a spoon at the appropriate age. She loves you for nothing, as you are. But once you move on, it can be a long road from mother-love to father-acceptance. Not because fathers are inherently bad or highly demanding, they just tend to value different things in addition to those survival skills that your mom taught you. For true father-acceptance, you must do things worthy of recognition. Talk. Walk. Act like a human. Show moral character. Work in the field, perform feats of strength. That is how you show your worth as a good son. So many things a mother wouldn't require, but a father might really care about.

Varian makes inventions because that's what he does, hoping his father will at last be impressed with him. Finally, he can gain that father-acceptance he so craves. He needs to see that "pride" in Quirin's eyes to feel that he's worthy of being loved. That get-for-free, endless outpouring of mother-love is no longer in Varian's life for whatever reason. And Varian is just a very sensitive little dude. He thrives on love. And nowhere better is that shown than in the picture hanging in Quirin's room, when both his parents were there with their attention entirely on him. Their love, entirely available. There was nothing he had to do to earn it. It simply was. And to Varian, that is his gold standard. Look at his cute smol face - bliss.

With the loss of mother-love, it's no surprise that Varian went just a little bonkers with the loss of his father. Research shows that when people go without physical / emotional affection for long enough, antisocial personality traits actually can manifest, whether temporarily or perhaps permanently. The onset of which can induce panic, irrational behavior and even temporary psychosis...

If you REALLY want to get theoretical, Raps and Cass provided a tiny bit of that mother-love and in Eugene's case, a little father-acceptance, enough to keep Varian wanting to hang around them. Like a drug, he soaked up the fact that they gave him even the time of day. That's how desperate he is for attention, because attention leads to love and acceptance, and those things make Varian feel safer and more secure in the absence of his mother. (And it’s so depressing to me that he feels he has to do so much just to earn a little scrap of love.) The loss of a mother in general is just very damaging, especially to someone who's sensitive to other peoples' rejection such as Varian. When developing, children sometimes are rejected by their peers or others, making the outside/external world seem unsafe. But they can use their mother as an anchor point to make that outside exploration less scary. That way, even if others reject or mock them (which in Varian's case is a lot, everyone in the village seems to exclude or just dislike him what with his inventions trying to kill them on a regular basis), at least they have someone who genuinely loves them to come home to. An anchor point, a person whose consistency and stability makes the world safe and encourages confidence. Varian needs that and only that, but it was taken from him, for whatever reason. (If we ever find out that there’s a character responsible for that loss... *takes out a bat* i just wanna talk.) Desperate for love, he'll attach to anyone who will listen or shows the slightest bit of interest or kindness to him. Raps, Cass and Eugene have all given him little mini-speeches on how compassionate and smart and unique he is, but it's barely enough. It's like getting a few bread crusts when you're starving for a three-course meal - it'll give you something to keep from going off the edge, but it's never going to fill that void. And he has to practically beg Cass to give her little speech, prompting her with "I was just trying to make you see something in me... something special... I was just being dumb." Most likely a subconscious fish-for-compliments move, but it gets the job done and he gets what he needs - a little validation.

Like others, I just find it kind of gross how far Varian has to go for love. If the people would just take a chance to get to know Varian, they would see that fundamentally, he is (well... was...) basically a harmless kid. Reckless, overconfident, excitable, yes, but he never wanted to hurt anyone. If anything, he only wanted to help them.

No child should ever live in a society where they have to feel like everyone in their town rejects and/or hates them, and that their only parent is distant. The point is, there's not enough love left in Corona for someone like Varian, who craves and needs response and confirmation that his Dad is proud of him. That validation literally means the difference between his physical and mental health and not - it is enough to make or break him. It's basically the one and only thing he cares about, returning to that time when his family was whole. With adequate mother-love and father-acceptance, Varian could be his best self. He could be very well-adjusted and would probably not have as much maladaptive thinking as he does. He'd be less defensive, more genuinely confident and act more maturely, probably. He’d still be his excitable, lovable self, but with so much less toxic thoughts running through his mind. And he'd be more open to suggestions about how to improve his alchemy. In What the Hair he just came off as insecure and unwilling to change his experiment. But with genuine confidence instilled by his parents' support, he'd probably forgo his pride in the interest of making safer and smaller inventions. He wouldn't feel like he has to prove anything, because he'd know he has as much love as he needs waiting at home. With Varian, everything in his mind and body is out of balance (which is ironic for an alchemist), so it's not surprising that he is such a mess or causes so many disasters...

People might disagree with me on this one but I honestly think Arianna is / might be the key to Varian's redemption. He claims to still be seeking the father-acceptance, but to come back from where he is, he first needs to take a step back and get the purest and most unconditional mother-love - HUGS FOR DAYS YA FEEL ME? - to know that he is still worthy of being loved. He did kidnap Arianna because she was the weak link, but in a way, it may not be that much of an accident, and more of a reaching-out for that mother-love from Rapunzel's mother, on a subconscious level (or not. “i want a mommy so i’m stealing one. no one will stop me...”)

No wonder seeing Rapunzel and both of her parents embrace set him off. That pretty much symbolized everything Varian was trying to get to... but couldn't.

tl;dr someone get me adoption papers NOW so I can adopt this child

#varian #you little icarus you. you just flew too close to the sun #I LOVE MY BOY #look at all my hyphenated words you can tell ive been reading too many cognitive science papers #IM NOT FREUD BUT....#*points* that kid is STARVING for more than just food #y'all know it's real. getting psychological now

87 notes · View notes

crossinggalaxies · 6 years

Text

Why That Episode was AWFUL

Okay here we go. There’s going to be a lot of things you don’t agree with probably in this post. So let me preface this by saying I don’t intend to argue. I’m also very well aware that this is my opinion and not fact. I also would like to warn you, as you can probably tell by the title that this is going to be INCREDIBLY NEGATIVE. So if you are easily affected by negative talk, enjoyed the episode, or want to debate; don’t read the post.

So let me start off by saying that when I say that the episode was AWFUL I mean the writing. It’s sooo hard to critique AOS and say anything that they create is bad because the ACTORS are so good that they make everything seem GOOD even when it’s not.

Even now my brain, on some level, is trying to convince me that it wasn’t that bad of an episode because the ACTORS (especially Iain tonight -HOLY SHIT) were soooo fucking good that it almost doesn’t compute with the shitty storytelling it was attached to.

I want to also mention that the first 40 minutes of the show seemed good, but ultimately forgettable due to how BADDD the last 20 were and that is when you know you DONE FUCKED UP.

But at the end of it all when I look at the script, ignoring the excellent, performances, I see that the writing was absolutely horrible. And below I will explain why.

I also want to preface this by also saying as a writer myself there is a few things that make a story/writing (whether it’s for a book, show, movie, or what have you) good in my eyes. 1. I absolutely believe you need to tell a story for yourself. You should write something you needed growing up (you probably still need it now). You should write something you find important. And in return you should hardly ever write for your audience. (Side note this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say for instance include gay characters. You should always try to write inclusively but not because it’s what your audience needs or wants but because it’s what ACTUAL life and humanity looks like. AKA representation matters). What I do mean when I say that you shouldn’t write for your audience is that you should write an authentic story that resonates with you and stems from a place that means something.

Btw writing for your audience doesn’t just mean writing happy/good things (IE FAN SERVICE) I also mean writing things for your audience like that purely for shock value because you know it’s what is going to get at your viewers (which is what they did, ie emotional manipulation) and cause a reaction. Ultimately you should never write just to cause a reaction. It should mean more.

2. A good writer in my book is someone who can write something that generates a response in their audience BUT NOT because it was their single goal to do so but because they authentically wrote something that meant something to them in a way that worked and their audience could feel it because of this authenticity. And tonight that wasn’t there.

To me this episode 100 percent was about writing to create shock value and showcased so little care for the actual story that they for the longest time seemed to be excellently and authentically writing. (They botched this last small half of the season and here’s why)

Deke’s Speech on Fixing the Team:

I was super conflicted about Deke’s speech to Daisy on needing to mend the team. On one hand I loved it because FUCKING FINALLY and also I 100 percent agree. But on the other hand looking at it now that the episode is done I think it was all about generating a reaction and not about story telling. For the longest time now I've been wondering why they haven't started this process of healing an episode or two earlier. And now I understand that they put it off until the last moment to increase the overall tension and reaction from the audience. It has felt incredibly out of character for the team not to be concerned about fixing things a little earlier (ie getting their shit together) than just the last episode. So while I am glad that they started the mending process it annoys me that they held it off until the last moment just to raise the stakes and make the audience feel more. Ultimately I think waiting until the last moment to raise such stakes made the pacing of the story a little off in the last section, which happens when you (in my opinion don’t write from an authentic place.)

Deke

I don’t even know where to start so lets just start with our old pal Deke. Deke became an amazing character because at first most of us really didn’t like him. However he became so important and integral to the story. And in my eyes he became a large voice of reason. The thing I loved most about him this season was watching him and his relationship with Jemma grow. It was so emotional and well done and I connected so deeply with it.

So you can imagine how LIVID I am with how he disappeared and literally no one says anything. It was completely OOC for the group but mostly for Jemma to not even acknowledge his absence and here to me is one of the largest sightings of shock value writing in this episode.

YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY NO ONE MENTIONED HIM?

Because the writers wanted you to feel the shock of his absence and in having someone speak of him it would have taken away from that.

Had someone mentioned him, or the potential for search for him... that could have possibly stripped away from the emotion/shock you were feeling for his absence. So despite the fact that it didn’t serve the story, it created what felt like a strange and OOC reaction from the group and namely Jemma, they went with it anyways because they were more concerned with the shock value. This to me served as one of the larger indicators that they were writing for shock over story telling and it damaged the episode in the process.

Phil

Oh okay. So he’s dying. But they’re just gonna chill on a beach, all smiles all is good. Man Idk I just felt like Phalinda as a couple and individuals deserved more. Also as much as I love this couple. Can I just say I’m a bit bitter. That they’ve been together for .3 seconds and would have still had a better happier ending to the entirety of the show, than a couple who’s literally suffered for 5 years. Like how the hell does that make any storytelling sense? Anyway.

Fitz

There's a lot of reasons for why I hated everything regarding his story in this last episode. Here is the most important though.

His death was bullshit: literally dude just got crushed by rocks. (Shock value much??) You know I've mentioned numerous times before that on a large level I thought that they might kill him. But even in that pit of despair centered thought I believed they would at least give him a hero's death. Believe me I know he is a hero. But that death was nowhere near what he deserved story wise. I thought that if he died he would at least have a speech/line that resonated with his death and life/purpose. Where his death would somehow have something good involved, like a sacrifice for something greater. You know a through and through heroes death? But no they didn't do anything for him. Like we have to authentically acknowledge as an audience and fan base that he's dead.

100 PERCENT DEAD.

I don't care if there is a frozen version of him floating around in space. The Fitz that we know, the Fitz that we saw grow this season is gone and dead. All those milestones - erased. (Which side note it pisses me off how much they hyped up how much the wedding meant and how excited Clarke was to get to produce it to literally just scrub it away for shock value).

Trauma: Let’s not also forget how not only did they not heal the framework Trauma but they exacerbated it and he died with those traumas unresolved and in my opinion worsened. His death ensures that that version of him that we knew and loved will never find resolution for such traumas. We have been waiting and begging for them to touch on and began to heal the trauma. But they LITERALLY brought it back and made it worse and then killed him with it unresolved.

SOOO ultimately, I was really SHOCKED that they didn’t give him the death that he deserved. Instead they had him die in some shocking random twist with unresolved trauma, the erasure of some of the HUGEST milestones of his life, no scene with the person he loved or moments of purpose just to get a rise from the audience. He didn’t get to say anything of value when he died. He didn’t get to see Jemma when he died. We have to acknowledge that all this is gone.

Let me just reiterate that again. HE HAD TO DIE WITH UNRESOLVED TRAUMA. (Also I bet your ass that CryoFitz for some reason doesn’t have any issues with the Doctor/Split and they will just use this earlier version of him to sweep away their lack of trauma mending under the rug.) Concerned about loopholes much?

Loop holes: Speaking of loopholes they totally used his death so they don’t have to go into detail on fixing his relationships with the other characters because the version of him they may find in space will have done nothing ‘wrong’ yet. (baddddd writing)

Also just another example of the shock value writing is the entirety of his death scene. Let me explain just how much they wrote these scenes just to fuck with us. So when stuff starts going haywire and the rocks fall the audience is in shock because clearly Fitz might be hurt or even worse dead. So you're brought into this feeling of intense shock as a viewer but then soon after that scene you see his hand come up through the rubble and you experience relief. You calm. Things seem okay. Until the soundtrack creeps in and he says he thinks he broke his leg, and the music deepens and you realize something is wrong. And you see the wound. And you are brought back to SHOCK. And its rising and rising. And he dies. But you look at your clock and you see there's 15 minutes left. There is time to fix it. So you relax a little. But then the show comes back on and you realize he's dead when you see Jemma’s reaction. And you feel SHOCK again. And you're crying and crying. And you see somebody wiping a plaque that says in memory (remembrance?) of but they're not showing the whole thing and then Jemma makes a comment about Fitz being interested in hearing the story that time can indeed be changed (or something along those lines) and for a second again you think he's alive and the shock dissipates. Maybe he faked his death. Maybe this is the plan. Why? Who knows. But then you realize she’s talking about CRYOFitz and the shock comes back.

THEY WERE EMOTIONALLY FUCKING WITH US for so long. I am honestly infuriated at this fact and it deepens every time I realize they thought this would be okay as a show ender. But mostly I’m infuriated over the fact that just they seemed to care so little about leaving us with a story that mattered and instead how much they valued leaving us with a story that left us shocked. Here’s a note to all writers. You may think shock value is more memorable. It’s not. It’s tiring and overused. And just leaves people bitter.

So if they were writing for shock value, they hit the nail on the head and knocked it out of the park. But shock value doesn’t resonate with me. At the end of the day. They killed a character off in a half assed way, erased his milestones, left him with unresolved trauma, allowed him no scenes with his wife, all to get a reaction out of an audience that could have had this as the last thing they ever saw of the show and ultimately they hella butchered the story in the process. (They should honestly thank they're lucky stars they got another season and can fix this.)

ALSO FRIENDLY REMINDER AGAIN THIS WAS ALL A POSSIBLE SHOW FINALE! THE FUCK??

Bruised Friendship: Also can we have knowledge that this Fitz that we know and loved who 100% died in this episode also did so being still at odds ends with his family/friends. Like the last things said between him and Mack in their one on one, or him and Daisy, never got resolved. Fitz died not knowing if Jemma was okay. He died not getting one more minute with her. He died not knowing if the rest of the team who wasn’t there in his last moments was alive. He died not knowing if Earth and humanity was going to be okay. But he also died not being on the best terms with his family/friends (at least not in the ways he has been throughout the show). He literally got SOOOO FUCKING JIPPED. Like YOU GAVE HIM NOTHING. YOU KILLED HIM BUT YOU EVEN HALF ASSED THAT.

Separation: I want to say that while I was shocked I was not surprised that they FS separated. But there is one main difference I want to point out. While I never liked any of the separations they went through you could always count on and believe that we would then see (VISUALLY SEE) Fitzsimmons overcome it and come out of it better, closer, and stronger. So a large part of my brain and I think mostly everybody else’s brains knew on some level they would be separated again. But they separated them again, this time, in the most final way possible. With death. Like honestly they have done this so much it shouldn’t have shocked us that they did it again only in a way more permanent fashion. And in a way that had no visual payment.

Reaction: What the fuck was that reaction from everyone. They seemed to basically be like. Yeah it’s sad but there’s frozen Fitz somewhere, so oh well.

BUT THIS EPISODE. WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN A SHOW FINALE ended with him dying and a 2 minute speech at the end promising to try to find him. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN OUR ENDING. A SPEECH?????? And just a bunch of shock. Like what a horrible ending that would have been. I’m tired of speeches. The poetic promise of trying to do something pales in comparison to seeing people outlive their trauma and survive. Stop telling me things might be okay. Show me for once, and mean it. Honestly such heartless and lazy writing.

Ultimately i’m just astounded that they knew this could’ve been the end and they thought it was still satisfying. And not because it was a story that mattered but because you would remember it, because you were shocked. All in all (might as well use an essay transition sense this is long AF) I don’t like shows that write for shock value. I have an issue with it because it makes everything lose meaning and authenticity. And that’s what this was. I mean I cant tell if I’m happy about the year wait or not. On one hand I can distance myself from it, and learn to care less so next time they fuck it up, it hurts less. But also a year with the imagery of him senselessly dying and the knowledge that everything good this season has disappeared with it just to close some fucking loopholes has me feeling some kind of anger I haven’t felt in a long ass time.

#aos negativity #negativity #phalinda negativity #fitzsimmons

12 notes · View notes

anotherwarren · 6 years

Text

Jurassic Park vs. Jurassic World

I was talking with a couple of friends recently about Jurassic World, and I finally took the time to articulate why, despite its many fine qualities, I always feel so uncomfortably ambivalent when I watch it.

Disclaimer that the upcoming film has a different director than the last one, and there is some reason to suspect these qualms might not be present this time around.

That said, let’s dig in. Short version: themes.

What bothers me the most about Jurassic World is how it flies in the face of some of the best themes of the original Jurassic Park, not only by putting forward a simpler and less compelling theme with less interesting to say, but by actively acknowledging the more complex and compelling themes of the original to then quietly and deliberately dispute the premises underlying them.

Jurassic Park isn't just about "What has science done?" It's far more about the fact that "Life finds a way." They put the subtext in the text with that line. It's that nature is powerful and ultimately uncontrollable. And yes, things fall apart because of a dude, but the first movie wants to imply that it was inevitable; that it was only a matter of time one way or another, because it is the nature of life itself to resist attempts to constrain it.

While Jurassic World not only fails to present anything that compelling, it also acknowledges those themes and demonstrates active contempt for them. To provide an example without spoilers: there's a scene very early on in Jurassic World where the female lead is talking to one of the men in some kind of control room, and he's speaking the first park with a considerable reverence. It transitions into sort of a philosophical dispute where he's representing the themes of the original and she's representing the idea that those themes are garbage. And while the text of the discussion isn’t quite conclusive, they end it with the man leaving a drink precariously on his desk and then ultimately knocking it over... but only after she'd observed the danger and moved his trash can to catch it.

And that’s the film associating this guy and his ideas through cinematic language with inadequate care and attention; saying that "these bad things happen because of human oversights, and they haven’t happened here because the leadership is more on their game, and that that's really all there is to it. The original park was careless; this one hasn't been." And perhaps that was meant as a justification for the existence of the successful park in the movie’s premise, but it still makes that statement: “It was human failings that led to the first park’s problems, not the things that the first movie told you it was. It wasn’t chaos theory, it wasn’t that entropy is inevitable, it wasn’t that ‘Life... uh... finds a way.’ It was human carelessness. That’s it.”

So they're basically denying the argument the original was making about itself -- that the park’s failure was inevitable -- in order to set up the idea for this movie that everything was fine and would have continued to be if not for the fact that they overstepped natural limitations and used science to do the unnatural. Because the theme Jurassic World does want to revisit is the less-important part of the original that basically asked "What has science done?" which it infuses with a few only moderately well-executed elements about how capitalism, profit-driven motives, and such cause us to be irresponsible when we'd otherwise be doing fine. And that's so much less interesting. It’s so much weaker. And they treat the original like garbage to set it up, not only throwing out the themes, but actively drawing a parallel to the mistakes in the original with something falling into an actual, literal trash can as a symbolic representation of what they claim was the problem with the original park.

And it pisses me off.

I mean, this makes it sound like I hate the film because I'm talking about my biggest problem with it, but I recognize that they did a lot of things right, and it's a quality film in a lot of ways. It's just somewhat difficult for me to enjoy despite otherwise being quite watchable because the theme thing is always nagging in the back of my mind when I do.

Now, full disclosure: I wasn't allowed to see Jurassic Park when it came out because my parents were concerned about violence. Then, when I was old enough to see it, there was a pressure to think poorly of it because my parents (and, by extension, my family) had decided that it was mostly a matter of empty, violent spectacle. And for a long time, I didn’t think much of it. But eventually a friend who loved the film came along, perhaps two decades after it was released, and their enthusiasm eventually enabled me to see the good in the film.

And when I finally came around to thinking highly of it, a huge part of why I ended up doing so was these thematic elements that Jurassic World treated so poorly. Because, yeah, the original Jurassic Park was a solid film overall with reasonably strong characters, good production values (especially for the time), and various other things going for it, but especially as it's grown more dated, the thing that most ensures I can't help but love it even as it creaks with age is this:

It had amazing theming, and those great themes were breathtakingly well-executed every step of the way from the screenplay to the performances to the editing. Everything about that movie, regardless of all the other things it did to keep people entertained, was beautifully constructed until the final product positively thrummed with resonance for a powerful and interesting idea.

That's why I love Jurassic Park now. That's what finally took me past the familial pressure I grew up with to dislike it and brought me to loving it and appreciating the love that the enthusiastic friend who’d brought it back to my attention felt for it. And that, in turn, is why watching Jurassic World, for all its strengths, is somewhat challenging for me given how they not only toss those themes out, but do so deliberately, contemptuously, loudly, and often.

That said, as I stated at the outset, this next one has a different director. And while I’m not going to express optimism on the subject, that’s reason enough to at least acknowledge that it might handle these themes better.

I really hope it does.

#jurassic park #jurassic world #fallen kingdom

5 notes · View notes