#hoc imagine
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Per Aspera Ad Astra (Duncan Shepherd)
Summary: Two years later after facing death at the hands of his uncle, Duncan is preparing to do the most difficult thing he's ever done.
Word Count: 2.2k
A/N: Here it is babies, the epilogue of Memento Mori. I'm happy with how it's ended, and I hope you are too! Let me know your thoughts, and thank you so much for reading.
Per aspera ad astra—Through hardships to the stars.
All prior chapters
Two years later…
The small park near the Potomac that Duncan Shepherd finds himself in could barely be considered a park. With D.C.’s money funneled into the areas surrounding the main attractions of the city, this little patch of land with a few trees and benches has been all but forgotten by the general public. There’s people that frequent the park, to be sure, but it’s just deserted enough to make it feel like he’s alone no matter where he is. Maybe that’s why he likes it so much.
Not only is it a nice, secluded park to be alone with one’s thoughts, but it’s also a nice, secluded park to have clandestine meetings at. Duncan waits under a tree that he’s so often been under in this position for, on the lookout for a contact for some sort of information exchange or other deal. As he checks his watch, noting that it’s now 4:33 when they were supposed to meet at 4:30, he’s reminded of when he was 18 and standing in this very spot, having been trusted to oversee an evidence exchange between himself and a cop on the family’s payroll.
He had been so nervous on that day. Today, he’s feeling those same nerves all over again.
Finally, a dark figure appears from the parking lot. Michael Langdon, dressed in all black with a dramatic red scarf wrapped around his neck, walks along the cracked sidewalk like it’s a runway at Paris Fashion Week. For Michael, most everything is his runway. Duncan has never met someone whom the saying “all the world’s a stage” applies to more than his oldest friend, his brother in everything but blood. Duncan can’t help but smirk as he shakes his head, crossing his arms over his chest and trying his best to look like he’s disappointed.
“We agreed on meeting at four-thirty,” Duncan says. “Does the sanctity of a set meeting time mean nothing to you?”
“Sorry. I have a good excuse, though.”
“Which is?”
“I didn’t want to be here.”
Duncan laughs and shoves Michael’s shoulder, the two getting into a small tussling match before remembering that they’re both grown adults and they should probably act like it. After they’ve straightened up, Michael looks at him.
“Well then? Do you have it?” Michael asks.
Duncan rolls his eyes, feeling almost affronted at the mere suggestion that he doesn’t have it. “Of course I do. You think I brought you out here for nothing?”
“Still a little confused as to why you had to bring me out here in the first place.”
“It’s not exactly easy to keep secrets from or around our family, Michael.”
Michael doesn’t even need to say anything, because Duncan’s right. The Shepherd family is great at keeping secrets from those that aren’t family, but within the family? If Annette were to find out about any of this a moment too early, she would immediately ruin the secret that Duncan has worked so hard to conceal. It would be out of love, he knows, but he still wants this to be perfect.
He needs this to be perfect.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, Duncan carefully grasps the small box that he’s carried around with him for over a week now, too paranoid to attempt to try and hide it anywhere in his apartment. At this point, the box’s very dimensions are familiar to him, with how many times he’s opened the box or simply held it for reassurance.
Duncan glances around both ways, paranoid that he’s being watched even though there’s no possible way and, as far as these types of meetings go, this is probably the most low-stakes one he’s been on. Once he’s sure that his fears have been assuaged, he opens the box for Michael to look into.
The ring is still just as beautiful as it was the first time that Duncan saw it. He had been looking for the perfect engagement ring for months, and was becoming increasingly frustrated at designs that, while certainly pretty, weren’t a ring that would fit Y/n’s personality. Nothing was totally right: either the design on the band was wrong or the diamond was too big or it just didn’t look like something that she would wear.
Finally, he finds the one, in an antique store that Y/n’s dragged him to on a cool September weekend. While she’s looking through collections of old photos and trying to convince him that the Victorian child of indeterminate gender is surely not going to haunt him if the photo ends up being bought (it won’t, not if he has any say), he spots it in a display case. A golden ring with delicate filigree twining around the band, small leaves fixed against the prongs in which a simple diamond is set.
It’s certainly not a traditional ring, but nothing about their relationship has ever really been traditional.
He had grabbed it while she was still distracted by the spooky, definitely haunted photos and faked having a work call so that he could escape to the front of the store and purchase the ring without her knowledge. The woman minding the shop was unable to stop smiling once Duncan whispered that this was going to be an engagement ring and asked her to ring the purchase up as quickly as possible. He was just thankful that she didn’t accidentally mention anything when he again came to the register, where Y/n purchased a couple of old photos that, while questionable, didn’t have any figures in them that would haunt their home.
From there, everything had gone smoothly. Duncan already knew Y/n’s ring size, and the jeweler he had used before was all too happy to provide a quick turnaround on resizing and fixing the minor imperfections on the ring. And once it was returned to him safely a week ago, he hadn’t let go of it.
Michael appraises it for a long moment, his face infuriatingly blank. Duncan shouldn’t care about Michael’s opinion on an engagement ring, but he does, because Michael is one of two people he’s closest to in the world. Finally, finally, Michael meets Duncan’s eyes and smiles.
“Perfect. You found it at an antique store, you said?”
“Yeah.”
“Even more perfect, because that means it’s unique.” Duncan puts the box back in his pocket, satisfied with the answer. “You did good, Duncan. She’ll love it.”
“You’ll be my best man, right?” Duncan blurts out suddenly, his mind apparently deciding that it’s now or never. When Michael doesn’t immediately respond, Duncan panics and tries to stutter out an explanation. “I mean, you’re really the only person who I could think of to stand by my side on the most important day of my life. You’ve been by my side for all my other important days, and–”
“Dunc,” Michael stops him with a hand on his shoulder, “of course I’ll be your best man. C’mon, did you even have to ask?”
He smiles. “I didn’t want you to think that you had it in the bag.”
“If you dared to even ask anyone else, I would kill them.” That’s not a joke, and they both know it. Still, they laugh. “But you know she has to actually say ‘yes’ first, right?”
Duncan nods, because of course he knows that.
And three hours later, as Duncan exits the restaurant with Y/n, still his girlfriend, he doesn’t think he’s even going to get the question out so that he can potentially be turned down. He had a plan. He was going to order her favorite type of wine, she was going to ask what the occasion was, and then he was going to get down on one knee and make her cry with his poetic proposal.
But then the restaurant didn’t have Y/n’s favorite type of wine, because he didn’t think to ask in advance if they could reserve a bottle for his table as well. And the suit that he had planned on wearing, the suit that he wears for every big event, wasn’t ready for pickup at the dry cleaners. And then he was late because of fucking traffic. At that point, when he finally made it to the restaurant to see her waiting patiently for him, he was already so upset at his plans being derailed that he decided to cancel his entire proposal idea for the night.
Y/n is none the wiser as they walk through the National Mall, chatting happily next to him about the latest book she’s been reading and the controversy surrounding the author on “BookTok.” The sun is beginning to set behind the buildings, casting a beautiful golden glow across everything it touches. The light catches Y/n’s eyes as she looks over at him to catch his reaction, and Duncan’s taken aback by how his breath catches in his throat at the sight.
This is it, he realizes. The moment that he’s been waiting for. It’s not what he had planned, but he knows it’s now or never, because there might never be a moment for him that screams “proposal” again.
“Y/n,” he calls her name, gently pulling her to a stop in the Constitution Gardens.
“What’s up?” she smiles at him, like she just knows he’s nervous about something. She probably does know, because she always knows.
“This…isn’t how I imagined any of this happening.” His hand goes into his pocket, and he grasps the box. “But then I thought, when has anything in our relationship gone according to plan?”
Her smile widens as she starts to get the hint of what’s happening. When Duncan gets down onto one knee, her mouth falls open. “Dunc,” is all that she can say, her tone warning that this had better not be a joke. As if he would ever joke about anything like this.
“I’m not the best with words, and you know that–I tend to talk with violence. We’ve been through so much together, and I can’t think of anybody else I’d have wanted to do any of the last three years with. And, after these three years, there’s nothing I’m more sure of than knowing that I want to do the rest of my life with you. So,” he opens up the ring box, “will you marry me?”
He’s barely finished asking the question before Y/n’s nodding and pulling him up to his feet and kissing him with a laugh. “Did you even have to ask?”
“Is that a yes, then?” Duncan’s grinning, already getting the ring out of the box and grabbing Y/n’s left hand so he can place the ring where it belongs.
“Yes. Of course I’ll marry you, Duncan.”
They kiss again, and then one more time for good measure. Y/n pulls back briefly to admire the new ring on her finger and how it’s glinting in the evening sun, and Duncan thanks the sunset for staying around for as long as it has.
“Y’know, I thought that you were going to propose at the restaurant.”
Duncan laughs like that wasn’t his plan and shrugs it off. “You really want to get married to me?”
“As if we’re not basically married already?” Y/n kisses him again, and Duncan’s sure that this is the best day of his life. “The only thing that changes after this is that now I can’t be forced to testify against you in court.”
“Is that right?” Y/n nods. “I should have put a ring on it two years ago, then.”
“You’ve rectified the mistake now, my love.”
Duncan grabs Y/n’s hand and swings her towards him, running his thumb over her ring.
“Should we head home, fiancée?” he asks. Y/n grins, pleased at the new pet name, and Duncan immediately files that away to use all the time now. “I’m sure there’s a lot of people that you want to call and tell the good news to.”
“That,” Y/n raises her eyebrows, “and we’ve got a lot of celebrating to do.”
She laughs as Duncan immediately nods, picking up the pace to get home now. Still, she’s not complaining, in fact, she’s jogging next to him, challenging him to actually break decorum and race her home. For her, he would.
Duncan Shepherd has worked hard to get to where he currently is in life. He’s quite literally shed blood, sweat, and tears in the process, and nearly lost his life multiple times. He’s faced heartbreak and loss, anger and grief, and thought that there would never be anything more for him than his work. Nearly running down the street with the woman who’s now his fiancée, both of them giddy with love and eager to get home and show each other just how much love they have, he knows that it’s all been worth it.
It’s all led him here, to the beginning of the rest of his life.
//
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#duncan shepherd imagines#duncan shepherd#duncan shepherd x you#duncan shepherd imagine#duncan shepherd fanfiction#house of cards#house of cards imagine#hoc#hoc imagine#hoc imagines
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on reflection, i think there's a symmetry to, say, doctors who are willing to refer patients to osteopaths or other ""holistic"" healthcare providers and the susceptibility of engineers to certain kinds of crankdom (of the "i-disproved-relativity-in-my-garage" type). both are forms of scientific training of a sort, but they're heavily outcome-focused and not theoretically focused. in large part, this is good! you do not as a doctor need to have a robust theoretical defense of every treatment you provide to patients, and it would be impossible to do so, because medicine is a huge and complicated subject. you do not, as an engineer, need to have a subtle grasp of theoretical physics to build a bridge; you just need to know what the latest developments in bridge-building are.
but it means in both cases you can have people who are skilled in their field, or who even excel, but who don't understand very well why certain techniques work. and in the case of alt medicine, where there has been considerable work to try to obfuscate or deceive people on how shaky the theoretical basis for their techniques are (stuff that literally if you remember your high-school physics and biology at all will make you go, "wait, there is no plausible mechanism for this, that's not how any of this works"), doctors who do not have time to read studies on RCT trials of every type of medicine they have ever heard of will blithely recommend stuff to patients that's actually complete horseshit, especially if the culture around them has been normalizing that woo as part of "holistic" therapy for the last hundred years, spurred on by alternative medicine practitioners and a public with a fear of needles and ~chemicals~ that medical practitioners have not done enough to allay.
it does not help that medicine only emerged very recently from being about 99% bullshit. like maybe at the end of the 19th century at best medicine was starting to be put on a broad-based empirical and theoretical footing--before that it's truly insane the stuff that wasn't just considered perfectly normal medical practice, but was considered serious Science. i mean, this is why we developed double-blind studies in the first place--because theoretical explanations of medical treatments are still necessarily often secondary to the process of finding ones that actually work, so we need really robust mechanisms to avoid confirmation bias or outright charlatanry. and while mainstream medicine is far from perfect in this respect, "alternative medicine" is all far, far worse.
#imagine if bridge-building was still trial and error half the time#like medieval cathedral building#that's probably not very fair to medicine#like we've gotten so much better in just the last seventy years#at targeted medical research#but still sometimes we develop new treatments#and we're like 'idk why this works but i'm pretty sure it does'#psychology still feels like it's full of individual practitioners with idiosyncratic theories#inventing therapies in an ad-hoc way#like ye olde 19th century doctors#but psychology is still theoretically very weak#so that kinda makes sense to me
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I hope you're having an excellent day 😊😊😊 What about Wei Wuxian as Naruto?
Thanks! It was pretty good. I organized my embroidery floss and took advantage of being alone in the building to dance around like a maniac for about 20 minutes. My cat hated it. My knees aren't sure they approve either.
Wei Wuxian as Naruto has a lot going for it right out the gate. Orphaned sunshine boy protagonist types, now we're cooking with propane. They're even both fox coded!
However, at the risk of stating the obvious, if Wei Wuxian were Naruto he wouldn't be Naruto anymore. That is. Fundamental to Wei Wuxian is that he is brilliant and talented and he damn well knows it. He would excel without effort in ninja school--not as much as he did in Jiang Sect unless he unlike Naruto was still getting personal mentoring in honor of his late father, but still.
Difference is, when this Wei Wuxian slacks off in class and the teacher tries to embarrass him, if he reels off the correct answer and then reinvents senjutsu from first principles in a creepy-sounding way for a lark just to show off, the teacher is not going to think that he's just like his annoying late mother. (Though he'll still have one. Kushina and Cangse Sanren are fairly similar Dead Mom archetypes too.)
The teacher is going to think things like, no real child would say that shit and I'm expected to teach the monster fox that killed my family basic ninjutsu I hate this I hate this we're all gonna die.
So basically this Wei Wuxian gets his Yiling Laozu reputation mod as part of the starter pack. I don't think he'd handle it super gracefully! But not the worst, either.
Not even as badly as he did in the actual version, probably, on account of he doesn't know his own dark secret. So he can't self-isolate to protect it. Though him pulling away from people once he does learn would be cool.
He'd probably have forged slightly stronger social ties rather sooner than Naruto did, even if he was just as neglected and radioactive; Wei Wuxian doesn't care what people think of him nearly as much as Naruto does, but in some ways he's a more genuinely social person, and he's got much better social intuition, so it's easier for him to figure out what people want and either do that or not do that on purpose.
He'd have at least a bunch of casual friends. Mostly civilians, and other kids from ninja school whose parents told them not to play with him but they did anyway.
Wei Wuxian cannot do therapy no jutsu. He does not have that ability to confront and exist with emotional discomfort or that intensity of interest in what is going on with other people.
He does however have some level of Friendship Beam Attack (the plot to some extent hinges utterly on how effectively it hit Wen Ning) and it would presumably be more effective, in a shounen context.
But that's the thing, Wei Wuxian isn't really built to confront shounen manga style problems. Or, well, he is, but he's overbuilt for them; they're his bread and butter. One of Naruto's key motifs, early on at least before we got into the heavy power creep, is not being a genius.
Wei Wuxian, by definition, is a genius. He is the kind of guy who walks up to shounen manga sorts of problems scaled to what ought to be his level, handles them, and goes 'what, like it's hard?'
Wei Wuxian is designed to be destroyed not by external threats but by his own loyalties, politics, and lies. (Which was a point of confluence with Itachi I didn't really touch on because the flow was so different lmao.)
He's also, otoh, designed to be destroyed. Naruto is designed to start off artificially low and climb steadily up toward heaven. (Ymmv on how this worked out but he sure did escalate.)
You have to pick which schema to apply when performing the fusion--I mean, it's not either-or, the whole deal with Wei Wuxian is he goes through the entire arc of a tragedy and then comes back to life and stars in a romcom. These things can superimpose and stack. But there are structural decisions that have to be made early.
So anyway, Wei Wuxian as Naruto is not going to enter the Genin Team phase of life with the same priorities, even if he has largely conducted himself about the same way hitherto. 'Proving himself' so 'people will accept him' is not a motive that works for this character--you basically have to give him actual precious people earlier just to get him to care about attaining ninja rank at all.
Otherwise he would probably much rather loaf his way through his teens stealing jutsu and making trouble. Which is the well-adjusted reaction to the idea of becoming a child soldier, like. He likes recognition but 'showing off' is a reason he does dumb fun things, not difficult high-commitment ones. He's like if Shikamaru had ADHD and no parents.
Being twelve is going to make him dumber, but I can't see it making him not the kind of person who stops caring about his marks in school if the teacher is hostile.
If Wei Wuxian here isn't acting out of appreciation for the Hokage raising him, or something like that, you have to give him a practical motive to enter military service like 'Konoha stops supporting orphans out of the public purse at thirteen so he's got to get some kind of job and ninja is the least boring option' which. Is significantly less like either Naruto or Wei Wuxian in terms of reasons to do anything, and starts getting into solidly OC territory.
The whole fact that Konoha's worldbuilding centers around an attempt to move away from decentralized clannish social organization and promote the idea of shared, communal social institutions and (in theory) civil society, and the ways this does and does not work out for people especially considering it is still a relatively small military dictatorship, honestly interfaces super interestingly with how, in Mo Dao Zu Shi, one of the underlying challenges backstopping all character choice is that there is no feasible alternative to the clan system, and you have to pick a family-faction to depend upon and submit yourself to, or face the world with no safety net.
Like. Huh.
.....Kishimoto is honestly unusually-for-shounen well-grounded in the genres he's riffing on tbh, for all my bitching there were some very good reasons his work found such success; I would have liked to see what kind of story he produced without the insane pressures of the Weekly part of Weekly Shounen Jump. I wonder if he'll ever publish again. For all I know he already is lmao.
So anyway, however we manage it we get Wei Wuxian on his genin team with like. Lan Wangji and Mianmian or whoever. Actually that's hilarious. Yeah, make it lwj and lqy, both of them so done with his shit.
Setting up some wild role-reversal here--Lan Wangji being the one to go Away and Wei Wuxian asking him to stay? Or Naruto-person leaving into the dark, and Sasuke-person remaining and calling for him to come back? Either way. Getting some inversion. Tasty.
Where does this leave Jiang Cheng, though? Because in a lot of ways Uchiha 'Deuteragonist by Editorial Mandate' Sasuke is straddling both roles.
In many ways Wangxian is much more like if Naruto had an endgame romance with Neji. Which is a great ship tbh, I saw very little of it back in the day?? In a series with a smaller cast or with less Sasuke Creep (not sasuke being a creep, it's like power creep) it would probably have done numbers.
...Naruto going away for that timeskip really limited his opportunity to make connections in the village huh.
I guess it depends on the kind of narrative you're trying to put together. On one hand, you can do Jiang Fengmian as the rather-more-involved Third Hokage, with Jiang Cheng as an aged-up Konohamaru kind of figure. And then Jiang Yanli is standing in as both Iruka and. I know I know the ramen guy's name. Ichiraku. Soup! XD Emotionally significant soup!
But with a different backstory than either lmao. Kurama very possibly killed Yu Ziyuan in this universe, though I can't visualize her as a midwife.
[[[Why do I have so much Naruto lore on tap, there is no life value in knowing Sarutobi Hiruzen's wife was at ground zero of the Kyuubi attack because she was the expert overseeing Uzumaki Kushina's childbirth a;kdj;lafdks. I do not remember the things I was actually studying in high school nearly this well.]]]
(Actually Jin Ling is Konohamaru and Jiang Cheng is aged-down Asuma. But whatever.)
And in this case Wei Wuxian's genin team is Lan Wangji and Mianmian under idk who. Lan Qiren, possibly, although he seems more the Ebisu type. Lan Xichen? (It's not like he can serve as a plausible Itachi. Can you imagine.) Actual Kakashi, possibly; we can't replace everyone with mdzs characters; the cast sizes don't square.
Kakashi training Wei Wuxian is very funny to think about. He deserves this.
Or on the other hand for a different pacing and focus, the genin team is him, Jiang Cheng, and Jiang Yanli under Jiang Fengmian, who dies sometime after or probably during the climax of the chuunin exams. And Sarutobi stays Hokage, and probably doesn't die during the chuunin exams. And we aim for a Naruto/Neji kind of romance storyline lol.
What is the Lan Wangji equivalent of Neji exposing his caged bird seal in front of god and everybody and ranting (it is very unclear at what effective volume though you'd think the proctors would have shut him up if he could be heard from the stadium seating that shit was sedition) about his traumatic backstory and the deep injustices in his family's system of hierarchy? I'm gonna say Not That.
Wei Wuxian versus Lan Wangji important ideological-conflict bonding duel in the Chuunin exam finals sounds excellent though.
Either way Wei Wuxian is going to get much more thoroughly involved in the ugly ninja politics than Naruto ever did, and he's going to hate it so so bad and at least temporarily lose so so so hard. A likely story element is he becomes troublesome enough he winds up having to flee the village ahead of a scheme by Danzou to (fatally) rip the Kyuubi out of him and implant it in some thoroughly conditioned ROOT kid.
Maybe Wen Ning?? Idk. I'm mostly saying this because Wen Ning 1) canonically gets Victimized and Transformed and 2) shares some notes with Sai. And this means he's leaving, in part, for Wen Ning, which ties into some plot and character stuff from their original narrative. You could make it work.
Also him taking the replacement human sacrifice with him when he books it would be hysterical.
Anyway he's branded a missing nin and it is, canonically, illegal for him to tell anyone who doesn't already know about the kyuubi thing, so both Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji are appropriately what the fucking fuck and receive no adequate answer. This is a workable plot element.
Either the Jiangs or the Lans are the Uchiha, here, which has its own story value, lots of fun to be had. Gotta engineer a way he's protecting Jiang Cheng--does Danzou want to make him the jinchuuriki? Is Orochimaru or his replacement making a play for Jiang Cheng's bloodline limit, whatever it is, fun if it's eyeballs, and Wei Wuxian bargains to give him a jinchuuriki instead? Hmmm.
You want an inside and an outside threat, the obvious viper and the political spider, so you can silo information and make sure nobody entirely knows what's going on.
If it's Jiang Cheng who's assigned the role of bloodline limit macguffin, I have the very wicked urge to cast Yu Ziyuan as some combination of Itachi and Obito. Very Vader kind of effect.
Jin Guangyao as Kabuto, excellent, I need that innocent smile and those torture skills. This may require making Jin Guangshan much smarter than he really is just to fill out the ranks, or again you can keep Danzou as himself.
Tsunade is amusingly enough occupying an overlapping Baoshan Sanren and Wen Qing position; given one of them impersonated the other that time you'd have to do something with that. She's also got some Yu Ziyuan vibe up ofc. Tsunade just contains an entire franchise's supply of girlboss tbh.
Who could possibly stand in for Jiraiya, nobody, but at the same time. Wei Wuxian (with internal sapient asshole nuke) apprenticing under Jiraiya of the Sannin sounds like enough problem-creating goofy jackass genius clown energy in one place to open a singularity. That's too much. No narrative could survive.
Anyway someone please feel free to write this, I am intrigued but also will 100percent never ever put in the time it would take to realize any version of this concept.
#ask#hoc est meum#ramblebrambleamble#mdzs#naruto#fusion#meta#ig?????#return of the son of the jane bennet cinematic universe#fanfiction#the thing about protagonists is they require a story#if lwj is neji then mianmian is tenten#who is Rock Lee?#hard work...pays off...but lwj holds him in contempt...there is no such person????#actually it would have to be Wen Ning#he's friends with Wei Wuxian and lwj's petty jealousy grudge is even fiercer and pettier when he is thirteen#haha then wwx casually ships lwj/lqy while lwj resentfully imagines wwx/wql#phantom love triangles that do not exist! two of them!#beautiful#if you need wen ning elsewhere then disrespect rock lee's name and plug su she in as their third#this is so fun and so not productive i have so many other things i should be doing a;ldsksdf;#i play a lot with the dog thing but i'm pretty sure#the number one creative reason wwx is afraid of dogs is just#that's a traditional way for foxes passing as humans to give themselves away#motif~~~~
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17, 18
17. Morning rituals?
Depends on where they’re staying while seeing each other (before moving out together). But for mutual points - Nace waking Jan up with a few kisses and “dobro jutro sonček”. Both staying in the bed as long as possible (aka until feeding time for animals). Then, after morning care and feeding animals - breakfast together and chatting about their daily lives.
Bonus if staying at Nace’s - mandatory morning walk with Ollie.
18. Evening rituals?
Showering together if in mood for that. Packing bags together if it’s the night before gigs. Cuddling animals if they’re around the bed (usually no entrance for them when sex occurs). Talking about the day and drinking green tea before sleep and cuddling each other to sleep when it hits.
#tbh it was hard ask#and everything here was imagined ad hoc#otp asks#joker out#nace jordan#jan peteh
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a man on a mission
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we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.
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like every other game dev born after 1985 i've had thoughts of making my own Pokemon-like and the main roadblock for me has been: how do i come up with a typing system that doesn't just mimic Pokemon's? and the answer is you don't come up with a system. maybe there's types but they're completely ad-hoc - you could even have one-off types just for one specific mon or move if you want. the flexibility is dizzying; you can add dozens or hundreds of new types whenever. sound type, radiation type, magic type. go wild! you begin to run into combinatorial explosion. strengths and weaknesses grow more nonsensical as you start skipping over most of your ever-growing type chart anytime you add a new one. after all, who cares whether food-type mons are weak or strong versus electricity? they just need to be weak against munch-type attacks, and maybe mold-type too. to make full use of the increasingly-specific types you've been coming up with, some of your mons end up with 5 or 10 types. your spidershark monster is, at the very least, a spider, shark, swim, beast, and bug type. overlaps happen; redundancies crop up. music type, nuclear type, mystic type. have you done those before? don't worry about it. 3 years into development you cannot imagine having ever hated anyone as much as you hate yourself
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Could we say that rejecting afab transfemininity is a form of bioessentialism because this rejection is based the sex assigned at birth of this category ? Isn't this like rejecting amab people from womanhood for the same reason ?
this only makes sense if you believe that "transfemininity" was a freely-made, vibes-based gender category with no prior anchor in the world. bioessentialism requires prescription by the accused bioessentialist; it requires that your imagined bioessentialist (me) decide post-hoc that certain biological claims about a person determine whether they can be transfeminine or not. if transfemininity was just a set of expressions, forms of behaviour and labelling, a particular aura or whatever, it would be indefensible to gatekeep people from it based on assignment. but that's not what transfemininity is.
transfemininity as a term developed to describe a category of gendered subjectivity in response to transmisogyny. the transfeminine isn't just a particular appearance or set of labels—transfemininity is anchored to the way transmisogyny shapes the subject-formation of those people who are subjected to it. like being a trans woman, being transfeminine is a politicized positionality determined thru cisnormativity and its reflex, transmisogyny. and the logic of transmisogyny operates precisely thru birth assignment.
here is a second clarification: birth assignment is not a biological fact about someone. birth assignment itself is a bioessentialist social action done to someone in the maintenance of hegemonic sexgender. the corrective machinery of gender then sets its normative expectations in accordance with ASAB, and metes out its punishment likewise. and transmisogyny is the specific genre of punishment reserved for those who have betrayed the expectations of being coercively assigned male at birth: the class of failed men who become an underclass of failed women because they cannot even perform the kinds of reproductive labour expected of women "proper". the transfeminine is a subject formed in response to this experience: a gendered category that coagulated against the stream of transmisogyny. it was not an invention ex nihilo, but political development.
so when I reject "afab transfemininity", I am not engaging in prescription. I am just describing transmisogyny, and deducing what must therefore be true of transfemininity. to call this bioessentialist would be a category mistake. take it up with the instruments of transmisogyny. the bioessentialism sits much deeper than a trans lesbian saying no—and your comparison to transmisogyny itself rejecting trans womanhood is, to be honest, absurd.
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the notion in video game culture that gameplay and story are separate is one that i think speaks to the juvenile state of the medium - mechanics and experience convey narrative themselves. it's the equivalent to lazy dubbed-over monologues or exposition titlecards in film, in regards to the notion that 'meaning' is something that can be slapped onto a work post-hoc like a sticker, rather than something integral to the entire thing. that's what causes the feeling of dissonance between the two - imagine if film audiences constantly said they dislike 'story' in films, while referring solely to an epidemic of infodumping interstitial cards and blade-runner-style phoned-in explanations of character motivation
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Hi! Because someone just asked me, I'd love you hear your Top 5 favourite McLennon fics!
You made my day! Nothing could have made me happier than this ask.
I'm not going to evade your question. I will post my top-five, even though it hurts to choose. But you inspired me to finally write a longer (okay: very long) post about some (not nearly all!) of my favorites, which will be under the cut.
(Sorry for not knowing every writer's tumblr, by the way. Please feel free to let me know, so I can tag authors where appropriate. Thank you!)
My Top 5:
MIRACLE WORKER by @scurator. What can I say. Every time I need my heart broken and to feel an inkling of what grace truly means, I go to this masterpiece about Paul and Robert Fraser finding each other again at Cavendish in 1981.
COAST STARLIGHT by bookofapril is "Miracle Worker's" cosmic twin. The sun to its night. Paul and Robert Fraser on Fire Island in 1974. Nothing I can say will do it justice, so I won't try. This is the "other world" conjured in "Tug of War," so powerfully and joyfully imagined, it's real. (I'm always thinking of this story, but I did so extra hard when I came across a prompt recently: 'They aren't each other's first love, but they're each other's true love'.)
SAME AS IT EVER WAS by RedheadAmongWolves. My favorite Outsider's POV. An ageing newsstand owner from Liverpool remembers John and Paul as boys and young men. There's something magical about the relationship coming alive in these glimpses. A story filled with tenderness that reminds me to always look closely.
AN ORGASM OF SOUND by @pauls1967moustache. The insanity of John and Paul in 1967 got the tribute it deserves. I sleep easier since I read this story. It feels cosmically right that it exists.
PLANT A SEED by @eveepe. Paul in his slutty sailor outfit in Miami. He and John are into each other, and happy, and fuck slowly. Afterwards, Paul has an idea for a new song. That's it. Tender, glorious, hot perfection. Apply at least once a week for best results.
For more thoughts about some of my favorite stories, sorted into very much defined-ad-hoc categories, read under the cut.
Young Love:
I love the myth of their first meeting, and stories that speculate about the sexually loaded creative fireworks/gritty jealousies/tentative hand-holding/topping and tailing during the first years. Here are some faves:
Paul finds music, and John, and his life is changing. In STREETS OF OUR TOWN (@with-eyes-closed) you can taste the upheaval and promise of first love and growing up. Deeply sensual, even without on-page sex.
The shaky, sweet, and all-consuming fire of John and Paul’s first kiss is immortalized in ALL I KNOW SINCE YESTERDAY (RedheadAmongWolves).
In NON NOBIS SOLUM (@downtothe-lastdrop), art student John simply has to know how far grammar school boy Paul will go to please him. But Paul matches him play-by-play.
In THE CAST IRON SHORE (@m1ssunderstanding) Paul earns extra money through music and sex. John finds out. They fall in love, and hide their mutual pining behind transactions—but in the end, they man up to pair up, and get their band back on track. (The first part is finished; I can’t wait for part 2.)
John and Paul’s ’61 trip to Paris has been honored in fiction many times; WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG THEY ASSUME YOU KNOW NOTHING (@lilypadd23) is a slow-burning, blessedly long story that blossoms sweetly.
DON’T THINK ABOUT IT is the concept by which Paul measures both his pining for John and their deeply satisfying (but surely not really queer?!) sex life. Perfectly realized Paul POV by @merseydreams.
Finally: I NEED YOU DARLIN’ (verse) (by @beatlessideblog) would have fit many categories, but I put it here, because in the end, it’s about young John and Paul becoming friends, making music, having sex, and falling in love. No more, no less. Embedded in a late 50’s/early 60's Liverpool omegaverse in which there's a place for their bond. But, surprise (?!): It’s still complicated. I can’t overstate how charming and satisfying and funny and hot this work is.
Old John and Paul:
Is there anything as lovely as imagining John and Paul growing old together?
In HERE TODAY (@herspecialagent), John and Paul found happiness with each other in Scotland. On 8th December 1980, they invite friends for a party, and fight an inexplicable sense of doom. A reminder that our other lives can be closer than we think, and to keep our loved ones even closer.
GROW OLD WITH ME (@inherownwr1te): Old farmers and husbands John and Paul enjoy domestic bliss, deal with a broken arm, and make sweet love.
HAVING COFFEE (@feathersandblue): John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “one of the most iconic gay couples in history,” look back on their early love, the Beatles, and being outed in the 80’s, in this oh-so-glamourous, well-written 2020 portrait…
Magical re-tellings of J/P and/or the Beatles Story:
No matter where you come down on the blessed vs. cursed continuum—they were living through something magical.
In KISSING THE BLARNEY (@zilabee) the Beatles draw love and music from kissing Paul, and each other, until the stupid world interferes. But fear not, all ends well. How to tell the truth through whimsy: this story demonstrates it.
In WE ARE ALL TOGETHER (also by @zilabee), John and Paul switch bodies. It helps.
I WAS A YOUNGER MAN NOW (THEN) (POST HOC) BY @fingersfallingupwards: Paul is a time traveler and braids his life together with John’s, out of order, through the years. And yes, they do grow old together—but not without losing each other first. I’m in awe of this story.
A darker time-traveling story is A MATTER OF TIME (D12Fan), in which John and Paul love each other, over and over, and never manage to make it work—but Paul won’t give up.
FOR THOUGH THEY MAY BE PARTED (@downtothe-lastdrop): The misery of the 'Get Back' sessions and memory-stunting technology imported from “Severance” are not enough to kill off John and Paul’s attraction and longing for each other. Again, this is basically what happened, so.
John and Paul without the Beatles?
Yes, please! Sometimes, the best way to dissect and celebrate (and fix?) this mesmerizing and exasperating partnership is to lift it from its context and drop it elsewhere. Anything goes.
WHATEVER FATE DECREES by @dailyhowl: A gorgeous, finely spun, securely handled, self-contained vision of how John and Paul could have worked as artists in love, without a band to 'legitimize' and constrain their bond. I love this homage to their deep and complicated love that needed trust and breathing room.
1967 by @walkuntilthedaylight: What if John and Paul had gone to Spain together and not come back? This story not only explores their relationship layer by layer, it also dives into the the feelings of those who knew them 'before' and who now meet them again, as a couple. A fascinating alternate history. Not a fluffy one.
TOMORROW I'LL MISS YOU (@pauls1967moustache): Paul abandons John in Hamburg—or John stays behind without bothering to write, depending on who you ask. This "Before Sunset"—AU reunites them, years later. They ride a bus and write a song, and the love and tension are sweet and painful.
DOUBLE FANTASY (by @javelinbk): Modern AU in which John and Paul meet at John's flower shop and manage to ignore and creatively re-interpret their feelings for one another for a surprising amount of time, before fate has mercy. I love how their sweet, well-matched eccentricity makes the world a warmer place for both of them.
WE ARE STARDUST (Unchained_Daisychain): AU. John and Paul meet at Woodstock, fall hard and fast for each other, and have to decide what to do with it: Paul's life is back home in England...except...
Angst, darkness, and courage:
Pain, fear, grief, and other dark emotions are part of the real J/P story, so it makes sense to honor and harvest them in fiction. One of my favorite brands of McLennon angst is the one triggered by their feelings for each other, and the thing they become once they're together™. When they're scared of how much they need each other, and of what will happen next.
ONE AND ONE AND ONE IS THREE and MANAGING EXPECTATIONS (both by @pauls1967moustache), for instance. The first is a terrifying threesome with Yoko (at John's instigation, of course), in which trust is never rewarded and sex resolves nothing. The second is Paul wondering, in thoughts both messy and crystal clear, whether he exists independently of John. He turns to Brian for answers. They fuck. It feels like a human thing compared to what is going on in Paul's mind. Just astounding.
SUNDAY DRIVER (@boshemians) dives into the theme of Paul and John being afraid of themselves in the aftermath of Paul's accident (moped, sexual) with Tara Browne. This one, like "Managing Expectations," ends on a lovely grace note.
MACABRE (@dovetailjoints). Lennon and McCartney go too far.
OPEN HEART (@paisanas). Paul drinks John's blood. John lets him. But Paul starts to hate himself for how much he needs John, which John feels as rejection. I love how this story ends on Paul embracing his need. You can see the painful, bare bones of their malnourished love under the lush sensuality of the vampire sex. Raw and rich.
SILENCE (@ohjohnnysblog). Short and piercing. If there is someone you love—tell them. Don't wait.
THE LATE, GREAT JOHNNY ACE (@midchelle). Reeling with grief, Paul is recording an album in 1981. George and Ringo are there. John is not. But in the end—he is. And they touch. I've always admired Paul's resilience in the face of having to perform or "prove" his love of John in public, and this story showed me, without sugar-coating, where this resilience comes from.
Light, hope, and fixing things:
There is also much lightness and brightness in McLennon, because John and Paul were ridiculous, and horny, and weird. And also: they deserve a laugh. They deserve the fluffiest of happy endings. They deserve high-quality, life-affirming smut. They deserve silly, because silly is what they were. You know their names, look up their number.
1980. John is in BERMUDA (@scurator), Paul visits. Paul comes prepared, John just comes. Sometimes, it can be this simple. This story always leaves me in such a good mood. Paul is the (more) experienced one, and it...really works for me.
GOT TO GET DOWN (@eveepe): In praise of John's obsession with Paul's...precious. His small and perfect prick.
ADVENTURES IN TOTAL HONESTY (@merseydreams). Pithy and sexy, and, I quote from the tags: #Excessive Margarita Mixing.
ANINUT (@pauls1967moustache): The Beatles heal, together and separately, after Brian's death. Once more, I quote the writer: "The Beatles did not follow any of the Jewish mourning traditions, and frankly, they should have."
The unhinged weirdness of the Mad Day Out, with John and Paul escaping and Francie, Yoko and Mal not missing them...much, is rightfully celebrated in one of the insaner stories I read: JOHN, I'M ONLY DANCING (@skylikeaflame)
FAIR'S FAIR (@javelinbk): John and Paul are being silly during a press conference, resulting in acute arousal requiring John's skilled intervention. I love the unexpected care and tenderness in this one!
WHERE THE POETS WENT (RedheadAmongWolves): Tender and enchanted story in which Paul and John go to a bookstore, where they're not as famous as everywhere else. As delicate as the chiming doorbells and the pages murmuring around them.
TAKEN AWAY (@crumblingcookies) Extraterrestrial Intelligence intervenes to reunite John and Paul.
CAN I TAKE MY FRIEND TO BED? (manhattanvalleys). Paul fucks the band in sequence and gets off in the end, as is his due. This is a story like Prince's KISS. No filler, all effect.
THEY SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY (@ohjohnnysblog). Warm and nostalgic phone sex in the 70's.
KEEP THE LIGHT WE'RE GIVEN (@backbenttulips). Amidst the rise of Beatlemania, Paul and John expect their first child. This is Paul's 1962 diary.
More Outsider POV's:
STILL MATES (@pauls1967moustache): in 1968, Peter Asher takes the leap to act on his feelings for his sister's spiraling ex fiancé. This isn't about Paul as much as about Peter, and who he wants to be. Gutting character study. It made me love Peter.
ANOTHER GIRL (@boshemians): Astrid reunites with the Beatles during the making of AHDN and registers their words and deeds with the same stark objectivity as her camera. I love how she seeks the shelter of obscurity while they are being dragged into the limelight. But she sees them, wherever they are. J/P in this story feels incredibly real to me.
WHY BUY THE COW (RedheadAmongWolves). The milkman sees everything on his early morning rounds: the arrival of a nice new family, the McCartneys, the mother's illness, the sadness after her death...and the arrival of a new love in the older son's life. He shouldn't approve—should say something, in fact. But a small inner voice holds him back.
SLEEPLESS IN WALES (thinkpink20). Mike overhears Paul and John whisper in bed. He doesn't understand everything they say. I do. Adorable.
Not each other's first love, but each other's true love
THIS YEAR'S FOR ME AND YOU (@skylikeaflame): After a long life, after deep and loving partnerships with other people, John and Paul, encouraged by their grown-up children, finally meet their mutual love head on. A festive story about waiting the perfect amount of time.
THERE ARE ALWAYS FLOWERS (tarenas): The Beatles are in the past; John and Paul's love is in ashes. Paul, who is fragile and bereft, lives with George, who is content. The four ex-Beatles unite for the second wedding of Mike McCartney. At times, the aching grief in this story is almost unbearable. But the love between George and Paul is unusual and real. This is unfinished. I'll keep waiting for the final chapter.
Beyond J/P
WANT ME WHEN I'M NOT THERE (@backbenttulips): Linda catches Paul cheating on her with John. She divorces him. Finally: a story that puts her most likely reaction front and center, with no mercy for the messed-up geniuses.
In the Rebecca-AU LOVE LIKE GHOSTS (@backbenttulips), Yoko becomes Mrs. Lennon. Soon, she discovers that her husband is haunted by the ghost of his first love. It's pleasing how well this re-telling matches the events as they (alas) (almost) happened. The ending is chilling. Genuinely horrifying. I love seeing Yoko as the sensible one and as the focus of empathy.
THE BASS LESSON (@aquarianshift). Paul and Stu fool around without letting go of their mutual resentment for even a moment. And it works. "Let's never do this again." I don't think so.
TELL ME ALL MY LOVE'S IN VAIN (@midchelle). Forget about quote unquote platonically obsessed male rock stars: This about about Maureen and Patti through the years. The web weaving continues.
SPOTLIGHT ON JOHN AND STU (@dailyhowl) A love story in letters—too brief, like Stu's life, but sounding as if the writer transcribed their dictation.
Some of the best descriptions of what it must have been like to play on stage with the Beatles during the mania are in NO I IN THREESOME (@with-eyes-closed). George finds himself in the beam of attention between John and Paul, and nearly loses his mind. But he's determined to stay and become part of them. Paul is daddy and "fucks like music" as seen through George's eyes. The whole story is vicious and hot and uncomfortable—until there's the love and quiet at the eye of the storm.
Not for the faint of heart! WHAT THE CIGGIE CARTON SAW (@waveofhand): Paul McCartney having his way with cigarettes.
This is getting out of hand...but I'll stop here. There are so many more stories I love. And I can think of many other categories that would deserve their own post.
So, who knows: To be continued?
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There are two related things I've noticed coming from the left that I really want people to examine deeply in themselves, because it's a major problem that I see happening over and over again. The whole I/P issue is the most currently salient example, but it is one of many.
1. There's this tendency towards retributive justice, wherein the solutions proposed fail to take into account whether the proposed punishment is at all proportional to the alleged crime, but rather is just treated as the natural consequence of that action.
2. This same principle is also extended backwards in time and used to excuse violence post hoc that they might not have chosen as an ideal punishment but have nevertheless decided was deserved because that person [allegedly] did something bad.
Both betray an underlying punitive or retributive justice mentality, where the goal is not restoration or reconciliation + accountability, but rather punishment. (There are some interesting religious and cultural aspects to this I could get into but don't want to derail this post.)
This untethering of crime to punishment in terms of (a) due process, (b) proportionality of punishment to the crime, and (c) a failure to consider restorative justice, reconciliation, and teshuva processes instead of retribution leads to monstrous and morally bankrupt results.
Put another (blunter, crasser) way: the left's longstanding hard-on for vigilante violence is a critical failure that undermines the entire movement.
You cannot base your politics on humanism, compassion, and due process out one side of your mouth and then cheer on vigilante violence, cruel and unusual punishment, and mob mentality out the other. It doesn't work like that.
Now I understand that sometimes armed resistance is necessary. People living under authoritarian and inhumane conditions may, out of necessity, turn to guerrilla warfare and unofficial armed resistance in self-defense. But even that has limits. When leftists fantasize about death by curb stomping or slitting someone's throat as a good thing, they are imagining this happening to armed fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, or possibly other categories of irredeemable people such as domestic abusers who maim or kill their partner &/or children, pedophiles, human traffickers, etc.
What they aren't imagining is the other side of that coin, which is the alt-righter who murdered Heather Heyer with his car, abortion clinic bombers, violent Q-anoners or terrorists. Each of those people also believe in the justice of their actions and their entitlement to act as arresting officer, judge, jury, and executioner.
"But those people are wrong!"
So? Why do you get to decide that for everyone? What about the people who think YOU are wrong?
There's a reason courts and due process exist. It's the same reason why "free speech" protects the speech you hate, why freedom of the press protects that rag whose opinions you hate, and why free exercise of religion protects shitty religious groups you wish to see gone. It's because we live in a society and you aren't the arbiter of justice for everyone. If you give in to that mentality, you will inevitably end up in a "might makes right" society, which never ends well, particularly for marginalized people.
If you wouldn't accept l'chatchila a certain punishment being administrated by a court of law without outcry and protest for human rights abuses, then don't cheer it on b'dievad. Either rape is unacceptable or it's not. Either torture is unjustifiable or it isn't. Either maiming is an acceptable punishment for certain crimes or it isn't. You either support the death penalty by certain methods (beheading, burned alive, strangled, hacked apart, stoning, hanging, etc.) or you don't. Collective punishment is either acceptable or it isn't. Vicarious punishment is either acceptable or it isn't.
All of those things are either human rights abuses, or they aren't. All of them fall outside even the rules that might permit self-defense or guerrilla warfare or other uprisings of the oppressed.
Due process is the same - either you believe in due process and the right to a fair and timely trial, or you don't. The moment you support one extrajudicial punitive killing, you have opened the door to the justification of murder, provided the killer has sufficient justification.
It's true that the rules of armed conflict and war are different, but that they exist at all is relevant here too. The reason they exist is to minimize suffering during an event that is guaranteed to cause great suffering. It's the same reason why the laws of self-defense are different than the laws of intentional murder.
The truth is that in order to live in a just and civilized society, there must be specific rules that govern the administration of conflict resolution and harm. These rules must be enforced consistently and equally, and the decider of fact must have reasonable access to the evidence that exists. The state or any court of law or other tribunal must render its decision in the most impartial way possible, even for the worst, most obviously guilty people. Even those that commit heinous crimes must be given those same rights. Without those safeguards, you create the opportunity for bad faith actors to label their undesirable groups or individuals as whatever category people find so despicable that they fall out of being considered human and lose their claim to human rights protections. It must therefore be impossible to forfeit your right to due process and freedom from vigilantes and mobs.
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I'm imagining the very unfortunate 13 year old trans boy who has top surgery and then grows more later as puberty progresses.
(I know that 13 year olds don't get top surgery unless there's something VERY weird/wrong [for instance: cancer] going on with the kid's body.)
Minors absolutely can and do get, for instance, breast implants--but only if they're cis, and only with parental permission. The fucked up thing is that a lot of medical procedures that are considered perfectly safe and uncontroversial as long as you're cis (puberty blockers, HRT, various kinds of plastic surgery) get rhetorically transformed into a big scary cloud of evil for trans people, and even transphobes who are nominally opposed to, say, breast implants for sixteen year olds certainly aren't going to spend nearly as much time, if any at all, railing against that sort of thing in public. Because all of this is a post-hoc justification for an intense disgust they feel at gender nonconformity, not actually a principled defense of anybody's rights.
This is also why you can't rhetorically pin them down on any single point. They'll lie about GCS; and when you point out that's a lie, they'll go "well, what about puberty blockers?" And if you point out that puberty blockers are pretty safe, were invented to treat precocious puberty in cis kids, and their effects are entirely reversible, they'll leap to bathrooms or FUD about nebulous issues of "women's rights," and if you try to pin them down about that, they'll circle right back around to lying about GCS, hoping any onlookers have forgotten about or missed that part of the discussion.
I have very little sympathy for people who argue so transparently in bad faith and whose pyschosexual obsessions are so nakedly on display. Books like Irreversible Damage lay bear the extent to which transphobia is almost wholly about cis peoples' anxiety about their own gender and gender expression, in the same way that homophobia is often straight people twisting themselves into knots about their own sexuality. What these people really need is therapy, or an ayahuasca retreat, or to do some yoga about it, but that would require the uncomfortable process of cultivating self-knowledge, so plan B is "make sure I don't have to be confronted with evidence that the human experience is more diverse and complicated than I have been previously willing to believe."
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imagine living in a society where drop spindles are constantly spinning around you making all the clothes and hand-powered rotary querns are grinding all the flour for the bread, and knowing about planetary rotation.
like the fact that the earth is spinning just like that all the time underfoot.
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【 # 001 】 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐈𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄
fallacy (n.) : are flawed, deceptive, or false arguments that can be proven wrong with reasoning.
𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘 : As a veteran AR60 player of Genshin Impact, you pride yourself as someone who knows the ins and outs of Teyvat, even studiously completing Spiral Abyss every reset, and having 100% exploration to some, if not all, of the released regions so far. Everything is fun and enjoyable, especially since Sumeru just recently debuted so you still have a lot to do!
All that ends though, when a mysterious passerby pushes you off the building of your university while playing Genshin. But instead of meeting your inevitable end, you find yourself waking up in the very world you were addicted to!
It's supposed to be a fun dream, right? Something you could laugh at when you wake up? Right?! So, why is that you were back in AR1 with nothing but a dull blade in your inventory?!
…well, at least you still have those 700+ sunsettias and mints, Timmie's fowls…and surprisingly similar game mechanics you used to merely see on the screen before. But what should you do now? Flirt with the Genshin men??? Good lords...
"Welcome to Genshin Impact, Dreamer. Here, we can show you a happier ever after you've never had before…so, ready?"
𝐂𝐖 / 𝐓𝐖 : graphic depiction of violence; possible character death (on bad ends so choose your route wisely!); multiple endings (including good, bad, normal and secret ends); canon divergent, game mechanics, existential crisis, character study.
𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄 : isekai/reverse isekai, choose your own adventure (cyoa) with branching narratives, romance, comedy, angst (depending on the routes), hurt with/without comfort (still depends on routes), action, mystery, found family.
𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐄𝐒 : albedo, tighnari, zhongli, cyno, xiao, diluc, venti, ayato, kaveh, kazuha and tartaglia. Possible more love interest as the story progresses.
𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒 : on-going
𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 :
𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 : that love is a fallacy.
𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐈 : alea iacta est. (the die is cast)
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈 : argumentum ad hominem.
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈𝐈 : argumentum ad ignorantiam.
𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐈𝐈: audentes fortuna iuvat. (fortune favours the bold)
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈.𝐈 : magister dixit.
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈.𝐈𝐈 : argumentum petitio principii.
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈𝐈.𝐈 : ignoratio elenchi.
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈𝐈.𝐈𝐈: cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐈𝐈𝐈 : veritas liberabit vos. (the truth will set you free)
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈𝐈 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈𝐈𝐈 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐈𝐕 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐕 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐕𝐈 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐕𝐈𝐈 : —
𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐕𝐈𝐈𝐈 : —
tba...
"𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐅" 𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐄𝐒
𝐈 | odi et amo ; ( gn!reader × scaramouche ) ; in which scaramouche reveals you the reason why he hates you so much. But in the silence that comes after his hatred is revealed, and from the unspoken words that never leave his lips, would it be too selfish to ask for something more than this?
𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒 :
reader here is gender neutral, so if I happened to have a pronoun slip by accident, please do correct me. I swear it was a honest mistake cause I don't really proofread my works :3
that being said, although reader should based off of you, as in you reading this, reader has their own background prior to their arrival in teyvat. Down below are some of the changes/characteristics I took the liberty to add to the reader's persona and history to fit in the story!
(i.) reader is a university student studying science or other related field (their specialisation differs in each route to make it interesting). though i did not specify their age, appearance and race (feel free to imagine them whichever), they were supposed to be in the middle of taking their college degree.
(ii.) reader has an adoptive older brother (who would be important in the storyline later on).
(iii.) reader is presented to be quite reckless, a bit ditzy, chaotic, an unhinge and lively character, rebellious, hardheaded, opinion oriented, and wouldn't bend to rules that they see as pointless no matter how the society dictates them to do so, but they were kind and carefree when you get to know them more. you'll see what I'm talking about in the first chapter 😂
before I forgot, although I'm a huge fan of the sagau presented in tumblr (the one with creator and cult themes; those are chef kiss btw), my take on the plot of sagau is very different. There's no divine creator here or cultish behaviours (i'm so sorry if that's what you're looking for 😷) my main focus here is all about the genshin characters' self awareness that they were in a game as they interacted with the isekai!reader, which is why I added the reverse isekai in the genre tags because it will be a huge turnover in the future chapters :>
also, the game mechanics I'm talking about above is what we see on the screen of genshin. Like the Paimon Menu, the inventory, the character archive, and so on! When reader is isekaid, it seems like they brought the whole screen with them? XD
I know stuff will probably be confusing for you and me later on because of the branching narratives happening in this hellhole of a plot, but please bare with me xD I will do my best to make it clear as possible.
This fanfic has four types of routes (or ends if you prefer it that way), There are good ends (romantic happy ending all the way!), bad ends (if you're unlucky that you fall in the dramatic hellhole then yes), normal ends (this could end in either being platonic, a cliffhanger or an open ending up to your interpretation lmao), and lastly, the secret ends (i'll keep whatever this is hidden for now because I planned something huge for this lol).
a "what if" routes are a series of one-shots, short stories or drabbles that was not really connected with the primary routes. It could be read as a standalone fics. Possibly just my word vomit and brainrotting lmao. They also don't have any branching narratives like the primary routes.
well! that is all, i guess! I'll add something later if I remember stuff I should be telling you beforehand but for now, i guess this would do xD also, if you wanted to be tagged for this, feel free to dm me or send an ask about it! Thank you for reading all the way and I hope you will have fun (and a good laughs!) while you were reading this trash of a fanfic lmao 🤣
Ps. I'll try to post the prologue tomorrow since its already half finished already <3
#genshin impact#zhongli x reader#xiao x reader#albedo x reader#cyno x reader#tighnari x reader#diluc x reader#venti x reader#kazuha x reader#ayato x reader#tartaglia x reader#genshin impact x reader#gender neutral reader#jaded moments—!#genshin sagau#sagau
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An earnest call for your support: Help me determine if there is a gas leak in my house.
for a long time now, I have been reading and hearing about This Guy on the news, and have been reading all the articles and stories about him:
Above: Sam, tenting his weird-ass fucked up fingers like a real Wall Street Guy might do in a movie he saw
Yep, you already know this guy, his name is Sam, I'll be referring to him as Sam, as that is his first name, and not by his initials, which is what I imagine a pod person might do in an attempt to emulate human behaviour. Whatever. You already know him and what he did, I won't waste your time. Listen. Pay attention. This is not a post about this guy or what he did. That shit is boring as fuck. This is a post about a potential gas leak in my house. We'll get to that in just a bit. Remember.
I've read all the articles and all the op-eds and everything. About Sam. Let us explore the entire spectrum of media coverage of Sam and Sam's Big Ass Problem, starting from the bottom, with the worm-food-tier jackasses: What do people like Jim Cramer and Shark Tank Guy have to say about him?
Above: CNN's "Mad Money" Jim Cramer also doing a weird hand gesture while he tells your alcoholic cable-news-addicted uncle to put his money in some dumbass shit
Above: I think this is the Shark Tank guy? I don't remember his name. Could have sworn his suit had dollar signs and not question marks (?)
I'll summarize their conclusions: "Sam is a boy genius who is super duper smart and can move objects with his massive brain due to knowing about Tech, FinDom FinTech, and computer money, specifically Money Coding. Unfortunately Sam committed massive fraud and will get his ass fucked in federal court".
Moving on from the worm-food-tier to the mediocre-tier: The totally nameless basic bitch journalists at the New York Times or Bloomberg. What do these assholes have to say?
Above: Jim Fuckface, associate financial correspondent for Bloomberg. Jim enjoys winding down on a Friday afternoon by sipping a Bud Lite Lime and wearing his baseball cap backwards, which bears the logo of his local professional sports team.
Above: Kate Fuckface, columnist at the New York Times. Kate enjoys spending her time chatting and interacting with her friends on Social Media Platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as purchasing items on Etsy
I'll summarize their conclusions: "Displaying the characteristic awkwardness of incredible technical and financial genius, it was clear to me during our interview that Sam's depth of knowledge truly knew no bounds. Unfortunately Sam committed massive fraud and will get his ass fucked in federal court."
Finally moving on to the people that might actually have a clue about what they're talking about. Sam Levine and Michael Lewis:
Above: Matt Levine, author of a comedy email newsletter named Money Stuff that is 95% financial information by weight and somehow still usually funny as fuck.
Above: Michael Lewis, author of a bunch of really good books you haven't read that were made into pretty decent movies you have seen: Moneyball and The Big Short.
I'll summarize their conclusions: "Sam sure is a smart kid and seems to know a whole lot about economics and this digital currency, and I mean a whole lot, and even more about business, accounting, and finance. Bright kid! Unfortunately Sam committed massive fraud and will get his ass fucked in federal court."
A pretty goddamn clear consensus across the board on both counts.
I listened to the interviews the entire spectrum of people listed above conducted with him -- the ones during which they unanimously concluded how smart he is. I listened to many hours of ad-hoc, unscripted Twitter Space calls he participated in, where he fielded questions about his fraud and his business with complete strangers. I listened to them very carefully. And here is my problem! I came to a different conclusion!
Sam is a fucking moron. I am not talking about solely his intellect, or solely his decision-making abilities, or any specific criteria. I am talking about all of them.
There are two possibilities:
(A) I am correct and, somehow, literally everyone else is incorrect, most of whom know vastly more about these topics than I do
(B) There is a fucking gas leak in my house and I have completely lost all cognitive abilities, suddenly and unwittingly, and exist in a cartoon reality inside my skull that would allow me to reach such a wildly different conclusion from the same evidence.
The likelihood of (A) being correct is very nearly 0%. I mean, come on. I am not fucking around when I tell you how troubling this is for me. I wrote earlier that this isn't a post about Sam or his bullshit. This is a post asking for your help in determining whether I have lost my god damn marbles.
I'll give Sam one thing -- he has some nominal ability to bullshit. If he's writing a Tweet, or making a short statement, he can finesse his words that, on some level, mask how much of a dimwit he is. He absolutely can't do that through about six hours of unscripted interviews. Listen to that shit. Listen.
I am going to go check all the joints in the gas lines in my house as well as the ports on my stove and heater. I'll come back and write a follow-up post on outlining exactly why I think homeboy is an idiot. While I do that, please, go listen to the interviews and tell me what you think.
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so there's two ways to interpret this
there's the idea that playing this game is inherently an endorsement of JKR's transphobic politics and its success is a sign of how mainstream transphobia is - this is a point of view that both JKR herself and a whole lot of people on tumblr have endorsed
but there is another interpretation, which is that the entire intense culture war around harry potter is really only visible to the very online, and many people who aren't transphobic bought this game simply because they aren't aware of or don't particularly care about this discourse. i think this is the more accurate interpretation, and also a far less demoralizing one
also like. not to rub it in, but trying to organize an ad hoc boycott through angry tumblr posts was only ever going to be a huge waste of everyone's time and energy. if you want to spend your days discoursing about harry potter, that is your prerogative, but don't, like, confuse yourself into imagining you are Doing Politics
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