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honeysuckle-venom · 11 months

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@queerfirewatchers asked a lot of great questions about our journey towards fusion the other day, I'm going to make them into a post here! It's very long, so it's going below the cut

Does your therapist specialize in dissociative disorders? If not, do you feel like that was a vice in terms of recovery?

My therapist does not specialize in dissociative disorders, but she does specialize in trauma, and had a decent amount of experience with dissociative disorders before me. She also has a lot of experience/arguably specialization in psychotic disorders and trauma based psychosis, which has been hugely important for me. I do not at all feel like her not being a CDD specialist was a negative thing; in fact, for me personally it probably would've been a worse experience to work with a CDD specialist because of my particular comorbidities. It was definitely important that she had previous experience with DID, and it would've been a problem if I had felt like I was the one educating her, but thankfully that was not the case. The other reason it wasn't a problem for me in terms of recovery is that our journey towards fusion is 100% a trauma recovery journey. Very very little of the work we've done, especially in the last few years, has been explicitly about DID. We rarely talk about alters, and despite have therapy 2-3 times per week for over 9 years I know that my therapist could not name all of my alters, because that makes up very little of what we talk about. For me healing from DID has been primarily about a) healing from trauma and b) accepting the parts of myself that I feared/hated/was ashamed of. Those two things are what have lead to fusion for me, not explicit DID recovery/communication/integration work. There was a bit more of that type of work earlier on, but the last few years? Very very little. But of course my process is not going to be the same as anyone else's, and there are some people who do need a DID specialist. We just weren't one of them.

2. How did you get all your alters on board with it? I'm really struggling with that part because I feel like I can't get the parts who are blocking us to show up in therapy

I'm going to be honest, I don't 100% know how to answer this one. When we first learned about our DID we were terrified of fusion. It sounded like killing some of us off, like destroying some of our chances to be who we wanted to be. And then even when we tried to believe it wasn't really like that, it still sounded awful bc it meant we'd have to be present all the time, no more switching out when triggered or overwhelmed, and why would I ever do that to myself? Why would I get rid of such an effective coping mechanism? I tried to keep an open mind, and certainly was never philosophically against fusion like some people are, but most of us had zero interest in seeking it out for ourselves.

That attitude changed very slowly, largely due to interacting with other people who had fused or were interested in fusion or were at least discussing it without the fearmongering you see all over tumblr. And then, several years ago, my brain did a weird thing. It gave me a week off. For about a week, everyone except me went dormant, but it didn't feel scary or bad. It was essentially like a sneak preview of fusion. I didn't have the kind of access to other parts I have now, but it wasn't quite like normal dormancy either. It was quiet, and peaceful, and felt like how I imagined people who had never had DID felt. I don't know how or why my brain did this, and it didn't last very long. But it felt really good, and gave us the courage to really start to accept fusion as a goal. I know that's not a helpful answer, because I don't know how or why that happened to me and can't make it happen to you. But that's pretty much how we got everyone on board.

I will say something about the second part of your question though, about having trouble getting the parts who aren't on board to show up to therapy. First of all, that sounds very frustrating, and I'm sorry that's been hard. You probably know all of the normal advice here (try to find out why they don't want therapy, do they not like your therapist, are they afraid of integration, do they think they need to keep secrets for abusers and/or from other parts, etc etc etc). If it's important for them to go to therapy, obviously you should try to work on that, and if there are issues that are stopping it from happening you should address them. But. I will say that at least for us, it was not necessary for every part to go to therapy, and many of us have never been. Even some of our most "difficult" parts never attended therapy. Instead, I talked about them in therapy, and my therapist was usually the one encouraging me to have more empathy for those parts. That was more important in the end for us than some of those parts attending themselves. Additionally, fusion really won't happen if you're not all on board, and that's okay. One of the things you definitely don't want to do is push it. For us fusion was a very very slow and natural process that came along with healing and lowering dissociative barriers. By the time we got to the point when it would be possible, we had been working as a team for long enough that some parts not being on board was not an issue. We had to work very very hard at understanding and accepting each other, that was the most important thing, including understanding things we fundamentally disagreed on, and trying to work those disagreements out and compromise. We had an easier time with this than many systems do, but it still took a lot of effort. But once we had done that, everyone was kind of naturally on board and working together and fusion just started happening because we were finally ready. My advice is not to push towards fusion, it's to push towards healing and acceptance of each other, at which point fusion might be something that happens, or it might not. And having all parts attend therapy is not necessary for that and may in fact be counterproductive at the moment if you're forcing them to do something they don't want to do. I would recommend trying to understand what's holding them back from healing instead of trying to force them to heal in ways they aren't ready for.

3. I understand that part of healing is integrating and sharing memories and cooperating, but idk how to do that when so many of the memories are like…. paralyzing with how petrifying they are to have happened to Me Collectively instead of Me an Alter. how did you deal with fear, assuming you had something similar?

I've definitely dealt with this, and it was by far the hardest part of the whole thing. And also the most important part, unfortunately. A huge, huge part of integrating has been not just surface-level-acknowledging but truly processing that I actively experienced some honestly horrific things. In some ways I was kind of forced to push through that fear, because I was getting flashbacks/having things come up no matter what, so I had to talk about them. And I didn't force it overly when things weren't coming up naturally. I tend to trust my brain/subconscious to know when it's time to do trauma processing. But it was still extremely difficult when it was time to face processing and integrating those memories and experiences and grieving their effects. And I had to do it in layers. I would process an aspect of my trauma history, and be horrified, and feel sick, and grieve, and talk about it, and I would think I was done. But actually I was only processing to the extent I was capable of at the time. And then a year later I'd kind of reach a new level with my recovery and the same memories would hit me differently and I'd have to do the whole thing over again. And each time it was pretty horrible. I don't really have anything that makes the process better. What I can say is that it's fucking worth it. I was always told "it gets better" and "recovery is possible" but tbh I didn't truly believe it. I hung onto it as a mantra, because I needed that hope, but I couldn't internalize the concept until I started to experience it myself. Part of why it was so hard for me to accept is because I hadn't really met anyone who'd done it. All of my friends were also deeply mentally ill, and I was further along in therapy than pretty much all of them. The only source I had was my own therapist, I didn't know details but I knew she'd recovered from some Serious Stuff TM. But because I didn't know details it still wasn't that helpful of an example. But I'm experiencing it now, and I can finally say for sure that it's real. That not only is fusion real, but trauma recovery is real. Those same memories, that I had to process over and over in a deeply scary and painful way in therapy? That tortured me for years? Aren't as powerful anymore. They're getting less powerful every day. My PTSD symptoms are improving, and I never thought that would happen. I thought that even if we fused I'd still be tormented by my past experiences. And while that's still true to a certain extent, for the first time in my life the impact of my trauma is lessening. I had to accept that those things happened to me, and it was awful. But having accepted that and worked to heal from it, it's so much less painful than it was before going through that process. It's a hard process, and it feels endless at times, but it truly is possible to come out the other side in a way that I once thought was a myth.

4. did you ever run into the problem of not knowing if a feeling was coming from your ocd or an alter? cause I've been dealing with that a lot and idk how to tell the difference or how to proceed bc I'm scared of irreparably causing damage by doing it "wrong" if that makes any sense

This is a tricky one. While I have not had the problem of not knowing if a feeling was coming specifically from my OCD or an alter, I have definitely had the feeling of not knowing if something was coming from my psychosis or an alter, which is different but not entirely dissimilar. In those cases though the treatment for both for me is quite similar, so it's not necessarily a helpful example when it comes to this question. I would need a few more details to know what your concerns are here/why you're so worried about this? But even if the things you would do to help with OCD are very different from how you would try to help an alter, I highly doubt that you need to be quite so worried about doing it "wrong," and I think even if you do the chances of the damage being irreparable is so slim as to be almost nonexistent. If it's possible to recover from the kind of damage that causes DID (and it is) then it's possible to recover from some mistakes during treatment. In fact, it's pretty much inevitable that you and/or your therapist will make at least a few mistakes along the way, and learning that it's possible to do that and to repair those mistakes is honestly an important part of the process. So while I would need more specifics to understand what the exact concerns are here/how I might respond to them, I will say that in general I don't think you need to be so afraid of attempting to heal something one way, realizing it's not working, and then trying something different.

Thank you so so much for all of these amazing questions, I really enjoyed answering them and I hope my answers can give some insight to people wondering about fusion! I'm happy to receive more questions from anyone who wants to send them :)

#answers #did stuff #final fusion #about us #my post #text post

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angelic-simp · 1 year

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For: @batteredcourier

Bonus of the "Steak knife" series.

Shape-shifting shit that mostly me and courier will understand, us rn 🤝👫

Songs I listened to while writing this: trash - Oscar lang, so long - fleece, heaven is a night drive - suave punk,

Warnings: kissing, a little bit suggestive, mention of weed usage, weird shape-shifting bs (tell me If I missed any.)

"What? What do you mean you can- oh shit."

Lavina had brushed my hair back with a smile, giving me kisses all over my face with a proud look in her eyes.

"Such a masterpiece you are A ghrá." My face brightens in color.

Leaning downward Lavina would capture my lips into a deep kiss, purely made up of love and adoration for my very being.

She pulls away, leaving me to chase her lips.

She chuckles and smooths my hair over and grabbing my face again with a wide smile, "You do the littlest things and my heart bursts out of my chest."

She'd admit, leaning down to put me in a passionate kiss.

Holding the back of my head and running her fingers through my hair she smiles, placing kisses all over my face down to my neck.

"Lavina-" I would nervously call, and she would look up towards me, her eyes widening.

'Not now, why now of all times?'

Blinking through new eyes I would curse.

'Fuck. FUCK! This wasn't supposed to happen, NOT like this. FUCK.'

"Sal, what wasn't supposed to happen?" Lavina would ask, looking around the room for me.

"Uh. So, uhm." I would mumble.

"Where the feck did you go?-" I would bring up Lavinas hands to her (our) Face, a nervous chuckle escaping me (us).

Placing my (our) hands over the bed I (we) clear my (our) throat, "So, uh. I can, kind of FUSE WITH THE ONES I LOVE? Not like family, like lovers and shit but its MEANT TO HAPPEN AFTER MARRIAGE."

'Adorable, they're nervous.'

"What? What do you mean you can- oh shit." She would lead us to the bathroom, looking in the mirror and cursing.

Instead of her normal appearance she had red eyes, two piercings on the lower lip, one above her eyebrow and ear gauges.

She pokes her tongue out, and sighs in relief when she realizes her own piercing was still in.

Besides that, nothing had changed.

"God I look Fecking hot like this." She would look over our appearance again while messing with the piercings.

Our face would heat up, I slap her hand away with her other hand and let out a hiss, "This isn't the time to admire how we look right now. We have to tell Bob."

Mentally I was freaking out, scenarios of what bad could happen over me 'fusing' (to simplify.) with Lavina.

We inhale.

'What if Bob leaves the relationship?'

Lavina would open the bathroom door and exit.

'What if, what if Lavina starts to hate me for doing this without asking?'

Taking a deep breath in she sighs, "I'm too high for this." She'd mutter under her breath.

'What if-'

Lavina taps the side of her head, bringing me back to her.

"Hey, fusion shit is wild, but I wouldn't leave you over it dude. Plus, while we're like this you're literally speaking to me like..."

She searches for the word.

"Like mind reading! Yeah, I'm sticking with that." I let out a sigh.

She would walk us to Bob, steady cooking in the kitchen.

He would hum a light tune with a smile while cooking a large meal, likely for the date night we had all planned.

Lavina and I took a moment to admire him from the hallway, biting our nail.

'I can't believe I got this lucky with such spectacular people.'

After that thought, her inner dialog became very suggestive.

Forcing us to walk over to Bob before she would act on those thoughts, I call for him.

"Bob!" He would stop humming and acknowledged me by calling out my own name, "Yes Sal?"

We walk over and sit at the Island, waving to Bob from said area Lavina would raise an eyebrow at him swaying his hips to the beat he'd made up in his head.

Bob looks to us, raising a brow.

"When did you get piercings like Sal? Should I be jealous?" He chuckles to himself and leans against the counter, the immaculate smelling food cooking on the stove.

Lavina laughs, "You should be. Maybe they like me more?" Bob raises a brow and looks over Lavina.

I chime from her body, "No, correction. I love you both equally." Bob's eyebrows would raise and he searches her eyes.

Something in his mind would piece together, "SAL???" I sigh, and Lavina laughs.

Wiping away a fake tear she sighs, "took you long enough big guy." I would groan and flick Lavinas ear, she hisses.

"WHAT WAS THAT FOR???" This time it was me who laughed.

Bob would stare at us in disbelief, a look of shock flashing over his face.

"Back on topic, I accidentally fused with Lavina." I would look at the Island, avoiding Bob's gaze.

Bob looked ready to throw up, cry and faint at the same time.

"What- How???" Lavina shrugs, "Sal got nervous, likely a part of why it happened. But we need your help." Bob would look at us and put his hands on top of his head.

Lavina would put her hand on our chin, and hum.

Bob would sigh, "Maybe you need an outside force? What were y'all doin' when Sal got nervous?"

She would smile, a proud look crossing her face, "WE were kissing on the bed. Like lovers do." Bob would think further on it, an idea popping into his head.

He hadn't told us a thing before doing it, walking over and grabbing our face.

Leaning down he gives us a deep kiss, smoothing over our hair.

Deepening the kiss, we gasp.

When I had opened my eyes, I was on Lavinas lap, and Bob was holding my hands with a smile.

Lavina would grab my hips and place her head on my shoulder, "He actually did something smart for once." She murmured near my ear.

I would laugh, leaving Bob out of the loop.

"What? What'd the tea lover say?" He would look between us with furrowed eyebrows.

Lavina would laugh as well, filled with mirth and excitement.

Bob would glare at the two of us, "What??? WHAT IS IT???"

Done once more! Writers brick has hit me in the head, I have so many ideas but I don't know how to write them out and it fucking suckssssssssss

I hope you enjoyed this one! I think I did a good job with it, had no idea how to work through it yesterday but I'm glad I figured out how to!

#bob velseb #bob velseb x reader #bob velseb x self insert #mutuals #bob velsen #polycule #steak knife series #for my mutuals #oc x oc #oc x oc x canon #oc x canon #bob velseb x oc

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maddstermind · 7 months

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I'm crying at some of these titles - but also Lemon Demon is making more sense now knowing you know Homestuck (this is a compliment btw, I'm adding some of their songs to my list (Knife Fight)) ANYWAY - pls tell me more about howie dies dot jpeg and 999 999 laughing for real right now- On a more serious note - we're doing it man, we're making this happen You've been updated to Warheads cause my face currently resembles sucking on one I'm losing my fuckin mind rn

Yes, YES, I highly recommend pretty much everything Lemon Demon has every done. Listen to Bustin', it's hilarious. (As far as I know, Lemon Demon/Neil Cicierega has nothing to do with Homestuck, but they do have a similar vibe lmao. Also I'm honored to be upgraded.)

OKAY WRITING THINGS YEEHAW.

howie dies dot jpeg Snippet:

President Howard Goodman sat at his desk in the Oval Office, alone. The orange light of the setting sun filled the room, silhouetting him with his back to the window. He was alone. He kept telling himself that. There was no one else in the room, hadn't been for hours as he demanded to be left alone for the rest of the day, but he could not convince himself that he was actually alone. He felt watched. Every shadow out of the corner of his eye looked to be a person, or a beast, or some horrific fusion of the two. It was worth mentioning that Howard hadn't been sleeping well lately.

About: The other (joke) working title for this was "Howie's Hot Girl Summer." The real title was "I'll Find You In The Next Timeline." It was meant to be for the 2023 Hatchetfield Big Bang (which I host!), but I got swamped and wasn't able to work on it for long. It's a timeloop story about the (fictional) President of the United States, Howard Goodman. And also he's in love with the mysterious military man, General John McNamara. I'll probably eventually get around to finishing and publishing it. Someday.

999 999 laughing for real right now Snippet:

"When I meet my soulmate, I'll tell you about all the colors, okay?" Light teased her about how she'd be able to describe colors without using examples, but she was stubborn. She swore she'd tell him what colors were like. "Alright," Light ruffled her hair, "you better keep your promise, then." "I will!" She grinned, though he didn't see it. He didn't have too, though. He just knew.

About: This fic is from [claps] 2017! I always meant to get around to finishing it... It's called "Prism of Light," and its a Zero Escape soulmate AU, the one where you start seeing color when you touch your soulmate for the first time. It's Light/Aoi (Snake/Santa) and I only got about two chapters in, but it is on AO3 for the curious. (It's not very good.)

we're doing it man, we're making it happen Snippet:

At age nine, Max saw a picture of Mothman and decided that was what they wanted to be when they grew up, and they've been working towards it ever since. Their desire to discover the bizarre often led to them believing too easily — luckily for them, Lizzie was always there to balance the scales. While she also had a keen interest in the weird, she was more skeptical, thinking things through more thoroughly before deciding whether or not to believe them. Together, the two had spent their years of friendship exploring the island town of Saint Hazel, following every possible lead in hopes of finding any scrap of strangeness in the sanitized town. They'd had their fair share of successes, even if it was never anything as grand-scale as Max hoped.

About: The actual title of this one is "The Conspiracy Gang," and it almost belongs in the "mix of both" category. It's an original work that is based on a roleplay of Starkid's Hatchetfield series done by me and my friends; the main characters are/were our OCs for the universe, but I love them so much I wanted to write a version of their story on my own (with my friend's permission, of course!) Max is my character, and Lizzie belongs to my good friend @cosmic--static! I haven't gotten that far into writing it, sadly, because I've been so heavily focused on Auberon. But someday!!!!!! OH ALSO ITS A COSMIC HORROR STORY FORGOT TO MENTION LMAO

#ask game #novel work #writeblr stuff #the-grim-and-sanguine #hope you find these fun lmao

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icilarastudios · 2 years

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5 Things I Dislike About the Henry Stickmin Fandom

5. Some Ships

It's a Fandom, there's going to be ships no matter what. So there's a lot of good examples of good ships in THSC, such as Rosevin, Rosemin, Stickvin, Panprice, Curtisson, and Copperight, and then there are bad ships like Pantis and Dr. Rose. So I'm going to be honest, the fandom did Ellie so bad, she was the target to many disgusting people and the things the Fandom did to her are beyond questionable, and probably the worst she's gotten were the ships, specifically the lesbian ships. No offense to those who think Ellie is in a lesbian relationship, but in all honesty, all the Lesbian ships with Ellie were attempts. The biggest one being Dr. Rose (Dr. V x Ellie), so the problem with this ship is that Dr. V is without a doubt older than Ellie, and Ellie we know has to be canonically in her 20s still, and considering how these two never actually met in the game makes no sense. Ellie is also often shipped with Carol Cross, and this makes no sense too. Another ship that makes no sense is Pantis, this ship was done terrible. The ship is Burt x Dave, and this ship often destroys Dave's character by making him a Toppat. This ship portrays Dave like he's the princess locked up in the Tower and he must fall in love with whoever frees him. And this is as worse as Burt is apart of the people who locked him up. The worst one in my opinion is Stickprice, mainly due to how it's executed. It's meant to be an Enemy to Lover ship, but Rupert and Henry are a terrible example! These two make it clear from the start that they hate each other and the game makes it clear these two are basically rivals of some sort as Rupert is constantly popping up where Henry is for most of the time! This ship is done terrible. The reason this is in 5 because you really can't stop someone from shipping something.

4. Not Following the Canon

So there's a lot of times when THSC artists don't follow what's canon and what's not. The only one that's really fine is the Jacob and Ellie are related, this was proven to be not true as they just conveniently had the same surname. Many people still consider them as siblings though, which is fine because people use this in the form of a Headcanon. However there are times when you can't make headcanons, especially when it's proven in the game, but mainly when it comes to ages, canon ships, and sexuality. Many people headcanon that Rupert during the game is in his 30s, however he is confirmed to be 26 years old. Henry is canonically 28 in the game. Many people believe Ellie and Henry are a thing in the game, however they're confirmed not as a couple or in a relationship at all, as none of the ships are actually canon in the game, so this leads to many people having the opportunity to headcanon ships like Stickvin, there are only two confirmed relationships in the game, that being Wilson Stone and his wife, and Gordon Smith and his wife who went into labor during ItA. The game has a lot of LGBTQ ships in it, and it turns out there are actually 2 confirmed LGBTQ characters, Sam Turner and Ellie and Henry in their fusion form, Ellry, are confirmed to be Non-binary, meaning they go by They/Them pronouns, however many people disagree with this and refers to them by their gender, which is considered misgendering, however this isn't always the case as many people don't really know they're canonically Non-binary.

3. Characters with Different Personalities

This is another one that pisses me off a lot. Many people like to completely ruin the personalities of some characters who actually show them in the game. The character who often falls victim to this a lot is Charles, as many people dislike his optimistic behavior in the games, and went as far as to changing his personality to more of an asshole or just nothing his personality. This one is based on the Fandom and was actually something that was said by @lexi-the-demon-child on their recent stream, they completely dislike how Dave is often the bottom in Panprice. I know this doesn't really fit in this category but there is a point in here, they also dislike how the fandom portrays Rupert in the relationship. The fandom portrays Rupert very dumb around Dave, while in the game he just treats Dave like a normal person than how the Fandom portrays them. There was also a time when many people in the fandom portrayed Burt Curtis as an emo su1c1d4l depressed person who wanted to die, however, this isn't the case in the game. Burt appears very bored and fed up with the people giving him orders rather than wanting to take his life.

2. Making Pure Characters Become Toppats

This is beyond stupid. There have been many times when people turned Charles into a member of the Toppat Clan, the people he is against in the game, along with Dave Panpa and Rupert Price. The Fandom does this a lot for Stickvin and Pantis. Pantis often results into Dave joining the Toppat Clan only really because he likes Burt and wants to be more close to him, where are Stickvin, whether it's Henry or Charles as the Toppat, is beyond disgusting. Charles is often r4p3d or covered in bite marks by Toppat Henry, who the fandom portrays very lustfully, while Toppat Charles is just often insane and wants Henry. There was only one person who really did this concept right, being Browa123's Triple Threat Toppats AU, as Henry doesn't appear to have any of the qualities the fandom gives him. Stickvin isn't actually shown in the first act, however the creator is confirmed to be shipping them in a healthy way unlike the fandom does, so this shows they actually did a good job at portraying it compared to others. The reason the fandom turns Rupert into a Toppat is unknown, especially because he's a government soldier who is against them and seen fighting them a few times. Charles' reason to be a Toppat is always stupid though, usually mostly because he's in a position he can't do anything and there's someone who loves him (this being usually Henry or Ellie) willing to let them free if they join them, and Charles is often simping for them. I don't really like Toppat Charles in general, it destroys his purpose of being in the government, while Browa123 did this in a good way, especially since Charles learned how messed up the side he was on in that AU.

Making the AU All About the Different Timeline Henrys

This one is the most dumbest one of them all, and destroys the purposes of the other characters in THSC. And I'm not talking about AUs that have characters from different endings or AUs meet each other, that's completely fine and actually nice to see. What I'm talking about is when people make the Henrys from the Different Endings in CtM meet each other and the artists completely ignore the existence of the other characters. They even go as far as to shipping the Henrys with each other. I absolutely hate this one because there are other characters in this and you completely make them all about Henry meeting his different ending counterparts is just stupid. I've seen this many times and it's gotten stupid that I really question if the artists have actually seen gameplay of THSC. Like there is really no reason to make stuff like... Toppat Recruits Henry x Triple Threat Henry. It's okay if all of the different Henry's just meet each other and then other characters get to see their different counterparts is even better since this doesn't make it feel like the only living thing in existence is just..Henry. Like at least include Charles and Ellie meeting their alternative counterparts, hell it makes sense to why Triple Threat Henry is called "TrIpLe ThReAt HeNry"

Those are my opinions, respect

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outofangband · 2 years

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Yet another Morwen and Aerin snippet

Set a month or so after this

I had to physically hold myself back from adding in references to Morwen and her witchcraft accusations:/ it was a struggle but at least I got them in the first part and in the last little snippet I wrote

Just kidding I managed to get in a mention

I actually have some longer fic ideas I’ll talk about in the end notes

I have this scheduled to post at midnight because I get so nervous posting these little snippets

Also please be advised my Google docs are filled with even more of them

Their fingers are interlinked, hand resting upon the cold hearth. There was no wood to spare for each room in the home and the chill was not yet so great to risk venturing out for more. Yet the need would arise soon enough. Morwen disliked to go far from her home but it was her alone who had the strength to take the axe that had been Sador’s to the smaller trees. Perhaps her daughter would one day gain it but that would come in ten years or more. If ever it did.

Aerin for her part looks more closely at their hands.

Morwen’s hands are calloused. She is not unused to this in theory. A lifetime spent atop horses, tying knots and pulling rope leads meant her own hands were far from smooth and she preferred them that way. But the change was stark in Morwen.

“How long can you risk before you must return?”

It is a question she asks every time they sit together. The circumstances vary only slightly and both know that a precise time is useless. But still it must be asked. Aerin squeezes the other woman’s hand almost painfully as she thinks on the question

“Not long. There is a meeting tonight though I must say I am unclear if my presence or conspicuous absence is what is required of me. But regardless, I must not be seen returning from anywhere with such an audience.”

“If you are caught?”

“I will be beaten.”

“For aiding the enemy.”

“I am not stupid enough to let them catch me bringing this to you specifically. You are dear to me, Morwen but I would gladly sacrifice your reputation further by condemning you as an elfwitch to avoid that charge. I have grown much as a liar.” Her smile is a wry, bitter one Morwen had known only briefly in the days, years before the Lamentation but might be among the rare smiles to ever cross the familiar face now

“As well you should,” said Morwen with the strange calm of a sky threatening storms, “We are, whatever else we suffer, removed from them. You are not.” There is a small pause. Aerin seems to sway gently before leaning forward to kiss her on her cheek, her lighter hair falling over Morwen’s eyes. It is a familiar gesture though Morwen does not understand why her grim acknowledgment warrants the affection

She does not truly believe Aerin would speak against her even out of self preservation. Self preservation does not seem to run in the blood of those she loves

My longer fic ideas:

More fusion with the book of lost tales version where Brodda, Lorgan and co are actually from Húrin’s own people. In addition to being less problematic in certain meta ways, it’s quite honestly scarier! To have this betrayal and ostracizing from people you knew. Of course Tolkien changed these aspects of the story heavily and the men were far less malicious in that version (Brodda’s marriage to Aerin might have been arranged on both sides but it wasn’t forced like in later versions) Anyways I have ideas that combine the worst of both worlds so the malice and cruelty and themes of occupation stay but the origin of the men is similar to the BoLT

I have a post with some of the differences upcoming

Morwen and Aerin utilize the fear Morgoth’s human allies have for Morwen to fight back. If you know the Redwall books, the storyline in Matimeo where Cornflower and Constance take advantage of the invader’s superstition to convince them that the ghost they feared is real? That’s sort of what I’m thinking

#the silmarillion #the children of húrin #Morwen #Aerin #short writings #cut your hand as willingly #sanctuary

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sweetescapeartist · 2 years

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MY "SECRET PROJECT"

So, for a few years, I've been secretly working on a DB project that explains stuff about different races in DB, different characters, different transformations, the different Hells of Dragon Ball, ect.

It will eventually be a DB databook/DB biology book that's meant to be more accurate than DB Wiki. But, I'll also add some of my own designs for DB characters. For example...

my design for old man Goku

my design for Tien when he was a child

my design for Lapis & Lazuli before Gero kidnapped them

my design for Chi-Chi's mother based off of what we were shown in the series

But I haven't started drawing anything yet. Just gathering information and writing it down. Gonna be a ton of information and art whenever its all said and done.

But I recently noticed something about DBGT...

GT has movie villains escape from Hell (like how Fusion Reborn did).

GT Goku uses the movie only technique; Dragon Fist.

What I'm basically saying is... GT is a continuation of the DBZ movies. (this doesn't include Battle of Gods or Resurrection F). In a sense, GT takes place after the End of Z, but in a different continuity. Similar to how Bojack Unbound takes place after the Cell saga, but in a different continuity.

{Maybe someone else had figured this out before me, but I just have never heard it from anyone yet.}

I've separated the DB continuities into 2 distinct continuities. This way things can be easier to comprehend. Here is what I call them for now...

MAIN DRAGON BALL CONTINUITY:

This is the main continuity that consists of DB, DBZ, & DBS's split continuity.

[+] DBS ANIME CONTINUITY: The anime events that take place after the Buu saga. This continuity shares similar story beats to its manga counterpart, but is very different. Examples being transformations, how god ki works, characterizations, and even battles are different. (This continuity includes the DBS films "Broly" & "Super Hero.")

[+] DBS MANGA CONTINUITY: The manga events that take place after the Buu saga. Just like how anime had the anime only Potafu arc, the manga has the manga only Moro & Granolah arcs (for now at least.) And while the anime has SSBKK, the manga instead has Mastered SSB. Some transformations are either manga only or anime only.

GRAND SIDE-STORY CONTINUITY:

This continuity includes the DB Movies, DBZ Movies (not BoG & RoF), & DBGT. DBZ filler takes place in this continuity as well.

Examples being the fact that the "Garlic Jr. Saga" references DBZ movie #1 "Dead Zone" which take place in the Z Movie Continuity. Also, the Other World Tournament Saga is in this continuity as well due to Pikkon only being in the Fusion Reborn film & never helping in the Buu saga. The Other World Tournament Saga is essentially what leads into the Fusion Reborn movie & Pikkon connects the two.

So, that's what I have so far. The main continuity that splits into 2 DBS continuities, & the early DBZ movies/GT continuity.

So for ppl who say "everything is canon" its not as bland as that. Certain things are only canon to specific continuities. Simple.

Maybe one day I will get everything sorted out and drawn. But for now, just more research to help explain things. Gonna add a timeline of DB events, item info (like the history of scouters), and maybe location info. This is something I will put on my Patreon (once I make one). And I should be able to produce consistent art if its just character designs. I dont want ppl to pay me and I'm not producing what I believe is a fair amount of art for them.

#coninuities #DB #DBZ #DBS #DBGT #DBZ Movies #future project #I've told maybe 3 ppl about this project of mine #and I told only 1 of those 3 ppl more specific details #doing this helps ease my mind too so its more enjoyable #more will be revealed in time #dbs anime continuity #dbs manga continuity

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the-element-siren · 2 years

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Darklina Prompt

TVD/SAB fusion crossover

Tell me that Klaus and Aleksander wouldn't be best friends and the ultimate wife guys. Assume that Ravka is Russia, Shu Han is China, and Fjerda is Norway, the Mikaelsons' birth country. Also, assume that Grisha are a very rare subclass of witches. So the show/book technically is guessed to be set around the 1700s, so this starts about the 1300s when Aleksander created the Shadow Fold. Assume that the Mikaelsons are traveling through Ravka for the first time.

After creating the Shadow Fold, Aleksander wanders for about a decade in very bad state. He's depressed, barely using his powers so suffering a case of wasting sickness, and is alone. One day, he wonders onto property just recently bought by a Fjerdan born family, the Mikaelsons. He gets a job on the estate as a gamekeeper and starts to notice things about the family.

He and Lord Niklaus form a friendship, each seeing something in other. Aleksander gains enough of Klaus' trust that he tells him that he and his family are vampires. Aleksander doesn't truly believe him at first until Klaus shows him proof; his speed and vampire face. At first, it takes a moment to process this new information. Aleksander takes a few days to truly process this before sharing his own secrets with the Mikaelsons. They embrace it, they had already liked Aleksander. He was a good worker, always willing to help with an odd favor or two, and didn't have to be told to not try anything with Rebekah despite her attempts.

Aleksander teaches them all about Grisha and actual events that lead to the Shadow Fold's creation. They in turn, teach him all about the supernatural world that they came from, how they became vampires, and their Mikael problem. One day, after viewing some of Aleksander's shadow tricks, Elijah comes up with a solution to benefit both parties. They will buy some land in their name but allow Aleksander to create his sanctuary in secret and if Mikael comes for them, Aleksander can use his shadows to contain him.

One hundred years later, Mikael sets foot in Ravka. During that time, Aleksander's sanctuary has been created and he has been able to help hundreds of Grisha. After some prodding from Rebekah, he also takes in orphans from overcrowded orhpanages. All of them are educated and the otkazat'sya children are taught not to fear Grisha and help them. The surrounding villiage becomes an example of unity, made up of otkazat'sya and Grisha who live in harmony, though the Grisha are an open secret but still secret.

When Mikael does come, he is discovered quickly by some heartrenders, who are able to send messages to Mikaelson estate very quickly and thankfully, unnoticed. When Mikael arrives at the mansion, he quickly finds the family in the library with Aleksander. Before he is able to do anything, he is paralyzed. Secret chambers with fabrikator soundproofing, even a vampire can't hear through them. Aleksander uses shadows to subdue him and one of his heartrenders even manages to get his plans out of him. The shadows destroy him quickly and painfully, and the Mikaelsons are finally free.

I'm assuming that they overthrow the Lanstovs, though I'm not sure who they put on the throne, Aleksander or Klaus. But the other stays on as their main advisor. Caroline is a fabrikator and one of Aleksander's best. Also, Klaus has an extremely obvious crush but Caroline is resisting. She thinks he's not serious and that she and Tyler are meant to be together. Aleksander is supporting it but won't force Caroline into anything she doesn't want. Skip to events of the canon. I want to say that Caroline and Genya are best friends and take Alina under their wings.

#darklina prompt #darklina #darklina au #sab #shadow and bone #tvd/sab fusion crossover #klaroline background

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doomsdayradio · 2 years

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non-parts anon here, let me explain

the part about final fusion is from the fact that the TOSD was created to "fix" systems and encourage final fusion. it's not inherently something you have to believe, but saying system only means system of dissociated parts and that you have to acknowledge that reminds me of the TOSD, and that ideology of "fixing" a system

the TOSD is not confirmed also. yes, systems more often form from childhood trauma, but we can barely scientifically know what consciousness is, how would we be able to scientifically tell if someone's actually "just dissociated parts" or actually separate consciousnesses. what even counts as a conscious awareness? i'd go further but i don't want to start feeling derealized right now lol

saying system of dissociated parts is also inherently using parts language on other people. did you not read the line? "system", meaning a group of, and "dissociated parts", also known as CALLING PEOPLES ALTERS/HEADMATES PARTS. yes, scientifically, it could be that way, but scientifically we could be not even real people. again, we're made to procreate and die. not everyone wants to have sex. we've made a life beyond nature, we've personized ourselves. why do we have to stick to scientific language even if we are disordered/traumagenic.

parts can have personhood, but the TOSD states that they're parts of a whole person, and again, encourages final fusion as the main/only way to heal, and if the TOSD is correct, and it is only a result of trauma and you're dissociated parts, it makes logical sense that the only way to heal would be to make the parts not separated... aka FINAL. FUSION. humanizing the parts / giving them separate personhood is seen as harmful to recovery for many.

i hope this clarifies some stuff

i have literally never heard that the TOSD was meant to "fix" systems as far as ive been aware its simply the current leading theory on how osddid forms so if you could possibly explain this more thatd be appreciated

i dont even know what to say to this one it feels dangerously close to "well psychologists arent even sure if osddid exists" and id rather not entertain it because itll also make me derealize and spiral 😭

dude i literally do not know what to tell you no matter what you do or how much you dislike it as an osddid system you are scientifically dissociated parts of the same person??? you dont have to use parts language literally anywhere else in your life, you can view yourselves as completely seperate people thats fine we're like that too most of the time but like you have to acknowledge when it comes to science that if you have osddid you are dissoicated parts of the same person?? like im sorry if that makes you uncomfortable its just. a fact?

again ive never heard the TOSD to be used as a way to "fix" systems, dehumanizing alters is a whole different like ableist thing that feels like too much to get into rn and will just result in a tangent

#im sorry if this doesnt make sense im tired and dissociated 💀#words words words !!#❓#syscourse #syscourse neutral

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denimbex1986 · 8 months

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'Charged with hindsight and consequence, the origin stories of landmark inventions make up, at this point, a genre of their own (e.g. The Imitation Game, The Social Network, and Hidden Figures). Any film that attends to a STEM breakthrough in particular has to deal with a daunting problem: how do you dramatize an esoteric subject for a general audience?

The STEM movie of the summer, Oppenheimer, seems to decide early on that its audience cannot understand physics, much less evaluate its protagonist’s skill as a physicist. Instead, Oppenheimer’s intelligence is asserted by way of what I can only classify as weird flexes: reading the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit mid-coitus, or giving a lecture in Dutch, later telling a colleague that he had learned the language in six weeks for the occasion. That there are no subtitles during his lecture, that the formulas he writes on chalkboards are shot out of focus and garnished with music, conveys the degree to which the audience is asked to believe in Oppenheimer’s competence but not to worry over the particulars—the particulars, which for me, lay the foundation of pleasure in any great film about craft.

A craft movie, as I’ll refer to them here, is a drama about a person who wants to be great at their trade. Sports movies and workplace movies fit into this category, as would a movie following an artist, chef, dressmaker, musician, hitman, ballerina, or stripper, so long as the work itself is central to the plot. The best craft movies replicate the pleasures of learning a craft yourself. You become conversant with a new world. You begin to recognize its values and customs...

The latest film from writer-director Christopher Nolan is a craft movie insofar as its central drama involves talent, work, and the pursuit of greatness, but it doesn’t leave me feeling like I have been brought into the fold. Most notably, I don’t feel prepared, or even invited, to evaluate J. Robert Oppenheimer as being uniquely capable at physics. Instead, I am handed other people’s evaluations of him and asked to accept them at face value. From the outset, the film proclaims Oppenheimer’s status as Promethean, leaving me, as a viewer, with nowhere to go, little to determine.

Oppenheimer is not the first movie about a man in STEM to hurry through the technical stuff. As Stuart Jeffries observed for The Guardian in 2016, math movies often have “a black hole where the maths should be.” So extensive are the precedents that Oppenheimer is not even the first movie with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck to fit this bill. Watching Oppenheimer, Good Will Hunting springs to mind, in which Damon’s Will Hunting develops his skills as a mathematician, yet his most memorable show of prowess, the one that leads his friend Morgan (Affleck) to boast—“My boy’s wicked smart”—concerns not math but early American history, as if expertise in one, conceivably more accessible field of study can stand in for another...

As is the case with any biopic or adaptation, Oppenheimer makes me curious about the logic governing Nolan’s choices of what’s left out and what goes in. A lot of names and terms populate the movie’s first act: quantum physics, fission, fusion, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman. (A “Sea of Scientists and Soldiers,” Vulture called it.) It leaves me both tired and disoriented, as though I have just read aloud the complete list of rules to a board game but am no closer to understanding how the game is played. We see, sporadically, through Oppie’s point of view, vibrating slinkies that represent the idea of energy. We watch him throw stemware into the corner of his room, where it breaks on the floor. I think we are meant to think something like, “Ah, yes. Physics.” Beyond that, the line between the slinkies and the glass and the bomb remains tenuous, associative at best.

Perhaps the intention is to overwhelm, to make the viewer feel small and unable to keep pace with the person whom the movie, and its source material, casts as Prometheus. I find it uncomfortable to be forced into a posture of reverence toward a man whose invention, regardless of its theoretical impact, killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. I’d rather be trusted to make up my own mind...

In the case of Oppenheimer, the one salient physics idea we need to hold onto is already there, within the noise: the chain reaction. As Oppenheimer tells Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), “When we detonate an atomic device, we might start a chain reaction that destroys the world.” This “troubling possibility” adds to the already high stakes of the Trinity explosion.

The chain reaction concept is doubly pertinent as a way to situate the Manhattan Project in the fuller context of history. Where does Oppenheimer’s culpability start and end? Is he a demigod, or is he a domino? To what degree was the bomb inevitable, with or without him, after the atom split? The presence of retired Einstein, who says, “Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement,” makes the frame of the story more cyclical and expansive.

Oppenheimer chafes when it uses scientific settings only as texture, when its digressions lean irrelevant, hagiographic, and intentionally showy. But when Oppenheimer lets us in on the work itself, when it lets us assess the goals, risks, and costs of the Manhattan Project, and with that knowledge, reach our own conclusions about the person in charge (that is, if are able to tune out the voices calling him things like “actually important” or “a prophet”)—that’s when the movie finds its groove. When Oppenheimer maps out a town in Los Alamos to be populated by scientists; when, using glass jars of marbles, he visualizes the amounts of uranium and plutonium that have been produced thus far; when, nonchalant, he explains the possibility of total atmospheric ignition: these moments work because of what they accentuate: the collision of the ego and the actual job.

Feynman, who is known for his work at Los Alamos as well as his contributions to the fields of quantum computing and nanotechnology, writes, “[A] kind of intense beauty that I see given to me by science is seen by so few others, by few poets and, therefore, by even fewer more ordinary people.” It is this visionary capacity that excites me most about craft movies and especially STEM movies. I want such a film to initiate me, if only for a few hours, into another way of reading the world.'

#Richard Feynman #Los Alamos #Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #The Imitation Game #Hidden Figures #The Social Network #Matt Damon #Casey Affleck #Good Will Hunting #Albert Einstein #Niels Bohr #Enrico Fermi #Werner Heisenberg #Tom Conti #The Manhattan Project

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tielt · 10 months

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Ësti

in many languages Ë has the sound of the vowel /ə/ . This is sounds like the middle eh in pay without the pah leading consonant. Many languages this character represents the 'schwa' particle as is seen in this wiki entry.

You can make a symmetry anagram with it like this

itzəsti (it zesti)

below the fold is an analysis

Ë corrects to E if a western computer reads my birth certificate. The name Estee also has some interesting lore from the bible, Estee as in Ester. I won't try to transcribe what the book meant, because I'm not Jewish/Christian but I want to point at this entry:

"In an apparent connection made by Hitler between his Nazi regime and the role of Haman, Hitler stated in a speech made on 30 January 1944, that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews could celebrate "a second Purim". Indeed, Julius Streicher was heard to sarcastically remark "Purimfest 1946" as he ascended the scaffold after Nuremberg."

I won't read my schwa name, but I think esti is fitting because thats the same vowel as hold schwa. If you watch Kino's Journey ep 8, the implication of what it meant to me was that Christ was reborn from the removal of all of his Karma with a painful process and encountered Ascension and the episode points at the inherent duality between these two forms of thought. I don't like the bible, but I'm not a critic of anything Jesus personally said or did. The swastika is now a real stigmata whether it's personal or not.

"It's spicy" is my middle name and there is a lot of context there and to me the least interesting is that its the evil e. I personally believe unfortunately every human has some diffuse karma related to this and part of getting out is in it's removal. I think that the weight is a diffuse thing that isn't at our current stage particularly personal to ones own person.

My favorite part of that Kino's Journey ep 8 is when they at the end it was like they were compelled to suggest to Nimia how to get off the ground and they didn't even believe it would work. Some people say all religions preach basically the same, this projection solves exactly the one that makes it difficult to believe is true. This is basically the only thing that manages to fuse two completely different forms of thought. You know I don't share the Christian views. We all exist in weird intersecting manifolds far above our ability to experience or transcribe and I'm in general a fan of fusion.

I stay agnostic, personally it looks like a rule of this place. You can not agree with someone and still treat them well.

#mine

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fallinglikemagic · 3 years

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Penny Polendina alludes to Astro Boy - and how this allusion foreshadows Penny’s eventual resurrection

Some of you may remember my first post in which I compared Penny and Astro Boy, with a specific focus on the version of Astro from the 2009 3D animated film (if not, you can read it here, but I'll be repeating everything stated there anyway). In the month or two since I first made that post, more and more parallels have start to pop up, with one of those parallels matching one of our most popular theories and foreshadowing Penny's upcoming resurrection.

In order to write this, I went through and watched the entire film, taking notes as I went. I'm not going to include every single detail that I noticed, only the things that seem the most relevant and can be put together in a single post in a comprehensive manner. Believe me when I say that I've thought about this a lot, and the sheer amount of parallels and connections (and the fact that I'm not the only one to notice these connections) has lead me to believe that this has been done intentionally.

With that being said, I'm only going to focus on the Astro Boy film from 2009 - the Astro Boy franchise is massive, going back to the first manga coming out in 1952 with a few different adaptations and reboots with different versions of the story, and I just don't have the time to go through all of those. As such, I'm going to be focusing on the movie, due to the fact that it has the highest amount of parallels to both Penny specifically, and RWBY as a whole.

So, let's get into this.

Worldbuilding

Metro City and the Surface - Atlas and Mantle

One of the reasons I've decided to focus on the film in particular is due to the nature of the film's setting. Astro Boy (2009) takes place in two locations - Metro City, and the Surface.

According to the opening of the film, Metro City was created when the people who would become the founders of the city noticed the world changing for the worse, and responded by taking part of the land and lifting it into the sky, creating a floating city - the opening voiceover refers to it as "an oasis, a floating paradise". Everybody else is left behind on what is referred to as the Surface, left to fend for themselves while the people of Metro City largely ignore their existence.

The parallels to Atlas and Mantle are crystal clear. Atlas and Metro City are both set up as a beautiful city above the clouds, meant to serve as an inspiration for the rest of the world. In reality, it's a place where the rich and privileged can live in comfort while shunning the poor. Meanwhile, down in Mantle/on the Surface, people are suffering and struggling to get by. Additionally, both 'surface' and 'mantle' are words that are associated with the ground.

The Blue Core (and the Red Core) - Penny's soul and Maiden powers.

Another concept that is (as far as my research shows at least) unique to the film is the Blue Core and the Red Core.

The Blue Core is a small sphere that is filled with pure positive energy, referred to as Blue Core Energy. It was created by Dr. Elefun, made from the fragments of a star that no longer exists - meaning that the Blue Core is all that's left, and cannot be recreated. This is reminiscent of how Pietro has no more aura left to spare, and thus is unable to give any more of his soul to Penny like he did the first time she died. In this allusion, the Blue Core is representative of Penny's soul and the power of the Winter Maiden.

When the Blue Core was created, there was also a byproduct - the Red Core. Essentially, it's the same thing as the Blue Core, but with negative energy instead of positive. If the Blue Core and the Red Core make contact, they both die - this is relevant later.

You could compare the Red Core to Watts’ virus, due to the way that it causes a robot to have red eyes and that it coming into contact with the Blue Core destroys them both.

Character Parallels

Before I get into this properly, I wanna give a quick side note. While Astro matches up to Penny perfectly, things get a little bit messier with the others in that we have a case of characters taking on multiple roles. However, this is far from unheard of in RWBY - let's not forget about how Blake represents both Belle and the Beast, Yang is sometimes the Beast to Blake's Belle, and Adam is an amalgamation of every antagonistic force in Beauty and the Beast. It's far from uncommon for a character to allude to multiple characters from the same allusion, or vice versa, which is what we see with some of the characters in this allusion as well.

Astro - Penny Polendina

Unsurprisingly, Astro himself is our parallel to Penny.

After the death of his son Toby, Dr. Tenma rebuilds his son as a robot, using the Blue Core as his energy source. The Blue Core is stated to be unpredictable, and it's this that makes Astro who he is, what makes him unique from every other robot. As stated earlier, the Blue Core represents Penny's soul (and the Winter Maiden powers that are attached to it). When the Blue Core dies - and Astro dies with it - and Dr. Elefun is asked if he can be rebuilt, the answer is 'no' because the Core was unique and can't be remade - just like Penny's soul.

While Astro appears perfectly human on the surface, he's fitted with as much self-defence technology as Tenma could fit in him. The most iconic of these upgrades (and the only one that's consistent across every single version of Astro throughout the franchise) is the rocket boots. He even flies in a very similar way to Penny - pay attention to the posing, especially with the legs.

When Astro starts making friends with humans on the Surface, he conceals the fact that he's a robot, afraid of what they'll think of him when they learn he's not human. This matches up to Penny initially hiding the fact that she's not human, seeing herself as 'not a real girl'.

Astro has two father figures - Dr. Elefun and Dr. Tenma. Similarly, Penny has two father figures - Pietro and Ironwood.

During the climax of the film, Metro City starts to fall out of the sky and back down to the Surface. This is a parallel to two seperate moments in RWBY. The most obvious one is when Atlas is falling onto Mantle after the Staff of Creation is used. However, I think this scene more closely resembles the scene from Amity in which Amity Tower begins to fall.

When Astro sees that Metro City is falling, he immediately flies in to hold it up, despite the incredible strain it puts on him. This is a direct parallel to how Penny flew in to hold up Amity Tower.

Astro pushes himself to the limit when he holds up Metro City, to the point where the flames from his boots burn so brightly that they turn blue - oh hey, doesn't that look familiar?

Astro also demonstrates self-sacrificial tendencies at a few points in the film. When he's captured in order to have his Blue Core taken out and placed into another robot, he simply accepts it, saying that "I think maybe this is what's supposed to happen...this is my destiny". This becomes a lot more interesting when you remember that the Blue Core is representative of Penny's soul and Maiden powers. Astro giving himself up to President Stone (the film's main antagonist who later ends up in a sort of 'fusion' with the Red Core) so that Stone can use the Blue Core could be a reference to the virus making Penny want to give herself up to Ironwood so that he can use her soul to open the vault - especially if we believe that the Red Core is connected to the virus in some way.

Near the end of the film, in the fight against the fusion of President Stone and a giant robot containing the Red Core (it's a long story, I'll get to it later in the post), Astro makes the decision to sacrifice his own life in order to destroy both the Red Core and the Blue Core, saying “this is what I was created for” and saving the lives of everybody else in the process. I doubt I need to explain how "choosing to die in order to protect other people" relates back to Penny in Volume 8.

At the end of the film, and in the rest of the Astro Boy franchise as a whole, Astro takes it upon himself to be the protector of Metro City (and technically the Surface, but since Metro City has fallen, they're not exactly seperate locations anymore...). 'Robotic guardian of a city who's seen as a hero by the people' - you don't get much more obvious of a connection to the Protector of Mantle than that.

Additional details that may not be intentional but I still noticed anyway;

- Dr. Elefun describes as Astro by saying "That robot had more humanity than most of us". At this point, there's been many moments that affirm Penny's humanity - "You have an aura, Penny. A soul. That's who you are - our friend. Not a machine", "Her soul is who she is", the fact that she was able to receive the Maiden powers, all of these moments affirm that Penny has always been just as human as anybody else. This is also contrasted against Ironwood (and, for a while, Winter), who act more machine than human.

- Astro is actually rather heavily trans-coded. Penny is also trans-coded, but this is mostly likely a coincidence that happened as a result of the inherent transness of robots

- Elefun tells Astro that he's "not actually an entirely ordinary boy", which is reminiscent of Ruby describing Penny as "she's...not your typical girl."

- The shape of Penny's bow (the way that it sticks out more on one side while the other side is more vertical) looks similar to the shape of Astro's hair (this one was pointed out to me by @cosmokyrin when I mentioned this theory in the Frosen Steel server)

Dr. Elefun - Pietro Polendina

Dr. Elefun is one of Metro City's top scientists, and one of Astro's father figures. He is soft-spoken and gentle, a dreamer but a genius. In terms of personality alone, he's a pretty good match with Pietro. He's also the one who created the Blue Core, which draws a direct parallel to Pietro creating Penny's soul from part of his.

Dr. Elefun is the first person to truly see Astro as who he truly is. Dr. Tenma expects Astro to be a replacement for Toby, and is disappointed when he isn't. Similarly, everybody else sees Astro as a robot just like any other at first - an advanced robot, but nothing more than a robot. But Dr. Elefun gives him genuine praise, and encourages Astro to live his life and find his place in the world, just like how Pietro tells Penny that he wants to see her live her life.

It's also worth noting that in most other versions of Astro Boy, Elefun takes the role of Astro's primary caregiver after Dr. Tenma no longer wants him.

President Stone - James Ironwood

President Stone is the current political leader of Metro City. For the entire film, his entire focus is on combat and military strength, and on multiple occasions he actively expresses his intention to start a war with the Surface. He believes that the best way to get re-elected is with a show of military force and violence.

His primary goal throughout the film is to have Astro destroyed in order to retrieve the Blue Core and use it for his own gain. This is a direct parallel to Ironwood's goal in Volume 8 - to hunt down Penny and have her use her Maiden power to open the vault, and destroy herself.

Stone wants to use the Blue Core in order to power a specialised combat robot, ironically called the Peacekeeper. When Astro continues to escape his clutches, he decides to use the Red Core to power the Peacekeeper instead, but it doesn't completely go as planned. The Peacekeeper is equipped with what the film calls 'adaptive technology' - it's capable of absorbing anything it makes contact with into its own body.

And I do mean anything

After Stone is absorbed by the Peacekeeper, he's in full control of it - essentially the Peacekeeper is nothing more than a metal outer shell. President Stone has become a fusion of man and machine.

Dr. Tenma - both Pietro Polendina AND James Ironwood (a bit more Pietro than Ironwood but it's worth acknowledging both)

You might notice that while Elefun and Stone do have plenty of references to Pietro and Ironwood respectively, there are gaps where they don't cover every aspect of these characters and/or their dynamic with Penny. This is where Dr. Tenma comes in.

Dr. Tenma is Astro's dad, and the one who built him. He originally created Astro as a sort of 'replacement' for his biological son Toby after he died, giving Astro all of Toby's memories (more on this later). Naturally, this is a very clear connection to Pietro.

Additionally, Dr. Tenma uses the Blue Core - a completely unique, one-of-a-kind technological marvel - in order to power a single small robot that's intended to be nothing more than a replacement for his son, saying "I can't lose him again!". In this moment, Dr. Tenma is so focused on not losing his child that he doesn't acknowledge the big picture.

However, once Dr. Tenma realises that Astro isn't a perfect replica of Toby, but rather his own person, Tenma discards him, not caring if Astro gets destroyed or not. Similarly, when Penny stopped doing what Ironwood wanted her to do, Ironwood stopped caring about her as anything more than a container for the Maiden powers and is perfectly willing to let her die once the vault is opened.

Luckily, Dr. Tenma does have a change of heart, deciding that while Astro isn't Toby, he's still his son. Near the end of the film, Astro is very injured, and Dr. Tenma encourages him to get far away from the danger. However, Astro refuses to back down, instead choosing to sacrifice his life in order to stop President Stone, despite Dr. Tenma begging him not to go. Here, we have yet another parallel to this moment in Amity.

Bonus (aka characters that aren't perfect allusions, but connections do exist)

When Astro ends up on the Surface, he's taken in by a man who calls himself Hamegg. Hamegg ends up being a jerk, and while his personality and actions in the film don't particularly match up with any characters in RWBY, his backstory is a perfect match to Watts - a head scientist in Metro City who was shunned and fired for reasons unknown (Hamegg claims that they were 'intimated by his ideas and talent', but this was when he was trying to impress Astro and he lies a lot anyway, so this could be a complete lie).

On the Surface, Astro befriends four human kids (Cora, Zane, Sludge and Widget) and their robotic dog, Trashcan. While the personalities don't really match up (though Cora, Astro's closest friend, does bear a visual resemblance to Ruby), the idea of a 4-person group + a dog could be a parallel to Team RWBY and Zwei.

Zog is a very old, very large robot that had been 'dead' for several years until Astro found him and revived him by giving him some of his Blue Core Energy. Zog is our allusion to Winter - Astro giving Zog some of his Blue Core energy is a parallel to Penny giving Winter the Maiden powers. Additionally, in The Final Word, Winter explicitly calls herself a machine. While this does have significance on it's own, it could also be a nod to this allusion. That being said, the main connection between Winter and Zog (and possibly the most important part of this post) is based on events that have yet to happen in RWBY canon, and so I'm saving that part for the end of the post.

Story Parallels

Toby's Death

Toby Tenma, Dr. Tenma's biological son, was very similar to Astro in terms of personality (with some key differences), as well as having a strong physical resemblance.

When the Blue Core and the Red Core were first being shown off to President Stone, Toby was accidentally locked behind a sealed off barrier, trapped with the Peacekeeper containing the Red Core. Toby was killed in a blast that completely disintegrated him, leaving nothing but a hat containing a single strand of hair.

This hair is important, because Dr. Tenma used this hair in order to extract Toby's DNA and memories, which he was then able to implant into Astro in order to make him resemble Toby.

This scene is most likely a parallel to Penny's first death in the Vytal Festival. In her first death, Penny's body was destroyed, but her core remained intact. Her core, which contained all of her memories, was the key piece in properly putting her back together without erasing who she used to be. The strand of hair containing Toby's DNA is representative of Penny's core containing her memories.

Additionally, there's the fact that when Toby was rebuilt as Astro, he was given various upgrades to allow him to better hold his own in a fight, with the most obvious behind the ability to fly via rocket boots. Penny received similar upgrades when she was rebuilt as well.

It's worth acknowledging that Toby's death could potentially parallel the moment that Ambrosius separated Penny from her robotic body, with the strand of hair instead being her soul, separated from her dying body and then disintegrating. However, due to the timeline and order of events, I think that Toby's death is more likely to be a parallel to Penny's first death, and her separation from her robot body is instead a parallel to the next scene I'm about to mention.

Momentary Death

When Astro is captured by President Stone and taken back to Metro City, Dr. Tenma actually does remove the Blue Core from his body, which does cause Astro to temporarily die.

Luckily, it only takes a few moments for Dr. Tenma to change his mind and return the Blue Core to Astro, reviving him.

Astro's 'soul' was removed from his body, causing that robotic body to die, even though in the end Astro does survive it. This is reminiscent of Ambrosius removing Penny's soul from her robotic body, letting that body die, while Penny survives.

Zog

I briefly went over Zog earlier, but I wanna go into more in-depth about him, because the parallels between Winter and Zog and the implications of said parallels are the main reason I ultimately decided to make this post.

As I said earlier, Zog is a very old, broken down robot that nobody has been able to revive in years. When Astro finds him, he brings him back to life by giving him some of his Blue Core Energy. Astro essentially gives Zog some of his lifeforce, a part of his soul.

Winter was on the verge of death at Ironwood's hands, but Penny was able to save her by giving her the Maiden powers, and her soul with them.

However, Zog doesn't keep all of the Blue Core Energy Astro gave him all to himself...

Resurrection

As I've mentioned a few times in this post, Astro does die - and I mean properly die, not a death that lasted 2 minutes at the most and had no consequences. Astro sacrifices himself and his Blue Core dies, all in attempts to protect the people of Metro City/the Surface and his friends. Dr. Elefun says that he can't be rebuilt because his Blue Core, his soul, was unique.

But then, Zog comes around. Zog, who is holding onto what is a part of Astro's soul - the only surviving part of Astro's soul. Zog returns some of the Blue Core Energy to Astro, which brings Astro back to life.

So, to recap: Astro gives a part of his lifeforce, part of his soul, to Zog. When Astro dies, Zog gives some of that soul back to Astro in order to revive him.

If you've been looking at the theories regarding Penny and Winter recently, this will sound VERY familiar. While the specifics vary, the essentials of the most popular theory is that Penny transferred her soul to Winter to hold on to along with the Maiden powers, and that somehow, Winter will return that soul to Penny in one way or another (either by putting her into another robotic body, or just somehow extracting her soul and letting it form it's own body again). The fact that this movie has these exact events occurring makes this seem more and more like the most likely route.

If Penny really is an intentional allusion to Astro Boy - which, based on the sheer length of this post, seems pretty damn likely - then the film practically spells it out for us. Winter will give part of her aura, the part that Penny gave her, in order to bring Penny back to life.

thank you for coming to my ted talk

#rwby #penny polendina #rwby v8 #rwby theory #rwby volume 8 #I've spent the past 2 days working on this #but the amount of parallels is insane #there's lots of bits and pieces I left out too #combine this with Pinocchio's three resurrections and the Narnia/Aslan theory and that's three allusions that foreshadow Penny's return #honestly I was just kinda chilling in my room yesterday when suddenly the scene with Zog came to me and I yelled HOLY SHIT out loud-#-because I realised it was the exact same scenario #there's probably some typos here and i could've included more pictures but like...it's 4am #and this thing is like 4000 words

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thespiral · 3 years

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INTRODUCING THE 80S DOCUMENT... a comprehensive doc on this funny mentioned-only raider faction that is incredibly fucking cool and a crime no one has mentioned them yet

this is more or less a compilation of different canon, semi-canon and fanon references! most of it taken from the hearts of iron 4 mod old world blues, joshua sawyer's simple and sprinkled some fanon from my head in here as well. this is to hopefully make other people aware of these guys!

a MASSIVE thanks to my partner alex for helping me write this up, the tops server members for lore council, esseress and everyone else who i rambled on and on about these guys. thank you so much

you can find the document here!

(and also under the cut!)

The 80s are a gang of raiders that operate along the Northern California 80 Freeway, mostly in the region northeast of the lawless, uncontrolled city of Sacramento. They occupy their own territory stretching between New California and the shores of Great Salt Lake, bordering the land of their longtime enemies the White Legs.

They are known for raiding frontier towns for supplies, kidnapping people, their tireless pursuit of enemies and for their occasional use of motorcycles. They are rightly feared for their ability to cover large areas of land with very few men using said motorcycles. They have recently spread out over a larger area, notably the I-80, due to the collapse of the Nevada Desert Rangers and the NCR's inability to patrol or keep tabs on the territory.

History

After the bombs desolated the country, the 80s began as a group of people that banded together out of necessity and trekked through the I-80, believing that the highway had to lead somewhere safe. The early origins of the 80s are muddled by word of mouth and mostly forgotten, but they fully coalesced into a raider faction when others learned to fear them.

The first peak of the 80s’ was reached when they took Sacramento for their own. For the first time, many 80s began to settle down and build a raiding community, often attacking smaller settlements in the area. These transgressions eventually led to the New California Republic expanding and securing its borders by taking Sacramento back, forcing the 80s out of the city.

The 80s then tore through Nevada, following the I-80 and launching massive raids on almost every community they came across for supplies and equipment, including NCR cities such as New Reno or Vault City. This led to even greater notoriety and, despite having been mauled by the NCR, drove fear into the heart of the Republic as they made their way to Utah.

Currently, the 80s have mostly settled in Wendover, expanding it into a town. Most of their conflicts lie with the neighboring White Legs, and they await the opportunity to strike back at the NCR and reclaim Sacramento.

Culture

The 80s primary philosophies are that other 80s come before all else, that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and that settling down is the opposite of freedom. They value a wild and free lifestyle, cheap thrills, mechanical and driving prowess, and the road. While some communities support them along the roads, they are their own priority above all, and many relations with other groups are sustained through physical threat.

While all 80s can be defined by a few common traits, most of them are decentralized and spread across various chapters. Each has their own rules, hierarchies and banners. Some chapters are nomadic, while others settle in towns they have conquered, and others live in self-made settlements by the road.

Identification between each chapter varies from chapter to chapter, with the most common traits being tattoos, body art, patches on armour and jackets, and so on. While in-fighting between chapters is common, the 80s are generally extremely close-knit compared to other raider factions. In most chapters, higher-ranking members wear red or blue I-80 road signs, while regular members wear the more common green signs, and initiates and hangarounds have no signs.

While most 80s are born into their respective chapters, the 80s will occasionally take on new initiates that are young or have potential when it comes to driving and repair skills. An initiate, or hangaround, mostly runs errands for fully-fledged 80s until the others have decided they are eligible for an initiation ritual. Most potential initiates have to go through a ritual to prove their worth, such as salvaging a motorcycle and making it their own.

Economy

When the 80s started out, they were disorganized and originally had to rely on raiding to get by. During their early years, raiding was quite profitable in the wasteland, and this time period would later be called the golden age of raiding. As time went on, however, theft and slavery became unsustainable as societies grew, and many chapters of the 80s were forced to turn to other means of survival.

Using their vehicles to travel greater distances faster than any other society could manage, many chapters of the 80s turned to drug trade, gun running, package delivery, caravan running and trading. Many chapters have become their own communities, and some have settled in certain locations to farm. There are still active raiding chapters, but in the present they are few and far between.

Despite no longer solely relying on raiding, some chapters still intimidate weaker communities into giving tribute to them, having no issue doing so with their vehicles. They also charge a travel tax on all outsiders that would cross their roads.

Military and Technology

The 80s are well-known for their expertise in and quantity of vehicles ranging from the common motorcycle to the large semi-truck. The 80s scavenge, repair and even build their own vehicles, and almost every member at least has their own motorcycle, as a common initiation rite requires new members to salvage their own bike. They also find and use old schematics to improve upon their designs, or create their own from scratch.

Most 80s make their own equipment when they cannot scavenge, from tires and tools to homemade fuel. Many bikes have been made to run on ethanol and other biofuels, while others run on energy cells, fusion cells, or any energy source that’s available.

Using these vehicles, the 80s utilize speed to break through enemy walls in battle, and often overwhelm their opponents before they can truly attack. They rely on hit-and-run tactics, and as a result have great offense and poor defense. For example, one common attack involves holding out a machete while driving by the enemy; destructive, but leaves the rider open for many attacks.

The most commonly used weapons are anything close and decimating. Many 80s carry shotguns, automatic guns and throwable explosives that are relatively easy to use while riding.

Politics and Diplomatic Relations

The cultural tenet of the 80s coming before anyone else carries into their politics. Little of the outside world affects their internal politics or laws (or lack thereof). They are somewhat hypocritical in that they believe in freedom for themselves and no one else. The 80s have no one leader, and overall are decentralized as a faction.

Each chapter has their own subset of laws, or none at all. While most 80s are close-knit, there is currently infighting between chapters as they debate on whether to settle down or continue raiding. Some believe that settling down goes against what the 80s stand for and would be abandoning their origins, while others believe they won’t stand a chance against other factions if they continue to raid.

The 80s are relatively cold toward other factions, with few allies and many enemies. They are generally neutral toward other raiding factions, such as the Jackals or the Vipers, but would put aside their differences for the sake of attacking the greater enemy, such as with the Great Khans or the Powder Gangers. No matter what, however, they will make it clear that they are their own priority.

The New California Republic is one of the 80s greatest and most powerful enemies. From the very beginning, the 80s and the NCR have fought each other as the 80s raided civilians and the NCR tried to stomp them out along with other raider factions. This culminated in the NCR taking Sacramento and forcing the 80s to leave for Utah, marking the NCR as the 80s’ worst enemy. Any 80s would not hesitate at any opportunity to get back at the NCR, no matter how petty or who they would have to ally with.

After the 80s were forced to travel to Utah, their territory began to border the White Legs’, and they frequently intruded on their land. This has led to many skirmishes between the two factions as they compete for their own territory.

While Caesar’s Legion does not have much presence in the West, many 80s have heard of this new threat against the NCR, and most who have are eager for any potential ally to get back at the NCR for Sacramento. The 80s know little of the Legion or what would happen to them if the Legion was successful, but are willing to do anything if it meant victory.

References

https://fallout-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Simple_organizations#80s

J.E. Sawyer’s Fallout Roleplaying Game

Hearts of Iron 4: Old World Blues

And all the other people that helped contribute to this document

#fallout new vegas #fnv #fallout

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fallout-drabbles-n-stuff · 3 years

Note

Omg bae (respectfully) I need you to write the Companions reaction to Brother Thomas telling the SS to give them all their stuff, as in meaning they kinda have to strip-

((ENJOY BAE))

(Imma do something a little different and do platonic and romanced separate)

Cait:

Platonic & Romanced-

"Shit, you aren't gonna offer any caps first? Haha, seriously though- hope you like the taste of your own teeth, bitch."

•if there is one thing Cait can't stand, it's a con man. Even if he wasn't demanding something so radical, she'd still smash his face in for undermining your intelligence.

Curie:

Platonic & Romanced-

"Ah, i see. I trust we will be issued our very own ceremonial robes, yes? Très bien!"

•Dont..don't trust curie with things like this. She honestly believe they have her best interest in mind. Plus she'll get excited to have a whole new band of people to call friends.

Danse:

Platonic-

"Civilian, this is obviously a shakedown. Out of mercy, I recommend you reassess the situation. If you persist, I'll take it as a threat to our livelihood and deal with you accordingly."

•Danse usually isn't so quick to be violent, or threatening for that matter, but this was different. If asked, he'd probably brush it off and say that it was necessary so valuable brotherhood gear doesn't fall into the wrong hands..but honestly? His reasons are a bit deeper than that.

Romanced-

"Ask my partner to strip one more time and I'll turn you into a pile of ash, do you understand?"

•As unlike him as it may sound, this may just be an empty threat. At least in the sense that he wouldn't waste fusion cells, he'd just beat the crap out of Thomas. Now, Danse ordinarily would prefer just to intimidate, but for you it was more of his protective tendencies and emotions taking control.

Deacon:

Platonic-

"Hey buddy, at least buy us dinner first."

•He may be cracking jokes, but deacon is obviously very uncomfortable with the situation. He's already scanned the area and figured there was something fishy before Thomas' odd order- so having that bunch confirmed does nothing to ease his nerves.

Romanced-

"No."

•The most disturbing part was that he was so calm, flatly telling the preacher no. No jokes, no horrible distractions..just a simple defying word that almost promised horrible consequences if Thomas didn't relent.

Gage:

Platonic-

"Well boss, you want me to hold him down?"

•Gage would probably kill him just for funsies- but in this case, he'll just slash the clothes off of Thomas' back and make him parade around naked in front of his following. Maybe even whip him with a rolled dirty rag or some shit.

Romanced-

"You've signed your ticket, bitch."

•Won't even hesitate to start beating the shit out of him. It's one thing to disrespect your common sense, another to demand something like this from a raider boss..but it was an entirely more personal infraction to order around his loved one.

Hancock:

Platonic & Romanced-

"Hey, I know you. Didn't Ham knock you out on your ass for your crazy 'salvation' gig? You ain't nothing but a crook- about to be a bleeding one too if you don't step the hell back."

•Hancock would probably make Thomas cry from embarrassment. You don't "mess" with Hancock, especially if you've already proven to be an issue close and personal to his home. It isn't good for the health. And by good for the health I mean..well, look at what he did to fin.

Macready;

Platonic-

"Hah! You're out of your gourd dude."

•He doesn't even understand why the two of you are here! What's the point? May as well leave this place before he gets fed up and loses his cool.

Romanced-

"I'm sorry, did you just ask what I think you did? Do you want a rear full of lead."

•Initially, Mac would be dumbfounded. Was this clown serious? I mean...the numbers are in his favor..but damn. Even if he doubts he could win, he'd be willing to fight "Brother Thomas" if it meant "defending your honor."

Maxson:

Platonic-

"Civilian, I advise you to not make orders to those above you.."

•He'd probably try to intimidate the cult leader, puffing his chest out and stuff...but honestly he's hoping that Thomas will give it up.

Romanced-

"Do you have any idea who you're harassing? Cease this idiocy at once or I'll take care of you myself- and that's a promise."

•Okay, so maybe Arthur doesn't really want to have to deal with Thomas or his cult, but when it comes to someone threatening the person he loves- especially in such a humiliating way- he isn’t above putting his pride aside and choke someone out like a lowly raider. Also- no one threatens his coat.

Nick:

Platonic-

"We don't need this..."

•Nick is...tired. Why must you drag him into these kinds of predicaments?

Romanced-

"That's a bold command coming from someone like yourself."

•Don't worry, if Thomas persists- the infamous "beep, beep, beep" prank is sure to follow. That or Nick might call in some favors..

Piper:

Platonic-

"Haha..you're hilarious...you're joking though, right?"

•She knows he isn't- but she just can't handle anything like this. If you don't do something to ease the tension, she might just slap him.

Romanced-

"Woah, creep. Back off."

•She'll be more civil than she'd like just because he didn't outright aggress either of you, but you bet your ass she'll write as many slandering articles as she can so no one else will join his band of weirdos.

Preston:

Platonic-

"General, you aren't seriously going to...right? This man is obviously a thief."

•Though he usually doesn't like to pass judgement on others and give the benefit of a doubt, buuuut he can't let this one slide. He just sincerely hopes you won't give in...

Romanced-

"I don't know who you think you are but you've lost your mind!"

•He's never come so close to punching someone that wasn't technically "hostile" before. Preston doesn't even entertain the idea of you complying for funsies either.

X6-88:

Platonic-

"I'm warning you, step away from them now.."

•X6 plays no shit when it comes to someone being even halfway threatening to you. Don't expect him to hesitate "defending" you if Thomas doesn't relent.

Romanced-

*shoots him in the face*

#fallout 4 #fallout #paladin danse #fo4 companions #fallout companions #danse #elder maxson #porter gage #curie #deacon #x6 88 #cait #hancock #fo4 #arthur maxson #brotherhood of steel #macready

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itsjustthechems · 3 years

Text

Musings on Danse's political/moral alignments

I saw a post mentioning how a lot of the Fo4 fandom associates Danse with current American conservatives. I disagree, and just want to ramble about my feelings on the subject.

Yes, he is a meathead asshole.

I totally understand taking Danse at face value and assigning him mentally to the "bigoted bootlicker" category. That's totally valid. Unless you travel with him extensively and pay close attention to his ambient dialogue, it's understandable to figure that's just how Bethesda wrote him.

Danse's backstory

To understand Danse's moral and political standings, we have to take a look at his origin story. As far as Danse is aware, he grew up alone in the Capital Wasteland. He was an orphan that scrounged for scrap metal and other junk, which he sold to get by. He had no known family, parental figures, or mentors of any sort. He had one friend, Cutler, who was around his age. The Brotherhood of Steel, much like the real U.S. military, preyed on people like this for recruitment missions. Teenagers of low socioeconomic status - hungry, lonely, desperate, unsure of their purpose. Of course Danse and Cutler would elect to join the Brotherhood, which promised them food, protection, somewhere to sleep at night, and above all else - camaraderie. During one of his affinity dialogues, Danse admits that joining the Brotherhood seemed like the only way to escape his situation.

The Brotherhood took advantage of Danse and other soldiers' naivety and lack of experience by instilling fear and hatred of the misunderstood (synths, ghouls, mutants) and using those negative feelings to shape their training. Dare to disagree with their belief system? At best, you would be disciplined. Verbally abused by the Elder and shunned by your friends and mentors. At worst, you'd be booted out - back to the Wasteland you had been taught to fear unconditionally. Back to starvation, radiation, poverty, and isolation.

After a year of service, Cutler disappeared on a mission. Danse searched for him for three weeks, finally tracing him to a super mutant hive. Cutler had been exposed to FEV and had become a super mutant. Danse killed him. He admits that he doesn't know if it was the right thing to do, but it was what he had been trained to do.

That was the first circumstance that really gave me a glimpse into the nuance of Danse's beliefs. Like...wait, he questions his oh-so-precious-and-infallible training?

Is he still a douche to almost all non-human NPCs? Yes. However, I don't think he knows how to be anything other than a condescending, militant, Brotherhood heavy. That kind of attitude is what got him promoted so quickly. It's what got him out of his bottom-of-the-pecking-order trainee position, where he had felt singled out by his superiors. He learned that bigotry and cold-heartedness were the only methods of survival and success in the Brotherhood.

His character arc

Danse is not meant to be a one-dimensional, blatantly bigoted character. If he was, I don't think Bethesda would have made him romance-able. In fact, that's why you can't romance him until after his character arc quest: Blind Betrayal.

Spoiler alert! On this quest, you find out that Danse is a synth. He had no idea, and has a subsequent identity crisis that leaves him suicidal. This is the breaking point in the struggle between his own innate morality and his Brotherhood training. His default stance is that he should be killed to uphold the Brotherhood's code — he even offers to do the deed himself to protect the Sole Survivor from disciplinary action (a true testament to the brutality of the Brotherhood — Danse would rather die than allow Sole, his best friend, to face Maxson's wrath). However, through charisma checks, you can remind him of his own humanity and convince him not to harm himself. This breakthrough leads him to recognize that synths are truly nothing to be afraid of.

After Blind Betrayal, he will agree with most dialogue options supporting synths. According to the wiki, any leftover dislikes regarding synth-related dialogue are glitches.

There are other moments in separate quests that reference his moral confusion — for example, he likes when you help Kent, who is a ghoul, but doesn't like if you flirt with Holly, also a ghoul (maybe that's just some jealousy, lmao).

He also dislikes when you give Virgil, a mutant scientist, the serum that will help him return to his human form. My personal headcanon is that seeing Virgil cure himself forces Danse to address the fact that he might have been able to save Cutler, but killed him instead, due to his Brotherhood brainwashing.

Evidence of Danse's fiscal/economic beliefs

Danse is a COMRADE. You heard me. This man's pussy pops for socialized medicine. When you walk through Milton General Hospital, he says: "Facilities like this were funded by privately owned corporations more interested in making a profit than helping mankind."

You heard me, this man hates capitalism. Behold:

"Vault-Tec built places like this to conduct unethical experiments on human beings. Just thinking about it makes me sick."

"It was corporations like this that put the last nail in the coffin for mankind. They exploited technology for their own gains, pocketing the cash and ignoring the damage they'd done."

"Private corporations like Vault-Tec ruined mankind. All that brainpower put to waste..."

"This is disgusting. I can't believe Mass Fusion dumped these barrels here. This is the perfect example of how environmentally irresponsible the ancient corporations behaved."

"This is exactly the reason that science never belonged in the private sector."

Ugh. Really gets me goin'.

Conclusion

He has several other comments that suggest he is generally anti-war, is very pro-education, shows appreciation for the arts, loves children and animals...several things that conservatives couldn't care less about. He reacts angrily to greed, assaulting or harassing any non-hostiles (including synths, ghouls, and mutants), turning your back on beggars, harming non-hostile animals, etc. In my opinion, he's a pretty stand-up guy once he completes his character arc.

Does he still love the taste of boots? Yeah, and he probably always will. :/

Bethesda did him so dirty by not finishing his character arc. The fact that he still gushes about the Brotherhood and acts as if he's still in their ranks after Blind Betrayal is pretty clear evidence that he's a generally unfinished character. I think he had the potential to become a more accepting, radicalized, philanthropic individual after recognizing the shortcomings of the Brotherhood's ideals.

But yeah. I love this handsome dumbass, and I personally consider him a comrade, not a conservative. Kudos if you read this far into my crazed ramblings!

#paladin danse #danse #fallout 4 #fallout #fo4 #blind betrayal #spoilers #tw suicide

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