#like philosophers at the fucking forum
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wink of god
#helluva boss#helluva striker#vivienne medrano#vivziepop#my art#the sow#ngl i've long harbored the chewing suspicion that striker's backstory would be treated as a gag or punchline#yet this one brush of deific finger over surface waters of ever-brewing striker aficionado community discourse#( discourse like what the greek philosophers had in their there forums )#has dispelled such worries#oh we will get that tragic backstory#and it's gonna fucking tear going in
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rewatching gravity falls as an adult is insane bc i actually have media literacy now. which i didnt when i was 13 watching the ending air. and everything hits so much harder now bc it makes so much more SENSE knowing everything and being able to understand each character's motivation more in depth. my partner and i are abt to watch weirdmageddon 3 and i am so going to cry about stan again and again and again
#vv.txt#he just wants his FAMILY!!!!#and mabel just wants her FAMILY and SAFETY and to have FUN WITH HER FRIENDS#(we've been talking about how stupid hating mabel is bc it completely misses the entire point of her character#)#watching this kinda drunk with my partner is like being philosophers in a greek forum. or whatever thr fuck#god#the way alex hirsch voicing like every character within mableland shows how much bill is everpresent there....
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the thing about classes like "ethics" and "lit crit", especially at a freshman level, especially-especially for non-humanities students, is that they are not there to teach you A Skill Set.
if you're the kind of person who's interested in taking Lit Crit, you honestly probably know how to do most of the stuff that you are learning in Lit Crit 101 already. you know how to do basic text analysis. you know how to pick out threads in what the author is trying to say. you likely already know how to analyze a text from a feminist perspective or a Marxist one or a Christian one, even if you don't hold to any of those ideologies. if you're the kind of person who's interested in taking Lit Crit and you're on tumblr? you probably already know how to write a good piece of meta, and Lit Crit is just meta with more citations.
similarly, if you're the kind of person who's interested in taking Ethics, you honestly probably know how to do most of the stuff that you're going to learn in Ethics 101. You likely know how to analyze a situation, make an ethical/ideological argument, cite both philosophical and sociological arguments in your favour, and defend your position against critique. if you're on rat!tumblr, Ethics is just the endless fucking Trolley Problem argument with extra steps and more citations.
the purpose of Ethics 101/Lit Crit 101 is not to teach you these things.
a 101-level humanities class is the academic equivalent of LURK MOAR. it's the equivalent of reading the 1000-page Vriska Quarantine Thread before jumping into the Vriska Quarantine Thread. if you don't lurk on the forum thread, you're going to make arguments other people have made before, thinking they're your own original ideas, and you will get laughed out of the room. once you've gotten past the 101-level course, you've learnt the lingo, and you've got a good understanding of what's been said and what hasn't? you can add to the conversation in a meaningful way.
writing off entire humanities fields as being pointless bullshit because you had to take a 101-level class for your unrelated major is uh... let's be kind, and say 'willfully ignorant'.
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hey can i get uhhh 25 for claus please 🎤 🎤🎤 🎤
HIYA DANA
25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?
When I first played Mother 3 I cried about him. I've done like 5 playthroughs since, and cried about him every time. My actual very first impression of Claus was some fanart of him dying in Lucas' arms, which I encountered in someone's signature banner on an old Pokemon forum in like 2008 - as you & I know, that's just the kinda shit we all did back then! Some of his last words were quoted on it, basically spoiled the entire game in on fell swoop. I was so mystified & captivated by this image that it lived rent free in my head for a few years until I finally played the game myself. Being spoiled had no bearing on the immersion or emotional impact. I still got my brains irreconcilably scrambled, and have been suffering from Long COVID-Clausteen ever since.
For a while I was blackpilled like "ok there's not actually much in the game itself to go off of, Claus is more a piece of symbolism & extension of Lucas' internal turmoil than a whole character in his own right, also he has to stay dead, otherwise it's disrespecting the story," and I was so fucking wrong on all counts. The shit going on between the lines with this kid is like The Bible 2. Ancient Greek philosophers could not begin to unpack the layers of grief and trauma and hope and love and allegory that Mr Itoi packed into this fucked up little redneck child. He is endlessly fun & fascinating to pick apart and analyze and deconstruct and reconstruct, almost like a cybernetic chimera or something, or maybe a model dinosaur, idk. If you make him twenty he becomes the funniest sweetest saddest guy of all time. If you make him thirty I need to go take a walk about it. Why is his hair orange. I didn't ask for blxrpy (nonbinary form of blorpy) but now I'm stuck with him forever. His full name is Doctor Claus Jackson "Billy Dinner" Westwood Motherthree and I should probably take him out back and shoot him already before the situation grows any more dire (read: I will never do this).
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//I just wanted to say, back in my Black Butler days (Which was WAY back like 2009-2019) I used to be a HUGE fan of Ash/Angela in particular, they were my first muse and for that, they still hold an EXTREMELY special place in my heart and sometimes I honestly kinda wanna go back to writing them lol
//They were my favourite chracter, and Alois is/was a close second, I wrote cringey fanfic, had based and created a whole OC off a kinda "Combination" of them who I still use today, and also RPed him for a time back on a few ancient forums and Google+ when that was a thing still (I'm ancient lmao)
//but overall the former ESPECIALLY barely had ever gotten any content - especially good, genuine content made from love rather than half spite "Look at this asshole" - and putting aside my surprise that the Black Butler fandom is still alive and kicking, i just stumbled across your blog and while I'm not sure entirely what Christlois is about (Please do feel free to give an explanation!) I just wanna say, a combination of my favourite things from my Black Butler days: Being Ash/Angela, Alois, THAT SEASON ONE AND TWO GET SOME ATTENTION, SERIOUSLY THEYRE STILL SO FUCKING GOOD!!!! ill be honest the direction it took with season three onwards kinda was a part of why i fell out of love with the series and just the existence of catholicism/priest aesthetics as a whole lmao)
//For the longest time the memory of the Black Butler fandom had left a VERY bitter taste in my mouth since being around in it's heyday as an Ash/Angela RPer was certainly an experience lol, but just looking through your blog, though I don't exactly know what it's about, is such a sweet taste of nostalgia that while I don't exactly find myself missing the community, I miss the characters and story established by the first two seasons greatly. :,) It's kinda odd to say but I was almost certain that Ash/Angela would just fade into obscurity with offhand mentions at best, no one to love and care for them, and so glad to see that someone is caring for them where I couldn't anymore!
//While I still find myself coming back to the priestisms (Leonard's 1.3 verse.... *Cough*) after all these years, it's honestly been a nice reminder on just how much these Ash/Angela and Alois have impacted my writing, both in muse writing and creative! Either way, thank you so much for your care put into this and please pardon the long message sfkdhbfkhkdfh
HI HELLO THIS IS SO SWEET OH MY GOD!!!
Where do I even begin? First of all THANK YOU!! I love these angels so bad, and YOU understand. They're a fascinating evil and a very interesting character concept. It's really cool that you roleplayed with them and I bet you had a ton of interesting headcanons and developments, more so than we got from the show! Because the thing is there is not a character as neglected by the fandom and the media as Ash and Angela. For their presence in Season 1, they are never talked about...
And that's not fair! They're so fascinating!! And thank you so much for the ask, genuinely, lenght doesn't bother me at all, and it's nice my mildly sacreligious blog brought some feeling of nostalgia.
ONTO THE INFO DUMPING! You're going to love this!
So Christlois is basically the universe of one specific fic, that being this one , written by me and co-written by @eemoo1o . It's basically a story about Alois turning his back on Claude and instead being swayed to Ash's side, becoming Ash's little puppet as opposed to Queen Victoria. It's mythological, theological, philosophical, and also really really disturbing JFJKSDF there's sebaclaude, sebastian being ciel's weird dad, alois being in-characteredly toyed with (poor boy), and ashgela being a total bastard.
here are some other goodies you might have seen, some animatics about it: part 1, part 2, and an anime opening, and an original song piece (I know...I'm very intense about this hgshdf).
Oh, and this! its unrelated but also I think you'd enjoy it!!:
youtube
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Ok what Sophia said in lrb is literally just so fucking real sorry LET CLARA BE FULL OF HATE AND SPITE….even in diurnal ending shes a teenage girl with a will of steel and a brain full of birds ok she does notttt just let go of things. I think she loves to stand outside dankovskys window and stare daggers into him in hopes of making his head combust into flame .And he just like closes the blinds and then she’ll run to another window .and if she sees him in the street she’ll catch up and start berating him with philosophical quandaries like socrates in the forum but it just devolves into her throwing pebbles at him.And in artemys case I think he tries to like give her food or something but she starts hitting at him and yelling and things and calling him a murderer and all that good stuff.and then he will leave the door unlocked so she can steal from his cupboard .I love Clara dont youu..
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i think the reason it gets under my skin so much when digital communities, even ones i have serious ethical and philosophical objections to, get mischaracterized is because, like, if you find these groups to be threatening, it's not a threat you can effectively mitigate if you're laboring under a shitty premise.
like, "incels worship elliot rodger as a god" sounds very "muslims in new jersey were cheering on 9/11" to me.
a particularly egregious example on the incel topic, this vox article that comments on the isla vista massacre:
The attacks were a turning point for the incel community. The killer’s posts on PUAHate, a popular online forum among incels frustrated that pickup artist techniques weren’t working for them, rendered the term “incel” toxic. It was the final blow in the war for inceldom’s soul — the moment when ReformedIncel knew his side had lost.
“The thing about Elliot Rodger is that he used that word. And that pretty much devastated the original incel community,” ReformedIncel tells me.
but the thing is, the word doesn't occur at all in his digital footprint, nor the manifesto, and you can check for yourself if you're unwilling to take my word for it.
which, i don't know, is a bit of a glaring oversight on whoever couldn't be bothered to use crtl+f and nominally fact check the guy he interviewed.
it's not just this group, but people fuck up the incel story more often than they don't
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Also with regards to the server changes:
I need people to understand. POLOL was never intended to become a megaserver. The point is not accumulating raw count. The point is accumulated interested and integrated community.
When POLOL started, it came from people like 2po and loljackles screaming at the non-christian people in the fandom that dared to pick up on the use of neoplatonic philosophy, alchemy, jung or the spiral narrative, screaming stuff about cult and paganism and generally being a bunch of christian pearl clutching cunts.
We didn't wanna deal with it, we wanted to intelligently discuss in peace, and we built a server.
We invite other people to that server. We are happy to genuinely explain this to interested people with which our emotional energy investment is actually respected. We've built an entire community on the back of this premise with more than 100 free originator accounts even in the paywall structure.
But it's not about accumulating that number. I don't give a fuck about having 500 lurkers. I'd rather have 10 contributors than 1000 lurkers. A few lurkers are fine because people are shy. But then per my last post you get the haters and two faces in there, and I ain't got time.
The paywall was the natural solution. And even our shy people reached out to get in past that if they were actually, you know, involved and interested in the server and paid attention to the notice like 100 other people achieved, which makes it real awkward when a subtweeter shows up days late ~hinting to hope to get in.
We don't want that shit man. We want to be able to open forum threads and discuss shit in good faith and actual interest. We want people that are friends, not assholes that just want to be here because they realized it's the It place to be. We didn't mean to become the It place. We don't want to be the It place. We want to be a bunch of friends, alchemists, neoplatonic philosophers, nerds, and curious people having fun with a good text, not be part of your petty cult of personality wars.
So I need people to get it through their head. We don't care if we get big. I literally just cut out 4/5 of the server by choice. If you choose to pay the $5/mo rent, you're contributing to maintaining the community culture's safety and quite frankly have a FUCKTON of content between streams, events, the infinite fic and rec, the meta discussion, the challenges, stickers and whatever else. I know people who charge $5/mo to join their server, be their friend, and that's it, that's their content, so let's not get dramatic like i personally invented patreon or integrations as a machiavellian scheme or whatever hysterical hallucinations 2po and his clique will try to make look anything other than hilarious. Guys, calm your tits. $5/mo for your hate blog content is a steal. Get with the times. Or move on to find new clickbait hate fodder to tell lies about, since your time here is about over anyway.
This is it. This is how it's gonna be now. People showing up years late to the party after giving me years of shit, realizing I've been right the whole time, you get to pay your dues to be part of this clubhouse. We cultivated an amazing community, and you guys don't get to fuck it up.
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Seven Days in Purgatory [Review]
Today I'm reviewing the dashington WIP "Seven days in Purgatory" by the author named I* also know in the COG forums as "Sel_Lee".
This piece is presented as a kind of psychological thriller, where the protagonist is an amnesiac person, now trapped in an adorable little house with their supposed partner.
I must admit that as a premise, it's certainly original and interesting, and I'm looking forward to see where it all goes.
CHAPTER 1
So the MC wakes up in what seems to be a bedroom, with the big difference that they are surrounded by medical equipment.
Not creeepy at all.
So what we get to know (Which is not told to us by the narrator but by the only other person we can interact with) is that we had some car accident, and this is why we been recovering at home. In Finland. Because that's totally what people do when their signifcant other falls into a coma. Nothing suspicious here.
So we get to choose our name as players, or we can have our totally-not-sus partner to remind us of it.
I'm squinting at you Anthony.
At that moment is obvious that our memory is clearly muddled. Some of the things that we seem to "remember" add ups to what our partner has been saying, but once again the memories are too confused and muddled.
I'm totally getting this vibe of fake security, for the whole ambiance the narrative puts us in. And the back that the MC seem to look rather unhealthy is clearly putting me off. I think I get the eerie vibes not only from the partner, but for the MC themselves.
There's some weird dissonance in there.
We go to sleep, and we have a psychedelic dream that takes us to the next chapter.
CHAPTER 2
Well we wake up in the most violent way possible, but darling is there to make sure we okay.
At that moment, the MC is clearly having some weird mental deluded state. I love the smell of past trauma in the morning, what can I say.
That the two characters were in a deep relationship and it's not lie, its quite obvious. Now the question is, if it was a healthy one.
MC has a memory place. Now given what happened, that's a big red flag to me. Like maybe I'm getting paranoid, but I'm getting the unreliable narrator vibes here.
Not to say this dude mind palace is complete mess and all over the place. I call on the guy being a complete psycho. I call it already.
This could be one of those "Who is trapped with who?" situation quite quickly. But I digress.
Okay so this time we are getting actual memories. That we have to believe are real. It's good to know that the MC wasn't exactly the most social person in there. But honestly I would feel the same with having to work with assholes.
There's this sudden quotes in the middle of the narrative, that are totally putting me off, but I mean it as a good thing. It almost feels like a someone reading a play out loud.
Freud's bullshit jokes are always appreciated.
Okay now we are going deep. Seems that the MC was quite the philosophical special potato. This still creeps me out.
I'm calling a tomato in the mirror. I'm calling it.
Hubbie didn't like to talk about other people it seems.
Now it's Queen time sprinkled with a bit of identity crisis.
You gonna call me genre savvy here, but those two are too cultured in such a modern setting. I read enough stuff, to say this smells fishy.
Okaaaaaaay, big reveal. Hubbie says he works for the FBI.
So you telling me, we have a prison nurse and a FBI analyst, living together in some isolated Finland cabin. And that's totallly normal.
Why is a federal agent out of the country? This is putting me off big time.
Well one thing is for sure. FBI hubbie is a horny animal.
And after a bit of Vivaldi we go back to the memory palace, to see what fucked stuff we are finding this time.
There's nothing like a room full of bodies and some dramatic castle at the top of the sea.
Psychotic bird killing. It's a good way to end the chapter.
CHAPTER 3
And we start with a Fairytale, as a way to emulate the obvious daddy issues along with some old daddy homophobia. So now we get even more trauma, it seems.
Now we get to explore more onto this whole social paradigma on the MC, trough the years of parental abuse.
So after a creppy tour around the nightmare cabin and some digging, we get listen to the enormous bird of wisdom.
Then I'm presented with some deep questions, and ofc I gotta choose what kind of kinks is the MC in. I'm a woman of a culture after all.
WELL IT'S GOOD TO KNOW THE MC IS SOME KINKY MOTHERFUCKER.
Thank you bird of wisdom.
To this point it's rather obvious to me, that those two end together, bonding over the past family trauma.
Anthony is being hella nice, but with the whole setting it's givng me some deep dissonance vibe. Almost as if the man is trying to hide something from the MC. Or maybe just being wary? Who knows.
Night never comes huh. So they are truly up there.
Now we have this little romantic picnic.
And now for the next dish, a bit of bloody food. I love how the MC can be rather child with it.
That was the creepiest exchanging of vows ever. Is this going to be some sort of psycho duo of love?
And with this totally normal interaction, we finish the chapter.
FINAL TOUGHTS
Well I wasn't expecting for this review to be this long, but it happened.
Now, it's obvious this IFs is not for everybody. But the author already warned about some degree of lack of player agency (unlike other) so one cannot truly complain.
Now as per my personal opinion. I been thinking deeply about what to say. This is quite something. This IF, this story, it's special. I'm not saying is the best thing ever or anything, but it has this vibe, this aura, that makes it shine between all the other works.
What is obvious to me, is that this is no amateur author. The way the narrative is flowing, how a lot of elements are described, there's a consistency there, almost like a rythm.
I have to admit I became fascinated by the story that it's been playing in front of my eyes. If the author is doing something that I consider is vital, is that they are trasmiting the feelings and the vibes of what it happening quite properly.
I will say it, it's been a while since I read an IF with this deep level of emotional inmersion, and I'm satisfied by it. I enjoyed the whole reading process, since the start to the end. It's a truly curated play, and I have doubts about it.
The setting is confusing, it's murky, and that's a great feeling when the story is about an amnesiac MC. You know there's something in there, almost like as I said before, we are not getting the whole perspective on it. This reminds me of an expresion that I read on a Japanese VN "You cannot truly hurt the moon, because you are unable to see it's truth form. So you will end stabbing the moon's reflection against the lake instead."
So we lack about of information, but the author manages to pull it properly, and it doesn't become a bother. On the contrary, it's like a puzzle slowly being completed, and you just want more and more pieces.
I like how the narrative goes into themes, and into situations that a lot of authors are afraid to go in. And I love to be able to look and analyze the psyche of the two actors in this play.
So I hope I can read more of this in a future, since this is a truly well done piece.
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subposting
i think the trinity is less weird polytheism as much as it's a giant "shut the fuck up and move on" that lost its context.
Like there were actual, uncomplicated polytheists in early Christianity. There were also actual, uncomplicated unitarians. There were people who thought Jesus was just human, was more like an angel, was more like some human possessed by God, was two people, one divine one mortal, that Jesus was literally a demigod like Herakles, that Jesus was just adopted, etc.
There were a *lot* of these arguments and a lot of stupid shit flinging. There was an internal, political need to develop an orthodoxy to avoid just falling apart entirely. Regardless of the truth of the religion, the facts about the political landscape and simple material intellectual problems (like, needing to not be defeated in apologetics) the early church faced were banal and something they managed to overcome.
One of these issues was how the proto-Orthodoxy compromised on the christology question. Instead of schizmatically leading into marcionite or ebionite or whatever christianity, just, whatever. It's everything, it's also nothing, it's a mystery. Understand it however you want, just repeat the formula to other (guest) christians because We Are Done Arguing About This. When you got the later heresies like Arianism the whole bloody issue isn't that they're Wrong per se (though that's also an issue because Christians at this time are trying to justify the legitimacy of appropriating Jewish religion, so they need to be better Jews than the Jews so to speak) it's that they're not playing along with the question that almost divided Christianity into a million feuding pieces like an anarchist collective.
eventually people forgot that and started to seriously believe the compromise literally without contextualizing it and sort of lost the plot entirely by the time the Armenians, Syrians, and Copts split from orthodoxy.
Like personally I think a serious, sober christianity that took itself and its historical context seriously as a player in a competitive field would probably understand itself as either unitarian or closer to Islam's christology. That's maybe beside the point though. There was considerable debate, often quite miserable, in the early church and trinitarianism is the result of centuries of the equivalent of stupid forum arguments that never died only the forum was an actual forum and no one was literate or knew the big picture the academia that developed *because of these debates in the first place* has the luxury of putting together. It's that trinitarianism the "whatever, it doesn't really matter, can we move on?" take in its historical context, not plantonist philosopher-kings conceiving an esoteric Herakles Judaikos, I'm pretty sure.
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Change my mind: Jesus was not an interesting moralist and the Bible is not an interesting moral text, philosophically speaking. via /r/atheism
Change my mind: Jesus was not an interesting moralist and the Bible is not an interesting moral text, philosophically speaking.
While getting a Philosophy degree (why, yes, you may stop reading when someone says that), it was regularly brought up that Jesus and the Bible are considered some of the more common examples of how religion can produce interesting moral thought -- even from a secular point of view.
Personally, even when I was a religious person, there was a massive distinction in my mind between the Bible and, say, the Nicomachean Ethics or, hell, even literary novels (Wuthering Heights is a far more interesting ethical thought experiment than anything in the Bible).
I can see why Christians want that status for their faves, since Buddhist and other religions have earned it (though not to the extent some may think), but the fact is... It could easily be argued that Jesus and the Bible not only have been used as justifications for the worst atrocities in history, they are somehow also not allowed on the list of "dangerous philosophy texts," such as Plato's Republic (which, if read literally and not as an esoteric thought experiment, is a manual for the worst tyranny).
As a casual atheist, even one totally comfortable talking about religion with theists, I am fucking tired of being expected to treat Jesus like some ethical genius or the Bible like a bedrock text to western morality or political philosophy.
Edit: just in case a replier isn't aware, "change my mind" is always meant ironically lol. I'm up for discussion! But mostly I'm posting this out of exhaustion with Christians, which this is uh... well, this is a forum for, so they say.
Submitted July 12, 2022 at 07:52PM by No-Imagination-3060
(From Reddit https://ift.tt/O4QfZ3H)
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What your favorite comic book writer says about you:
John Byrne: When you say you wish comics would go back to the 80′s and 90′s this is what you mean. Also, you like to forget he went nuts on a forum once.
Mark Millar: You are a walking contradiction. You love really fucked up edgy stories and you like good stories with good morals as well.
Garth Ennis: You are the edgelord supreme. You also like war stories and the Punisher.
Frank Miller: You are one of two people:
1.You are an edgy 14 year old who just discovered TDKR. You proclaim him to be the greatest, edgiest writer. You also like to pretend his post Sin City work doesn’t exist.
2. You’ve read his other work besides TDKR and can appreciate how he can go in depth with some characters. This is before he went nuts btw.
Pau Dini: You are a chad with good taste.
Dwayne McDuffie: You like great well written diverse characters. You use him as the gold standard of writing diverse characters.
Jason Aaron: You have shit taste.
Ta Nehisi Coates: You are black, and you love being black, and tell everyone the first chance you get how black you are.
Alan Moore: You are 1 of 2 people:
1. You either have only ever read Watchmen and think he’s the greatest thing to grace comics ever and everyone must bow down and worship him. and believe Watchmen should be the norm.
2. Or you have read his other works and like his depth to comics but also understand he is not a god to be worshipped but just a writer. And that watchmen should not be the norm and Tom Strong is a much better embrace of superhero comics.
Grant Morrison: You are an alt chick in her 20′s that likes weird, trippy esoteric stories with a deeper meaning.
Kurt Busiek: You love fun straightforward super hero stories that are very well done.
Geoff Johns: You have great nostalgia for Barry Allen and Hal Jordan and silver age nostalgia. You like fun, expanding stories but that’s all you like. You cannot write philosophical stories to save your life.
Mariko Tamaki: You really like social commentary despite how dull and poorly done it is. Also, you obsess over food a lot.
Jonathan Hickman: You have the patience of a saint or you have nothing going on in your life.
Greg Weisman: You love well written planned out organic stories and you love Shakespeare.
Christopher Priest: You like well written stories alongside being black. And in depth character arcs that kind of peter out at the end.
Gail Simone: You love her earlier works and pretend her post 2011 works are still good even though they’re not.
Chuck Dixon: You love gritty crime stories, action stories and espionage. You are also probably a conservative.
Larry Hama: You love military adventures and are obsessed with ninjas.
Charles Soule: You love incorporating how the legal system works into your stories. Otherwise you are pretty good compared to your contemporaries.
Vita Ayala: You are woman in your 30′s who thinks she’s hip with the kids but is not. You desperately cling onto your youth. You use Twitter way too much.
Tom King: You are a masochist. You and Tom King desperately need to see a therapist.
Nick Spencer: You like smaller street level character stories. You cannot write event titles and social commentary to save your life. You should stick to street level stories.
Mark Waid: You like fun wholesome stories. You also cannot write social commentary to save your life.
Chip Zdarsky: You are competent at super hero writing. You maintain this equilibrium of being good but never great.
Gene Luen Yang: You like Chinese mythology and the “Asian American Experience” TM. In fact that’s all you seem to like.
Brian Michael Bendis: You are 1 of 2 people.
1. You love his older work and how he handles street level characters. You also acknowledge he went to shit as a writer once he got to work on the Avengers.
2. You blindly read his work no matter what. Even though he has gotten worse as a writer. You believe dialogue is more important than visuals. You love his walls of text to the point you would read a novel by him. But you are too insecure to read novels because that’s for grown ups and you are still mentally 14 years old.
Warren Ellis: You like stories that are fucked up but also have something poignant and deeper to say. Also, you like to say the word, “fuck” a lot.
#comic book writers#parody#mark waid#chip zdarsky#gene luen yang#brian michael bendis#john byrne#mark millar#grant morrison#garth ennis#warren ellis#frank miller#paul dini#dwayne mcduffie#jason aaron#ta nehisi coates#alan moore#kurt busiek#geoff johns#mariko tamaki#jonathan hickman#greg weisman#christopher priest#gail simone#chuck dixon#larry hama#charles soule#vita ayala#tom king#nick spencer
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Why The Crows Being Teenagers Is Actually Perfectly Realistic
There’s a TL;DR are the end because wow I like to rant.
I lightly discuss the general situations they’re all in to explore how they are frighteningly mature and competent, but it’s not particularly depressing or descriptive, it’s definitely lighter than the books
I thought about this post with a joke first: “People who think that Six of Crows is unrealistic because they’re so young clearly have not spent much time with traumatized honors students.”
It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the point stands.
But I decided that, hm, actually, I could make a point about this. I totally agree with the aging up of the characters in the Shadow and Bone show, but when people straight up say that the books are wrong or unrealistic for having a young crew, I get annoyed, and here’s why (other than me reading the books for the first time when I was 13 and thinking ‘Huh okay, I see it’ and now being lowkey offended when people say they ignore it for being unrealistic):
On Inej
- At first I thought Inej’s wisdom and general demeanor was one of the most unrealistic things in the book
- When I thought about it longer, I was like “Actually, she’s 16, right? I’ve sent some of the most lyrical philosophy trying to help my friends while in high school. My friends have done the same. It’s valid.”
- Frankly, teenagers love hard-hitting philosophical truths. They love repeating what they’ve read or heard in movies and in books and from family stories. They love sharing little bits of wisdom they have come up with
- Inej’s ability to hear and understand philosophy and wisdom that she was surrounded by for 14 straight years and then sit on it and elaborate it for her friends to understand, or even just to piss them off in Kaz’s case?
- Teenagers have that. They do it. So, Inej’s Wisdom passes, to me. It’s valid.
As for her being calm
- You know how everyone jokes that Kaz seems calm on the outside but when you get to his POV he’s like “What the fuck” at the Van Eck house or just straight up “Huh, is this revenge for making tree jokes” at the Djel River thingy in the Ice Court?
- Inej is like that, too. And she gets angry, and she gets confused, or exhausted.
- AKA every quiet kid ever. Like, are you kidding? Have you ever been in a situation in which it’s literally chaos all around you, people are screaming and things are being destroyed (think middle school classroom with bitchy long term substitute and even worse students), and you’re just, calm? You pick up your things, you do what you need to do?
- That’s Inej. Like, what else is she gonna do? She’s smart enough to know that panicking won’t help anyone, and so she just rides it out. Internally she might be like “Why is this happening” but frankly, her being quiet and controlled in most situations is probably a coping mechanism and I respect that
- Pretty sure this is also based on the fact that the Suli have no land for their own and constantly have to keep moving. It might align with generational trauma, I’m sure someone could explain it better than me, but being able to keep your cool while constantly having to change and adapt to new situations, in, say, a country with hellfire politics and no land to call your own? Seems like a hereditary trait that could be useful in Ketterdam, although it’s sad.
On Inej’s abilities
- Simone Biles started training when she was 6 and went to the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships when she was 16, where she qualified in all the events.
- There are videos of people walking over tightropes as young as three years old. We know Inej didn’t start that young, but not only was she naturally talented at it, but she spent a lot of time practicing. I think it’s valid. Plus, some of her family members do some pretty crazy things in her flashbacks, because that’s the whole point of what they do.
- Youngest person to beat American Ninja Warrior was 16 year old Vance Walker
- Inej has a variety of of tools that help her wall climb, and while it’s true that she started young and got good really fast, she already had a history of physical work that would help her, and from what we can gleam from the book, a surprising amount of free time in which she was actively encouraged to learn everything she could.
So that’s Inej! I think her skills are perfectly possible for someone with her history and situation. It’s true that she’s naturally skilled, but that’s not actually all that unusual. And her demeanor and wisdom do fit in with what a lot of teenagers are like and the circumstances she was brought up in
Onto Kaz!
- One thing I hear about is that Kaz is too smart for not having gone to school and also too young to know all that he does
- Do you all KNOW how many self-taught people there have been in this world? The word for people who are self-taught is autodidacts, and honestly a huge amount of famous people apply. Like many, many other people in history (there’s a whole list of them in Wikipedia), he had an vested interest in a field and he learned all he could. Sure, those fields were magic tricks and math, but still.
- Suddenly I have a lot of thoughts
- Okay, think, hyperfixations. That’s essentially what Kaz’s thing with magic tricks was, right? Have any of you ever spent time with an eight year old that clearly really, really loves dinosaurs? Those kids can spout names and facts and identify them by their skeletons and frankly know more than I ever will. Kaz’s was magic tricks. All kids are special.
- Kaz continued working on magic tricks and practicing them for years, so, I think that gets a pass.
- As for the math! Look, a Fact Of Life is that some kids are just Like That, whether it be possibly from neurodivergence or other factors:
- Flo and Kay Lyman are twins with Autism who basically have the calendar of EVER memorized. Kaz memorizing card decks is sensible, and these ladies don’t need to look up anything to figure it out, so Kaz doing sums inside his head seems plausible. His “photographic memory’ isn’t impossible, although the term itself might be incorrect.
- Katherine Johnson who worked at NASA (yes, the lady from Hidden Figures), was so good at math that she was in high school by age 10 and went to college at age 15. It’s true that she had some teaching, but 1. There’s no evidence Kaz had absolutely no schooling, even if it was just at home with books and 2. Kaz was 9 when he came to Ketterdam, and after Jordie died, when he wasn’t surviving, he was learning.
- Human calculator is a term that is applied to children a lot and there’s definitely plenty of videos showing how smart these kids are and them doing mental math easily, which he does in the books
- He had a LOT of pressure on him to figure out all he could, and if he wanted to move forward, he was going to have to learn a lot. He spent hours practicing magic tricks, for all we know he spent hours practicing math too. We know Jordie was a bit of a bookworm too, so Kaz from a young age probably already had a reason to learn. Personally, a lot of my love for books was inspired by my older sibling when I was younger
- Young people are adaptable. Kaz is incredibly adaptable. The term prodigy exists because of people like him through history.
- As for him being rational, there’s no other way to survive. Some of the greatest soldiers in history have been very, very young, and very, very smart. It’s true tacticians are generally considered to be older, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been very young ones.
- A lot of the generals I found were like, 19 years old, but Kaz is 1. not a general and 2. in a place where young people take up the mantle really, really quickly, and frankly it’s been like that for a long time. I still think this passes. This isn’t relevant but William the Conqueror was apparently called “The Bastard”?
- Frankly, underground communities of thieves probably don’t go around publishing their escapades so to me it makes sense that I can’t just look up “famous young thieves” and get anything that makes sense, but I did try
- Y’all I tried to do research on youngest escape artists since I think Kaz qualifies and I found myself in what I think is a magicians forum? It’s from 2002-ish and I feel like I’ve just found a relic. I can’t definitely prove they’re all saying the truth, but some of the people there talk about 10-11 year olds at magic camps, so, it’s not impossible for this to be a skill Kaz learned really young, particularly when he made a habit of following around magicians
- I think he passes the realism check overall
For the other Crows:
- Nina being so proficiently multilingual makes sense to me, because she’s been in the Little Palace almost her entire life with all the best teachers they could afford at her disposal. Some people just click with languages. One such would be Timothy Doner, who spoke 23 languages at 16.
- Nina is a child soldier. She of course can handle the battlefield, although I imagine there’s a degree of trauma that she has to deal with (although it’s true that most of her work was always meant to angle her towards being a spy).
- Jesper was taught to shoot from a young age by Aditi, who was likely incredibly proficient. Plus, there’s mentions of him and his father being on some sort of frontier at one point in the books, so, it’s likely that Jesper got his fair share of ‘being a child soldier” since he would’ve been 15 or younger. Plus, with being a Fabrikator, he gets a leg up
- Jesper’s smart y’all, he just also likes to have fun
- I am a little terrified by the fact that I looked up ‘youngest sharpshooter’ and found out about a 9 year old girl (Addysson “Addy” Soltau) who can indeed shoot guns, but uh, it does prove my point
- Matthias... I haven’t heard anyone really argue about Matthias. He’s the oldest at 18 and again, he’s essentially a religious child soldier. Of course he would be built af and know how to handle himself in a fight, and in a flashback about meeting Trassel, we’re told that he was actually distanced from the other boys and was the biggest and strongest/smartest of the group. Perhaps not compared to Kaz, but still
- We know how Wylan ended up how he is, so I don’t think i have to defend how he’s both a musical prodigy, good at math, and good at chemistry. Plenty of kids who can’t do one thing will immediately gravitate to a different field (think AP math students who can’t write essays, or those kids who could analyse a book and it’s metaphors in class but didn’t understand geometry).
- Granted he took it far but it’s kinda implied that his father ignored him eventually and what else was Wylan going to do
- I don’t really know how he did chemistry while not being able to read the symbols and stuff, but that’s likely because I’ve never had to learn the way he did and also I really suck at Chemistry, but I refuse to believe that it invalidates his capabilities
Final Thoughts:
- They’re Traumatized Honors Students
- People might say that “it’s unrealistic that all the smart ones somehow ended up together” but again they’re traumatized honors students and those gravitate to each other
- Of course the smart ones ended up together, they’re the ones in those crazy situations precisely because they are prodigies. Nina wouldn’t have met Matthias if she wasn’t skilled and a spy, Kaz wouldn’t have known Inej if she hadn’t been skilled at silence (I can’t explain that one but uh ninjas did/do exist and it IS still a fantasy world). Kaz would have never been a leader of the Dregs in a position to find Jesper if he hadn’t been so determined to rise to the top, and Jesper wouldn’t have been in Ketterdam if his father hadn’t thought that Jesper was smart enough to get that chance.
- You know how those fringe revolutionary artists for new eras end up knowing all knowing each other and even hanging out? That’s them.
- I have decided there is a strong basis for Autistic Kaz, someone who is more studied than me should feel free to explore this.
- I read this book a few years ago, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. It’s about this guy’s experiences as a boy soldier and it’s a painful read so I’m not sure I recommend it as a casual read, but he talked about these young kids being able to actually make competent military strategies and handle warfare. It’s an extreme example of what I’m trying to explain when it comes to them being able to handle the brutality of their situation, but it’s true, essentially
- They are definitely serious, but if you think they’re not teenagers I just, disagree so much. They have moments of lighthearted banter, they make light of their situation, they try to support each other Nina covers it so well in her farewell at the end of Crooked Kingdom: The little rescues of laughing at each others jokes or eating together and just supporting each other, is not only a very human thing, but a very teenager thing.
- Scary experiences that shape us happen all the time, and although for most it’s not the things that the Crows experience, picking each other up is a big part of why they do read as teenagers to me. I’ve seen kids be able to seriously converse about things like being questioned by the police, or being left to their own devices for days at a time, or the general impending doom they all feel, and it’s dark, but they’re also going to joke about silly puns 20 minutes later.
- Teenagers aren’t exempt from terrifying maturity and competence
- Finally: Despite all I said, it’s a fantasy story and doesn’t have to be realistic
In the end, everyone can believe what they want to believe, but this is my case for my opinion.
TL;DR The Crows are all prodigies and a lot of their achievements and capabilities are based in reality and there are real people who actually achieved things like what they’ve done. Messed up prodigies gravitate to messed up prodigies, hence how they all end up together. When it comes to their mental state, most of them have been brought up their entire lives in situations that required for them to problem solve and keep their cool even when things are going to hell.
#my crows#six of crows#six of crows duology#SoC#Kaz Brekker#Inej Ghafa#Jesper Fahey#Nina Zenik#Matthias Helvar#Wylan Van Eck#For traction:#Kanej#It mostly analyses them anyway#child prodogies#character skills#character analysis#shadow and bone netfix#character trauma#The Crows#The Dregs#look I think it's realistic and I'm going to stand by that#Realism In Fantasy#feel free to interact#feel free to reblog#send an ask if you wanna talk about this
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hargrieve’s fic recs — september
happy unnaturally warm autumn! climate change is upon us! I am indoors and I keep reading and reading and reading. I'm kind of going through a kpop phase right now (three guesses as to who my biases are based on the fic below lmao). even though haikyuu did sink its hooks into me for like eight months, I initially started this fic rec series last year to keep track of my wandering hyperfixations, so here we are with my first major fandom swerve of the year! do not worry, haikyuu readers, I will be back for you so soon. season 5 when
(but seriously, txt blogs please hit me up, I am desperate)
@ravenclawboys <3
FANDOMS: HAIKYUU!!, BTS, TOMORROW X TOGETHER
Haikyuu!! recs:
zero to hero by sketchedsmiles
akagin; rated T+; 18.8k words; 1/1; gin pov
superhero au :) civilian gin is saved by masked superhero akagi
i’m a sucker for any and all superhero au’s but this one is especially well-done. i loved gin’s voice and akagi’s characterization and the way everything ties back together in the end :)
featuring miya atsumu who won’t stop chasing superheroes sightings on internet forums and kita shinsuke trying to shut down his posts
BTS recs:
let the waves chase us down by watchtheleaves @noctiluka
namjoon/seokjin/hoseok; rated T+; 5.7k words; 1/1; namjoon pov
summer camp counselor au. namjoon is sick in bed all day
a short but very complete au featuring ot7. one of my favorite things about this fic is that instead of the camp counselor setting being used as a get-together trope, each character (particularly hyung line) really has an established place in this universe
2seok are so sweet to classic overthinking namjoon
love is no big truth by venusghost
vmin, namkook; rated M; 3.6k words; 1/1; namjoon pov
in which an aghast and appalled namjoon can’t stop third-wheeling cosmic soulmates vmin. canon compliant, boy with luv era
“Be the leader of the group, they said. With your temperament, it’ll be easy, they said.“
SHORT HILARIOUS WONDERFUL READ that so captures the essence of both vmin soulmate behavior and kim namjoon’s philosophies on love. and also being in the wrong place at the wrong time
on earth we're briefly gorgeous by notyoongs
hopekook; rated T+; 17.8k words; 1/1; hoseok pov
hogwarts au in which charming hufflepuff quidditch player hoseok is a seventh-year and super shy ex-student jungkook is a ghost who has a big crush on him
as much as this is a cute hopekook fic, it is also a story about growth and spending time with the people you love and finding what makes you happy
kind of sad, as one would expect from a ship where one of them is a dead ghost, but it is very heartwarming. 10/10 cute
over + under by honeyboyyoon
vmin; rated E; 28.6k words; 1/1; taehyung pov
soulmate au where vmin are not soulmates
writer taehyung and the many painful ways in which he loves his not-soulmate jimin
my favorite thing was the imagery in the fic. I’m obsessed with the way the author writes weather and color and sensation into metaphor. pure prose poetry
TXT recs:
you wouldn't do it, but i just might by renaissances
yeonbin; rated T+; 17k words; 1/1; yeonjun pov
canon compliant trainee/pre-debut era. non-linear narrative where half the story is forward on the day that yeonjun’s introduction film was released in 2019 and half the story is in flashbacks
time-skipping narrative done extremely well. a yeonjun character study where he reconciles 1) the fact that he was bighit’s top-ranked legendary trainee, 2) the fact that soobin was named txt’s leader over him, and 3) his feelings for soobin
if any of you were around for when I cried over hatsuna’s “I wish to live in a world” back in march, I felt exactly the same emotions reading this. 10000/10 I love ao3 renaissance’s writing style and pacing and development so much
I feel like if you’ve been in the txt fandom longer than I have (and you definitely have), you’ve already read this
recs I received in my inbox (all for haikyuu!!):
a liar’s truth by internetpistol
sakuatsu; rated E; 50k words; 2/2
summary: “In which Sakusa Kiyoomi is raised to believe that gay people go to hell but then takes one look at Miya Atsumu and thinks, then why the hell did God make them so fucking hot?”
bound by internetpistol
sakuatsu; rated E; 68k words; 3/3
summary: “Miya Atsumu and Sakusa Kiyoomi get cast in a gay film together where they, in the words of The Great Philosopher Rihanna, fell in love in a hopeless place.”
one more time, with feeling by liliapocalypse
sakuatsu; rated T+; 15k words; 1/1
summary: “Kiyoomi has a crush, but there’s just one, tiny problem: he basically malfunctions around his senpai. So when he finds out that his high school rival and now college batchmate is actually a shapeshifter, he swallows his pride for a favor: he asks Atsumu to shapeshift as his crush and be his practice date.”
your ivy grows by sketchedsmiles
matsuhana; rated T+; 11k words; 1/1
summary: “When Hanamaki Takahiro shows up on Matsukawa’s doorstep after being fired from his second job in a row, it’s instinctual for Matsukawa to offer him a place to stay until he gets back on his feet again. // It doesn’t take long for the cracks in Hanamaki’s cheerful and upbeat exterior to appear, and it is up to Matsukawa to keep his best friend from falling over the edge completely.”
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past fic recs
send me a rec!
>> honestly, since these are no longer haikyuu-only lists, if you have any recent faves from your favorite fandoms, go ahead and pop them into my inbox and I will properly tag them when I post
#haikyuu#bts#bangtan sonyeondan#tomorrow x together#txt#haikyuu fic recs#bts fic recs#bangtan fic recs#tomorrow x together fic recs#txt fic recs#akagin#sakuatsu#matsuhana#vmin#namjinseok#namkook#hopekook#yeonbin#hargrieve's fic recs#mine
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✰ [GHOST] BUSTING MAKES ME FEEL GOOD
pairing ⋆ connie springer x fem!reader
synopsis ⋆ you don’t know who’s crazier. your ghost hunting boyfriend or you for even dating him.
warnings ⋆ paranormal encounters, slight ghost coercion, oral sex, vaginal sex, creampie
ꔵ there was no doubt about it, your boyfriend connie was an oddball. like tin hat wearing, crazy conspiracist, dark reddit forum odd. his friends often asked him how he’d bagged a chick like you in the first place and honestly you were curious too. you’d met him at a halloween party your best friend mikasa had thrown. one wild night and two awkward dates later you both became that sickeningly sweet couple that everyone hated to love.
at this point in your relationship you had grown used to connie’s random 3AM messages about some spooky forum he’d found or him sending random true crime articles he wanted you to read. he and his roomates jean and sasha all ran a somewhat popular youtube channel — they called themselves “the phantom philosophers” — where they covered different cryptid and ghost stories sent to them by viewers. they also went on numerous ghost hunts to try and speak or communicate with ghosts. you were always curious about your boyfriend’s odd way of life and even appeared on one of his streams once — his subscribers couldn’t believe he had a girlfriend. so, when connie asked you if you wanted to come along with him, jean, and sasha for a ghost hunt you jumped at the opportunity.
that’s exactly how you found yourself in front of an abandoned church while your boyfriend and his friends began setting up their equipment. tonight they were looking for the ghost of a pastor who secretly ran his own brothel beneath the church. one of the women had turned on him and murdered him while they were having sex. the story seemed completely made up, but connie assured you it was legit.
you watched as connie started setting up his body camera and clipping it to his jacket. “so...anything i can help with?” you asked, rocking back on the heels of your sneakers. connie looked up at you as if he’d forgotten you were there. “huh? oh, no babe you’re fine. just stand there looking pretty.” he replied sweetly. you forced a smile towards him, letting it falter when he went back to messing with his equipment. you had only agreed to this because you wanted to spend time with him, but this entire trip he’d been so distracted. you were so used to having his attention all the time, it was starting to take you out of the mood.
you decided to go find out what sasha was doing. she had a boyfriend too, niccolo. he was really nice and an amazing cook. earlier you’d asked her why he didn’t come with you all, to which she told you that niccolo was secretly a huge fraidy cat. when you approached her she was sitting in the trunk of jean’s pick up. she seemed to be really focused on...some sort of device? “what’s that?” you queried, sitting next to her. sasha beamed and shoved it into your lap. “this, my friend, is a modernized proton pack like the ghostbusters use! i’ve been engineering this baby for a couple months now and this is gonna be its first field run!” she squeals as she begins to point out all the functions and uses of the device. it looked sort of like a portable cd player.
while sasha babbled on about her “precious baby” jean and connie approached you both, equipment and cameras ready. “here you are ____.” jean presented you with a headlamp and a frequency tuner. “now first rule of ghost hunting, do not be on your own. you’re always gonna want a buddy. i’m assuming connie will fill that role?” he asked, looking between the two of you. you were still annoyed with him but you nodded anyway. you’d bring it up when the two of you were alone. “alright then. sasha you’re with me. and don’t even think about trying to spook me this time, i took self defense lessons and i’ll definitely clock you this time.” he scolded, to which sasha responded by rolling her eyes. “oh please, it was just a joke pony boy.” she taunted. jean shot her a glare. “keep it up.” he warned before turning back to you.
“second rule, do not under any circumstances curse a ghost. not only will that anger the ghost and make it mad at you, it will also get mad at everyone else and we don’t want any part of your beef. so keep it to yourself.” it was your turn to roll your eyes. “jean you don’t need to mansplain ghost hunting to me, i’m not stupid. plus i watch you guys’ channel all the time.” you say, sliding off the truck and situating the headlamp on. “i’m ready to get to some ghostbustin!” sasha hops up and high fives you. connie laughs and wraps his arm around your waist. “ah don’t worry jean, i’ll be with her the whole time.” jean stares blankly between the three of you before shaking his head.
“whatever. connie go ahead and start your body cam. it’s time to head in.” connie chuckles at jean’s annoyance and switches on the camera, a small red light peeps out to signal it’s recording. jean has one on as well, tapping his slightly to test it out. “alright gang, buckle up. i’m trying to meet a horny ghost.” he said with a grin, beginning his march into the church, the three of you following close behind.
ꔵ inside the church it was dusty and reeked of mildew. you pinched your nose as you and the others switched on your headlights. “jesus christ, it fucking stinks.” connie remarks. sasha elbows him in the rib. “dude we’re in a haunted church, you can’t take the lord’s name in vain.” she scolds him before crossing her shoulders in silent prayer. you giggle as connie rolls his eyes at sasha’s ridiculous antics. a strong gust of wind blows through the church, causing the front entrance to slam shut. you shriek, grabbing ahold of connie’s arm while sasha laughs at your frightened behavior. “don’t worry ____, ‘s just the wind.” connie reassures you, rubbing your shoulder.
“alright guys enough fucking around. it’s time to split up and cover more ground.” jean says, taking charge. “sasha, you and i are gonna explore the chapel and the pastor’s office. connie and ____, you both are going down to the abandoned brothel in the basement.” he instructs. connie groans and folds his arms. “seriously? that’s probably where his ghost is hiding.” connie complains. you tense up at that. it was only your first ghost hunt and they were sending you right into the fire. “that’s the point dumbass? sasha and i will be up here gathering frequencies and seeing if we can find any phantom residue. if you two can get in contact with the pastor, we can probably record his frequencies from up here to listen back later.” he explains.
sasha pulls some weird tool from her fanny pack, holding it up. “this is mission is perfect for using my tuning fork! i’ve been wanting to try this for ages.” she squeals, her voice echoing through the church. “damn sasha, lower your voice.” jean mutters, to which she responds with another giggle mumbling out a quiet “sorry”. jean looks back to the two of you. “well we have our assignments, lets get this show on the road my fellow philosophers.” jean salutes you both and opens the doors to the chapel, sasha waves and follows after him before shutting the door behind them. “jerk.” connie mutters under his breath. you squeeze his hand and smile up at him.
“c’mon connie, i wanna see my boyfriend bust some ghosts.” you say, hoping to cheer him up a little. connie nodded, barely acknowledging your attempt before starting to head off towards the doors leading to the basement. “alright babe, stick close. i have no idea what’s down here.” he instructed. you hummed in disinterest and began to follow him in his descent. amazing! astonishing even! you were practically throwing yourself at him, yet your boyfriend was still more interested in some stinky old pastor ghost. as you traveled deeper downstairs, the air around you began to get warmer like a stuffy room. by the time you’d gotten down to the basement there was a humid temperature surrounding you.
“is it to supposed to feel so warm down here?” you asked, taking connie’s hand to be as close as possible to him. connie whipped his head around the basement floor shining his headlamp on all the different doors. “you would think it’d be cold with all this concrete, it’s weird.” he finally answered, switching on his frequency tuner. you followed his movements and did the same. “good weird or bad weird?” you asked again, growing a bit concerned. connie shrugged before making his way towards one of the doors, his frequency tuner picking up. you glared at him, having had enough of his nonchalant attitude.
seduce him.
you blinked as the thought came from seemingly nowhere. you shook your head, deciding to ignore it. you watched connie peak into the room that was making his frequency tuner go off the wire, letting out a gasp. “____! you’ve gotta come see this!” he exclaims, grinning back at you before making his way inside. you follow after him, curious to see what surprised him so much that he actually acknowledged your existence. when you stepped inside you were surprised to find the room...spotless? there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. the decorative rugs and tapestries that hung on the walls created an erotic atmosphere. the large bed looked clean and comfortable as well, an oil lamp sitting on the bedside. “i thought this church was abandoned, who’s doing the upkeep?” you observed, still taken aback by the surprisingly clean and crisp room. connie pressed his hand down on the bed, feeling it out. “no idea. even the mattress and blankets feel fresh.” he marveled.
seduce him and gain his favors!
this time the thought echoed louder through your head, making you feel a bit lightheaded. your knees buckled causing you to drop down to the floor. connie whipped his head around in shock, instantly rushing to see if you were alright. “you okay baby?” he asked, concern lacing his words. you nodded and took his hand to help you stand back up. almost as instantly as you were back on your feet you felt the pressure in your head drop to your chest and then to your arousal. you let out a small whimper at the sudden wave of pleasure that came out of nowhere. connie pressed the back of his hand to your forehead, his touch felt like lightning.
“are you sure you’re okay? maybe we should — “ the door to the bedroom slammed shut behind you, but you didn’t really care. all you could think about was satisfying the sudden hunger that had come over you. connie jiggled the doorknob trying to get the door back open, curses spilling out of his lips. you sauntered up behind him, snaking your arms around his waist, swirling them up to lay your hands on his pecs. “wha — ____?” he turned his head to his shoulder, trying to get a view of you. you giggled and kissed his shoulder. “awh baby, we can stay in here and get comfy.” you whine, pressing yourself against him. connie tensed up in your embrace, caught off guard by your sudden switch in attitude. the oil lamp beside the bed flickered on, casting the room in a warm dim orange glow. connie grabbed your hands and snatched them off his chest. he spun around to face you, cupping your face in his hands.
“____, hey get ahold of yourself!” he tried snapping you out of it, his fingers popping between your eyes. you leaned up and kissed him under his chin. “i want you to get ahold of me.” you murmured, grabbing his wrists to place his hands on your waist. you batted your eyelashes at him with those puppy dog eyes you knew he couldn’t resist. connie gulped, his hand hands instinctively squeezing around your waist. “y-you’re not yourself, this isn’t right.” he muttered under his breath, more so talking to himself.
you snaked your arms up and around his shoulders walking back into the bed, flipping around to push him into the bed. “you made me very upset, ignoring me all night for your dumb ghost hunt.” you said, planting yourself in his lap, running your thumb along his lips. “how are you going to make it up to me?” connie frowns furrowing his brows. you don’t even wait for him to answer before letting your head fall to the side, kissing over the expanse of his neck.
connie shivered, falling prey to your advances. you snatched off both your headlamps in a playful demeanor while your other hand trailed down to the seat of his pants, letting your fingers splay out across his crotch. “____…w-wait a moment.” he breathed, letting out a slight moan when you squeezed your hand around his clothed length. you giggled softly, slithering from his thigh to between his legs. you nudged his crotch with your nose, looking back at up at him. his face was flushed and his eyes were glazed over with lust. that was all the indication you needed to begin to undoing his jeans.
your mind was clouded with thoughts of your boyfriend fucking your mouth and praising you with all the attention you’d yearned for. you pulled down his pants and boxers, licking your lips at his erect cock, leaking with precum. taking your thumb to his tip, you gently began to spread around the sticky substance. your tongue darted out to kitten lick the little mess you made, leaving connie hissing and squirming. “you’re such a tease.” he grunted. you grinned up at him knowingly before tilting your head to kiss along the length of his shaft.
connie desperately bucked his hips slightly as your kisses became wet and suctioning. done teasing him, you eagerly wrapped your lips around him sucking his tip before bobbing your head further. your tongue swirled around his shaft expertly, causing him to groan and buck his hips. you moan as his cock travels further down your throat, the vibrations of your voice stimulating him further.
“fuck baby…keep sucking me in just like that.” he huffs out, trying to keep his moans from pitching. his hands nestle in your hair, bringing your head down further. you relaxed your jaw as he continued to fuck your mouth, saliva collecting and dripping down your chin. connie bucked his hips into your mouth with fervor, you could tell he was close. “your throat feels so fucking good around me, keep swallowing me down just like that.” he praised, letting his head fall back against his shoulders.
he takes another deep thrust before you feel him spill his thick warm release down your throat. his cock twitches on your tongue as you slowly drag his length from your mouth. connie sits breathless on the bed, panting from the climax he’d just had, but you weren’t finished. you rose back up to your feet and stripped off your jeans and panties before crawling on top of him. with your hands slowly lifting your shirt over your head, you ground your wet cunt against the underside of his length.
connie stared up at you, his daze apparent on his face. “my turn.” you whisper, kissing the side of his mouth. you raised your hips slightly positioning his cock at your entrance before sinking down. you whimpered as you felt him filling you up all at once. connie took ahold of your hips, hissing as you clenched around him. “shit…your pussy loves sucking me in.” he groaned, bucking his hips again.
you whine, rocking your hips back against him. “it’s because i wanna feel you, right here.” you move your hand to your lower stomach, where you wanted to feel connie push against. connie smirked, lifting his knees up on and raising you up to hover over him slightly. “i can do that for you baby.” he growled into your ear before rapidly thrusting his cock into you. you grabbed ahold of his shoulders as he bucked into you, trying to keep your balance.
connie kept his word, fucking you balls deep with no mercy. you were so overwhelmed by pleasure you didn’t realize how loud you’d become. the oil lamp flickered as connie swiftly switched positions so you were on your back. he pushed your thighs back exposing your wet cunt that gaped for connie’s cock. he smirked and spit against you clit rising a whine from your throat. he chuckled cruelly before burying his cock back inside of you, his thrusts causing you to lurch up against the bed.
you clawed your hands over his his shoulder blades as he fucked you deep. “you feel so good, don’t stop!” you moan, arching you back as he hits your sweet spot. connie groaned from the way. you squeezed around him before leaning down to kiss you, his tongue swirling around yours. the sinful noises that came from between you both, echoing through the room. connie moved his lips across your jaw, praising you as he kissed and sucked your skin. you dazedly let your head fall to the side.
then you saw him.
a young man dressed in preachers robes, watching you both intently. you cried out clinging to connie — connie assumed it was a moan and continued to fuck into you. the preacher grinned at you and faded from your eyesight. just then connie let out a grunt. “shit baby, i’m gonna cum.” you were too dumbfounded to respond but it didn’t matter. connie had already grabbed your waist, pulling you down on his cock faster. the movement shocked you out of your mindstate, making you forget about the whole “pervy preacher ghost in the corner of the room” thing.
“fuck connie keep going!” you whine, your hand coming to grab your tits to keep them from bouncing out of your bra. connie fucked you like that until your legs became jelly and you creamed all over his cock. just as you were catching your breath connie came inside you, spilling his thick seed all over your walls. connie collapsed into your chest taking deep breaths.
“shit.” he breathed out, his hand squeezing your waist. “you okay baby?” he asked, tilting his head back to look at you. you smiled and nodded, massaging his short silvery hair. connie seemed to have a thought of realization and frowned. “i’m sorry ____. i should’ve done more to make you feel like i wanted you here. i must’ve looked like such an asshole. i was so focused on busting ghosts, i forgot the most important thing i wanted out of this was to introduce my girl to my uh…hobbies.” the sincerity in his eyes had you swooning. you cupped his cheek and leaned down to kiss the top of his head. “you’re forgiven.”. you say, before sitting up.
not a good idea.
your head was spinning. you moaned and grabbed your head, massaging it. “____? baby, what’s wrong?” connie asked worriedly, sitting up as well. then just as quick as the dizziness came, it went. you blinked. “i have no idea. maybe you just fucked me too hard, hm?” you teased, poking his shoulder. connie pressed the back of his hand against your forehead. you couldn’t read his expression, tho it looked like a mix between a shock, confusion, and disappointment. in short, nothing good. “what?” you ask.
connie shook his head. “this is gonna sound crazy, but do you think you were possessed?” he blurted out. you bit your lip, remembering the preacher and the strange echoing voice in your head. “ah…maybe? but i wanted that, it was me no one was controlling me. it just felt more like someone was egging me on.” you explained. even coming from your own mouth it sounded delusional. “oh my god connie, did i get possessed?!” you squealed, snapping your legs shut.
connie laughed and leaned forward, pulling you into his embrace. “no it wasn’t possession baby. just a bit of paranormal influence, like in the poltergeist.” this did not reassure you whatsoever, but connie was already sliding off the bed. “c’mon let’s go back upstairs and see what jean and sasha found. don’t tell them what happened okay? jean’ll kill the shit out of me.” he chuckled, kissing the top of your forehead. you did once over of the room again to make sure there was no ghost priest hiding in here before starting to get dressed again.
ꔵ “finally you two are here! you’ve gotta come see this!” sasha exclaimed as she saw the both of you approaching. sasha and jean had hooked up some sort of computer and were huddled around it. “what is it you?” connie questioned, taking your hand and hurrying you towards them. you smiled, relieved that he had meant what he said and was starting to finally include you. “it seems like whatever you guys did down there worked! we recorded these weird frequencies and we think we might have caught the pastors attention.” jean said, clicking around the screen.
you and connie exchanged wide eyed glances. “uh…what did you hear?” you asked, instinctively squeezing connie’s hand. jean and sasha shrugged. “nothing, we couldn’t hear it until it finished recording.” jean grinned up at the two of you. “but you arrived at perfect timing, now we can play it back together.” jean pulled up the sound byte. “jean i don’t think — “ connie started to protest, but jean had already pressed the space bar.
the empty church echoed with the sounds of your lewd moans and connie’s sensual praises. the heat rushed into your cheeks as you looked down in shame. you didn’t wanna see anyone else’s facial expressions. after what seemed like forever sasha’s hand darted out to pause it. safe to assume you were never invited to go ghost hunting with you boyfriend and his friends again. however you and connie did some extensive research afterwards.
connie’s body cam had mysteriously became static when he walked into the bedroom, so there was no footage of the ghost — you were honestly just relieved the two of you didn’t film a sex tape. however, apparently the ghost of the priest wandered the church, waiting to lure couples into the brothel rooms so that he could gain pleasure from seeing his brothel still be put to use. seven other couples who had visited the church also reported a strange occurrence where they ended up having sex in the brothel as well. you wondered how jean had missed that key part of research about the ghost.
“we may not have busted that ghost, but he sure made us bust.” connie cackled, nudging you. you gave him a pointed look. “you make awful jokes.” you told him, nudging him back. though the experience was a bit of a mindfucker, it truly brought you and connie closer together.
author’s note: hello again! this took me a really long time to write and yet it still feels really rushed :( i tried to do what i could in the edits but this probably isn’t my favorite. i would appreciate feedback if anyone has any though and if you did actually like it, thank you! i promise i can do way better though lmao </3
#connie x reader#connie smut#connie springer x reader#connie springer#connie springer smut#attack on titan#shingeki no kyojin#aot x reader#aot#snk smut#snk#x reader
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What happened w the rationalist community, if you’re ok talking about it?
LONG REPLY TIME.
In my Wild Youth (tm) I was hardcore in the rationalist/skeptic/humanist community. You know, the New Atheist types (the vast majority of the community didn’t call themselves New Atheists, that was mostly American Dawkins fans, but we were those kinds of people, just less arrogant-PR about it). For people who don’t know, the core philosophy of this subculture basically comes down to:
- humans are mostly good people, or try to be good people, and we should act in ways that are good for humanity, the environment, etc.
- people with better or more accurate information about the world are capable of making better decisions
- it is therefore vitally important that we view the world as accurately as possible. Truth is inherently important and valuable. We should do everything we can to make sure that our beliefs about the world are as accurate as possible.
- your mind will lie to you. Cognitive biases have their social and evolutionary uses, but they result in bigotry and bad information. We should do everything we can to identify and compensate for these, and think as rationally as a human is capable of.
- while it’s not perfect, science is the most effective tool we have for determining what is most likely to be true. Rationalism is therefore massively pro-science and pro-science education. (This isn’t a blind trust; most hardcore rationalists are scientists and fully aware of the limitations of the messy reality of how science is funded and published and the biases that introduces. These are taken into account. The other hardcore rationalists tend to be magicians/illusionists.)
All of this is perfectly fine and a hill I’m still perfectly willing to die on.
When you get a bunch of people together who are sincerely seeking truth and want the world to be a better place, there are some fairly obvious groups that they’re going to tangle with. Before my time, when we were just called skeptics, the main targets had been psychics and life-after-death spirit-communing con artists (this is where our magicians came from, the philosophical descendants of Houdini, one of the earliest voices in the movement, and later James Randi). But the big proponents of harm in my time were the healing crystals/essential oils/faith healing people, and the ‘Creation should be taught instead of evolution’ creationists. We spent a lot of time trying to stop people from selling oils that they said could cure cancer, and fighting against science education being replaced with religious belief inserted in science classes. (I spent a lot of my teenage years debating creationists on the internet. I can summarise this experience as a frustrating waste of time on both sides of the debate. Neither side was going to accomplish anything in these discussions.)
This is all perfectly fine. I won’t pretend I’m completely happy with everyone’s actions; it’s the internet, so of course there were subgroups doing things like mass trolling conservative religion forums and stuff, which had no purpose except to piss off people we happened not to like, but you get that. The problem with this is that it’s easy. People can believe what they want, but if you’re coming into a rational debate, every pro-Creation, anti-evolution argument is complete and utter bullshit, mostly demonstrating nothing beyond the fact that the creationist debater a) doesn’t understand the most fundamental things about biology or b) does understand and is willingly misleading the audience. Every pro healing crystal, pro astrology or pro telepathy argument is fatuous nonsense. Twelve-year-olds could walk into these discussions and completely shred every argument put forth by big-name “creation scientists” in minutes -- I know, I watched it happen regularly. I was on our conservative creationist Christian-owned community TV station for awhile doing a little ‘creation vs evolution!’ debate against the wealthy station owner’s son to fill air time, and I’d see him do a couple of hours of research for anti-evolution arguments every time we filmed, and it always pissed him off that I’d shred anything he said immediately, having done no research whatsoever, because even to me, a child, the giant drive-a-bus-through-this holes in his arguments were obvious. (Also, they were old hash; I’d read all the books by his idols before and checked the reasoning myself long before.)
Fresh voices in the community came from two main sources -- people who’d been pro-people and pro-reason/science for years finding others like them, and ex-creationists and magic healer victims who’d eventually found the holes in what they’d been taught. This second group, for obvious reasons, tended to be the most passionately pro-reason and pro-science people, and discussing different experiences in a place where people could feel safe being critical and actively celebrate doubt was great. But, inevitably, we got lazy.
A lot of the ‘laziness’ was perfectly reasonable and practical. Time and attention is always limited, and when you’ve dealt with six claims of “the eye is too complex to have evolved!” and explained the flaws in the irreducible complexity argument four times that fortnight, when someone walks in with “blood groups couldn’t possibly have evolved, therefore the earth must be 6,000 years old”, you just don’t fucking bother, and you shouldn’t fucking bother, there’s no value in that discussion.
That’s not the kind of laziness I’m talking about. I’m talking about the part where we got so used to ‘that sounds so fucking stupid’ leading directly being able to tear an argument to pieces,that it became normal to assume that anything that sounds stupid on the surface MUST be obviously wrong. Where ‘this is weird, let’s examine it and check for flaws’ became ‘that person disagrees with my preconceived notions, let’s double down and explain why they’re wrong, because I’m already assuming that they’re wrong’. At some point, “we want to be as rational and accurate as we can be, we call ourselves rationalist and work towards that” became “we’re rationalists, so we’re more accurate and rational than average and probably right”.
You might recognise that as in fact being *the exact opposite of the proported philosophy*. There were always some overenthusiastic idiots in any group, but watching it slowly become normal for rationalising to replace active rationalism and for the names of cognitive biases to be thrown around as gotcha buzzwords rather than things people were seriously considering in their own arguments was... concerning. (There were a lot of very smart people in the community, which unfortunately made it far more vulnerable to this particular kind of thing. Smarter people are better at fooling themselves; a person good at reason is also good at rationalising, and you can’t tell the difference between these things when you’re the one doing them.)
In practical terms, this doesn’t matter that much when you’re playing in the easy leagues of explaining to someone that the overpriced eucalyptus oil they bought from an MLM won’t protect them against chicken pox. The person who’s gotten lazy is shit at being a rationalist, but your reasoning skills don’t actually need to be all that impressive for this. You know what they do need to be impressive for? For when somebody says, “women are taken less seriously than men in science and biased against in hiring, payment and promotion”, and this hypothetical you, a male scientist who’s never noticed this and already knows that his profession is full of smart and reasonable people who wouldn’t do something stupid like that, thinks “that is fucking stupid” and automatically, without thinking about it, puts their energy into shouting down and dismissing alternate evidence. Or when somebody points out islamophobia in the community, or passive racism, or... you get the picture. Social issues can (and should) be examined and interrogated using rational philosophies, but it’s so much harder to do that than laugh at creationists who are sending you abusive messages about going to hell. And given the particular hot-button issues in the community, most of the people there were interested in biology, chemistry or physics and simply had no idea how to *do* social sciences, treating the parts that were familiar from their own specialities as valid and the rest as irrational nonsense. And now, you have prominent rationalists panicking about Sharia law, sneering at the made-up problems of feminism, and generally making fools of themselves... because they got lazy.
Because, like how it’s hard to be a liberal (American definition) but easy to be a conservative in a gay hat, it’s hard to be a rationalist, but easy to be an arsehole with a big vocabulary. And that’s why I can’t gush about how great Richard Dawkins’ early science books are without somebody bringing up his bullshit twitter opinions.
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