some people on here rlly treat having privilege like it’s a moral failing and not a circumstance you’re born into by luck

Okay so This is just a way to let out some frustration so I can put it out there and stop mulling on it bc I'm bad at this sort of stuff - Feel free to ignore it

I'm putting this under Read More; if your fav past-time is to call anyone who likes Ironwood's character or was disappointed by his V8 turn to villainy a stupid bootlicker who "should have seen the signs he was always a tyrant !!" please don't interact with this post. You're ultimately free to think what you want but honestly I see enough of that in the main tag when left alone, I don't need it on my blog it doesn't make me feel good.

Anyone else... well you can read if you're interested but you don't have to either. Feel free to respectfully disagree though, I'm not that bullheaded that I can't partake in a friendly argument =) I'll just be listing some things about Ironwood's reading by the FNDM who get old or draining as someone who doesn't like the V8-characterization they went with

Can people please stop just... copy/pasting real world issues on a world/characters that have nothing to do with them or a completely different context ?

Like,, I genuinely try to educate myself on real-world issues. I know I'm rather privileged so I try to listen and hear out people who speak out about the issues they live through day by day. I know why the "ACAB" moniker exists. I understand the problem that lies within the american police system (and likely other countries as well). I see why the army, on our blue planet, is criticized & its many failings. Etc, the list can go on...

But I'm sorry to say, Remnant isn't OUR Earth. Their Army's primary job is to fight actual evil soulless monsters, not people. The Ace Opps or Huntsmen are not an organization directly inherited from slave-hunting groups. James Ironwood isn't the US army general bombing Middle East. Clover Ebi isn't the racist cop you want in prison. So WHY are they treated as such by so many people ? Stories are not a 1-1 where you can take everything you know and just apply it to a completely different world.

Has Atlas been presented as a country that suffers from racism & classism ? Certainly. Has it be shown this way ? That's already more debatable since the only racist arguments we got were in Mantle (which is the city we're supposed to be rooting for so that's a weird choice but eh it's whatever). Are the characters, as persons, shown to evoke these issues in a way that deserve our scorn ? Not really.

Is Ironwood depicted as particularly racist for example ? I wouldn't say so seeing as one (or more considering Tortuga) of his Ace-Opps are Faunus & it seems perfectly accepted; and he hates Jacques Schnee's guts. So why does he get to shoulder all of our real-world issues as if he was responsible for them, in a context where (pre V8) his army had most likely never killed anything else than Grimm and was shown to elicit very positive reactions from most of the population (V3) ? (In direct contrast to the polarization that the US army might evoke for example.)

You can totally hate Ironwood because of the feelings he evoke, the trope he stems from or the parallels to be made. That doesn't mean however, that he IS truly guilty of every one of OUR world issues (pre-V8)

Just because classism is prevalent in Atlas society does not make Ironwood the figurehead & leader of this issue.

Is classism an issue in Atlas ? Yes. That's been made clear because of Mantle's state as well as Jacques Schnee entire existence & even Cinder's backstory. Does that mean every single one of Ironwood's decisions reeks of classism ? NO

Trust me, as someone who found Ironwood's V8 characterization not... well-executed & too much; there's nothing more annoying than being assaulted by posts about his fall going "it was so obvious !! look at -" only for them to then list reasons in a really biased way or even headcannons based on (again) irl problems. An exemple...

Reasons his turn was good that I see thrown around : "Ironwood left Mantle behind because he only wanted to save the rich. He's a selfish coward & an asshole !"

What we were actually given : "Ironwood suffers from PTSD, and faced with Salem's imminent arrival, he tried to save what he was CERTAIN to be able to protect aka the flying city and all the people on it including Mantle evacuees. There is absolutely no text backing the idea that he wanted to leave with Atlas because it's rich. We could even suppose that he would have left with the 'poor' Mantle if it was the flying city and rich people were hanging safely on the ground. There is indeed an issue with Atlas & Mantle disparity, but Ironwood isn't directly responsible for it."

Does that make his decision to leave Mantle behind a morally right one ? That's of course NOT what I'm saying. The situation is still very ambiguous. But the classism theme has NO place here.

"Ironwood leads Atlas & Mantle. As such, he inherently holds responsability for the issues plaguing it." THIS is an acceptable reading according to me. I would probably argue that even if Ironwood's the only Atlas leader we're shown; he actually only oversees the military & academy (where we haven't ever seen classism issues), so putting Atlas' classism issues on him still doesn't sound fair to me. However the idea & argument is sound.

Acknowledging only how his actions look/the tyrannical surface reading and not the reasonnable justifications or glimpses we were given (pre-V7) of Ironwood being more than his trope

I'll probably stop after this one, but the last thing that is both tiring & annoying after too much of it; is seeing people boil down all of Ironwood's character to the most basic summary, inherently written to paint him in a bad line. And then saying that everything led up to his downfall by using these watered-down versions of the show's events to justify it. Or worse (imo), saying that people who are not satisfied with his V8 characterization that THEY don't understand how good a character he is and don't really appreciate him.... All the while only ever highlighting his characters flaws. Please stop this.

"Ironwood brought an army to the peace Olympics why are you surprised he turned out this way ?" ==> Ironwood brought an army to a country where the civilians visibly have no issue with said-army, to protect a peaceful event that he KNOWS to be targeted by foes. It's definitely overzealous & his conviction that threats should be dealt with by blunt force IS one of his flaws; but pretending that he did it for fun or because he's a tyran is just as misplaced.

"Ironwood said he'd shoot Qrow if he were one of his men why are you surprised he shot Oscar ?" ==> Do I really need to flip through every joke in this show and consider it as absolute truth & proof that the character would enact these words if given the occasion; even when we're shown with certainty that they actually don't mean it ? (IW hugging Qrow to welcome him, refusing to attack Qrow when he's certain Qrow IS attacking him...)

"Ironwood has his military all over Mantle, there's a curfew, all of this is tyrannical why are you surprised he's also down for genocide" ==> Damn, it sure is criminal to have Mantle defended from the litteral monsters roaming inside & out, and to make sure with a curfew that the people are not at risk during the night. I wonder if any recent events could make us reconsider our stance on how evil a enforced curfew is. Mhmmm maybe a pandemic ? Nah I must be imagining things. For real though, at what point did Tyrian's framing/lies (IW has his soldiers all over Mantle because of politics/he's a tyran who refuses opposition) became the truth of the situation for the FDNM too ? Again Mantle's situations SUCK, and that's a problem in itself. Making up problematic reasoning for the situation is dishonest though.

To end this, I'll just make clear. I do not condone any of Ironwood's actions post-V7. I don't think he had to be the big hero of the Atlas arc. Nor that he was without faults. I merely think that he'd have been a better antagonist than villain. And that it'd have been nice to keep the ambiguity/morally greyness that surrounds him; the knowledge that he's TRYING hard to do what's best for everyone; that he has good intentions. That he cares about individuals too to a lesser degree, and that he had people who cared about him as a person.

For short... Ironwood as an antagonist with understandable issues, flaws & failures; making questionable choices but with good intentions ? Hell yeah. Ironwood as a villain, more irredeemable than Hazel, willing to kill people for NO reason or even wipe out a city ? I'm not convinced.

Another thing I want to talk about in addition to Band of Brothers more specifically and I will dabble into a little bit of the Vietnam war in this rant as well is something that never settled right with me when watching the band of Brothers series was the moment when they were shaving the French women's hair for being collaborators and I really want to talk about this.

When we think of the female collaborators or collaborators in general a lot of people think about people who help the Nazis identify Jews or Romani individuals gay individuals the list goes on. But in fact a lot of the female collaborators who were punished publicly for collaborating didn't do any of these crimes a lot of them slept with German men yes because they had no other way of obtaining necessities. I didn't really think about this or why it upsetted me up until the point that it became I believe a war crime for a man in the military of an occupying force to sleep with a woman, or vice versa female occupier male civilian, even consensually like 100% consensually in the country that he is occupying. It's considered rape or sexual assault because a woman cannot fully 100% consent to somebody if she is using sex that she doesn't necessarily want to have in exchange for goods or necessities to live. So basically you are using sex as a commodity in order to obtain food or medicine or shelter. Let me put it into perspective you are a 25-year-old French woman your husband is in the French army you have three children and France just surrendered to Nazi Germany. And because France just surrendered to Nazi Germany You have to live by the German rules and the German laws maybe your money isn't accepted your husband is a prisoner of war because he was in the French army and he fought against the Germans or maybe he's even dead you still have three kids to take care of You have to close them feed them give them medicine when they're sick and that is a very hard thing to accomplish when your country is under Nazi occupation or even occupation in general. Sure you could trade things with German soldiers in exchange for medicine or food but eventually you're going to run out of those goods to exchange so let's say you have a Ruby necklace and you exchange that for medicine for one of your children because they have the flu well you've used up all of that medicine which is something you've traded your ruby necklace for and now you don't have anything else to trade So what else do you give in order to obtain what you need? The answer is sex, because it is a commodity in which you possess that cannot necessarily be taken from you Yes you can still be raped but it cannot be stolen from you because it is attached to your person. It is a commodity that you can continuously trade in exchange for goods or necessities. It is something that you can always possess and have on you at any given point in time, unlike other goods that are difficult to carry especially if you're having to leave your house because it's been bombed out or you need to flee the country to be safe somewhere else it's lightweight you will always have it with you and you can continuously trade it. I'm not always are you trading sex in order to get necessities but possibly good favor so this way maybe You can continue to hide Jewish people or help the resistance in some way so this way they'll overlook you because oh this woman is having sex with me that means I trust her or maybe you're trading sex for information I know all of us have seen the propaganda of loose lips sink ships well when are a man's lips more loose than when he's getting his dick sucked? Because men want to look impressive to women because they want to get her attention and one of the ways they will do that is oh well I'm an officer in the German army I know all of this I know where our men are here's all this information hoping to get women. And that can be valuable.

Also if you look at a lot of the photos where there are shaving these women's heads to humiliate them and to basically say to the world hey these are collaborators look at how happy the men in those photos are You know why? Because they found somebody to blame for the exact same crimes they themselves were committing but because we place such heavier penalties on women who are sexually active or even victim blame women who are raped. we are more likely to punish women more severely for the same crimes that men who commit those same crimes are less likely to be punished for or be less severely be punished for. Also during times of war prostitution goes up it just skyrockets especially in countries that are being occupied. A prime example of this that comes straight off the top of my head is during the Vietnam war The United States for lack of a better term kidnapped a lot of women particularly Vietnamese women and women from the surrounding areas / countries and forced them to basically become comfort women for US soldiers. They took them under the guise of oh well we need models or we need nurses or any kind of job that would get them to leave their homes so this way they could take advantage of them. And then once they were raped and abused they tried to go home and they were allowed to but because of how the world views virginity and sex and everything these women were treated like criminals and like the scum of the earth their families and villages no longer wanted them so they had nowhere else to go. So what did they do? A lot of them became comfort women and prostitutes out of necessity because they no longer had a society or a country or a community that wanted them So out of necessity these women became prostitutes and did sex work because they had no other choice in order to keep themselves fed clothed and have access to health care.

Another thing too is any woman who had sex whether consensual or not with German soldier was tried as a collaborator or humiliated at the collaborator and that's just not fair to the women who were raped. I think a prime example of this was a video I was watching on YouTube several years back I can find the video if anybody is interested in it but it was on the focus of sex during world war II. One of the prime things that it focused on was Jewish women who were forced to become comfort women or prostitutes for German soldiers. Some of these women were actually tried after the war as collaborators and when they returned home a lot of people knew who they were and what had been done to them and treated them horribly as a result even though they had no choice what happened to them they had no more choice than the people who are going to concentration camps and being worked to death. In fact they were boarded in the same areas as other Jewish women who were forced laborers because they were prostitutes they were fed better and treated better because men want to look at something a little bit healthier than near death looking when they're raping them I guess. And as a result of them getting better treatment then these other women these other women would just go and physically assault them or try to kill them hurt them bully them exclude them and just treat them like shit even though these women had again no more choice than they had. It's the us versus you. You're angry and you can't lash out against the people who are forcing you to do this but you can lash out at the people that are getting better treatment than you especially when you think that they chose this job because they Believe in the ideals of the country of the men that they are forced to be with sexually. War is horrible for men having to kill people seeing people be killed everything that goes along with it but to be a woman in times of war is more deadly and more dangerous and a lot worse in my opinion than what happens to men. Women aren't really allowed to join their militaries or defend themselves women can be subject to the same torture and whores that men can be subjected to with the added fear of being raped or even being raped and the fear that comes with it after. The fear of people around you finding out and accusing you of being a collaborator or being a traitor a turncoat even though you didn't have a choice.

Hey there! I’d like to ask something, if you’re ok with that. In mdzs, a lot of people say that despite JC being so antagonistic towards WWX, he still loves him and misses him. I don’t see how, his actions in any version of the story say the exact opposite to me. Maybe one needs to look between the lines to see it, but I’m horrible at reading others, so if I may bother you and ask what your thoughts are on the subject?

Hey! You are always welcome to ask me questions about MDZS. Especially while we’re all trapped inside.

So I will say I do think Jiang Cheng does indeed love and miss Wei Wuxian. I also think the fandom has a tendency to wipe away Jiang Cheng���s extremely serious flaws (especially in comparison to, say, how they treat Jin Guangyao’s flaws in comparison). Jiang Cheng is very much a foil for Jin Guangyao and for Madame Yu, Wei Wuxian, and Jin Ling (as well as Su She, but that’s perhaps for another meta).

Jiang Cheng’s fundamental defense mechanism is projection. We know already that he is insecure–the way his father treated him is horrible. Madame Yu, in turn, was very clearly projecting her own insecurities onto her son:

Jiang Cheng was stuck between his father and his mother. After a moment of hesitation, he moved to his mother’s side. Holding his shoulders, Madam Yu pushed him forward for Jiang FengMian to see, “Sect Leader Jiang, it seems that some things I have to say. Look carefully—this, is your own son, the future head of Lotus Pier. Even if you frown upon him just because I was the one who bore him, his surname is still Jiang! … I don’t believe for one second that you haven’t heard of how the outside people gossips, that Sect Leader Jiang has still not moved on from a certain Sanren though so many years have passed, regarding the son of his old friend as a son of his own; they’re speculating if Wei Ying is your…”

She’s really asking: I’m here, so why don’t you care about me? Do you really prefer a dead Cangse Sanren to me? But the tragic irony is that the way in which she asks this question only pushes Jiang Fengmian away. And yet, she did love him, which Jiang Fengmian realizes when, in the end, he finds out Madame Yu had taught Zidian to obey his command as well as hers. Zidian is a symbol of her pride and heritage.

Let’s also look at MXTX’s description of Jiang Cheng’s ideal woman. While it’s not in the novel and is extra material, it’s a perfect example of projection:

naturally beautiful, graceful and obedient, hard-working and thrifty, coming from a respected family, cultivation level not too high, personality not too strong, not too talkative, voice not too loud and must treat Jin Ling nicely. 

Is he looking for a wife, or is he looking for Shijie to mother Jin Ling? Because he’s 100% describing Jiang Yanli.

Jiang Cheng does exactly what his mother did to him to Wei Wuxian. He projects his own insecurities, the very ones Madame Yu identified (great job mothering there), onto Wei Wuxian. Why does he hate Wei Wuxian? He hates Wei Wuxian for killing Shijie, when it was Shijie’s own choice to sacrifice herself, and Jiang Cheng then rendered her last sacrifice moot by killing his shixiong. So does Jiang Cheng hate Wei Wuxian, or does he hate himself for killing his sibling in a moment of rage?

It goes deeper, though. Because we see that Jiang Cheng’s fundamental issue is that he hates himself, because he is not as good at cultivation nor as strong as Wei Wuxian, and his father doesn’t love him as much as he loves Wei Wuxian. A child’s mind is going to connect that to “if I’m stronger, Dad will love me.” Jiang Cheng never grew out of this mindset. But what is strength to Jiang Cheng?

It’s protecting the people he loves. So Shijie’s death? He blames himself. One of Jiang Cheng’s most vulnerable moments is when he begs Wei Wuxian to turn away from Yiling and the Wens, because “I can’t protect you.” He wants to protect Wei Wuxian because he couldn’t protect his parents, yet he wants to protect himself more. It’s tragic. What Jin Guangyao said to Jiang Cheng in the temple is true, though of course, it’s not so simple as to be Jiang Cheng’s fault solely. But his insecurities did play a role and were indeed exploited by a cruel, calculating society:

“… Back then, the LanlingJin Sect, the QingheNie Sect, and the GusuLan Sect had already finished fighting over the biggest share. The rest could only get some small shrimps. You, on the other hand, had just rebuilt Lotus Pier and behind you was the YiLing Patriarch, Wei WuXian, the danger of whom was immeasurable. Do you think the other sects would like to see a young sect leader who was so advantaged? Luckily, you didn’t seem to be on good terms with your shixiong, and since everyone thought there was an opportunity, of course they’d add fuels to your fire if they could. No matter what, to weaken the YunmengJiang Sect was to strengthen themselves. Sect Leader Jiang, if only your attitude towards your shixiong was just a bit better, showing everyone that your bond was too strong to be broken for them to have a chance, or if you exhibited just a bit more tolerance after what happened, things wouldn’t have become what they were. Oh, speaking of it, you were also a main force of the siege at Burial Mound…”

Jin Guangyao isn’t wrong here, and unlike Jiang Cheng, he’s aware that society sucks but tries to join it anyways. Jiang Cheng grew up privileged despite his sad home life, and therefore never examined whether society was fair or not (as is reinforced by the early conversation Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian have about Jin Guangyao, in which Wei Wuxian expresses that he likes Jin Guangyao and Jiang Cheng says that, as the son of a whore, Jin Guangyao will only be able to climb so far, yet expresses no deeper concern about this). Jin Guangyao’s tragedy was trying to join society in an effort to prove himself to his father, and Jiang Cheng’s tragedy was not examining himself and his role in society in an effort to prove himself to his father as well, both fathers of whom would be better off ignored. Jiang Cheng did rebuild Lotus Pier, but Wei Wuxian learns that the local people are terrified of Jiang Cheng and hate him, while Jin Guangyao actually did protect the common people, yet Jiang Cheng still has a chance to redeem himself in the end and Jin Guangyao does not, which can be chalked up in great part due to privilege.

This isn’t to argue Jiang Cheng is worse than Jin Guangyao, because better/worse is moot in the world of MDZS. The point is that both Jiang Cheng and Jin Guangyao bring about the death of a brother by prioritizing their own wellbeing and proving themselves to the fathers whose approval it is impossible to win (because the problem is with them rather than with Jiang Cheng or Jin Guangyao themselves), would have/did kill a child on the basis of their parentage (Wen Yuan was rescued by Lan Wangji or he would absolutely have been killed, Jin Guangyao does kill A-Song–it doesn’t matter whether or not either of them did/would have done it personally; at the very least they set in motion events they knew would result in a child’s death), and yet both raised and genuinely loved Jin Ling (as Jin Ling himself concludes in the end).

But in regards to Jin Ling, Jiang Cheng’s insecurities make it impossible for him to communicate well with the people he loves. He warns Jin Ling not to come back unless he accomplishes something on Dafan Mountain, which almost gets Jin Ling killed trying to prove himself. (I wrote more about that in this meta here.)

After Wei Wuxian’s resurrection, Jiang Cheng proves that he doesn’t hate Wei Wuxian several times despite claiming he does. Firstly? When Jin Guangyao accuses Mo Xuanyu of being Wei Wuxian in the middle of a crowd, Jiang Cheng could easily turn him in  and be rid of him since Jiang Cheng already knows it. And yet, Jiang Cheng does not do so, even when called upon; instead, his indecision is noted. Secondly, he kept Chenqing with him all these years, when he very easily could have destroyed it (which is another parallel to Jin Guangyao, who kept Suibian, an ultimately useless sword); the flute, on the other hand, is a symbol of demonic cultivation and yet Jiang Cheng does not get rid of it. He went so far as to torture other demonic cultivators to death, many of whom are noted to have been innocent, and yet he kept demonic cultivational tools with him, because it was his brother’s–which also, yes, shows how he hates himself and kind of wants to punish himself, too.

And, of course, there’s the sacrifice that Jiang Cheng never reveals (at least not by the novel’s end). He sacrificed his own life to save Wei Wuxian from the Wens, was willing to give up what he always wanted–to lead Lotus Pier and thereby earn his father’s respect–to save Wei Wuxian’s life. Yet, in the end that led to Wei Wuxian sacrificing his golden core for Jiang Cheng, and in the end, Jiang Cheng can’t tell Wei Wuxian for the same reason Wei Wuxian couldn’t tell Jiang Cheng in his first life: it would sound like an excuse. So, again, Jiang Cheng’s pride is getting in the way–yet, at least this time, he is willing to sacrifice looking good and look worse for the sake of letting Wei Wuxian go.

However, I think there’s reason to hope, as I’ve said before. I did not interpret that ending to mean their relationship was over or could never be significantly close again. Wei Wuxian has let go of a lot of his pride and learned some hard lessons about self-sacrifice and protecting people, and the younger generation is making so much room for nuance and kindness and thereby challenging society. I personally assumed they’d have that conversation eventually, but we didn’t need to see it to assume it would happen.

What’s your opinion on Kerry being available to only male V when it’s mentioned in-game that he’s bi (correct me if I’m wrong, I have terrible memory)?? I feel like they should’ve had bi romance options if they were able to implement both gay and straight ones.

Oh anon, oooooh anon. I love you dearly, but you intentionally or not might as well have thrown lit dynamite in my ask box. This discourse has been such a strange beast within this fandom and I have definitely shared some vague thoughts about it before. I’m putting everything under a read more, to help stave off some....harassment or putting it in people’s lives who may not want it. 

 I still remember I was frankly heartbroken and upset when I first learned Kery wasn’t romanceable by female V when the game first officially came out, but before I played it; River and Panam weren’t even really known about, cause they weren’t talked about much in the promo material,  plus Kerry was shown in romance scenes with what looked to be female V. So, if you go back far enough you’ll find me in December cope posting and being the saddest and angriest of beans, because other than Johnny who I knew was likely off the table. He was one of the only characters I wanted to potentially romance. Now, I’m further away from it, have  processed my feelings regarding it and am more rational I believe regarding the issue. 

But, that being said, a large issue of this sort of discourse is that; no matter what anyone says, someone somwhere is upset. I’ve been insulted, blocked, accused of fetishizing gay men, and so much over my opinion regarding this matter. I’m still currently debating if I even wanna tag this, cause the issue almost always brings negativity to my blog and to me. I have very little interest in being berated for this, so we’ll see how I feel after I finish typing this all out. I’m going to try to go through all my issues, my points, my troubles and feelings about the matter. But, at the end of the day, it is merely my opinion. If someone disagrees, fine, just don’t attack people or berate them over pixels in a video game. Just dont. That’s all I ask. Okay, so I’m gonna divide this into talking points and whatever, now. 

Firstly, Kerry is bisexual. Point blank, period. I’ve seen folks try to argue that his wife was like comphet, which if you dont know means that sometimes exclusively homosexual people will try to force themselves into heterosexual relationships because society has conditioned them to believe they have to be straight. While, I’m not negating the fact that this happens, as a bisexual/pansexual (I use the terms interchangeably to define my experience and feelings)  person I’ve struggled with it when making sense of my attraction to women. It genuinely is something that happens. This is not the case for Kerry; he doesn’t ever hide his attraction to men, between TTRPG lore and the video game he has had two wives , and he is stated by game developers and TTRPG creator to be bisexual.He is bisexual. Getting that out there, saying other wise, in my opinion is a level of bi erasure. That being said, I do still have my grievances with how the game chose to handle his bisexuality and bisexuality as whole, also imo, the game generally doesn’t seem...to treat players who are attracted to men well… 

But before I get into that, I wanna make clear, I feel like Cyberpunk 2077 should have had more romance options for every orientation. If you’re not going to create a player-sexual style of romance; ie where every romanceable character is attracted to the player regardless and wish to focus on each character having their own predetermined sexuality; only have one character for each sexuality is kind of bullshit. If you’re a lesbian player and you’re not into Judy, you get nothing, except a fuck around with Meredith (who I will get to later). You’re a straight woman, but not into River, shit out of luck. You’re a gay man who’s not into Kerry, sucks to suck bud. You’re a straight man who’s not into Panam (kind dont get how you wouldn’t be but who am i to judge), well, you can fuck Meredith… so woooo. Oh also, if you’re not attracted to women, you will still be forced to watch in first person pov a sex scene with Alt and if you want Johnny to like you, you gotta date a girl. Also, all the male love interests will be sidelined mostly…. Hooray… But I digress, either go in with all romance options bi/pan/player sexual, or give more options for romance. Cause now you have the issue of people not getting the partner they hoped for and not liking their only option. Now, you got people trying to make the Judy  bi, which is lesbian erasure and lesbophobic, along with people saying Kerry isn’t bi and can’t be with women which is bi erasure and biphobic. Whereas, if you had just gone in from the get go with either more options or a player-sexual romance system; we wouldn’t be here, CDPR. 

Okay, so next thing, now that I’ve addressed my issues with the entire romance system and that yes, Kerry is bi. Should Kerry have been able to be romanced as female V? Yes and no. Which sounds vague, but I’m going somewhere. With the current set up of it; Kerry being romanceable to a female V would have unfairly given female players an additional love interest over male players. Female V would have the option of Judy, River, or Kerry. And Male V’s would have the option of Kerry or Panam. That’s not fair. I get that, inherently. CDPR painted themselves into a corner, by only letting there be two romances for “each” gender, one for “each” sexuality, and then using a canonically bi character for one of them. They played themselves, they were either gonna have to give an unfair amount of love interest to one side of their gender system or make a bi character who will only pursue one gender. So, they went for the latter. 

Now, some people feel thats fine, because Kerry having a gender preference is fine and its okay for bi people to lean a certain way in regards to gender and its okay for them to not be attracted to people. And that is true. I am a bisexual woman who leans a little more towards men, I get that. However, I have only been given one reason for Kerry’s preference for male V over female V. And it was by a developer of the game who stated that Kerry pursues Male V and not Female V because Male V reminds him more of Johnny… And I hate that. I personally, hate it so deeply, because to me it does a complete disservice to Kerry and V’s relationship and Kerry’s arc. Because even with female V you see him being preoccupied with Johnny and V’s connection to Johnny, then you see him move past that. So, to then state, its still a deciding factor in him romancing V is so wrong to me. Like why???? Why would you do that to people who like Kerry??? Why would you put that in their heads, that Kerry on some level, subconsciously or not, was thinking about Johnny when he decides to romance V. Cause that’s not in the game, in the game you get the vibe he’s moving on past Johnny, like he’s growing, developing, genuinely likes V. But that stupid tweet, just radiates rancid vibes, whyyy???  

And then, outside of that nasty tweet, I have to ask what other reason is there for why he prefers male V over fem V.  They’re...the same characters essentially, just with different pronouns and body type. They also can look like whatever you want; they’re completely customizable. So, Its based off of what the game associates with  gender characteristics and nothing else, meaning, his attraction is rooted solely in their gender and he turns down fem V by virtue of them being a woman and nothing else. Which, yeah, bisexual/pansexual people have preferences but when that preference completely excludes a gender based on nothing but gender…. Uhh????? See my issue???? 

And I’ve seen people saying, well, its better than CDPR playing into slutty will date anybody bisexual stereotypes. But, the thing is...THEY STILL DO THAT which is what drives me up the god damn wall; they managed to do slutty bi stereotypes and I don’t even get kiss the boy, which again, I get the need for fairness but wow, just wow. And lemme explain. 

Meredith is the only character, other than joytoys, whom you can have sex with regardless of gender, body type, etc. She is the only character who shows that she is attracted to V on some level regardless of gender. 

She is a one night stand. Her sex animations are the same as joytoys. She treated like a promiscuous love phobic woman.  And having characters like that is fine, my own V is promiscuous and love phobic. But, we can acknowledge that in a video game by a AAA game company having the only character who is at least physically attracted to the player no matter what, be nothing but sex fodder...isn’t great bi representation, right? 

Oh, and Kerry himself still is a promiscuous bisexual man, he just won’t romance female V because apparently, according to a dev, they don’t remind him of Johnny enough. AND THATS THE DEVS WORDS, NOT MINE, I HATE THAT. Like, Kerry is shown to have people’s lingerie around his house. He’s stated by Johnny to be someone who fucks around. He gets a blowjob from a man in a stairwell. 

The two most blatantly canonically bi character in this game are promiscuous; one wont romance V at all and just wants sex, the other will only romance a male V because at worse, he’s comparing them mentally subconsciously to his dead friend and at best….because….reasons…. Literally, from what I understand for Kerry to romance V, they have to have the “male” body type and “male” voice. Meaning, fem V could literally by all appearances look like masc V, body type wise, but because she uses female pronouns and has a feminine sounding voice...no… the stars say no… 

In my honest opinion, it is bad bisexual representation and a not so well thought out romance system for a game. 

But, that being said, I literally never romance anyone, because I’m a Johnny simp. So, the fuck do I know.

oh god do i tag this.... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Transcribed and formatted for readability the master thesis between me and @wlwclem​ on the nuances to NaraTrish together and as individuals being why we love it and respect it not being CompHet- we spent way too much Big Brain Energy on it to not share 

tw: brief mention of F-Slur when giving an example on toxic masculinity being bullshit, sexuality is briefly discussed in a non sexualizing way and in no graphic detail

*insert IM TRISH KIN BUCCIARATI joke here*

epickinnienaranciaYesterday at 11:45 PM

JDDBSJDBD YES bc ofc she gotta be Reassuring but at the same time his Himboism Knows No Bounds One of the lines in EoH u can give her is “Go get me an Italian Vogue magazine too while you’re at it” and I’m like. Queen

nozomijoestarYesterday at 11:46 PM

JDHDHDF BDE Narancia whipped Narancia stands no chance

epickinnienaranciaYesterday at 11:46 PM

OH FOR REAL one of HIS victory lines is something about getting all the stuff for her lmao And this is like even if she isn’t in the battle, Always Thinking Of His Queen

nozomijoestarYesterday at 11:50 PM

Trish decides to test the limits of this and his ability to recognize them by asking for impossible or nonexistent items/feats and when he continues to try for her without question she realizes she has too much power and must restrain it fjdjjdjfjf Can't turn into Dad

epickinnienaranciaYesterday at 11:51 PM

JDBDBSJS The color palette changes while she has an inner monologue while she watches him try to make her happy

nozomijoestarYesterday at 11:53 PM

"Oh my god Bucciarati was right...he's too loyal for his own good I need to stop even if it's a little fun"   Meanwhile Narancia: growing more and more frustrated with himself for perceived failure to someone he loves

epickinnienaranciaYesterday at 11:55 PM

She stops for the most part but does it every so often bc it’s cute

nozomijoestarYesterday at 11:56 PM

Lucky to have a freak like dat I feel like the only thing that can counter this self defeatism Narancia can get (bc his younger childhood...ofc he's fucked up and anxious and paranoid abt not being enough or abandoned) is Trish having to open her own repressed self up and love the shit out of himLike those reassuring lines she has in EoH and her moments in the anime/manga Bruno fucking does it as his father figure and Narancia admits it gives him strength

December 19, 2019

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:04 AM

Yes, he feels like he has to prove his worth and like he’s worth having around otherwise he’s useless, i def feel like he would not like talking about the stuff that happened in the past with everyone bc he would feel ashamed and stupid or st, he needs to be told You Are Enough and her to open up too so they can lean on each other

nozomijoestarToday at 12:12 AM

Honestly no jokes for a second I feel like this is also abt breaking toxic masculinity bc it's fucking Italy in the early 00s just out of the 90s...it was RIFE rifer than even now with that shit like in much of the world then too, the idea that a boy becoming a man and men in general need to strictly follow dumbass self harming rules

 especially abt not opening up and only having real priorities for earning money, honoring family, and procreating as much as possible whether it's marriage making a family or "having sexual conquests" in promiscuity, anything outside of this bullshit image can't be tolerated and you might as well be a woman or "a fag" if you don't assert some fictional narrative of trying extremely hard to have power in everything bc that's all that matters is the ridiculous idea of Alpha Males applied to humans 

Narancia being a 80s- 90s kid with the childhood he had did not give him much fighting chance at all in this context and time period  esp just bc he happened to be born with a dick and thus saddled with these harmful expectations society made that could've only further repressed his recognition of not beating himself up and his own emotional needs on top of EVERYONE ever betraying him Where was he supposed to go? He can't go anywhere unless he meets Bruno

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:18 AM

yes i agree..... like, males being looked down upon for opening up, being societally forced to shoulder the burdens and “man up” and just deal with it and fix everything. And then already having a toxic support system with his “friend” betraying him and his dad Sucking Major Ass, all he’s been taught is deal with it but hasn’t been given the tools to know how, and if Bruno didn’t meet him he honestly would be so stuck, what person (esp in that time period) is going to go out of their way to help an uneducated young male?

nozomijoestarToday at 12:20 AM

Even if it tragically ends with his death in canon I feel like the time he spent with Bruno's bois, Giorno, and Trish was huge in making some of that crack little by littleBc he has moments where you see how sweet he actually is, his "real" personality if you will underneath all the unresolved anger when he's with ppl he sees love him and give him hope When Giorno said No One Is Going To Hurt You Anymore that just made me cry harder

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:23 AM

Yes! Like, ofc he gets angry, has unrepressed rage and reactions to things, he hasn’t had any type of emotional support in SO long and it’s not like it’s 100% fantastic in that regard with buccigang (which don’t get me wrong they are family but they are still in an aggressive gang and go off and give each other lots of shit)-YEAH AND THE FUCKIGN PLANT GROWING TOO IM

nozomijoestarToday at 12:25 AM

Trish is legit I think the one person aside from Giorno who would treat him without even the gang's aggressiveness Narancia is my fav in VA even if Bruno is the best written VA character bc he's me, this kind of shit in my life is why I developed PTSD undiagnosed since my childhood that only kept getting worse until only this year have I gotten any true help I know exactly how he feels 

Esp when you think your whole life exists to serve others never yourself NaraGio shippers I see y'all argument even if I don't follow it tbh, Gio was again the only one besides Trish to consistently care for Nara in day to day and when he was in danger and esp during the Clash and Talking Heads fight Gio was the one dude present like No Narancia It's Ok Please Tell Me What's Wrong You're Clearly Stressed

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:31 AM

yeah although i haven’t experienced it i can still empathize and try to understand, i think there’s so many layers of protection and walls that most people never truly look past it to see the root cause or true self YES that fight was so frustrating bc they were all like Narancia stop being an idiot when something was clearly wrong and he was obviously in distress!!

nozomijoestarToday at 12:32 AM

Also Gio was the only one who first asserted that No, Narancia did the right thing in fighting Formaggio

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:33 AM

Yes and with that whole interaction the gang often uses Narancia as the scapegoat essentially and just give him shit for every little thing without trying to understand his POV

nozomijoestarToday at 12:33 AM

The Clash fight tbh I feel was an ass pull set up to give Narancia his big bad ass loyalty proving moment even if it's a great fight that beginning part is...only the Trish and Gio interactions rly make sense fjdjdjI wish him and Giorno hung out more or I guess more like talked more bc you can't rly hang out when you're getting assassinated every day hfgdg

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:36 AM

Yeah hdkdb, even with Fugo, even tho he found him and brought him to Bruno, he still calls him a dumbass, stabs him with a fork and shit, and then with Mista even tho I feel like they are Like Bros, he destroys Narancia’s radio for no fucking reason and also has a pattern of taking shit Narancia paid for without paying him backI def agree with that, I feel like Giorno interactions were lacking in that there really weren’t many one on one meaningful things so it’s hard for me to grasp his personal headspace and relationships a lot of the time

nozomijoestarToday at 12:37 AM

However to be a little more fair to the Bucci gang the manga version has Narancia trying a lot lot more to get their attention in logical ways that unfortunately Talking Heads completely ruins, he tried writing to let them know what was happening and TH warped the text into him saying vulgar things bragging abt his dick being a powerful Stand

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:38 AM

Yeah I was gonna add I wasn’t sure if the manga had other stuff, tbf

nozomijoestarToday at 12:38 AM

I think this is also Shounen Tropes of the 90s at play too the "child" character was often written as the comic relief dumbass Narancia suffers it so it does add a layer of Not Good to his relationships The trope still exists tbh Anime cut out him writing I assume bc it's too sexual It's already pushing it having him whip it out and piss in front of everyone jfhdhd

epickinnienaranciaToday at 12:41 AM

Yeah you right, it’s like the i want it to be that deep meme, like Araki obvi doesn’t have him only as comic relief but if he delved into his character more there would’ve been so much more that could’ve been done and shown YEAH DJDBDJDJF I WAS SURPRISED THT WAS ANIMATED

------------------------[ CUT INTERMISSION ]-----------------------------

nozomijoestarToday at 12:51 AM

Ok but to get back on track with where I was trying to go even opening this all up is how it's critical to NaraTrish in a mutually beneficial way

nozomijoestarToday at 1:01 AM

Nara is no incel he's a King obvs but he is also at heart a confused scared kid uncertain of anything in the world beyond what's closest in his grasp and without someone actively believing in and validating him he can't fully achieve awareness of healthy dynamics and even the problems within the ones he already has with his gang and Bruno- Trish doesn't have to babysit him and be the stereotypical The Woman Only Supports And Gives Up Her Body bc thats never her and couldn't be her and Narancia wouldn't make her that way bc even when he kinda touches on that (giving in a bit to the idea that men are the main protectors of women) when he gets too fixated on wanting what he thinks is for her wellbeing he does snap out and acknowledge he's wrong bc 

Trish by her independent nature and tremendous Will proves those stereotypes are bullshit, not even factoring in their first meeting as already making a huge impression on his beliefs of what girls can do- Trish knowing how to challenge him by staying true to herself yet having the compassion to help someone suffering and with fewer chances from birth than she had would not only win him over but give him something even Bruno can't, self sustaining confidence, bc Trish isn't part of a chain of command, she's just a girl in love with a boy who wants him to be happy and that concept while foreign to him for so long once it kicks in he could actually learn to build himself For himself and For someone who wouldn't use him for some greater schemes or dirty work, 

I love Bruno ok he's one of the best characters in anything ever but his flaw in his ability to help motivate ppl is tied to that fact that he's bringing them into a dangerous strict order of command to Serve not entirely in a place/way that lets them just be themselves and realize organic loving relationships with anyone and themselves SO

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:05 AM

they’re healing...... being shown love without a position of authority or any obligations is so powerful for his growth

nozomijoestarToday at 1:25 AM

That all being said, Everything Trish does he's paying attention to, she keeps him alive during the Grateful Dead fight not because she needs him to serve for a cause ( a cause might I add even Bruno the near saint he is was ready to let Nara go right then and there for bc death is in the job description) but because she doesn't know him well yet and shit he even swung a knife at her when they first met over who was in the bathroom, but he's a person suffering and in pain and to let him die even if it's Expected Of The Mission is garbage to her even if she respects Bruno down the line as a father compared to fucking evil Diavolo,

 Trish constantly goes out her way to do these things for Nara bc Trish instinctively knows he's the most vulnerable mentally and her sense of compassion and justice (likely something Donatella made sure to instill in her before her death by cherishing Trish and spoiling her even as a single mother) will not stand to not help someone when she could've- and he reciprocates it even if in disbelief bc he can tell This Person Is Safety, This Person Is Like Me Yet Not, A Better Me I Want To Be, by the time he's about to die someone with his fragile mind was actually gaining conviction about taking control for himself on his own terms and he would risk even those chances to defend the person who actually helped him arrive there (along with Gio) in the first place, 

I think by the end of his life he rly did love her or start to, it being romantic or not is up to individual interpretation to which you know I'm in the romance camp, point is he found someone who truly taught him strength without him fully realizing it and did so without belittling him, if anything instead treating him only with love and kindness and patience (not being a door mat for him, but like, not treating him like ass like everyone else has their moments of either), I think anything Trish asks of him, this is all why he's so willing to do it on top of feeling deep  empathy, I've written in my character notes as well that like this goes even further to sex being one of the most intimate things there is, like I kno we jest and jape abt Teens Doing Dumb Shit bc we're clowns 

but the sheer vulnerability you have to have esp in a first love situation to be willing to go through with that for the first time ever takes a lot of trust and courage, aspects I think Trish was able to give him and would solidify in asking something seen as so important for many people from him, the headstrong Trish wants to be vulnerable for him and the slowly confidence boosted Narancia wants to accept that faith and trust and love and exchange it with his own of the same for her, it's not horny teens 100% it's two hurt but hopeful kids on the verge of having to be adults wanting to find another piece of identity in how they are with someone else, obvs it will forever be offscreen bc pedos deserve to be skinned alive 

I just feel that the components that would fuel them to do something teens try to do to feel more adult and bc hormones are a lot more based in growing maturity than pure lust, I think this is what I fully mean by Writing About Teens Exploring Love And Sexuality; Not Fetishizing And Reveling In Showing The Act Itself Especially For Disgusting Titillation, I think this and not explicitly writing the sex are the difference between child porn and creating realistic characters

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:36 AM

Yeah, it is going to sound like a dumb take but the topic of sex and sexuality itself is not inherently sexual, by which I meant it isn’t the focus — there’s SO much more to it and in this case especially it can be like the ultimate sign of love, trust, intimacy, compassion, trying to make your way as a teen through a harsh world, like I can go on. Nasties Dont Interact but the shying away from the mere mention of it in a non-sexualized context is unrealistic. 

 Yes The Grateful Dead fight i 1000% agree is so important in both his personal growth and the development of their relationship, I think it’s an important parallel that he is dumbfounded about her going to such lengths to keep him alive without the sense of duty/obligation versus Trish’s feelings and outbursts of confusion on why Bucciarati and his gang even cared about her, protecting her to the point of death being on the line.(edited)

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:44 AM

all these elements of complication and similarities between their characters is why ive gotten so passionate about both them and their relationship (whether romantic or platonic it’s really fucking strong and good), the story of two kids making it through adversity, learning to unshoulder their burdens and lean on others, the Found Family™️, and learning and growing together is just so much more fucking deep and complex than the mainstream bs that exists. 

now im not any type of elitist hipster but esp in male and female relationships portrayed in what feels like basically fucking everything are just like CompHet Bullshit and they’re together bc They Are Just Supposed To Be (not to mention the toxic masculinity culture within that where the women barely have character arcs and are just seen as objects anyways) But what I’m trying to say is that in this the relationship is real and it feels earned in a way that just isn’t there in so much other media out there(edited)

nozomijoestarToday at 1:48 AM

Honestly if we tweak this just a lil more this is basically Guts and Casca One of the greatest and saddest romances ever written

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:48 AM

i still have berserk bookmarked just haven’t gotten around to reading yet

nozomijoestarToday at 1:48 AM

If VA was a Seinen it's p much Berserk In Italy Also big brain...galaxy brain...everything you said was a fact signed sealed and delivered(edited)

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:51 AM

Wow we’re actually in sync and using the brain cell to its fullest extent tonight

nozomijoestarToday at 1:51 AM

When I say she's his world and he's hers this is what I mean, not comphet hdhdhfhYEAH HFHDG

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:52 AM

(also my phone autocorrected “and” to “ANF” bc of twdg..... it also sometimes changes it to “AMD” bc I work in technology. My Phone Knows My Interests Are More Important To Me Than One Of The Main Parts Of Speech. Iconic)YESSSS they’re just SO GOOD there’s so much to articulate!

nozomijoestarToday at 1:55 AM

She was his Queen, and god help anyone who disrespected his Queen

epickinnienaranciaToday at 1:55 AM

JDBDHE SHIT THE FUCK IP DKDBEBDJFBBD

nozomijoestarToday at 1:56 AM

Buy my silence $8000 a month

Part 4 of the Skully ask that turned into a whole AU

(A little somethin extra at the end too)

After a concerning amount of time, Brian finally began regaining consciousness. Opening his eyes and letting out a few groans of pain, wincing at the soreness of his body, he looked down and instantly realized he was bound to the chair he was so familiar with. No longer having his vision obscured as he was so used to having, he realized his mask was off. He set his sights on Jay, giving him a knowing glare. He stayed silent, his gaze burning into Jay, but didn’t struggle from his position. All he had was an intimidating expression on his face that Jay wished was aimed at someone else. Mustering up some courage, Jay decided to break the silence at long last. But to his surprise, it was Brian who spoke first.

“Y’know, there were better ways to do this.”

Jay gasped in surprise. He assumed that one-word answers were all Brian could manage at this point, but it looked like that wasn’t the case. Brian continued speaking, a sly grin beginning to spread across his face, despite the several bruises and bloodstains.

“For starters, this chair is barely being held together after Tim nearly broke it. Metal’s bent, and I could struggle out pretty easily. Second of all, you can’t tie knots for shit. I already got a little wiggle room and I didn’t even move yet. Third…”

Brian turned his gaze to Tim, who was still crouched down and silent.

“… have you forgotten? We’re a team. I know how to control him, you don’t. Hell, I could tell him to kill you right now and you’d be none the wiser.”

Jay looked down in shame. He really didn’t think this through, and Brian was making sure he knew that.

“Seriously, what were you thinking? I don’t blame you though. I’ve seen how you act. You can be pretty damn stupid sometimes.”

Jay wanted to respond to the insult, but he couldn’t think of an adequate response. Brian let out a laugh and looked down at the blood dripping onto his jeans. He looked back up and flashed a crimson smile at Jay.

“But let’s say you weren’t a dumbass. Let’s say you took me far into the forest, Tim nowhere in sight. You tied me tight enough to make my limbs numb, and you have a jagged knife in your hand, ready to cut me up and bleed me like a pig if I don’t answer your questions. Let’s say you’ve absolutely broken me, and I’m sitting here crying in pain, begging you not to tear into me anymore. My eyes are gouged out, my clothes have been torn off, and you’re there making sure I feel as much pain as possible. Even then, I wouldn’t tell you jack shit. Let’s say you’ve trained Tim and you’re making him crush every bone in my body into fine dust. Hell, let’s say you’ve buddied up with Alex and he’s siccing The Operator on me, making me live through a thousand years of pain in one minute. Even then, I won’t tell you shit!”

Brian let out another laugh, taking sick pleasure in describing his own brutal torture.

“But none of that’s happening. You’re here, having me tied onto a flimsy chair, right next to one of my most vicious partners, and you didn’t even have the brains to gag me! You’re a real riot, Jay, I’ll give you that.”

In an instant, his tone shifted drastically, now looking at Jay with a stone-cold expression.

“But this is all so, so, so useless. Curiosity killed the cat, Jay, and right now you’re looking like a nice defenseless cat caught in a bear trap, surrounded by nature’s top apex predators. Why don’t you give me a reason to not kill you where you stand?”

Sweat was running down Jay’s back. He was terrified. Brian was not like this at all. Not the Brian he knew. Jay stuttered, trying to think of a valid reason that wouldn’t get him killed.

“W-well… you uh… y-you need me!”

Brian raised an eyebrow and smirked. Jay knew exactly what Alex was feeling when he told him to wipe that stupid smile off his face.

“I do?”

Jay tried his best to hide his fear. The shuddering overtaking his body was on obvious tell that he was very bad at hiding it.

“Y-yeah. You and T-Tim can’t take on Alex. Y-you’ve tried before! You need me!”

Brian looked to the side and nodded.

“Alright. Fair point. You can live for now, but if you t-”

“Wait!”

Jay made a sudden and brave interruption. He wanted answers, not another reason to fear the hooded man. Brian seemed surprised by the sudden courage as well.

“Whoa. Didn’t know you had the guts to interrupt me when I’m talking. What do you want?”

Jay stopped shuddering. He had to find out at least one thing.

“Why does the mask calm Tim down? Why does the mask turn him into that?”

Brian gave Jay a pained smile, looking like he’d been wanting to answer this for a long time.

“Aw well, that’s easy. See, when Timmy boy doesn’t get his meds, he gets real, real angry. It was always a slight problem. Back in college, the worst that would happen is that he’d lash out and maybe yell, but that’s about it.”

Brian paused for a moment, and Jay swore he saw a look of guilt in Brian’s eyes.

“But then enter Alex and The Operator. Yeah, that thing had latched onto Tim, but he did a pretty good job at not letting it get to him. Alex, on the other hand, oh boy. One encounter, and he’s out here killing people left and right, unknowingly feeding that thing. The Operator is a pretty messed up thing, y’know? If it doesn’t swallow you up in its dimension to keep your hopeless corpse in for god knows how long, it’ll instead chew you up and spit you out, breaking your mind in the process. Happened to me, happened to Tim, and now it’s happened to you.”

Brian’s eyes began to water, yet his voice didn’t waver.

“And man, let me tell you, it fucking sucks! Tim got even more violent before I was even there to intervene. He’d go on rampages late at night, running around the forest and tearing up all those poor innocent animals he saw. Dude was strong enough to take down a deer with his bare hands. That’s pretty impressive, ain’t it? Too bad I didn’t get any superpowers. All I got was a nasty cough and the worst trauma of my life!”

Brian’s voice was now breaking. He was beginning to lose his composure.

“You know how it feels to wake up one morning with no memory of what happened last night, and suddenly realizing that you don’t care about anyone anymore? I could cut up my own parents with a rusty razor, hear them cry my name and beg for mercy, and I wouldn’t feel a damn thing! Not even a drop of remorse, nope! And believe me, I wish I could. I wanted to care so much. But now, I couldn’t give a damn about what happens to anyone! Not even myself! I can’t live a normal life anymore. Society would lock me up and let me rot. I can’t have friends, I can’t have a family, I can’t have anything a normal person can have! And you know what? I’d prefer being dead!”

Brian let out a shaky laugh, several tears dropping onto his hoodie. He was vulnerable right now. Going against his morals, Jay decided to take advantage of this.

“Is that why you want to go to the ark?”

Brian immediately stopped. He looked up, his intimidating glare having returned. But just as soon as it came, it left. Tears welled up as Brian burst into tears, finally letting out years of pent up trauma and grief.

“Yes! Yes goddammit. I saw it! I saw the ark and by god, it was the worst experience of my life, but it has SOMETHING. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to how I used to be. I want to. I want that life back so bad. I want all those lost years back. I want to have hope in the future, but right now I’m feeling that the only thing the future has for me is my lifeless corpse in the middle of nowhere.”

Brian took a moment to compose himself. Despite easily being able to free himself from Jay’s restraint, he chose not to do so. Jay wondered if this was a sign of submission.

“You though. After all those years, you began watching those tapes. You learned everything. And all of the sudden, I wasn’t alone anymore. I had a little sliver of hope in my life once more.”

Brian gritted his teeth and shook his head, regaining his anger.

“But you weren’t doing ANYTHING helpful. You just walked around like a headless chicken, getting yourself in spats with Tim. And then one day you team up with Alex despite knowing damn well something was up with him, and together you fucking broke Tim’s leg. No Jay, you weren’t just not doing anything. You were actively HURTING my efforts. You made it all worse getting all inflammatory with Tim. And I went back to being alone. Even more alone than before, since you took Tim along with you only to traumatize him even more.”

Jay immediately snapped back, shocked at Brian’s lack of self-awareness.

“I’m the one who traumatized him? Don’t you think treating him like your personal attack dog would have a worse impact on his psyche?”

Brian lashed out at the accusation, though Jay could see his facade beginning to break.

“Doesn’t matter what I do to him when he’s like that. He doesn’t remember any of it anyways. Unless of course, two lanky idiots decided to break his leg. That would matter quite a bit.”

Jay was getting heated as well. He knew that he wasn’t the most responsible decision maker, but Brian had a lot to be blamed for as well.

“You kept stealing his meds. You forced him into that state, robbing him of the normal life he tried so hard to have. He can’t hold steady work, and his mind is getting worse and worse every time you use him like that. Does that not matter to you?”

Another flash of guilt appeared in Brian’s eyes. He tried to deflect it once more.

“What matters is getting rid of The Operator. One casualty is nothing compared to the damage it d-”

“You never answered my question.”

Brian paused.

“Huh?”

“I asked you why the mask calms Tim down. Answer me.”

Brian’s face got red.

“Well, it’s because uh. . . it reminds him of the old days. I did my research. Back when he was being hospitalized, they’d always place a mask over his face to administer anesthetic to get him to calm down. Tim was too violent, though, so a normal mask wouldn’t work. They had to lock up his entire face into a heavy-duty one, made so that it couldn’t be ripped off or broken. Any time he wears that mask, it reminds him of those times. By instinct, it makes him calm and obedient.”

Jay shook his head as he glared at Brian.

“You’re fucked up. Don’t you feel any pity for him?”

Brian stayed silent.

“Well, do you? Tim was your best friend. Surely you feel at least SOMETHING for him?”

Brian bit his lip as he tried to stop the tears from flowing once more. He remained silent but pensive.

“What even is the ark, Brian? What is this thing you deem so important that you’re willing to ruin your best friend's life to even get a chance of seeing it?”

Brian looked up. His violent spirit had also been calmed, replaced with a softer tone that Jay could tell had a lot of fear behind it.

“The ark is where The Operator keeps all its victims. I saw it when Alex fed me to that thing. An ever-growing empty landscape filled with bodies. Some still conscious, but their minds gone. Some rotted, some freshly killed. Some still crying for help. The Operator feeds off of their despair. It prefers people on the brink of death, so it can suck out as much despair from them as possible. It keeps the corpses to induce even more despair into those who go into it.”

Brian’s gaze went off into the horizon, empty and unblinking, as he remembered everything.

“You’re a religious guy, aren’t you Jay?”

Jay nodded.

“You know the story of Noah’s Ark? Of course you do. There’s a reason why I call this place The Ark.”

Brian grinned for a moment before returning to his somber expression.

“There’s two of each.”

“What does that mean?”

Brian bit his lip once more, this time drawing blood.

“Every person in the world you can think of. A shy lonely man with social anxiety and a knack of bringing danger to his friends. A troubled man running from his past. A cheerful girl who dated the wrong man. Any person you can think of, any combination of traits or personality, anything. Absolutely any and all people you can think up of, no matter how specific, The Operator wants two of. Doesn’t matter how unique you think you are. In there, at some point, you’ll eventually find someone just like you. And that’s when you lose all hope. That’s when you realize that if someone just like you never escaped, you’ll never escape as well. How you’re just a bag of flesh with no purpose. And that’s when The Operator digs in, having the biggest feast of a lifetime.”

Brian took a deep breath, having to compose himself yet again. The stoic personality he kept in his hooded form had shattered thanks to Jay’s conversation.

“The Operator loves taunting us. Sometimes it’ll toss you into the ark without a second thought, wanting you to feel nothing but despair. But I want to go there. I know better. I can go in there with hope and help people escape. The more I help, the more people that can help others. It only takes one hole to sink a boat, after all. Once the ark is empty, The Operator has nothing left to feed on. From there, it’ll starve. And that’s one less horror the world has to deal with.”

Brian’s gaze suddenly turned hopeful.

“And that’s where my plan comes in. If I can get into the ark without being on the brink of death, I can save someone. Just one person. That alone would be enough to hurt The Operator and leave it from attacking us ever again. But that’s not what I want. I want it dead.”

Brian looked up at Jay, his eyes now kindled with a familiar warmth behind them.

“Catch my drift?”

Jay nodded. Brian had completely changed from the psychopathic sadist he was before this. Was a good conversation all he needed? Jay’s internal questioning was interrupted by Tim shuffling in front of Jay. This reminded Jay of another point he wanted to address.

“Wait! What about Tim? Do you really want to keep him like this?”

Brian nodded, then paused, shook his head, then nodded again.

“I uh. . . I don’t know. He’s more useful this way for sure but. . . if you take that mask off him and give him his meds again, he’ll be fine. But is that what you want? How do you think he’ll react to seeing you, not only still alive, but in cahoots with his presumed dead best friend who ended up being his stalker all along. How do you think he’ll react knowing that two of his closest friends brutally attacked him and broke his mind? Do you think he’ll be cooperative?”

Jay was stuck. Brian had a good point. Turning Tim back to normal would cause a lot more problems, and chances are it would traumatize him more than anything. But keeping him as an obedient, unthinking bodyguard felt wrong, and would only worsen his mental state. Meanwhile, Brian had already freed himself and was standing next to Tim, a bottle of pills in hand. He could tell Jay was having a rough time deciding. 

“Well, what’ll it be Jay? Free him, or keep him masked up for a while longer?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Surprise! I don’t know how to follow this up so I’m just gonna say fuck it and let whoever cares enough about this to choose. Of course, if I get requests for both I’ll write em both, but I’m interested to see where people's hearts lie in this situation.)

Laurien, Meet Shanna

Written in collaboration with @the-siren-saga

Stay in the temple, Shanna was told. You don't know who could be looking for you. 

It seemed fair to her. In her mind, security was the most important thing on this little excursion, and she wasn't about to neglect it. Especially seeing how paranoid Marchosias could be. Not paranoid, she corrected herself. Concerned. He just wants to keep me safe.

There was, unknown to Shanna, someone within the temple compound itself who was quite eager to find her. 

It was the only thing on Laurien's mind. Or, at least, she wanted it to be the only thing on her mind. As it was, finding one specific person in a group of-.. Less than easy to read people was more difficult than she anticipated, especially when said person wasn’t even around most of the time.

Probably should have prepared for that. Ah well. 

As it was, her stay here was almost pleasant. If not for the nagging reminder in her mind that she was supposed to be looking for somebody, damn it. 

As it happened, as Laurien was looking for Shanna, Shanna was also looking for Laurien. Establishing rapport is a key part of the initiatory process, she could hear the Consort saying in her mind. Before anything else, you must get to know her. 

She finally found her target in one of the rooms set aside for prospective initiates, sitting on the bed, writing in a journal. "May I come in?" she asked, with a soft knock on the door even though it was open. 

Though the entrance was soft and cautious, Laurien still jumped half out of her skin, sending her journal sliding from her lap and onto the floor. “Oh, I-!” She looked up midway through scrambling to grab the damn thing, glancing over the newcomer with a frown. She hadn’t seen this one yet. Could it be..? “O-of course! Anyone is welcome, I-.. I’m Laurien. And you..?”

I'm Shanna, she wanted to say. "Herald Averil," she actually said. "I was assigned to get to know you, make sure you're comfortable here before we initiate you."

Herald. Averil. Laurien found herself frozen in place for a moment, a brief burst of panic gripping her chest. “O-oh! I’ve heard-..” She tripped on her words, dropping her book again and shooting to her feet with a smile, though she wasn’t quite certain why she did. “I’ve heard about you! It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Herald.”

Shanna smiled at that, inviting Laurien to sit back down. "That's what a lot of people have been saying," she said, sitting on the bed next to Laurien. "Including this one very friendly photographer, I think he likes me." She blushed at that. "Not that I could do anything about that. I'm pledged to our God-Emperor's service exclusively."

Despite knowing what she was there for, there was something about the Herald’s presence that was almost nice. Something about the way she spoke was calming; reassuring. Like everything would work out in the end, no matter what happened here. Laurien found herself smiling along even as some deep recess in her mind shrunk away from Shanna’s words. “It must be lovely to be so devoted to something. Though I don’t know-.. I think I’d lose my mind. I have the most terrible attention span~”

"So did I, for a while," Shanna confessed. "Mar-- Elucidis changed all that. His presence is so wonderful, I can't bear to leave it. You'll see in a few days."

A few days. That’s how long she had to change all of this. If all went to plan, she’d make it out before any of this became serious.  Something told her she wouldn’t make it out so soon. 

“He sounds wonderful,” she lied, her smile growing just a little wider to compensate for the squeeze in her chest, “I can’t wait. You’ll be there, yes? It’ll be nice to have a friendly face with me. I’ve heard-.. Things. Is it truly so frightening, to be Initiated?”

For a moment, Shanna could feel the fear of the naive Arkn woman sitting next to her, and it was almost enough to weaken the trance. 

Almost. 

"Frightening? Not at all. I mean, sometimes," she admitted, "when it's what an initiate needs in order to come to faith. For you it shouldn't be. Most just require the experience of being near to Him. And I'll be by your side the whole time, making sure you're alright."

“What if I can’t take it?” Lauri blurted, biting her lip just a little as her wide smile fell to wide-eyed anticipation. The more they spoke of it the more real it became, and the worst part was the ringing in her ears -- her brother, no doubt, trying to force past the block she’d put up against him. It melted into something deep and confused in her thoughts and became almost like background noise, constantly throwing her focus and shaking her confidence. “What if I’m not alright? I’ve never done anything so-.. Big before. I’m-.. frightened. Of what might happen. Of what might not happen.” 

Where was this coming from? Gods, she was in too deep. Far, far too deep. Still, no turning back now. She’d made a promise, and she’d do this no matter what. Just focus, Laurien. Focus.

Shanna got a bit closer to Laurien, lifting a hand to smooth Laurien's hair the way Marchosias always did to comfort her. "You will be alright," she reassured. "You'll be more than alright. Your Initiation will be everything you hope that it'll be."

And just what did she hope it would be? There was guilt gripping tight to her gut and pulling her backwards-- and not for the first time. Cult or no, it felt almost dirty to be Initiated into something she didn't believe in -- worse, something she was actively trying to tear apart from the inside. 

But when Shanna put it that way, and with such a gentle reassurance, she couldn't help but breathe a gentle little sigh. "I don't know what I hope for," she admitted, "I've never been part of anything this big before. It feels like… this big family. And I'm the new child nobody is sure of yet. Like I'm intruding on something I have no place in."

Focus, Laurien. Focus. What would Laen think, seeing you fall apart to a false story? You're better than this.

"I hated Him, when I was first brought into His service," Shanna said with a gentle laugh. "I was actually sent to capture Him, and He knew that. But He showed me such grace and kindness in choosing to heal me from the psychic torture I'd been put through as a child. It wasn't a formal initiation, but it was a rebirth, an awakening. And that's what it is for everyone." Shanna kept her arm around Laurien, in a gesture of reassurance, of stability. "Including you, even if you're not sure yet. You will be, soon enough. He takes our hesitance, our fear, our reluctance, and turns it into something beautiful and glowing with love for Him." 

There was a sense of incredible wrongness growing inside of Shanna with every word she spoke. Look at you, something seemed to say. You don't even know who you are anymore. You've been destroyed. Do you really want to do this to her?

Obviously not, Shanna answered the voice in her head. But it's not like I have a choice.

"How can one man possibly do such a thing so easily? I've been uncertain all my life," Lauri chuckled, "it's strange to imagine that gone." Strange, frightening… but nice.

With every word Shanna spoke there was a growing sense of rightness. Perhaps she'd had this place all wrong, perhaps-

'SISTER. Stop this. Please.'

Laurien winced as her concentration broke, the blocks against Laen shattered violently for a moment. Focus, focus, focus…

"It's because…" Don't do this. Fight it. Take control, make the fire yours. "It's because Elucidis is more than a man," Shanna said, her voice and her touch so soft and reassuring as to remove any blocks that the initiate-- Laurien, that rebellious voice reminded her, she has a name-- might still have. "He's the divine itself, given Dekn form."

"The divine…" Gosh, everything was so soothing. She must have had this place all wrong; it was so nice to be doted on and paid attention to like this. When was the last time someone truly listened to her?

'Lauri, I know what you're doing. Please, for the sake of yourself and your family put this behind you. Leave it. You're not ready for something like this.'

"Oh, be quiet!" Sucking in a breath, her eyes glazed for a moment as she focused on firmly pushing her brother away and re-erecting the walls that kept him that way. "Sorry, n-not you," she clarified to Shanna, "my brother. We have a telepathic connection and he-.. well, he's never liked my choices."

"I didn't know Arkn could do that," Shanna said, not disbelieving so much as simply curious. "Have you come here to get away from him? Does he treat you badly?"

Shanna had been told early on in her training that many people come to the Society of the Purple Rose from relationships and families in which they were ignored at best and outright abused at worst. That within it, those lost souls found a far more encompassing and welcoming form of love than they'd ever known. Shanna tried her hardest to project this love, despite the nagging voice in the back of her mind telling her it was all an illusion anyway. Shut up, she told it.

“Not all of us can, but me and my brother-.. We’re twins. And we’ve been honing it since we were very young. He doesn’t treat me badly, I promise. Actually, he treats me-.. Far too gently for some of the things I’ve said and done to him. He’d never raise a ringer in anger nor a word in hatred, he’s just-..” Laurien tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, which immediately flopped back into her face, and slowly let out the breath she’d taken, “...protective. And stubborn. He doesn’t understand a lot of my choices, nor I his. All of this conflict between Arkn and Dekn caused a lot of it. And since we’ve been apart, it’s harder and harder for us to truly understand each other. So of course, he doesn’t like that I’m even among Dekn, let alone that I’m to be Initiated into the Purple Rose.”

Shanna smiled a sympathetic smile. "I have an aunt like that," she said. "She's young enough to be my sister, and we've always acted like such with each other. She's… the reckless type, always involved in some kind of dubiously legal activity. No doubt she'd object to me surrendering myself as I have."

"Why did you?" Lauri wondered, eyeing Shanna thoughtfully, "Come here, I mean? It must be difficult, being away from family."

Shanna thought about this a while. A long while. She hadn't seen Moirah since being sent to Ersis, and nearly forgot that the woman existed for a long time. And as for her immediate family… the less said about them, the better.

"I was abandoned by most of my family," she finally says. "They left me to rot on Ersis to save their own skin. Then from there I met this half-Arkn kid…" The memory of the brief time that Shanna knew Franz Irinith-Faust caused something to catch in her throat, and she had to pause for a moment to take a breath. "I agreed to help him with this ridiculous mission he was on. That's where I met Elucidis. He showed me a brighter way, where I wouldn't have to be so alone."

“And what of the half-Arkn?” Lauri pressed, half simply out of curiosity. “Were you friends? Have you spoken to him since?”

Shanna wasn't prepared for that line of inquiry. Up until that point, her answers had been well-rehearsed, scripted for the purpose of establishing rapport and building trust. Laurien getting curious about Franz Faust was not something she'd planned for. 

"Um," she stuttered, "no, actually. Elucidis washed all of that away when He brought me into my new life." Her voice seemed to waver, as opposed to the zealous confidence and easy calm that she'd previously possessed. "But… it troubles me, that I can't seem to find the space in my mind to care for him. I know he's going through something terrible right now."

“It can be difficult to care about things we’re cut off from,” Lauri reassured carefully, snapped suddenly back to what her entire mission actually was. “Have you ever thought about visiting him? I know you have things to do here, but-.. Well, surely if Elucidis is so loving, he’ll allow you to visit an old fr-. An old acquaintance in need.”

An old acquaintance, Shanna thought. A very deep part of herself felt that the kid must have been more than an acquaintance, but it wasn't a feeling she could track or place. "That wouldn't do," she said simply. "He expects me to be single-mindedly dedicated to my training. I can't afford that much of a distraction. Elucidis is a benevolent patron to serve, but He punishes disobedience swiftly and painfully." Shanna was suddenly not as calm or assured as she seemed to be just a moment ago.

“Painfully?” As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she decided she didn’t want to know. It sounded as if Shanna had dealt with ‘swiftly and painfully’ far too intimately-- and for a moment she thought about perhaps keeping that little detail from Moirah for now. No use adding fuel to the fire just yet.

"...Just forget I said anything," Shanna stammered, studying the pattern on the floor. 

Shaking her head, she offered a faux-innocent smile. She was good at those-- very good at those, especially since she and her brother had learned to communicate behind their mother’s back. “So you’re not allowed to leave at all? That can’t be very good for you. Or fun. Or-.. it just sounds not good, is what I’m trying to say.” Laurien frowned in thought for a moment, before leaning a little closer; schoolgirl mischief in her gaze, “What if… you were to come out with me? Just a little trip, nothing big. You could say it was for me, for some part of my preparations or something. I get stir-crazy, you know?”

This made Shanna smile. She hadn't been to Taveril'domaine since she was a child, and was looking forward to seeing more of the city during her time there. I… suppose I could say that it was an attempt to further secure her trust, she thought to herself. "I'd love that."

Laurien’s smile split into a beaming grin the moment the words left Shanna’s lips, and she laughed a little encouragement. “It was so difficult for me to get here, it’d be a shame not to sightsee a little,” she hummed, “and you need a little break from being stuffed up studying all the time. I’ve never been the brightest but I know how to balance work and play; and you, Herald Averil, deserve a little play. Should we go tomorrow? The sooner we do it the more you can say it was for me, right? Because I’m new?”

"Yeah," Shanna replied. "That sounds like a plan to me. And, um…" Her cheeks went bright red at this. "You can call me Shanna, if you want to."

Summary: Lily Evans thought her life would be normal. Well, as normal as it can be for a muggle-born witch in England. But when her boyfriend turns out to be the prince of the wizarding world, and tensions begin to rise among factions of wizarding society, Lily must find her way in situations she never anticipated, and try not to lose sight of her identity. Word Count: 2,023 (5,316) Links: ao3 | FFnet | Tumblr: Ch 1

A/N: Welcome back and happy Saturday! We have a slightly shorter chapter today, but it's a pretty important one. This is probably the shortest chapter of the story by quite a bit, so you have long chapters to look forward to. I think that's all my notes for today. I sincerely hope you enjoy this chapter, and I look forward to reading your comments!

Chapter 2

Professor Flitwick had come down with a nasty case of phoenix flu so Charms lessons had been cancelled for the week so that he could spend time recuperating in the hospital wing. Professor McGonagall had offered to cover some of his lessons, but he had insisted on giving his students the time off. They had been working hard, he had said, so it would be a nice treat for them. He had set them some extra reading, and a long essay to be turned in when lessons resumed, but the seventh years still had their Thursday and Friday afternoons free, and that had given them all a rather exhilarated air.

James had approached Lily as soon as they’d gotten the notice, asking if she wanted to spend some time with him, maybe walking around the grounds. He had slipped his hand into hers as he asked, and she felt warm and happy as she accepted his offer. And so, Thursday afternoon, Lily found herself strolling arm in arm with James, laughing lightly at his jokes and enjoying the feel of the autumn sun on her skin. As the light started to fade and the sun dipped behind the trees of the Forbidden Forest, they sat down on a red and white checkered blanket that James conjured. He seemed lost in thought, unusually pensieve, but Lily just leaned back and waited for him to decide whether or not to share the thoughts swirling in his mind.

“Lily, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” James said quietly, his fingers playing with her hair delicately, tracing the sunlight as it danced across the strands. “It’s not... I don’t usually share... but I trust you and I... I care about you and I want you to know the truth...”

His words captured Lily’s attention and she sat up so she could look at him and see his face. He looked tortured, like whatever he was about to tell her was hurting him to say, and the idea of it tugged at her heart a little bit.

“You can tell me,” she answered softly, stroking her hand lightly across his chest, and he let out a very small purring noise.

“I know about Marlene’s notebook,” he sighed, and Lily looked at him quizzically. “She’s right, theory #5. Hit the nail on the head with that one.”

“What?” she breathed, hardly understanding a word he was saying to her. “What do you mean?”

“I was born James Charlus Linfred, Prince of the Magical Kingdom of Britain. My parents are King Fleamont and Queen Euphemia. One day, hopefully not for a very long time, I will be the king. And I don’t want,” he winced, scrunching his nose at the words, “I don’t think it would be fair for us to continue with this,” he waved his hand vaguely between them, “without you knowing all the facts so that you can make an... informed decision.”

“James,” Lily answered, the corners of her mouth turning down in a frown, “I appreciate that but, this is just –“

“Don’t say it’s nothing, Lils,” he practically begged, propping himself up on his elbow so their eyes were level. “You know this is something.”

“But we’re only sixteen, and we’ve only gone on a handful of dates, James, it’s far too soon –“

“It’s not. Everyone moves at their own pace, and I just know.” He seemed agitated, and he began running his hands through his hair feverishly. “I know that it’s you and me, Lils, I just do. And it’s okay if you don’t know it yet, but you will some day, and I need you to know the truth about the man that you’re falling in love with before it happens.”

“Love?” she balked, a fierce blush rising on her cheeks and across the bare skin on her chest.

“I don’t mean...” he sighed, trying to slow his thoughts. “I just meant that if you did fall in love with me, and then you found out, you might feel betrayed, lied to, and I don’t want that to happen. I want you to know now, and if you do love me some day, I want you to love me with full knowledge of who I am.”

Lily didn’t have words to answer that, it was so eloquent and so sincere, and she could tell that it was not a conversation he had ever had with another girl, and that it was one he had agonized over for a while. And she loved the words, loved the sentiment behind them, loved that she meant enough to him for him to share his secret. But she wasn’t sure if she loved him yet. Maybe if she was honest with herself, the answer was yes, but the thought scared her. It was too soon to be throwing words like love around. Instead of saying anything, she leaned forward and kissed him, not their usual heated, devouring kiss, but a sweet, tender thing. Her lips moved softly against his, and she tried to convey her undetermined feelings in that action. She thought he understood, because he seemed to relax in her arms, swooning at her touch. They pulled away after a moment, both smiling warmly.

“You can ask me anything, if you want to,” James added after a moment.

“Hmm,” Lily hummed, lying back in the grass with a light laugh, “has anyone ever told your father that he has a ridiculous name?”

“Once or twice,” James chuckled, lying down next to her and reaching for her hand. “I might have even said it myself.”

Lily laughed, high and bright, before serious thoughts returned to interrupt it.

“What does this mean for you, for us?” she asked, hesitantly. In all honesty, Lily wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to this particular question. “How does this change things?”

“It means that if we continue to see each other, at some point our relationship will become very public,” he answered. “So far I’ve been given as private a life as I could have led so far, but when I graduate, that changes. I’ll have to start fulfilling my obligations, living a more public life. The wizarding world needs to know who I am if I am ever to be accepted as their monarch. If we... if we got married, it would be a spectacle, everyone of importance would be invited. People you don’t even know. Our children would be royalty, and I would strive to give them the same level of privacy that I enjoyed, but there’s always a risk. One wrong step, Lils, and the world would have known exactly who I was. So much went into protecting who I was so that I could have a normal childhood. It was exhausting at times, for myself and for my parents.”

“How did they do it?” Lily asked, suddenly overcome with curiosity. “Keep you hidden in plain sight?”

“The house in Godric’s Hollow, the one you visited over the summer, that’s where I grew up,” he explained. “There’s a direct line in the Floo Network from Whitehall in London to Hollow House. I lived in the Hollow with my nanny, Maylis, mostly apart from my parents. They came to see me or I went to see them nearly every day, but I was still apart from them quite a lot. They had business to attend to in London, or were on state visits, and they couldn’t exactly be seen coming and going from the same house as me. And on important events, or at least just enough to keep reporters from digging too deep into things, they would truss me up and bring me out to be photographed and shown off. Always careful to make sure I looked different enough not to be immediately recognized.”

“I don’t think I could do it,” Lily said, snuggling closer to James. He seemed upset at the thought of his upbringing, as though he wished it had been different, and Lily could understand why.

“I’m not sure I could either,” he answered honestly, “but in truth there’s not much choice. It’s the only way, as far as I see it, to let me grow up and make friends without people knowing right away who I am. And it’s not like they were cold or distant. I always knew they loved me, I always felt loved. I just wasn’t around them as much as most kids.”

“Well, aside from maybe having to rethink the childrearing strategy, I don’t think any of that sounds too awful,” Lily said with a smile, playing with James’ fingers. “It might take some getting used to, but I don’t think being in the public eye is a dealbreaker.”

“Lils, you don’t understand,” James said, shaking his head, “there’re rules to this way of life.”

“So tell me,” she answered, taking his concern very seriously.

“There are rules for what you can wear and who you can socialize with, there are rules for everything,” he sighed. “You wouldn’t be able to have a job – charity work is the most you can do. You wouldn’t be able to be political.”

Lily sucked in a breath. She hadn’t realized that. On some level she should have known. James had always been very careful who he expressed his views in front of, and it was the same way in the Muggle world. It was important that the monarchy remain an impartial component of the government and Lily could understand why. The monarchy would always be the same – same family, probably similar views being handed down. But the government would change constantly, and they still had to be able to work together regardless. It was logical. And yet, Lily had a hard time envisioning a world where she gave up her politics, especially with the turmoil that was spreading through the country.

“War is coming, James, and soon,” she answered, looking at the sky, “I can’t just ignore that. And it would only get worse if we... People like Voldemort, like Sev’s friends, they would only be more infuriated that a Muggle-born was their princess. Do you honestly think they would sit back and let it happen? Do you really think they wouldn’t come for me, for us?”

“We would be safe, Lily, I promise I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you,” he assured her, but Lily only shook her head in agitation.

“It’s not just about safety though,” she persisted, getting frustrated. “James, do you honestly think that I could just sit back while a lunatic and his followers systematically murder people like me, while they murder our friends?”

“No,” he said, his voice sounding heavy. “You have no idea how difficult it is, not to be able to do anything.”

“There must be exceptions,” Lily pressed, determined to find a compromise. “After all, Prince Philip served in the military during World War II, and that was certainly political. It could be like that. Military service against Voldemort.”

“I don’t know, Lils,” he answered, reaching up to run his fingers through his hair again. “I want to believe it’s possible, but I can’t promise that.”

“We’ll make it work,” she replied, surprising herself by meaning both the issue of politics and their relationship.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She snuggled into him again, and was content to close her eyes and breathe in his scent for a moment.

My liveblog/commentary on October Daye #11 "The Brightest Fell" or "Friendship ended with Sylvester Torquill. Now SIMON Torquill is my best friend"

God if you told me that's a sentence I'd write when I read book 1 I'd call you fucking insane. We had this whole Cain and Abel thing going and Seanan McGuire had to go be a GOOD WRITER and make them COMPLEX CHARACTERS and shit.

Also featuring a "Resurrect Your Gays" novella at the end so.. that's nice

-Wow, this opens with a story so far section and everything 👀

-who would be like "gee the October daye series sounds interesting. Let's start with book 11"

-omfg The Luidaeg singing Poor Unfortunate Souls. Fucking hell yes.

*stares at my vampire crack theory* *stares at that line* *stares at the camera*

-(To be fair, it does parallel when Simon showed up in book 8, which is probably the actual intent, but uhhh)

-then AGAIN, half the foreshadowing lines in this series had double meanings in context

-Amandine calling Simon "your father" oh oof.

-oh my god Amandine is AWFUL. Jesus christ. Insults everyone in the room then kidnaps 2 people and just strolls out. This puts Tybalt, one of the more OP allies, out of commission for like the whole book lol

-Definitely Impossible Quest: find this character that disappeared over 100 years ago who Simon spent the last century committing misc atrocities to find

-This does lead me to wonder what motivated Amandine to show up suddenly and force October to find August. Is she just unstable/crazy as has been implied, or is it something more?

GOD shes awful!

-So oh boy we are actually waking up Simon! I'm glad we are getting more development for him cause holy crap he's an interesting gray morality character.

-Sylvester using the same binding spell Evening used on October in book 1, but this time to keep Simon from hurting October, sure draws some.. uh.. interesting parallels.

👀

-Amandine shows up again and is just fucking AWFUL. I'm trying to figure out if she has any real sympathetic traits. This is the first book she really shows up as a character out of flashbacks and the trippy shit in book 4.

- "Oh yeah Toby the reason I abused you and twisted your blood human as a kid was I wanted to mourn the daughter who disappeared and then let you die asap" like. Yikes

-Simon, established as an Arch Villain just being an awkward dad (at least toward October) is interesting. I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

-oh hey saving the pixies in book 5 actually set up a Thing in this one. Huh.

-Surprise that random pixie you saved in book 5 is relevant and a full fledged character now.

-The Luidaeg is a sympathetic character and a consistent ally in the series but BOY does she have her moments. Egads. (Quentin, who adores her, was NOT amused. We'll see how that shakes out...)

The Luidaeg just.. resurrecting an extinct race here. No big deal. I'm sure this has zero future implications.

-oh fuck the Babylon Road is back. Oh shit book 3 vibes. Oh shit

-lmao they literally end up in Blind Michael's lands. Just fuck me up

-ok theres a line that basically implies Blind Michael wasn't even that bad of a guy at one point, that he did The Ride with the best of intentions and for the life of me I am trying to figure out what they mean by that

-also intentional parallel between Blind Michael and Simon with the whole "best of intentions" thing.. Simon started as like, the arch villain. And now look where we are. So what is that implying about Blind Michael? 🤔

-I mean Blind Michael is the closest this series has come to a Dark Lord character. He was fucking awful. I'm interested to see if we are going to explore from a different angle?

-Goddamn world tour here showing up in Annwn.

-Oh duchess Riordan.. she's so pleasant. I'm glad we get to see what the fuck she's been up to since being trapped there

-Oh fuck they found Officer Thornton. He is not Well. I remember speculating what we were going to do with that plot thread lol

Are you FUCKING kidding me

-That was book SEVEN. I fucking REMEMBER that part. August was a fucking throwaway background character??? Chekhov's missing sibling?

-And it was intentional because of the door thing! She was described in a weird amount of detail for a background character! What the fuck!

-AAAND we found August. And the first thing she did was attack and basically turn October almost human. Whoops.

-And she doesn't recognize Simon. Her father. Because the Luidaeg's price was her way "home". Which includes Simon. Yikes

-omg Simon's magic finally smells like it does in flashbacks before he got corrupted. Smoke and mulled cider. Maybe I'm kinda sappy but I like that that paralleled the whole redemption arc thing

;____; FUCK dude

-October accidentally makes herself almost entirely human to save Simon. Whoopsie daisy!

FUCK DUDE ;______; full redemption arc shit there I'm gonna cry

-OK so I'm inserting this after finishing the book. And I realize this sounds like a MAJOR "not as much of an asshole as you could have been" award. But Simon had NO reason to treat Toby well. And he certainly did not in the brief glance of him in the book 1 prologue. That's changed by his second appearance (book 8). She's a changeling (always seen as inferior in Fae society) and she's the bastard child of his wife. He has every reason to treat her like shit. Yet he doesn't. He seems to want to be a father figure for her, even though she isn't really his blood related daughter, and this book reinforces that attitude. He even gives up things he wants--on multiple occasions--in order to save October, simply because he wants to. Compare him to his wife, October's actual biological mother, someone who literally created her as an expendable coping mechanism and resents the fact she's still alive? Despite everything he is WAY more of a parent to her. Found family sure is a thing in this series, huh.

-i like how instead of going all emo that she turned basically human October's just like "oh yeah I was raised in a street gang" and beats the absolute SHIT out of August

-Simon: uh excuse me did you just hit my daughter in the back of the head with a CLUB

October: she'll be fine

Well SHIT. The other shoe dropped, but not how I expected it.

-Like Simon genuinely redeemed himself, saving both August AND October despite everything. And he just sacrificed all of it. That was the final price of redemption for him. Yikes. YIKES. Like I knew it wouldn't be that easy, but this SUCKS.

-And this basically states that he wont be back to normal until fucking Oberon returns. I know the series has been leading up to that but... when the fuck. That seems like it would be the endgame.

-this is somehow worse than killing him off. How the fuck.

-August might have some redeeming traits. Shes an asshole but she is genuinely distressed when she realizes what Amandine did to October. Amandine? I'm pretty sure theres nothing to redeem her at this point. Shes fucking terrible.

-Jazz and Tybalt come back.. completely traumatized. Yeah. Ok. This entire last third is just complete despair I guess.

And award for "bleakest ending in the series" goes to...

-i think "The Brightest Fell" is the most fitting title in the series. It works on so many levels and for multiple characters. Especially in the context of the Shakespeare quote.

-i have.. thoughts. I think I'm going to do a compilation of said thoughts when I finish the next book and am officially caught up.

For now, there is also a novella @ the end so I will read that!

-"Of Things Unknown" (the novella) can basically be summarized by:

It's cool to get April's perspective! And some good old fashioned "resurrect your gays" on top of it.

-The Luidaeg: hey toby you know how you brought me back to life? You probably should not have been able to do that. You probably should not make a habit of raising the dead.

Toby: *resurrects like 5 characters who got killed off in book 2*

The Luidaeg: *breaking down the door* What the FUCK did I just say

-I am sure that January (a fucking month name) being resurrected has absolutely no future implications whatsoever :')

-Oh god theres one book left then I'm caught up. At least the novella softened the gut punch that was this book a little bit.

Survival of the Richest

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Douglas Rushkoff

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.

Halloween bedtime stories

“Mama tell us the story about the Savage!”

“Again?” a hyuran woman chuckled as she tucked her eldest into bed.

“Yes Mama! It's my most favoritest story.” her daughter replied, sitting on top of her covers again as if to say see? I will not be in bed until my demands are met.

Their mother smiled down at them, their eyes sparkling with the light of new life, her son 5 summers and her daughter a mere 3. She's told them the story countless times, each time her children chiming in how they thought the story should go this time. A new tale each time, it was a great game for them. She made a show of her shoulders sagging and rolling her eyes so hard her head had to follow the same motion.

“Okay Olivia bas Muspin,” she waggled her eyebrows at her daughter, holding the edges of the bed sheet and waiting for her daughter to crawl underneath “as my lady commands.”

Once both of her children were at least halfway beneath their covers, she tapped her finger to the bottom of her chin, feigning being deep in thought. “Now, how does this story start again?”

“Oh! Oh Mama you should start with Lord Zenos.”

Her smile faltered for a moment; their poor monarch had just lost his father to those Eorzean assassins, one of them being the former black wolf himself. Her children wouldn't understand the implications, and the horrid sparks of unrest within the Garlemald that bothered her and their father greatly. They'd always be loyal to the throne, as will their children, for they knew the real threat.

“Ah you want to start halfway through the villains story? No I think we should start at the beginning.”

“So, our...soldiers were making their way down to liberate the savages of the south.” she couldn't bear speak Gaius van Baelsar's name “They had heard the people there were under constant threat of eikons, great towering beasts that sucked the life out of the very ground you stand on. Now, they had little resistance on their travels. Eorzeans were simple folk, you see. They still worship false gods, praying for good weather and keeping away from magitek sciences. Most welcomed our way of life, and those who didn't were taught how well they could live following us.”

“But!!” Her daughter screeched, and she shushed her, not in an unkind way.

“Yes, but, despite how well things were going, rumors were gathering. Some of the more savage people who fought our soldiers spoke of an especially vicious one. Someone who they said was chosen by their gods, a woman, for lack of a better word. Now...how did she look again?”

“An eye the color of blood!”

“Sharp claws”

“Pointy teeth!”

“Yes long sharp teeth, easier to eat you with!” She tickled her son who kicked and wriggled as he laughed. “Big fangs and a beastly look about her, with hair like black oil, and a tail and cat like ears. She hunted like a panther in the dark, they said. Now our soldiers laughed, for the Eorzeans described her as their warrior of light, their savior. They thought they would run into a strong savage, but she would be taught as all the others before her. They were so wrong.”

“Now, I won't tell you children any lies, so we don't know what happens when Garlean's finally laid eyes on her, only that when she snaked her way into our camps, it was torn apart. It was as if a wild animal was released, our soldiers were hurt, our tech burning. We didn't know what to make of it.”

“And then Gaius came, he stood up against the warrior of light to protect his people!”

“Yes he did, but he failed and he was felled. Now, our soldiers retreated for a moment to mend wounds and take care of each other, and they thought that horrible day would end the rumors of this savage woman. But her story continued.”

“What she did next was so much worse. It was as if she got a taste of blood and hungered for more. Her red eye sought more tender flesh to rend. As the Eorzeans acted in celebration for their hero, she lead one of their leaders into a chamber. A small girl, naive to the dangers and learning to rule for herself it's said, was lead by the hand to her chambers, believing herself safe with the warrior of light. When the door closed, the warrior gobbled her up.

“Never trust a beast Mama.”

“That's right, even if you think a beast is a pet, they're still a wild animal at heart.”

“Her people cast her aside, realizing the danger she posed as she bit the hand that fed. This is not the end to her story. No it only seemed to fuel her desire for blood. Another kingdom lay to the north of Eorzea, another land riddled with false gods that she preyed upon. The Holy see of Ishgard. Now, with our people out of danger, she infiltrated these people's lands, learning how to better disguise herself as a tamed pet to fulfill her desires. They filled her belly with the blood of dragons for a while, but it wasn't enough. Her teeth found the throat of a blue haired knight, and held him to hide her attack, to trick the people who took her in. They believed her, and they allowed her continued stand in their midst. They, like the Eorzean's before them, believe her to be their savior.

Soon, her regicide continued. She followed their leader and his guardian knights of heavensward, waiting for their leader to be caught alone.”

“But the knights were smart, they knew she was bad.”

“You got it son. They heard the way she used her own homeland, so they were prepared to protect their majesty.”

“But it wasn't enough.”

“No, sadly. She could not wait any longer, and that day we learned she wasn't only learning to stand in society. She was also learning the dark magicks lost to her people. Once again, our reports on the incident were low, but we knew she encased herself in the terrible body of bahamut, one of the greater eikons. She decimated the royal and his knights clad in the body of a dragon, their greatest enemy. It was this day we learned that she used primal energies to power herself.

“So, our military sought more information on this warrior of light. She was not just a weapon to be used against them, but a wild card, only craving to fulfill her violent nature. She preys on the lonely, and those who stand against her are systematically torn apart.”

“They don't even know where she comes from Mama.”

“Isn't that scary?” Olivia shivered.

“Yes, despite our most earnest investigations, it was as if the warrior of light popped into existence around your birthday Molas.”

“Mama don't say that!”

“Molas shares a birthday with the savage!” Olivia giggled.

“Let's continue this, so you can get to bed.” she said sternly. “Anyways, so as we investigated, we learned she was taken back in by the Eorzeans. They seemed to have forgotten how she treated their own people, and she raised a bull of a man to rule in her stead. Eorzean's were no longer simple, they were becoming dangerous as they fell in line with their supposed savior. We learned that as she veiled herself as an eikon slayer, she herself used the same dark magics to power herself. Floating mini primals follow in her wake, even going so far as to turn herself into one. The Eorzeans seemed not to care, as they believed her way more clear than ours. They started to fight against us with fervor, their own teeth gnashing with bloodlust.”

“Our very own crown prince, upon learning the dangers she posed, went down to slay her himself. He's our strongest, most bravest fighter.”

“He wiped the floor with her!”

“Indeed, and in his wisdom he sought to give her mercy, and stayed his hand as she crawled away and off the battlefield. Instead of that being the end, her viciousness would not be sated. She learned that to beat our Lord Zenos, she had to build a pack. As time went on, our people found she was pulling more and more towards her, using her dark magic to sway the minds of the people around her, and built a group she needed to keep at hand. Her and this particular group followed her dishonest actions, and tried to hurt Zenos when he was alone. Again however, he was able to beat them back.

The warrior of light was furious. She had never lost before, much less lose twice. She became obsessed with him, finding more people to help her cruel journey to slay our lord. She summoned an eikon in the end, just to be rid of our lord.”

“and she hurt him, thought she destroyed him.”

“Yes, for a beast who seeks blood will calm at the sight of it. As our lord was hurt from battle, she thought it the end and left, the simple people of Ala Mhigo cheering their savage savior at the death of Lord Zenos. As they did, he was able to get away to safety, our best physicians helping him to recovery.

“Now, between then and now, the warrior of light seemed to have disappeared from the public eye. Perhaps her thirst for blood was sated by royal blood, or perhaps she lies in wait, hoping to reach our fair country to have more for herself. Even now, in the darkest of nights, as you lay awake in bed she waits for you to wander off by yourself, hoping to eat another singular soul.”

“Mama that'd never happen.”

“Mayhaps, but I'd just as much you didn't go off by yourself without me. Don't make your Mama worry, and go to bed.”

Thoughts on racism, sexism, and fandom: How to Suck Less

I've been in fandom for almost twenty years, and here are some things that are true of pretty much every fandom I've seen: There is a lot more sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, anti-semitism, etc., in fandom than most of us would like to admit, and the vast majority of it is unconscious. People (mostly white, etc.) THINK they're being perfectly unbiased and fair, and they really, really aren't. Their unconscious prejudices are shining through. And it sucks. We, collectively, suck. But here's something I think most people miss: when we talk about this stuff, the point is not to make people feel bad. It's not about who's a "good," non-racist person, and who is a "bad" racist. It's not about proving who's "pure" and who's not. (Or at least, if that's why you're doing it, you're a really screwed-up self-righteous asshole.) IT'S ABOUT CHANGE. Because the thing is, we are all swimming in a sea of racist, sexist, queerphobic crap all the time. We can't change the larger culture (at least not by ourselves), but we CAN change fandom. I know, because fandom has gotten better about this stuff over the last twenty years. There is still a LOT of room for improvement, but it's better than it was. And it can get better than it is. But not if we ignore the problem or sweep it under the rug or get defensive. The first step in sucking less is to realize that you suck in the first place. The second step is figuring out how to suck less. This post is about that second step. This post is about how to take the knowledge that, yes, we have some problems, and work to make those problems smaller. This post is about how to work through that, grow as a person, learn to suck less, and still have fun in fandom while you're doing it.

There are a lot of posts out there about how to be a good ally. There are also lots of posts out there about avoiding racist/sexist/ableist/whateverist tropes in fic. And there are a lot of good posts out there pointing out that fandom gets WAAAAAY more interested in able-bodied neurotypical cisgender white men than about any other character. We all know what the problems are, or at least, we should. But I think there's a need for "okay, I want to be more inclusive/suck less, how do I do it" on a broad level before we get to the nitty-gritty of "these are tropes I should avoid or be careful about." Namely, how does one get oneself to be fannish about characters that all one's cultural conditioning is screaming at you to ignore? First, some basic principles. 1) This is fandom. It is supposed to be fun. This should not be like that terrible assignment from your least favorite teacher in school, fandom should be fun. 2) We've all been marinating in a stew of racism/homophobia/sexism/ableism/antisemitism/islamophobia all our lives. Even if, on a conscious level, you disagree with any given ism, your gut has been conditioned to prioritize white able-bodied cissexual neurotypical men over everything else. 3) Racism and sexism suck, and sucking is bad, and it makes fandom NOT fun for those on the receiving end of it. We should all be trying to suck less, both as a goal in its own right and because we want fandom to be fun for EVERYONE. 4) It is possible to work at sucking less while still enjoying fandom. 5) The higher we are in the kyriarchy, the more damage your sucking causes, and the more we are protected from that damage. So, like, a white person is part of the power structure that causes and benefits from racism; we're less likely to see it, more likely to cause damage to others because of it. BUT we also have a lot more power to change things for the better. It's not up to black people or Latin@s or Asians or Roma or LGBTQ people or people with disabilities or Jews or any other oppressed group to fix things--they're not the problem. The ultimate responsibility is up to Whites to suck less. (This doesn't mean that, say, a Black person can't suck--just that they are WAY less likely to damage others through their suckitude.) So the question is, how do we as White people have fun in fandom while sucking less? Fear not! It's actually pretty simple, you just have to make that a consistent priority. Let's define Principle 1. How is fandom fun? Well, for me, fandom is fun because there are shows and movies and books that I love, and I love reading and writing fanfic and meta about them, and squeeing about them with my friends. I find all of those activities fun. I hope you all do, too. I want you to keep on finding those things fun. BUT there is a problem. We are conditioned by our society to value men more than women, Whites more than any other race, able-bodied neurotypical people more than disabled and/or neurodiverse people, etc., etc., you can all fill in the hierarchies that our society has tried to instill in us (and has probably succeeded in instilling more than you realize). The preference for white men in fandom isn't any worse than in other places in our society. It's true, and I think it's important to remember. The problem comes in when we leave it at that. "Well, it's not my fault, and anyway even if I AM conditioned to pay more attention to white men more than anything else, this is fandom so I should be able to just ignore that and go on like always." Aaaaand then you continue to have fun, but you keep sucking, and hurting people in the process. We have all been conditioned to favor whitedude above everything else. By which I mean, our society privileges stories about able-bodied neurotypical white men above stories about other people. A white man who has super incredible abilities and can do all the things is Batman, a white woman with all the same qualities is a Mary Sue, and is usually depowered to make room for the male hero, to boot. And characters of different ethnicities, or religions, or with disabilities, don't even have it that good. We think stories about white men are interesting because ... those are the stories we've read, watched, listened to the most. We're used to them. We've been taught all our lives that these are the good stories, the stories that matter. And so most of us have learned to prioritize those stories on an unconscious level. And we show that in our choices, which shows we watch, which actors/actresses we think are hot, which characters we write about. The good news is, that's conditioning. It's not some inborn genetic thing, it's how we've been trained. And we can train ourselves differently! It starts by being mindful. What we consume shapes us, right? So keep that in mind when you choose what you consume, what movies, what books, what TV shows, what fanfic. I'm not saying "don't watch your favorite show if it's got too many white men." But let's be real: some TV we watch/read because OMG ITS TEH BEST EVAR!!1! and some we watch/read because it's fun and some we watch/read because our friends are and some we watch/read because it's better than other things we could be doing. When you're making a choice between two shows/movies/books that will probably be about the same level of entertaining, go for the one that's less ALL WHITE MALE. This is the age of the internet, where our choices are much greater than they've ever been before. When you're browsing Netflix on a Tuesday night looking for a fun movie to watch, give higher preference to diverse shows. Not in an "OMG, I can't ever watch anything with white men again, no matter how awesome it is!" way, but rather in a "I've seen so many movies about White Men(tm) in my life--is this one going to just be more of the same? Are there other options I might enjoy?" way. When you've got a variety of options and they would all be enjoyable, go for the ones least likely to reinforce the WHITE STRAIGHT ABLEBODIED NEUROTYPICAL CIS MALE IS THE DEFAULT AND BEST inside your head. What this can look like in practice: I like Marvel, but I am not a big enough fan to watch all of their shows. I pick and choose and leave myself time for other shows as well. On Netflix there are two Marvel shows I could be watching that are roughly comparable: Daredevil and Luke Cage. Both are about urban superheroes, but Daredevil is white and Luke Cage is black. (Also, Daredevil has some really terrible Yellow Peril stuff.) So I watch Luke Cage. I enjoy it. I'd probably enjoy Daredevil, too, but I don't have time for everything, and so I prioritize. And I don't treat it like I'm taking my medicine and forcing myself to watch something because it's more socially just and not because I like it. I go in expecting to have fun. And you know what? Usually I do. Another example: back in 2011, I needed something new to be fannish about. I had enough time to be fannish about one television show in addition to the stuff I was already fannish about. There were two shows premiering that fall that looked interesting to me, both rather similar: Grimm, and Once Upon A Time. Both were urban fantasy. One starred a white man, one starred a white woman. I chose the one starring the woman and went in to it prepared to love the show. Not grudgingly, but "ooh, this could be fun." And I loved it. If I hadn't, I would have stopped watching it after a couple of episodes and switched to Grimm. That was always an option; I wasn't watching OUaT to be masochistic about "doing the right thing." I was choosing which of two interesting options to give brain and heart space to, and I was going in to it with a brain and heart open to being pleased. If, despite that, it didn't please me? I'd move on to the next thing. Plenty of other fish in the sea. But I started with the less-whitedude option. What this does is it gives brainspace to new possibilities. It erodes the assumption your hindbrain makes that white men matter more than other people do. It erodes the assumption your hindbrain makes that white men are more interesting. The more attention you pay to people outside the cultural norm, the more interesting you find their stories. When you do this, you are actively re-training your cultural conditioning about who matters and who is interesting. And you are having fun while you are doing it. This has two ways that it will erode your suckage in fandom-related ways. First, it increases the number of people likely to be in non-whitedude fandoms, which is a slight counterweight to the overwhelming whitedude nature of fandom in general. One more person reading the fic and (hopefully) commenting. One more person posting about it, whether you do meta/art/fic/gifs/fanmixes/videos/whatever. Second, if you do this consistently over a long period of time, you will find that your instinct to always focus on white male characters will erode. Your background assumption of who is interesting and who isn't will start to shift. Do this with the fannish content you produce, as well. You have a tumblr? Give preference to reblogging women and people of color. If you see something about white guys that is AWESOME AND SQUEEWORTHY, go ahead and reblog it and enjoy it while you do. But, you know, a lot of times we reblog stuff that's interesting but not full-on capslock squee, right? Stuff where it takes a second to decide if you should reblog or not. Where you could go either way. And in those cases, make a conscious decision in favor of diversity. Stuff about white men? If it's in that "should I reblog this?" category, don't reblog it. Stuff about anyone else? Do reblog it. When figuring out new content to post, do the same thing. AWESOME SQUEEFUL STUFF? Post away! Interesting but not incredible? Give more weight to stuff about women and people of color and queer people and disabled people and neurodiverse people and Jews and Muslims and all the rest. It's not about harshing the squee, or putting your fannish tastes through some kind of quota system. It's about balance. Trust me. The world and fandom both have PLENTY of whitedude stuff, they'll get along just fine without more. But there's a shortage of everything else, so that's where the focus should be. And you can do the same with fanfic! Again, I'm not saying "never read your favorites!" I'm saying, be mindful. Are you a big Captain America fan? Check out the Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov and Maria Hill fic in that fandom, and keep your eye out for more. When you do so, consider filtering out Steve/Bucky stuff occasionally. (http://ift.tt/2oUmoPT) After all, presumably you already read a lot of S/B. Your goal isn't to find fics where Sam is in two scenes to get the Whitedude together or help them work out their shit, but fics where Sam gets to really shine. As himself, not just the sidekick to the whitebro. And don't do it grudgingly; do it with open heart and mind, ready to embrace Sam in his awesomeness. This isn't to say you should never read whitebro fic, if that's your thing, but rather that there should be a health(ier) balance. This isn't about forcing you to choke down your bitter fannish medicine; it's about expanding the things you love. It's about creating more opportunities for joy and squee. And when you read those fics, comment on them! Spread the love! Authors who write about women or people of color tend to get fewer comments on those fics than on stories focused about white male characters, which is discouraging. Share the love; kudos and comment. A comment saying "Good fic" is great, it doesn't have to be long and involved. This holds true for all your fic, by the way, not just the fic where you're consciously diversifying your reading habits. Reading a Steve/Bucky fic and the author wrote Sam well, or Natasha, or Maria, or Rhodey, or Dr. Cho? Tell the author! Point that out specifically. Doesn't have to be elaborate; "I liked Sam" is fine. The point is to reward people for being more inclusive. When you find a particularly good fic based on a certain woman or character of color, check out the author's page. Chances are, they've got more like it. If they do, and you like their work? Subscribe to them so when they write something, you see it. Again, the goal is to still have fun with awesome fic, but shifting what you consume to be more diverse. Because that will shift your internal default away from the Straight White Neurotypical Ablebodied Man that our society tries to push as the default. And that will affect how you see the world both in fandom and out of it. Part of the fun of fandom, for many of us, isn't just about consuming content, it's also about creating it. I love writing fanfic. And here's where a lot of peoples' asses start to show, and where they start whining about how they just write what they write and they only get plotbunnies for whitebro. And that may be true, but again, this is something you can actually change. If your brain doesn't come up with plotbunnies for characters of color, or for women, or for lesbians, or for a mixed-race canon couple, or for disabled or neurodivergent people? You can work on coming up with plotbunnies on your own and train your brain in the process! For example! Say you are a fan of The Flash. For every episode you watch, come up with one plot bunny for a non-white male character. You don't have to write it; that's another step down the road. It doesn't have to be something huge. The first step is getting your brain used to generating plot bunnies for characters you normally wouldn't. If Iris had a big part in that episode, think up a story idea for her. What was she doing while Barry was fighting the villain of the week? How's things going at work for her? If Joe had a big part, think up an idea for him. If there was an Iris/Barry moment, think up a story idea for that pairing. Wally, Cisco, Caitlynn, Lisa Snart, you get the idea. If you're a Supergirl fan, come up with a story idea for Hank or James or Renee Montoya or M'Gann each episode. You don't have to write it, the goal for this part is to get you used to thinking of these characters as people with stories. People you are interested in. I mean, if you get a great idea and want to write it, awesome, but step one is to get your gut and your hindbrain primed to think about these people and care about their stories. You've already been primed to care about and think about white male characters by everything you've seen and read and heard since you were a baby, but there's been precious little priming you for everybody else, so a little extra effort is probably going to be needed. The next step is similar to the choosing-fandoms step, only for choosing plotbunnies. You will probably have some ideas that just yank you over and demand to be written, so write them. But if you are anything like me, there are also times that you want to write and have a lot of different ideas you could write, you just have to decide which. And in that case, you can probably guess by now, give more weight to the non-whitebro options. If you have four plot bunnies you could write, and two of them are about white male characters and one of them is about a white woman and one is about a character of color? Give more weight to the woman and (especially) the character of color. I'm not saying "you can never write white men again!" I'm saying that in your decision-making process, recognize that the rest of the world is weighted WAY THE FUCK IN FAVOR OF WHITE ABLE-BODIED NEUROTYPICAL CIS MEN, so to provide balance, we should be weighting in favor of everyone else, and giving the most weight to the people that society gives the least weight to. The things I've outlined in this post don't magically get rid of all that social conditioning overnight, and they don't magically fix everything. What they do is they give you a place to start, and aim you in a direction so that, if you work on it over time, you will suck less while still having fun in fandom and making it more inclusive. And the more people who do stuff like this, the less fandom will suck over time.

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A Gimpy Kid’s Book Review

When you are forced to spend time on the couch and movement becomes something you only do when absolutely necessary, you find yourself with piles of free time.  At first, I filled said free time with horror movies.  Halloween being my favorite holiday, it only made sense to cheer myself up via my favorite movie genre.  Quite quickly, however, I realized my six to eight hour daily horror movie habit, was in fact, mind numbing and made me feel worse about my overall situation.  

I dabbled in a variety of arts and crafts, including: swear word coloring books, adult coloring books, paint-by-number, figurine painting, and knitting.  I also spent way too much time on Facebook and did my fair share of crossword puzzles and word searches.  It was probably the only time Mike would say “want to play a board game?” and my answer would always be “YES!” 

Despite my attempts to replace the outdoors with much more mundane activities, I was left with time to fill.  I remembered at some point, before graduate school, I liked to read.  Graduate school ruined reading for me via a unreasonable number of pages per week.  When I graduated, I was free from the massive pile of sometimes wildly boring reading assignments and I took said freedom, as a pass to basically never read a book again.

My long periods of forced couch time over the last two and half years, have reminded me, I do in fact like to read.  Perhaps a silver lining of an otherwise abysmal experience, I started to read again and kept doing it.  Below are the books I’ve read since I hurt myself and my general thoughts about each.  I hope you find something you would like to read!

What is it about: Roxane Gay was gang raped as a child.  To cope with the trauma, she gained weight.  To her, it was a way to protect herself, because society tells us heavy people aren’t desirable. She details her lifelong struggle with PTSD, obesity, relationships and how society sees and treats her as a obese, female, queer, person of color.

My thoughts: I LOVE THIS BOOK!  It’s an intense read and can be triggering.  At the same time, it’s such a well constructed, honest, and raw look at how we look at trauma and more so, how we treat obese people.  It connects her experience as a trauma survivor, with her experiences with racism, sexism, and sizeism in such a perfect and often times disturbing way.  I cannot recommend this book enough.  This was also the first book I read when I got hurt.  It holds a special place in my reading heart.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 5/5

What is it about: John Hodgman is a comedian.  The book is about how he grew up in a working household, who often struggled, and his transition from just making it, to having a vacation home in a wealthy town in Maine.  

What I thought about it: It’s a comical exploration into class in America.  He writes about the silly things he used to do as a youth and the equal number of silly class based practices, he sees as a wealthy person.  He takes a critical look at both the working class and the ultra-wealthy.  He also writes about “belonging” and what it’s like to transition from one class to another and to feel like you don’t fit-in.  

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 4/5

What is it about: It challenges the concept that Millennials are a lazy, entitled group of brats and explains how they are, in fact, screwed in many ways.  It focuses on the economy and discusses everything from student loans, to the job market, to internships, to helicopter parenting, to benefits, to buying a house, to the environment. 

What I thought about it: As a Millennial, I thought “finally! someone who gets it!”  At the same time, I thought “This all sucks!”  It’s a good exploration into the financial and life ruin we setup young people for.  It blows apart the idea that if you “try,” you’ll end up with 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a house on a col-de-sac.  I found it to be both affirming and disheartening.  The end outlines a few action steps, but when you spend a couple hundred pages detailing how bad it is, 20 pages outlining how to make it better, doesn’t really do the trick.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 3.5/5

What is it about:  Michael Finkel is a journalist, who attempts to write about Christopher Knight.  Christopher lived in the woods in rural Maine for several decades - by choice.  It details both his relationship with Christopher and how Christopher survived living outside for so long.  It also explores why Christopher chose to become a hermit, in the first place, and his struggle to assimilate back into society.

What I thought about it: I LOVED THIS BOOK! and I found it to be really sad.  I appreciated the author didn’t straight out say Christopher was a mentally ill person, who fell under the radar for a couple of decades.  At the same time, it was hard to read about someone who purposely opted out of society and then was forced back into it.  It’s an interesting look into the idea there are people out there who don’t want a car, a house, or a job, and are actually happy living in the woods - and this is okay.  It’s a challenge to what we see as “normal,” honors Christopher’s life, and the complexity of his choices.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 5/5

What is it about: Rebecca Solnit is an activist and a writer.  This book is a collection of several essays she’s written.  “Men explain things to me,” is one of the essays in the book and explains the concept of mansplaning.  It starts with a story about how someone, who didn’t know who she was, tried to explain her own book to her at a party.  The other essays look at various areas of feminism, including the institution of marriage, sexual violence, war, racially fueled sexism, and how misogynistic norms are strongly embed into our society.

What I thought about it: She is a great writer and everything in this book is true and important. Everyone should understand these truths and should work to change them, as she outlines, so clearly, how destructive they are.  At the same time, nothing in this book was new to me.  I felt myself saying “YEAH!” but not learning anything new.  I’m not sure this is a reason to not read this book.  It’s a well written collection of feminist essays.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 4/5

What is it about: It’s a graphic novel about the author’s relationship with her father.  It starts with her as a young child and goes through his death. 

What I thought about it: The author is a Vermonter and I like to support people who live in Vermont.  As a queer identified, it focuses heavily on her experience as a queer youth, coming out, and her thoughts on her father’s sexuality.  She didn’t have a good relationship with her parents and I wouldn’t say it’s a happy book.  She also explores her challenges with mental illness, relationships, and becoming an author.  I don’t know if I would say I liked this book, mostly because I don’t think I like the author.  I find her to be arrogant and a little too neurotic for my taste.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 3/5

What is it about: It’s a graphic novel about the author’s relationship with her mother.  It’s a sequel to “Fun Home,” which I talk about above.

What I thought about it: It’s a less interesting version of “Fun Home.” I didn’t enjoy it.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 2/5  

What is it about: It’s a fictional story about a women’s experience with deciding whether to have weight loss surgery or not.  It’s meant to be a commentary on sizeism, the diet industry, and how awfully we treat people who are overweight.

What I thought about it: I enjoyed it.  It’s a good look at how awful we are to overweight people and in how many different ways.  It’s critical of the weight loss industry, fad diets, and weight loss surgery. I found the end to be a little weird, but overall, I liked it.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 3.5/5

What is it about: It’s a beginner’s guide to meditation, for people who don’t do yoga or drink soy matcha lates. 

What I thought about it: Well, I never started to mediate - so it was not life changing.  At the same time, it made mediation approachable and this is coming from someone who often times vehemently rejects things I believe are “hipster.”  It makes a good case for the health benefits associated with mediation, gives you a clear plan to start, and takes out much of the touchy-feely side of meditation.  Mike got this for me when I was not a happy camper, thinking it might help.  If you aren’t into yoga, essential oils, or have no idea what chakras are, this is a good book - if you want to start to meditate.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 3.5/5

What is it about: It’s a collection of Oatmeal comics.

What I thought about it: If you like the Oatmeal, you’ll like the book.  It’s funny.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 4/5

What is it about: Christian Picciolini was a high level skinhead.  The book details how he became a skinhead, what he did while he was a skinhead, and how he got out of that lifestyle. Since writing the book, he started a non-profit, which helps other people get out of this lifestyle.

What I thought about this book: I really liked it.  It, at points, is hard to read.  He is honest about what he did as a skinhead and all of it is horrible.  It’s quite violent at times.  At the same time, it’s an honest look about how these groups recruit new members, groom them, and eventually rope them in.  It relates skinhead groups closely to tactics used by gangs.  It’s also an honest look at someone who did awful things and managed to change.  Reading about someone who had such toxic views about race and truly reformed, is refreshing given our current political climate.  It’s an example of how people can change, no matter how “far gone,” they may appear to be.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 5/5

What is it about: It’s a comic series named the Awkward Yeti.  The Yeti is the main character and all the other characters are the Yeti’s body parts.  It personifies their body parts and each comic explores something we can all relate to, when it comes to our body.  For example, the intestines are grumpy and talk about how tongue and brain make him do so much work.  His tag-line is “soon!”  Tongue is a villain who makes brain eat everything awful for the Yeti.  Eyes are bros who just like to lift weights all day.  Gallbladder does nothing other than make gallstones and says “I maked these.”

What I thought about the books: This is my favorite comic series.  I think I started to like it  more when I was struggling with my body.  I could imagine my little tendons dancing around and my stomach being like “NO MORE TYLENOL!”  I also relate strongly to heart, who is impulsive and motivated to do everything.  The relationship between heart and brain is interesting, because although heart is impulsive and often times doesn’t follow-through, heart motivates brain to relax and see the brighter side of life.  At the same time, brain keeps heart in line.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 5/5 - I even own a heart plushy!

What is it about: It’s an essay about how feminism is not a “woman’s cause” and how we should all care.  The title basically explains the book.

What I thought about the book: I 100% agree with everything in it.  It’s well written and I feel the same way about this book, as I did about “When Men Explain Things to Me” - I didn’t learn anything new.  At the same time, I feel like every white male should read it.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 4/5

What is it about: It’s a women’s empowerment piece written by a writer for Dad’s Magazine/Elle columnist and a writer who does a bunch of critical pieces about pop-culture.  The book basically dispels all the pressure women put on themselves, to fit a particular socially created mold, and encourages women to be more supportive - since we are all part of the same “coven.” 

What I thought about it: It’s a fun and superficial look at how destructive pop-culture is.  It’s an interesting read, especially if you love everything about Halloween and feminism.  There are reviews which are really bad, because it actually has little to do with witchcraft.  It uses the fundamentals of witchcraft to challenge pop-culture and encourage women to be themselves.  It’s not really trying to be a book about becoming a witch.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Review: 3.5/5

What is it about: It takes 10 minutes to read and it’s one of those life quote books.  It’s a book for adults.

What I thought about it: I LOVE THE COOKIE MONSTER! It’s written from their perspective and talks a bunch about how cookies make life better.  It’s just a fun read for Cookie Monster lovers.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 5/5 only if you love the Cookie Monster

What is it about: It’s about a black teen (Starr) who lives in the ghetto, sees her black best friend get shot by a white cop, dates a white boy, and goes to an expensive private school - where she is one of two black students.  It explores the challenges she faces as a black youth who goes between “ghetto life” and “rich white people life” and looks closely at the complexity of race relations in America, with a clear focus on racially driven police brutality. 

What I thought about it:  If you have ever uttered the words "all lives matter" or "blue lives matter," read this book. If you didn't vote in the last election or believe politics is something you can opt out of, read this book. If you've made a racist joke in the last 10 years, read this book. If you don't think racism or the impact of racially driven police brutality is real, read this book. Even if you are a politically active, socially responsible, white ally, you should still read this book. It should basically be required reading for every white person.

Gimpy Kid Five Star Rating: 5/5

What is it about: Holly Madison was a Playboy Bunny for a long time.  She lived in the Playboy Mansion with Hue Hefner.  The book is a tell-all about what it was like to be in the Mansion and live with and date Hue.

What I thought about it: I really liked this book.  Holly blows apart the concept of the “dumb blonde.”  She writes a detailed expose into how awful Hue Hefner was.  She clearly explains how he abused his “girlfriends.”  It’s a in-depth look into the complexity of domestic violence, tactics used by abusers, and is written by someone who supposedly “had it all.”  It also challenges more militant feminists to honor the experiences of people who engage in behaviors, which are seen as counter to the feminist agenda. 

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 4.5/5

What is it about: It’s a self-help book written by a blogger.  It focuses on concepts like: saying no, being okay with failing and learning from it, being okay with being wrong, the concept of choice, and how the perpetual race for “happiness” is crap.

What I thought about it: I bought it in an airport on my way to NYC, mainly because of the title.  I like the overall concept of letting things go and trying to stop living up to socially created ideals of happiness, which are all bullshit.  It’s definitely for those of us who are a little more bitter about life.  At the same time, it’s not a bitter book.  It takes bitter people concepts and uses them as a way to let people live life in a more free and less stressful way.  I wouldn’t say it’s life changing, but it’s interesting.  The guy is also a little bit of an asshole and as a fellow slight asshole, I can appreciate this.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 3.5/5

What is it about:  Porchoista has lime disease. It’s details her horrific experiences with the American Healthcare system, when it came to getting a diagnosis and appropriate care.

What I thought about it: We all know, at this point, I think the American Healthcare system has epic room for improvement.  I found this book to be comforting, because basically all the ways I’ve written about how Healthcare is America is awful, she also experienced.  I also found it to be terrifying, because a small part of me hoped what I experienced is not the norm.  If some day I write a book, it’ll be like this book.  It made me feel mad and sad on Porochista’s behalf, she had to struggle for so long, just to get better.  It’s a comprehensive look at dismissive doctors, the horrendous state of women’s healthcare, and pill happy doctors - and the wreckage this can create.  It should be required reading for all healthcare workers.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Review: 5/5

What is it about: Samantha Irby is a comedian/blogger/writer.  It’s a collection of essays about her take on life, which are really funny.  It’s an honest look at her experience living with IBS, dating, and being an obese black person in NYC.

What I think about it: You know those things we want to say about life and never say?  Well she says them - all of them.  It’s a hilarious and raw look at some of life’s most embarrassing life moments.  I found myself saying “YES!” while laughing and being a little terrified.  It’s a book any, slightly bitter, young woman can relate to.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 4/5

What is it about: It’s memoir about her life before the Mindy Project.

What I thought about it: It’s well written and I like her.  If you like her as a comedian, you’ll like the book.  It mainly looks at how she became a writer and her time at The Office.  It’s not fantastic, but again, if you like her, you’ll like the book.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 3/5

What is it about: It’s a collection of short descriptions of monsters across the world.  They are mainly folklore or the monsters your parents tell you about to keep you doing bad things.

What I thought about it: It took 10 minutes to read and I like Halloween.  Mike got it for me when I was having a bad day.  It did it’s job i.e. it cheered me up.  The illustrations are really well done and there are a couple of interesting monsters.  Enera is my favorite.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 3/5

What is it about: It looks at the Hillbilly culture in Northern Kentucky and the author’s experience growing up in a poverty stricken part of Ohio.

What I thought about it: I hate this book.  The author becomes a lawyer and graduates from Yale.  He uses this as a platform to say “Look at me! I grew up in crappy conditions and still made something of myself.”  He blames people for perpetuating systemic poverty and basically confirms everything conservatives say about “welfare queens.”  Although J.D. had a really tough childhood and no child should have to experience what he did and I’m really glad it all worked out for him - I think his book lacks insight regarding the complexity of systemic poverty and I wish he didn’t write it.  I mainly kept reading hoping I was missing something and it would get better - it never did.

Gimpy Kid 5 Star Rating: 0/5

We Don’t Need Maternity Leave, We Need Caregiving Leave

As is wont to happen every couple of years, my online world is again awash in articles and arguments shouting in favor of and for fully paid maternity leave in the United States. Not one to think that women should be denied full rights to further their career, or that mothers should necessarily be punished for the act of having a child, I have always avoided extended comment on the topic in the past. After the year I have had, however, I cannot avoid it anymore. The United States does need a more comprehensive leave program, but targeting it at mothers and/or fathers completely ignores the needs of those who lack children and drastically underscores the importance of family members we are not likely to be potty training.

Family leave policies in the United States are, right now, pretty slap-shod. Some corporations offer insanely generous policies affording new parents a year or more off at fully paid wages. Others allow you to take little more than a week off and pay you nothing while you are gone. The federal standard, guaranteed under the Family Medical Leave Act for those employees that work in eligible positions, is 12 weeks long and unpaid. For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to utilize the policy at my place of employment as that’s the policy that I know best and, frankly, it will work really well to illustrate the issues that could come to pass if a parental-leave-only policy were put into place.

Where I work, employees accrue both sick time and vacation time based upon the pay-step they are working at and the number of hours they work. A higher pay grade affords you more time off, in both categories, per hour worked and, obviously, working more hours will afford you more time off, as well. We do not have a paid parental leave program. A full time, mid level, professional employee can expect to earn about 2.6 sick hours per 37.5 hours worked. A year will earn them about 135 hours, or a little more than 18 paid sick days. For most healthy humans, it’s more than a sufficient amount, particularly since sick time accrues with no maximum cap. This means my hypothetical employee would have roughly 90 sick days after working for three years. Throw in the roughly three years worth of vacation time you are allowed to store before it becomes “use or lose,” and you add on another 60 days. 150 days, divided by approximately 20 actual working days per month, affords a new parent 7.5 months of paid time off.

Of course, those 7.5 months can only be achieved if the parent in question has taken no sick time and no vacation time in the three years leading up to the birth of their child. Clearly, this isn’t an ideal situation. What it lacks in idealism, however, it makes up for in “fairness.” Yes, that’s right, this policy may suck for new parents, but it sucks just as much for the woman whose husband has cancer, the man whose mother is dying, or the woman whose brother is on life support after overdosing (I work basically in the heroin capital of the country, it’s not really an unheard of situation). In all cases, they are restricted only by the amount of time off they are able to accrue and save. For better or worse, it’s fair to everyone, whether they are parents or not.

Okay, let’s back up a minute. To sometime in 2010. I was working in a logistics shop for an Infantry Brigade, and one of the multitude of tasks assigned to me was the review and approval of military travel requests within the Brigade. Someone gets sent somewhere, uses their car and their credit card to get themselves there, and now they wanna be paid back. Makes sense. I was the last stop this request made before being sent to Division finance for final dispensation of their check. These reviews usually took little more than ten minutes apiece and I very rarely had more than three or four to handle at a time. At most, it was an hour of my day.

This was, in large part, because the bulk of the work was done by a Sergeant on the other side of the building. Initial requests would get sent to her, and she was who then had to hunt down the Soldiers in question and demand any missing paperwork or any additional proof of expenditure. Moreover, for those travel arrangements being made by the Brigade, she was the one who played travel agent. She booked the flights, booked the rental cars, and ensured everyone knew where they were going and how they were getting there. While this was not her only tasking within the Brigade, it was one of her larger ones. It occupied a significant amount of her time.

Until she went on maternity leave at the end of 2010. At which point, it occupied a significant amount of my time. Time that I really didn’t have to dedicate to it, unless I stayed late or did the work from home. Such was my introduction to the idea of comprehensive paid maternity leave, a type of leave for which there was no non-parental equivalent and thus, of which, I would never take advantage. Despite this fact, a frenzied and harried spurt of 50 hour weeks spent doing almost two complete jobs was not the last time I have had to pick up the slack in a work place because a mama bear somewhere has been taking care of their kids. The coworkers left to pick up this slack don’t get paid more for doing it, don’t get extra time off afterwards, and often aren’t even thanked for their extra input. It’s just expected that, be it three weeks, three months, or a year, we’ll step in and handle it. Kids are important, after all.

Kids ARE important. Which is why I would never argue against a comprehensive leave program of some sort. I would argue, though, that kids are not necessarily the ONLY important thing for which one might need to take extended leave at some point.

A couple of years ago, my grandfather got sick. Or rather, my grandfather started to lose his marbles. My grandmother has been sick for awhile, but her health has also gotten progressively worse. Just before Christmas this past year, my grandmother ended up in the hospital following a stroke. Getting time off to see her wasn’t hard at all, as I have an awesome boss and amazing coworkers. I also have a sick time policy that includes grandparental care in its stipulations, so I didn’t have to eat up my vacation time. While I only utilized a couple of days to go out east, check on everyone, and then head home, I could likely take more time to assist if I needed to. The amount of time would overwhelmingly be determined by the amount of sick time and vacation time I have saved, as tending to sick relatives is a valid reason to be out of work per our policies. In short, our leave time, though seemingly shitty to parents, treats all employees the same. Which is to say, parents are not put on a pedestal that the childfree don’t have equal access to.  

One of the staples of individual work places, cities, states, or whole countries that have comprehensive family leave programs is that the program isn’t actually “family” oriented. It is “child” oriented. Sure, a new mother can take 18 months off to tend to her newborn baby. But more often than not, someone wanting to take six months to help their mother through breast cancer is going to run afoul of work place regulations, since that kind of family is often not covered by long-term-leave programs. Hell, someone needing to take a year off because they, personally, are battling cancer may well find that doing so while getting paid is nearly impossible. In this country, FMLA covers all qualifying family members equally, but is completely unpaid unless the company chooses otherwise. Most corporations with paid long-term-leave programs offer only parental leave, not actual family, caregiving, or long-term medical leave. If I am going to be expected to cover down on a new mother’s daily taskings for upwards of a year or more, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that I be able to help a family member through an illness without obliterating my vacation time. Particularly since I can already assure my own coworkers that I will never be leaving them because I’ve had a baby.  

I have no issues with mothers or fathers, biological or adoptive, taking time off after their newborn nuggets have arrived. I do have issue when that time off comes not only at my expense, often tethering me to tasks and hours that are not usually my own, but comes with absolutely no equitable compensation recognizing that parental leave affects significantly more than just parents. As I’ve already said, kids are important. So important, in fact, that the childfree routinely pay monetarily for them, despite not having them. We pay property taxes that go to school systems we will never send our children to. We watch as our friends with children are routinely granted tax breaks, sometimes in the thousands of dollars, that we will never be granted. The usual excuse given when, and if, we have the audacity to complain about the financial burden that children place on those who don’t have them, is that children are our future and it’s society’s job to tend to them.

Fuck that. Children aren’t OUR future. Children are the future of the people who have them. And that’s fine. Expecting children to be the future, in some grand and great way, is placing an awfully unfair burden on them well before their brains have even begun to develop. I don’t want them to be anything other than whatever they are supposed to be when they grow up- whether that’s President, a teacher, a stay-at-home parent, or a caregiver for old farts who didn’t have kids of their own, like me. Those kids who do grow up to take care of old farts who didn’t have their own kids are, I’m sure, amazing people who were raised by wonderful humans. Humans who did not have those kids thinking to themselves, “someday, my noble child is going to take care of selfish childfree people who didn’t have kids of their own.” No, they had their kids thinking, “I want a kid,” or “I need someone to take care of me when I get old.”

Yes, some children will grow up to be the future. They will care for humanity and the planet and make everyone’s lives better places. Just as many will grow up to be average people whose only serious influence will be on their friends and family. That’s okay, it doesn’t make them bad people. But it also doesn’t make them people I should have to worship from the moment they are born. Yet that is precisely how society is set up. From parental tax breaks to property tax to calls for parental leave to the expectation that the childfree will be willing to take the vacation days that don’t correspond with summer break, children are to be treated with an odd sense of reverence by absolutely everyone. Including the people they don’t belong to.

It’s a concept that is rapidly losing tenability in a country where roughly half of all young women are living without a spouse or partner and only 54% of women of childbearing age have actually had a child. Of the ones who haven’t, only about half actually want to. You cannot ostracize a full quarter of the women of a population and expect to get much changed in the way of policies. Particularly when that quarter of the female population is likely going to be overly represented in the workforce and in leadership roles, owing to the fact that they’ve never taken time off for children. If we’re serious about comprehensive parental leave policies, at a federal level, we need to have a real conversation about the fact that those policies come at a detriment to an outsized chunk of the working population, and they dramatically minimize the definition of “family” in this country.

Parents need time off when a baby is born. But so do people whose spouses are sick. So do people whose grandparents are dying. So do people whose siblings are struggling after rehab. So do parents whose adult children are struggling after an accident. So do people who are battling brain tumors that take more than 12 weeks to conquer. Caregiving is no easy task, no matter the age of the human you are caring for, and the idea that the only people deserving of “special” time off to give care to those who matter to them are new parents, is completely absurd. If we want paid parental leave in this country it’s time to reframe the argument. This isn’t about parents needing time to take care of new babies.

This is about humans needing time to take care of other humans.

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.