I'm ngl I'm pro self diagnosis but a lot of you just do not have DID!

FRUITS BASKET | a commentary on the societal rejection of "maternal" and "feminine" qualities in people

It seems like both Yuki and Akito reject the aspects of themselves that are what we consider to be traditionally "feminine" or in other words internalised misogyny. I think it may be the mangaka's intention to call out the larger systemic issue that society has with people in general that considers traditionally "feminine" qualities such as

gentleness

"weakness"

feminine sexuality

passiveness

to be inferior to traditionally "masculine" qualities. In fact, every character on the show suffers from some sort of internalised misogyny. Arisa got mad at Kyoko for no longer being the "cool Crimson Butterfly" in her youth gangster days after she had Tohru but Kyoko then simply said,

"I've calmed down."

And then we see that Arisa learning that it's ok to embrace the parts of herself that craves to be enveloped in this maternal gentleness which she so clearly was deprived of as a child. Same with Rin and Hiro and finally finally our dense-brained Kyo, it took them a while to realise that they don't need to put up such a strong front all the time, they can lean on Tohru, who is the complete embodiment of all these qualities.

it is society that "genderises" these qualities because society as a whole is still for the most part, quite sexist.

These traits are not exclusive to men/women or queer individuals. But because if the sexism that still exists in today's society, that's why Yuki and Akito has issues with their femininity and masculinity. Honestly, I cannot stop thinking about Yuki and Akito as characters. They are SUCH WELL WRITTEN MIRRORS AND FOILS of each other.

Akito

1.Ok can we please just put the spoilt god/toxic thing aside for two seconds, that's a whole other theme that I want to tackle. Akito seriously reminds me of the ironclad women in leadership that feels the need to abandon their femininity and adopt masculinity in order to be taken seriously in their roles. Honestly, it's something that most men would hardly understand how much the everyday woman have to think about the way they dress for job interviews in order to be taken seriously even though the way we dress should have absolutely NOTHING to do with our intelligence. Akito of course was raised like a boy but undeniably is a woman.

The moment I found out that her character was a woman, my heart wept for her for I saw not only myself in her but thousands of women in leadership who suppress their "feminine" qualities in order to be taken seriously.

2. Akito feels a hate for Tohru because Tohru embodies everything that she herself cannot have and cannot display openly. Akito hates all the women in the zodiac for being able to display and embody any ounce of femininity that she herself cannot display. It's cruel but isn't it honestly so sad?

3. Akito was given a literal box, but the box she discovers is empty the moment she opens it but she doesn't know how to react to it so she kept it hidden. Until finally she realises that she creates her own identity, she doesn't need to be shackled by how others define her.

Yuki

1. Yuki due to feeling an amplified sense of abandonment from his parents, he sees his weakness and his gentleness as parts of himself he needs to fix. Because of this societal sexism and genderism, he ends up grouping those qualities with other traditionally "feminine" aspects of himself (aka his appearance, which honestly has nothing to do with these personality characteristics) and takes it incredibly personally whenever anyone comments or points them out.

2. He feels a love for Tohru but because of feeling like he needs to reject these qualities, he still conforms to his "prince-like" facade. Which is why he opts for the route of seemingly trying to seduce Tohru (asserting his masculinity or what he thinks traditional "masculinity" looks like), but it sickens him and confuses him, because that's not actually how he feels for Tohru. Tohru says multiple times, "Woah, he really is like a prince!"

3. Upon reflection, what touched Yuki about Machi was Machi said immediately that "Yuki was nothing like a prince." and that "Yuki was lonely." So Yuki's facade came down straight away with Machi. Which meant that his feelings and affections didn't have to be rehearsed, they were *genuine.

That chalk scene is undeniably the most romantic scene I've ever seen in my entire life. Well done my man Yuki, you don't need to play the Prince card, my heart was stolen the moment you did this for Machi holy shit I love you.

4. Yuki, just like Akito, has kept a lid on himself and needed to open it to become his true self and does so by joining the student council, which was a HUGE GROWTH STEP. In doing so, Yuki actually comes to terms with the fact that Akito and him are the same, Akito is just seeing Yuki as a reflection of herself in the mirror and therefore looking for someone to blame and bare the burden of the pain of denying one's true self. That's why Akito got so triggered when Yuki said

"I forgive you".

Akito at that point hasn't accepted her true self yet.

These two characters are so freaking well written it's actually incredible. I feel like I learnt so much from this anime.

History has a tendency to sway hard to the left and then hard to the right, newer generations outrightly rejecting older generational values but then it's overdone, and the next generation rejects the older set of values again with greater turbulence. The women suffrage movement led women, including myself, to grow up internalising and rejecting traditionally "feminine" tasks such as cooking, sewing, nursing, baby-sitting.

This anime is a social commentary that it's ok to want and desire "feminine" and "maternal" things in life such as marriage, kids and family.

I don't know if these things are what I do envision for my future but it's definitely made me reconsider the way I view these things and for that, I am grateful for the new insight it has provided me.

lion primary (bird model) + slightly burnt lion secondary

Hi there! I’m a fan of your sorting posts, and of your kind and insightful way of supporting people in finding out more about themselves. So naturally I’d be very interested in your take about my own sorting, if you’re game! :)

I won’t talk much about my Secondary, because now that I’m starting to unburn my Lion seems very clear to me, even when my explosion-prone Badger model still tries to get in the way of that clarity sometimes. The more interesting riddle is my Primary. So far I’m operating under the working theory that I am a Lion with a very strong Bird model - or is it the other way ‘round?

The supposed dichotomy between “thinking” and “feeling” in many of the more binary personality models has always bugged me, so it’s no wonder this is the area where whenever I feel like I’ve decided on who I am (for now) a new question mark pops up (so much fun!).

If ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ doesn’t work for you as terminology, it might help to think of Lion as leading with subconscious reasoning, and Bird as leading with conscious reasoning.

Instead of trying to formulate a cohesive text, which would have gotten even longer, I’m putting together an associative list of thoughts and stories that kept turning up while I was trying to figure out my Primary.

A very Lion primary way to solve a problem, not gonna lie ;)

- I think I got my Bird model from my father, who made quite an effort to teach me to look at things from all angles. As a child, whenever I got in a fight with this friend I had, he would sit me down and ask me to put myself in my friend’s shoes. It was hard, because a lot of the time my friend was being unfair to me and I actually could have used some support, someone to tell me that it was not okay to treat me this way. But I’m still immeasurably grateful for my father’s lessons, through which I’ve learned to understand peoples’ motivations and gained an understanding for the complexities of every conflict. He also taught me to doubt, to look closer, to not just believe the first thing I see, or want to see. To this day I still consider my ability to pin down the relevant factors of a situation before I make judgments one of my strengths.

That definitely sounds like a very strong, beloved Bird model.

- Whenever I had to write an essay at school or uni, I first had to come up with some aspect about the subject that I really cared about, even could be passionate about. (I am passionate about many things, so it was usually possible to find some connection to that.) Then I would use the essay to discuss this aspect in great detail, ending with a polemic flourish. I had the time of my life doing that; meanwhile the text would structure itself magically in relation to the issue I had chosen to focus on. Whenever I tried to write without such a focus, I’d get bored, stressed and the text would be of a much lower quality.

- Something similar happened in oral exams at uni: Only when I got the opportunity to bring a discussion paper (a few pointed statements regarding the exam topic) which I could then debate, I was able to recollect all the important details I needed for that. If I just had to report on the topic or answer questions, I often got confused, to the point of drawing a complete blank.

Linking things to emotion and passion - thinking with emotion and passion, basically - is a Lion primary thing. Especially if doing that makes you feel safe & comfortable & effective & happy.

- Even as a teenager I was very interested in philosophy, ethics and moral decision making.

I love teaching philosophy to teenagers. It’s the perfect time for it, they are so into it, and if it were up to me I would absolutely make it a required class.

I picked up certain philosophical ideas and concepts that I liked and integrated them in my belief system (yes, I know how very Bird that sounds).

I had my mind blown by Genealogy of Morals in high school, and I still won’t shut about Eichmann in Jerusalem. But what was so staggering to me in high school was… here are these ways of thinking that are possible and allowed. The fact that here they are in words in front of me made me a great deal more expansive.

Now that I think about it — I don’t remember adjusting my beliefs as in any way traumatic back then. The shift from a belief in the Christian God to Mother Goddess to my very own brand of agnostic paganism was smooth, natural.

Now that I think about it… I would describe myself as a mythic relativist (which is a term I just made up.) Systems of belief are metaphors, and they’re metaphors trying to describe and say something large and beautiful about what it means to be human, and what it means to live a good life. And since we are all human, they are all attempting to describe the same central, indescribable thing in different ways.

I feel this very deeply, but it took me a long while to be able to articulate it.

I constantly reevaluate, and I adapt.

You stop reevaluating and adapting, might as well be dead.

Still, there are some basics I’ve kept with me that just make too much sense to me to give up, and some that perhaps I keep because I just really like them and I’m kind of attached to them.

… somebody’s thinking with Pathos :)

- I’m a constructivist at heart, so that makes it much easier to tweak the content of my beliefs while staying true to the principle that we (socially) construct our reality, and (my take on this): that I choose what kind of world I want to live in, and according to that I make choices which are the most likely to create that world.

- At uni I attended a seminar about the development of moral judgment and action. What I remember most clearly about it is how much it bugged me that the other students didn’t seem to understand that morality always depends on the perspective. Even though I had definite moral convictions that I was ready to fight for, at the same time it seemed obvious to me that theoretically there could be a justification for every kind of moral guideline; it depended on your principles and the world you wanted to live in.

A human after my own heart.

I wanted to understand these different perspectives, not talk about empty categories like “right and wrong” or “good and evil” that meant nothing to me. I still feel that way.

Absolutely. I don’t use alignments when I DM Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, I can list evil *things* but that’s not the same thing as defining *being evil.* I want to know WHY these people did these evil things.

It just seems so impractical and complicated to base a conversation on those broad categories that don’t have any definition people can agree on instead of referring either to defined principles (in order to explain what good/ bad is *for you*) or consequences of certain actions, and whether you want them/ accept them/ don’t want them.

Oh that’s a fun discussion. Asking a highschooler to define “evil.”

(and then they have to figure out what moral systems Jigsaw, Pinhead, the Joker, and Bane all subscribe to.)

- Between “the Revolutionary” and “the Grail Knight”, I would love to be the former, but I’m clearly the latter. I’m someone who questions, not someone who knows.

Take my archetypes with a grain of salt, they are supposed to describe characters. (Who are different from people - but still useful, because they are attempts to describe us.) I actually want to write more about the differences I see between the way fictional secondaries are written and the way real-life secondaries work.

And just “knowing”... is dangerous. That’s how Exploded Lions happen. 

There are a lot of causes I find worthy to fight for, but I haven’t committed to any one, which so far I’ve attributed to my Burned Secondary (How do I do things?).

Sounds about right.

If I’m honest, though, it feels a bit strange to really, really fight for anything. I’d rather contribute to the cause by keeping an eye on whether we stay aligned to our values on every level of the fight, not by storming sightlessly in front of some army. (I got polemic again, didn’t I? ;))

So after all this Bird talk, why do I think that I’m a Lion?

… that was the Bird segment?

- I trust my intuition. It has never steered me wrong, with one exception: My Primary burned for a time when I first understood the concept of privilege and internalized bias, which was coincidentally at a time when I also went through a lot of changes in my personal life. Like many people unaware of their own privilege, I had thought of myself as “one of the good ones”. I learned that even with the best intentions I could cause great harm without even noticing it. This then also happened to me in a relationship, when I was already confused, hurt and more than a bit burned. It seemed like I couldn’t trust my intuition anymore, but I also couldn’t figure out intellectually what to believe, because I felt mentally overwhelmed by all those new concepts, all of which put my previous convictions into question. Which Primary burned then?

Been there, done that, it’s brutal. It sounds to me like a Lion dramatically changing direction - that’s what I mean when I say that it *hurts* when a Lion changes their mind. Birds see their past selves that thought wrong as almost different people. “I wasn’t aware of my privilege then, now I am, and can take steps doing forward.” But if you’re a lion it’s like… I *should* have been aware, and the fact that I wasn’t says something terrible about my moral/emotional calibration, and THAT has to be put right.

- I felt like everything I had learned about the world and myself didn’t count anymore. My concepts and my strategies didn’t serve me anymore. So I started to rebuild everything from scratch, this time with less pride and more practicality.

Yeah. That’s some Lion recalibration. With a Bird Model, to help.

- Anyway, I trust my intuition. It contains my experiences, instinct and all my accumulated unconscious observations of the situation, and it’s very reliable. Usually I use it as an important source of information which I try to back up with data/ understanding, but when push came to shove and the apparent facts would contradict what my intuition told me, I would be unable to set my gut feeling aside. I wouldn’t follow it blindly, of course. But I would never just go against it either. If the voices of my unconscious and conscious mind don’t align, I keep poking at the issue until they do. If I absolutely cannot come to a satisfying conclusion, I go with my gut. Since I know it usually knows what it’s doing, I’ll find out the reasons for my feelings later. (Weird, says my inner bird who is busy compiling these examples.)

I’LL FIND THE REASON FOR MY FEELINGS LATER. What a perfect way of articulating what is perhaps the central experience of being a Lion primary.

- Probably I’m just both, you know. Some interesting lion/bird-chimaera. I like it.

I read you as a pretty clear Lion Primary, Bird primary model. But as always, the decision is very personal.

- I have a weird way of processing information: I read/ hear it, work to understand it, work to connect it to existing knowledge in my mind, then my beliefs, my existing knowledge and my feelings about it all wind around each other, grow into each other, some dissolve together, becoming a swamp which then nourishes the plants of new ideas and connections that grow from it.

You grok it. And that’s not weird.

I often can’t remember where certain knowledge came from. I can’t take it out of a memory shelf and tell you about it. I usually remember that I’ve read a certain book and whether I liked it / it influenced me, but I won’t exactly remember what was in it, even if it was important to me. Because all that information is already processed/ digested/ transformed into something new. It’s much easier to access my memory swamp intuitively than consciously.

and you seriously had like… any doubt that you were a Lion.

In intellectual discussions I tend to get stuck because I just can’t remember enough of the details (for my satisfaction), just my conclusions about the topic and how I feel about it.

I’m inclined to think that not accessing the details is either a secondary thing, or an entirely unrelated processing thing.

What do you make of all this? I’m very curious!

:)

[On an unrelated note, I’d like to specify the compliment I made at the beginning of this post. I’m really impressed with your ability to pick up on what people need, not just what they say they want. As a counselor this is a skill I try to hone, so I know how difficult it is to not get too distracted by the story people tell and miss the more subtle cues. You have a powerful combination of perceptiveness, insight and so much kindness, which you use to effectively support people who have questions, are in distress or confused. You don’t generalize. You don’t judge. You see the people who talk to you.  I love that you’re a teacher, because I can see you’re using the influence that gives you in a way that contributes to making the world a better place. Fellow Idealist, I’d like to give you a High Five for that, if I may. :)))]

I’m not sure I’ve ever been given a better compliment. Thank you.

RWBY Character Analysis: Pietro and Penny Polendina

Up until now I’ve been keeping quiet about my opinions on the newest volume, in no small part because my personal life has been one absurd setback after another, and I haven’t had the energy to engage in fandom meta. If you do want to know what my current opinion of RWBY is, go over to @itsclydebitches blog, search through her #rwby-recaps tag, and read every single one. At this point, her metas are basically an itemized list of all my grievances with the show. I highly recommend you check ’em out.

Or, if you don’t feel like reading several hours’ worth of recaps, then go find a sheet of paper, give yourself a papercut, and then squeeze a lemon into it. That should give you an accurate impression of my feelings.

In truth, I have a lot to say about the show, particularly how I think CRWBY has mishandled the plot, characters, tone, and intended message of their series. And while I enjoy dissecting RWBY with what amounts to mad scientist levels of glee, I think plenty of other folks have already discussed V7′s and V8′s various issues in greater depth and with far more eloquence. Any contribution I could theoretically make at this point would be somewhat redundant.

That being said, I’d like to talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while, which (to my knowledge) no one else in the fandom has brought up. (And feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)

Today’s topic of concern is Pietro Polendina, and his relationship with Penny.

And because I’m absolutely certain this post is going to be controversial and summon anonymous armchair critics to fill my inbox with sweary claptrap, I may as well just come out and say it:

Pietro Polendina, as he’s currently portrayed in the show, is an inherently abusive parental figure.

Let me take a second to clarify that I don’t think it was RWBY’s intention to portray Pietro that way. Much like other aspects of the show, a lot of nuance is often lost when discussing the difference between intention versus implementation, or telling versus showing. It’s what happens when a writer tries to characterize a person one way, but in execution portrays them in an entirely different light. Compounding this problem is what feels like a series of rather myopic writing decisions that started as early as Volume 2, concerning Penny’s sense of agency, and how the canon would bear out the implications of an autonomous being grappling with her identity. It’s infuriating that the show has spent seven seasons staunchly refusing to ask any sort of ethical questions surrounding her existence, only to then—with minimal setup—give us Pietro’s “heartfelt” emotional breakdown when he has to choose between “saving” Penny or “sacrificing” her for the greater good.

Yeah, no thanks.

If we want to talk about why this moment read as hollow and insincere, we need to first make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Spoilers for V8.E5 - “Amity.” Let’s not waste any time.

In light of the newest episode and its—shall we say—questionable implications, I figured now was the best time to bring it up while the thoughts were still fresh in my mind. (Because nothing generates momentum quite like frothing-at-the-mouth rage.)

The first time we’re told anything about Pietro, it comes from an exchange between Penny and Ruby. From V2.E2 - “A Minor Hiccup.”

Penny: I've never been to another kingdom before. My father asked me not to venture out too far, but... You have to understand, my father loves me very much. He just worries a lot.

Ruby: Believe me, I know the feeling. But why not let us know you were okay?

Penny: I…was asked not to talk to you. Or Weiss. Or Blake. Or Yang. Anybody, really.

Ruby: Was your dad that upset?

Penny: No, it wasn’t my father.

The scene immediately diverts our attention to a public unveiling of the AK-200. A hologram of James Ironwood is presenting this newest model of Atlesian Knight to a crowd of enthusiastic spectators, along with the Atlesian Paladin, a piloted mech. During the demonstration, James informs his audience that Atlas’ military created them with the intent of removing people from the battlefield and mitigating casualties (presumably against Grimm).

Penny is quickly spotted by several soldiers, and flees. Ruby follows, and in the process the two are nearly hit by a truck. Penny’s display of strength draws a crowd and prompts her to retreat into an alley, where Ruby learns that Penny isn’t “a real girl.”

This scene continues in the next episode, “Painting the Town…”

Penny: Most girls are born, but I was made. I’m the world’s first synthetic person capable of generating an Aura. [Averts her gaze.] I’m not real…

After Ruby assures her that no, you don’t have to be organic in order to have personhood, Penny proceeds to hug her with slightly more force than necessary.

Ruby: [Muffled noise of pain.] I can see why your father would want to protect such a delicate flower!

Penny: [Releases Ruby.] Oh, he’s very sweet! My father’s the one that built me! I’m sure you would love him.

Ruby: Wow. He built you all by himself?

Penny: Well, almost! He had some help from Mr. Ironwood.

Ruby: The general? Wait, is that why those soldiers were after you?

Penny: They like to protect me, too!

Ruby: They don't think you can protect yourself?

Penny: They're not sure if I'm ready yet. One day, it will be my job to save the world, but I still have a lot left to learn. That's why my father let me come to the Vytal Festival. I want to see what it's like in the rest of the world, and test myself in the Tournament.

Their conversation is interrupted by the sound of the approaching soldiers from earlier. Despite Ruby’s protests, Penny proceeds to yeet her into the nearby dumpster, all while reassuring her that it’s to keep Ruby out of trouble, not her. When the soldiers arrive, they ask her if she’s okay, then proceed to lightly scold her for causing a scene. Penny’s told that her father “isn’t going to be happy about this,” and is then politely asked (not ordered; asked) to let them escort her back.

Let’s take a second to break down these events.

When these two episodes first aired, the wording and visuals (“No, it wasn’t my father,” followed by the cutaway to James unveiling the automatons) implied that James was the one forbidding her from interacting with other people. It’s supposed to make you think that James is being restrictive and harsh, while Pietro is meant as a foil—the sweet, but cautious father figure. But here’s the thing: both of these depictions are inaccurate, and frankly, Penny’s the one at fault here. Penny blew her cover within minutes of interacting with Ruby—a scenario that Penny was responsible for because she was sneaking off without permission. Penny is a classified, top-secret military project, as made clear by the fact that she begs Ruby to not say anything to anyone. Penny is in full acknowledgement that her existence, if made public, could cause massive issues for her (something that she’s clearly experienced before, if her line, “You’re taking this extraordinarily well,” is anything to go by).

But here’s the thing—keeping Penny on a short leash wasn’t a unilateral decision made by James. That was Pietro’s choice as well. “My father asked me not to venture out too far,” “Your father isn’t going to be happy about this”—as much as this scene is desperately trying to put the onus on James for Penny’s truant behavior, Pietro canonically shares that blame. And Penny (to some extent) is in recognition of the fact that she did something wrong.

Back in Volumes 1 – 3, before the series butchered James’ characterization, these moments were meant as pretty clever examples of foreshadowing and subverting the controlling-military-general trope. This scene is meant to illustrate that yes, Penny is craving social interaction outside of military personnel as a consequence of being hidden, but that hiding her is also a necessity. It’s a complicated situation with no easy answer, but it’s also something of a necessary evil (as Penny’s close call with the truck and her disclosing that intel to Ruby are anything to go by).

Let’s skip ahead to Volume 7, shortly after Watts tampered with the drone footage and framed her for several deaths. In V7.E7 - “Worst Case Scenario,” a newscaster informs us that people in Atlas and Mantle want Penny to be deactivated, despite James’ insistence that the footage was doctored and Penny didn’t go on a killing spree. The public’s unfavorable opinion of Penny—a sentiment that Jacques of all people embodies when he brings it up in V7.E8—reinforces V2’s assessment of why keeping her secret was necessary. Not only is her existence controversial because Aura research is still taboo, but people are afraid that a mechanical person with military-grade hardware could be hacked and weaponized against them. (Something which Volume 8 actually validates when James has Watts take control of her in the most recent episode.)

But I digress.

We’re taken to Pietro’s lab, where Penny is hooked up to some sort of recharge/docking station. Ruby, Weiss, and Maria look on in concern while the machine is uploading the visual data from her systems. There’s one part of their conversation I want to focus on in particular:

Pietro: When the general first challenged us to find the next breakthrough in defense technology, most of my colleagues pursued more obvious choices. I was one of the few who believed in looking inward for inspiration.

Ruby: You wanted a protector with a soul.

Pietro: I did. And when General Ironwood saw her, he did too. Much to my surprise, the Penny Project was chosen over all the other proposals.

Allow me to break down their conversation so we can fully appreciate what he’s actually saying.

The Penny Project was picked as the candidate for the next breakthrough in defense technology.

Pietro wanted a protector with a SOUL.

In RWBY, Aura and souls are one of the defining characteristics of personhood. Personhood is central to Penny’s identity and internal conflict (particularly when we consider that she’s based on Pinocchio). That’s why Penny accepts Ruby’s reassurances that she’s a real person. That’s why she wants to have emotional connections with others.

What makes that revelation disturbing is when you realize that Pietro knowingly created a child soldier.

Look, there’s no getting around this. Pietro fully admits that he wanted to create a person—a human being—a fucking child—as a "defense technology” to throw at the Grimm (and by extension, Salem). Everything, from the language he uses, to the mere fact that he entered Penny in the Vytal Tournament as a proving ground where she could “test [her]self,” tells us that he either didn’t consider or didn’t care about the implications behind his proposal.

When you break it all down, this is what we end up with:

“Hey, I have an idea: Why don’t we make a person, cram as many weapons as we can fit into that person, and then inform her every day for the rest of her life that she was built for the sole purpose of fighting monsters, just so we don’t have to risk the lives of others. Let’s then take away anything remotely resembling autonomy, minimize her interactions with people, and basically indoctrinate her into thinking that this is something she wants for herself. Oh, and in case she starts to raise objections, remind her that I donated part of my soul to her. If we make her feel guilty about this generous sacrifice I made so she could have the privilege of existing, she won’t question our motives. Next, let’s give her a taste of freedom by having her fight in a gladiatorial blood sport so that we can prove our child soldier is an effective killer. And then, after she’s brutally murdered on international television, we can rebuild her and assign her to protecting an entire city that’s inherently prejudiced against her, all while I brood in my lab about how sad I am.”

Holy fuck. Watts might be a morally bankrupt asshole, but at least his proposal didn’t hinge on manufacturing state-of-the-art living weapons. They should have just gone with his idea.

(Which, hilariously enough, they did. Watts is the inventor of the Paladins—Paladins which, I’ll remind you, were invented so the army could remove people from the battlefield. You know, people. Kind of like what Penny is.)

Do you see why this entire scene might have pissed me off? Even if the show didn’t intend for any of this to be the case, when you think critically about the circumstances there’s no denying the tacit implications.

To reiterate, V8.E5 is the episode where Pietro says, and I quote:

“I don’t care about the big picture! I care about my daughter! I lost you before. Are you asking me to go through that again? No. I want the chance to watch you live your life.”

Oh, yeah? And what life is that? The one where she’s supposed to kill Grimm and literally nothing else? You do realize that she died specifically because you made her for the purpose of fighting, right?

No one, literally no one, was holding a gun to Pietro’s head and telling him that he had to build a living weapon. That was his idea. He chose to do that.

Remember when Cinder said, “I don’t serve anyone! And you wouldn’t either, if you weren’t built that way.” She…basically has a point. Penny has never been given the option to explore the world in a capacity where she wasn’t charged with defending it by her father. We know she doesn’t have many friends, courtesy of Ironwood dissuading her against it in V7. But I’m left with the troubling realization that the show (and the fandom), in their crusade to vilify James, are ignoring the fact that Pietro is also complicit in this behavior by virtue of being her creator. If we condemn the man that prevents Penny from having relationships, then what will we do to the man who forced her into that existence in the first place?

Being her “father” has given him a free pass to overlook the ethics of having a child who was created with a pre-planned purpose. How the hell did the show intend for Pietro to reconcile “I want you to live your life” with “I created you so you’d spend your life defending the world”? It viscerally reminds me of the sort of narcissistic parents who have kids because they want to pass on the family name, or continue their bloodline, or have live-in caregivers when they get older, only on a larger and much more horrific scale. And that’s fucked up.

Now, I’m not saying I’m against having a conflict like this in the show. In fact, I’d love to have a character who has to grapple with her own humanity while questioning the environment she grew up in. Penny is a character who is extremely fascinating because of all the potential she represents—a young woman who through a chance encounter befriends a group of strangers, and over time, is exposed to freedoms and friendships she was previously denied. Slowly, she begins to unlearn the mindset she was indoctrinated with, and starts to petition for agency and autonomy. Pietro is forced to confront the fact that what he did was traumatic and cruel, and that his love for her doesn’t erase the harm he unintentionally subjected her to, nor does it change the fact that he knowingly burdened a person with a responsibility she never consented to. There’s a wealth of character growth and narrative payoff buried here, but like most things in RWBY, it was either underdeveloped or not thought through all the way.

The wholesome father-daughter relationship the show wants Pietro and Penny to have is fundamentally contradicted by the nature of her existence, and the fact that no one (besides the villains) calls attention to it. I’d love for them to have that sort of dynamic, but the show had to do more to earn it. Instead, it’ll forever be another item on RWBY’s ever-growing list of disappointments—

Because Pietro’s remorse is more artificial than Penny could ever hope to be.

UC 51.03 - London Business School vs Hertford, Oxford

Since it was introduced at the 1988 Olympics, every single Gold Medal in the Women’s Team event in the Archery has gone to South Korea. Including yesterday’s win that’s nine straight victories, and their period of unparalleled dominance continues. The men’s team have also won six of the nine they have contested, and a mixed team won the first staging of that event in Tokyo too. Adding their success in the individual events, South Korea have won 26 gold medals, and 42 in total, in the 43 archery events which have been thus far staged at the Olympic Games. 

As Twitter’s own @tarequelaskar pointed out in the brilliant article which alerted me to this story, this is a perfect example of specialisation, an economic concept whereby countries or companies focus intensely on one particular aspect of a given industry and come to serve that niche in such a specialised fashion that they become the ultimate experts and nigh-on irreplaceable. This is done in government and business by providing companies with incentives to specialise, and supporting those who succeed at it. 

With respect to Korean archery, similar forces are at play. There are a bunch of professional teams and leagues in the country, giving archers financial stability while they focus on their training, something not as common across the world. Said training involves such things as practicing in live baseball stadiums and replicas of the Olympic venues, to mimic first the atmosphere and then the conditions that will be present on the day of the actual tournament. 

This philosophy of marginal gains - the same system used by Team Sky and Chris Froome to win multiple Tour De Frances on the trot - puts their preparation miles ahead of the competition, which goes some way to explaining their dominance. It is not the only reason. Before the fine-tuning of the elite shooters comes the discovery of the promising young ones, and the inspiring nature of past success (along with a historic national love of the sport) helps to create a virtuous cycle which give Korea a far larger number of archers to choose from than any other country. This greater choice means that there is a greater chance of finding the next Gold medallists.

Making the argument that professional footballers are at a higher level than other elite sportspeople, Michael Cox used this same argument in a recent article for The Athletic. To summarise, he stated that because there are a far higher number of people who wish to become professional footballers, that must mean that the ones who do make it are at a higher standard than those who make it in other sports. Initially, I was drawn in by the pure maths of this point, but having thought about it some more I’m no longer sure to what extent I agree. 

Now, the fact that hundreds of millions more people play football than rugby, or basketball, will certainly confer some level of “eliteness”, but only up to a certain point. Because football has been so popular for so long, the general standard of the play, relative to what it used to be, has had longer to improve. In the same way that if you transplanted a 100m runner from the Olympic final in the early 20th century to now they probably wouldn’t even qualify for the games, a footballer from the 80s would stand less of a chance of making it were they playing today. Many other sports don’t have that level of natural progression, afforded by decades of technical and tactical advancement - at least not globally. 

But the numbers argument only goes so far, as can be demonstrated by the Korean archers. Yes, there are more archers in Korea than anywhere else, relatively, giving them a higher chance of uncovering those with a natural aptitude, but the reason behind their bow and arrow dynasty is the specialisation. The hyper-detailed level of training and focus which allows them to be the best they can possible be. 

Now, archery is unique in that there is a theoretical maximum score (I understand that this is to some extent arbitrary, and related to the rules of the game as defined by some human being, semi-randomly, but it works in terms of this argument, because it gives a percentage score of how good the archers are based on the agreed-upon parameters of the sport), which, at the Olympics, is 720. The Olympic record is 700 (held by Korean Kim Woo-jin, giving an implied “eliteness level” of 97.2%. 

The best player in the history of football (don’t @ me) is Lionel Messi, and few would doubt that he operates at or above that level of perfection in his sport. But I also don’t think you could doubt that Novak Djokovic, or Serena Williams in her pomp, were similarly magnificent at tennis. Cyclists on the Tour De France put their bodies through more in three weeks than most people endure in a decade, and have every aspect of their training and diet strictly controlled so as to bring them as close to perfection as possible. There will certainly be a higher number of these elite performers in football, because there are a higher number of paying jobs for said elite performers, and because more people attempt to become elite performers, but I don’t think that it follows on from that that they are better at their sport than other elite athletes, all of whom have undergone years and years of specialised training to get them where they are.

Does any of this matter, in terms of how each sport should be enjoyed? Probably not, but its interesting to think about, and kind of awe-inspiring to try and appreciate just how good those at the top of their respective games are. And if there is some discrepancy in the level of eliteness between the different sports it doesn’t detract from the fact that they would handily dispatch any civilian challengers without breaking a sweat. The joy comes from watching people who are good at stuff doing that stuff - and, as evidenced by the crowds which gather for non-league football, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are at the absolute pinnacle of said stuff. They’re still going to be much better than the rest of us. 

Competitive quizzing is different from the activities previously mentioned in that any normal person can have a guess at pretty much any question, with a chance that they’ll get it right. What sets the contestants apart on shows like University Challenge is the speed of their recall under pressure - the quickness of their knowledge as well as the knowledge itself. But there are plenty of armchair quizzers who think they could wipe the floor on the show, so just how good are the actual contestants? (Compared to an elite footballer or archer on an imaginary scale that accounts for relative skill in all disciplines?). I don’t know (and in case you hadn’t noticed by now I’m just fascinated by people who are really good at anything, and wanted to share some of that fascination with you all), but I’ll try and have a go at answering it anyway. 

So, the World Quizzing Championships have been dominated by British and Irish quizzers since its inception in 2003, with 16 of the 18 winners coming from either Britain or the Republic of Ireland (who have four wins courtesy of The Egghead Pat Gibson). This, in my mind, makes this neck of the woods comparable to South Korean archery. It is a hotbed of talent, and the infrastructure is in place to encourage and aid talent maximalisation. Indeed, if you scroll down the list of highest ranking players at the WQC in any given year you can see a significant cohort of UC alums, so clearly there are a number of elite quizzers who have passed through the show. 

This specialisation can be seen in microcosm with the preponderance of top-level quizzers produced by Oxford and Cambridge, who both have a long-standing culture of competitive quizzing far beyond other Universities. The debate is there to be had on the fairness of each institution having so many teams, but clearly they produce enough elite players to compete with far bigger Unis when entering as (sometimes tiny) colleges. 

In conclusion, I think it is pretty obvious that UC is a breeding ground for world-class quizzers, and though no one has won a World title straight off the bat after appearing on the show, there are top-50 and top 100 finishes abound, which is still greatly impressive, and helps to give an idea of just how good these students really are. 

Hoping to justify the 1000 words I’ve just written about their exceptional talents are two teams from the London Business School and Hertford College, Oxford. The Oxford side have never made it beyond the second round, but LBS reached the semi-finals in 2006, their only previous appearance on the show. Anyway, there is quite literally no time for me to recite the rules; here’s your first starter for ten... 

Paxman mentions that LBS were in the show in 2006, but doesn’t mention that they reached the semi final, which is lazy imo. A bunch of them are studying for MBAs, which makes sense. He doesn’t mention Hertford’s previous appearances either, but that’s more understandable.

Hertford’s Hitchens takes the first starter with Kennedy, and the Oxonians added a full set of bonuses on words made up by authors - including a couple of educated guesses. LBS hit back with the next question, but can only manage one bonus on famous scientists. One of the two they miss is Rosalind Franklin, and Paxman teases them for not spotting an apparently obvious clue within the question.

The first picture round is on national emblems, and LBS are first to recognise that of Vietnam for the starter. They don’t know Laos or Belarus, but do know that Mozambique has a machine gun on its one. Butterworth then jumps the gun with argon on the next starter, giving his answer just as Paxman says it in the question. Butterworth makes up for it with the music starter, recognising Fat Boy Slim before anyone else, and LBS know Primal Scream and Wu Tang Clan too. They’re still fifty points behind though, and will need a big second half to turn things around.

This task gets more difficult for them, as Hitchens takes another starter. Lloyd adds a second in a row for Oxford and they are nearly one hundred points clear. LBS really need to get some points on the board, and Ruess duly obliges, knowing that there is a massive sculpture of a spider called Maman, which sounds needlessly scary, to the extent that I’m not even going to google it.

The comeback is ended before its even begun as Oswald takes a starter for Hertford, which gives them the picture bonuses - the starter having been dropped by both teams. Lloyd produces another excellent guess of Reuben, demonstrating how useful it is to have vague knowledge as well as specific knowledge. This is one of probably five questions he has answered in a throwaway manner, but which turned out to be correct. 

By this point LBS seem to have accepted defeat. Ruess takes another starter, but there is little to no urgency on the bonus questions. They’re right, granted, to have none, they have no chance of winning, but if they gave it a go they might scrape a high scoring loser spot. Ruess is the only one who seems bothered, and bags himself ten more points. They have an amusing discussion about methods of poisoning in Agatha Christie novels (’it was used as a curry ingredient?’, Ruess wondered aloud, trying to figure out which spices could be poisonous, before Butterworth pointed out that it wasn’t something commonly used as a curry ingredient, prompting respectful mirth from the audience) on the bonuses, but still languish miles behind. 

Lloyd grabs the last starter of the night for Hertford, who win by eighty at the gong.

Final Score: London Business School 100 - 180 Hertford, Oxford

At the end, Paxman mentions Hertford’s stellar guesswork, which means I wasn’t chatting nonsense (at least on that front, the jury is out on the rest of it), and says that they’ve done a really good job. Incredibly effusive praise for a score of 180. He really is going soft in his old age.

Phew, that was a long one. If you made it through the intro you deserve a prize. And that prize is that you get to come back next week for the next episode of this blog!! Woop woop! 

And if this wasn’t quite enough UC content for you then you can subscribe for extra blogs on my Patreon, which features Retro Reviews from the 2015/16 series of the show. Ta x

Given the immense popularity of the Harry Potter series, it's clear why every character in the franchise would develop it's own unique fanbase that is drawn to that particular person for a set of particular reasons. But one of the most curious phenomenons within the world of Harry Potter is the enduring and intense popularity of one of the most unappealing characters in the series, Draco Malfoy. In a world populated with exceptional wizards, epic heroes, and genocidal villains, why does this arrogant schoolyard bully hold so much sway with so many Harry Potter fans?

The prevailing theory of the book's author is that Tom Felton is the reason why so many fangirls and fanboys are mistakenly believing that this bad boy has a heart of gold buried underneath that steely gaze and designer suit. But it doesn't seem wildly unfair to say that the author's ability to get a good read on her audience is... not great, and that seems like a vast oversimplification of Draco as a character and the audience's reaction towards him. But if it's not because of his pretty pretty face, what exactly is it that makes Draco so intriguing to so many people? After all, the amount of attention that he gets within the books is actually pretty minimal, and the screen time that he gets is even stingier, so what is there to even get intrigued by?

Harry Potter is a series that is exceptionally skilled at creating dramatic tension within it's storyline, but that is exceptionally bad at creating dramatic tension within it's character developments. Literally every major character within the story has a pretty firmly established personality that is only refined and directed towards whatever North star is guiding them. Although the stakes are constantly being raised and the risks are getting greater, every character has always known what they had to do and why they had to do it. With only one significant and glaring exception to that rule. Draco Malfoy. 

From the moment the audience meets Draco it's clear that he is intended to be a foil for Harry, and throughout the entire series he truly does embody everything that Harry is not. He's arrogant, exclusionary, rude, entitled, and lacking in empathy. He's weak in every way that Harry is strong, he's cruel in every way that Harry is kind, and everything about his character coding is bad in contrast to Harry's good. Harry is the prime example of Gryffindor's heroism and innate goodness, while Draco is the prime example of Slytherin's elitism and cruelty. Draco was raised within a family that suffered greatly at the defeat of Voldemort, at least relatively speaking, and Harry Potter was the one who defeated him. In a philosophical sense, it's clear that Draco is meant to be Harry's inverse, but on a more practical level, Draco should also be inherently unappealing because he's just a bully, and people don't like bullies. So, why is it that so many people like him?  Well, because in certain ways Draco is the easiest character to relate to. 

Many of the main characters in the series make a lot of mistakes throughout the course of the story, but they seem to stick within a certain subset of mistakes that make them seem so heroic that they almost feel disconnected from normal humanity. Characters like Harry, Hermione, and Ron make mistakes based on faulty logic or mistakes that are driven by emotional reactions that they don't think through, but they don't really ever make ethical mistakes. They're good people who do good things with good intentions, and if anything ever goes wrong it's not because they've done anything morally wrong. 

Draco on the other hand, makes many ethical mistakes. He's raised by selfish and cruel people who spend his entire life telling him how superior he is, so he's very distinctly lacking in his ability to empathize and relate to others. And honestly, regardless of how anyone was raised, that lack of self-reflection and inability to understand how we can affect others is something that most people can relate to, especially when they're younger. Most people understand how it feels to make a moral mistake because of some kind of ethical or psychological immaturity, and that makes it easier for everyone to relate to Draco. 

And why is it that Draco is lacking this traditional moral compass? Well, because of the way that he was raised. His parents obviously loved and doted on him, but they quite literally raised him to believe in ideologies that are objectively morally wrong. From the moment he was born he was indoctrinated to very bigoted views, and because of the privilege he grew up in and his lack of contact with any other ways of thinking, he never had any reason to question those views. And that's yet another aspect of his character that is extremely easy for a lot of people to relate to. More often than not, children are raised and taught ideas and ideologies that they ultimately realize they might not agree with, even if their parents raised them to believe that those ideas were objective truth. 

What makes Draco such an interesting character is that for the vast majority of his character arc he had an extremely limited and unempathetic viewpoint, but his later actions and behaviors clearly indicate that he had an innate sense of morality. Draco behaves in such an arrogant and demeaning way because he doesn't think of the way that he's been raised as a point of view, he sees it as reality, so having other students like Harry or Hermione challenge that elicits an extremely negative response from him. But once the most brutal aspects of the ideologies that his parents raised him with become his reality, it's clear that it inspires an almost immediate change within him. 

Because Draco has an innate sense of morality and that morality is now coming into conflict with his entire familial structure and belief system, that conflict starts tearing him apart. And honestly, while conflict is not a prerequisite for a character to be interesting, creating character conflict and tension that needs to be resolved will always inspire intrigue and interest in an audience. Easy isn't often interesting, and in a fictional world where every character's motivations are well defined from start to finish, even if those motivations weren't revealed until the end of the series, it's easy to see why Draco stuck out in the crowd. 

It's clear that almost immediately after becoming a Death Eater, Draco's sense of what he should do is thrown into disarray. And of course, why wouldn't it be? A lot of Draco's fans seem to refer to him as the boy who had no choice, but that actually doesn't seem like a very accurate representation of Draco's status by the end of the series. On the contrary, it seems like he is the only character with choices. It's just that all of his options are terrible ones. 

When we see most of the other characters, there is never any question of what they should do or will do. While what they must do or will try to do is very difficult to actually accomplish, it's never a very difficult choice for them to make. They can either fight for their friends and loved ones, or let wizard Hitler overtake the world. For many of them, the only options are to either fight Voldemort or die. But the decisions that Draco has to make are actually far more complex. 

As the audience, we all know that Draco doing the right thing would mean rebelling against the Death Eaters, joining the good guys, and not killing Dumbledore. But if anyone were asked a hypothetical question about killing someone they barely knew, or possibly letting their family die or getting themselves killed, it's clearly not an easy answer. In fact, many people would choose to let a near stranger die in the place of someone they loved. Draco's character arc is compelling both because he is forced into an insanely difficult choice, and because he is arguably the most ill equipped character to handle this kind of decision. His internal moral compass is something he has literally just discovered, and he now has to make the most difficult choice that any of the characters have had to make in the series. 

And what muddies the water even further is that while the immorality of murder is a moral absolute, Draco's relative life experience is entirely diametrically opposed to the experiences of any of the other main characters. The heroes of the story understand that the Malfoys, the Death Eaters, and Dark Wizards at large are the "bad guys," and by extension the audience understands that as well. But in Draco's world, those are the people who have given him all of the love, acceptance, and admiration that he's ever experienced. And on the flip side, the "good guys" of the story have only ever offered him dismissal, derision, and rejection. 

So, even if Draco is having a crisis of conscience, he could possibly lose everything that has meaning to him and gain nothing in return. And compounding that pressure even further, he's never had any guidance or role modeling that would show him how to stand up against someone else, let alone someone as terrifying as Voldemort. For the vast majority of the characters in the series, regardless of where they land on the moral spectrum, the choices laid out before them are so drastically one sided that they're not really choices at all. But for Draco, there are legitimate options, all of which could end in cataclysmic disaster for him. 

The Harry Potter saga is the story of it's titular hero defeating the most evil wizard who ever lived, so it operates on a pretty srong dyad of good vs. evil. But, reality rarely lays things out that clearly. Everyone likes to envision themselves as the hero of their own story, but the truth is that everyone understands how it feels to experience difficulty in deciding what's right or wrong. Seeing characters who's experiences mirror our own is immediately appealing, and it explains why so many people are drawn to a character like Draco. And that's not the only thing that makes him relatable. 

While Draco spends most of the series trying to capitalize on his famous name, he's actually a pretty exceptionally skilled wizard and seems to be an excellent student, at least good enough to be made a school prefect. And while his overall position within the storyline does seem to indicate that he's popular, at least in Slytherin, it doesn't seem like very many people actually like Draco for Draco or recognize that he's good at anything. People either love him or hate him purely based on the assumptions that they make about him, many of which don't reflect his inner persona. And that's a feeling that almost everyone in the world can understand on some level. Everyone wants to feel seen, and everyone knows how it feels to work hard at something and feel like that work is unrecognized. Everyone fears rejection, so even if Draco's overly defensive posturing is unappealing, the emotion that exists behind it speaks to the heart of many Harry Potter fans. 

Draco was never going to be the hero of this story. But what he did get to be was something that is much more morally and thematically relevant to the audience at large. No, he didn't get the redemption arc that many of his fans may have been hoping for, but the end result of his character may have been something much better. 

Draco did eventually grow, change, and evolve as a person. But what makes his ultimate about face even more interesting is that he did it despite the fact that there was really nothing in it for him. He didn't do anything because he wanted the world to see him as a hero for once, or because he wanted to be liked, or even because he just wanted to show up Harry Potter. He did it because he genuinely reflected on his own behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, and he decided that he no longer agreed with what he thought before. 

Self-reflection is one of the deepest and most profound experiences that a person can go through, but it can be extremely painful, difficult, and it isn't necessarily all that rewarding either. So the fact that a character like Malfoy made that choice and came out the other side of it as a better person is actually pretty inspiring. Deciding to be a better person just because you want to be, not because there is something to be gained from it, is an incredibly powerful message. And beyond that, the thought that someone who started off where Malfoy did would actually make that choice, even when he has a lot to potentially lose because of it, makes his character even more dynamic and complex. It's something that speaks to so many people on such a fundamental level because it demonstrates that just because mistakes have been made in the past, that doesn't mean they need to be repeated, and one doesn't have to be born good in order to become good. 

Draco Malfoy obviously wasn't a character who was created with the intention of gaining many fans, but the intention behind the character is irrelevant. Draco is an incredibly flawed individual who goes through some very serious growing pains, and who often doesn't make the right decisions. But in a fictional world filled with characters who's development seems to travel from point A to point B with nary a bump in the road, it's easy to see why the snobby rich kid with the famous name became such a fan favorite. 

Femininity

   Home isolation has induced atleast in some of us thoughts that need organization and opinion. It is in such a circumstance that I decided to pen down some of my sociological observations. A very complex idea that controls many of the stereotypes existing in our society is the notion of femininity. In reality, the notion of femininity in itself is arrived at from various gender stereotypes. I will try to make this write up as unbiased as possible. As of now, I have not made any reference or reading to enhance or give extra value to my opinion. Hence this is relatively original and crude in terms of writing. The idea though, I am pretty sure is popular and discussed vigorously on intellectual levels.

   In the most mundane of all senses, femininity to a lay person may mean anything at all that is stereotypically associated with a woman. This may include the art of make-up (more specifically the use of lipsticks, evident eye make up, etc), the 'responsibility' of looking pretty to satisfy the male gaze, the way a woman walks (like a cat or a swan as popularly described in literature, it can get even weirder in various other languages), smelling like flowers and fruit, throwing tantrums, maintaining foot hygiene etc. The one factor that is common among all of these characteristics is that they are all more or less physical or appearance oriented. They are associated with the physical features that are typically thought of to be associated with women. But femininity is way beyond the exterior of a woman.

   Let me start with a conceivable and straight example. Those persons who are into management, especially if you have to travel to other countries as part of your job, meet and interact with people who are from culturally diverse backgrounds, you might know that nationalities, more aptly nations, are classified into being either feminine or masculine. Japan falls on to the feminine side because of their sensitivity to modern day issues, their importance to growth as a group or a community of people and not individualistic progress, their belief systems and several other sociological parameters. The United States of America on the other hand is classified as a masculine country because they give a lot of importance to personal growth and success at a more personal level. These classifications are not based on how feminine or masculine the people of these country look like but they reflect a deeper aspect of the general characteristics of the behaviour of their population.

   Conventionally, femininity is characterized by compassion, care, love, patience, physical beauty and many other virtues. When we talk about femininity, we must also talk about masculinity, which is the other side of the same coin. Masculinity is characterized by the sense of responsibility, chivalry, protective nature, physical strength etc (conventionally). We will see the logic behind the development of this classification very soon. I would like to further classify each of these qualities into two, namely physical and abstract. Physical femininity can be associated with the more physical characteristics amongst the feminine characteristics, like physical beauty and maintenance, mannerisms, gesticulation etc, while abstract femininity can be associated with emotional and intangible characteristics defining femininity like compassion, loving nature, motherly affection etc, likewise for masculinity. Something we must understand from my definition of these qualities is the fact that femininity and masculinity are not associated with anyone being a male or a female but are defined from how male and female stereotypes have been in a particular society. What I did is to classify the qualities into two categories, and not people themselves. It is true that statistically (though statistics can be the biggest of all lies) women are more feminine and men are more masculine, but there is no restriction to anyone showing any of these characteristics on a more practical sense.

   Continuing from the last sentence of the previous paragraph, as a matter of fact neither femininity nor masculinity is strictly associated with someone being a woman or a man. But we all know that conventional societies like ours stress upon a woman and only a woman to display physical feminine qualities and vice versa. 'Boys don't cry' or 'Girls don't cross legs' are phrases that we hear from our childhood because crying is typically (stereotypically, emphasizing) a feminine trait and crossing legs when among a group of people is typically masculine. The truth is, every man exhibits femininity and every woman exhibits masculinity, or more clearly, they exhibit the traits that come under the umbrella of femininity and masculinity. This can never be untrue and hence the veil of the idea of a person strictly belonging to one particularly gender philosophically can be invalidated. This is because the extent up to which a man exhibiting femininity or a woman exhibiting masculinity is very relative and is dependent on a multitude of factors that include one’s culture and various facets of it. Hence, a man who is masculine with respect to one culture may be seen feminine in another culture. Same is the case with women. Henceforth, gender must be viewed of having more of the form of a spectrum (Reminding the fact that gender and sex need not necessarily coincide every time. We tend to forget the nature of the classifications 'gender' and 'sex' and assume that a person who is physiologically a male must be also a male in gender and vice versa) and can never be viewed in an absolute sense (a new spectrum can be visualized for every culture, not sure if this is practically possible though!). There are several applications online to check how feminine or masculine you are on the basis of a certain number of questions and these work on the basis of such parameters and definitions. You need not be surprised if you are physiologically a man, but exhibit more femininity than masculinity!

     Hinduism has a very fine example of the concept that was discussed above. The idea of Shiva-Shakti or Ardhanareeswara is an observation on the same lines. A human being is complete when both femininity and masculinity are present in them. The ambiguity in the concept lies in the uncertainty in how much of each quality must be assigned in a person for them to be regarded as an 'ideal' human being. A person with high masculinity is ideally a man, and a person with high femininity is ideally a woman in terms of their gender (clearly not sex), then what about someone who is high in both or low in both (We have specific terms for candidates satisfying these criteria) ? We know that the word 'ideal' in itself is very debatable!  

Hello there! You’ve posted quite a bit about dark ecology, which I absolutely love as a concept. However, I’ve found Tim Morton’s work can be a bit dense for folks without a philosophy background — do you have any “starter” reading recommendations for people who’d like to learn more before diving headlong into Ecology Without Nature? Thanks!

Despite how over-the-top excited I was to see this great ask, I held-off on answeringimmediately because I wanted to make sure that I chose my words very carefully.Thank you so much for reaching out. (And I’m so sorry! I’m always very grateful forquestions and try to respond much more quickly!) Regarding how inaccessible Morton’sjargon-heavy and convoluted writing can be, I deeply relate. It’s dense, andafter 10 years of reading, I still cannot fully vouch for or clearly explainobject-oriented ontology; Morton can be floofy and difficult. However, I think I’m a relatively better acolyte of dark ecologyand Morton’s more overtly ecological material; I also think that Morton is much more accessible in interviews and when speaking in-person and in recorded lectures. Pertinently, the publishers of Morton’s latest book (Being Ecological - 2018) have added a kind of goofy, informal, and marketable subtitle to the book: “A book about ecology without information dumping.”

In my experience, it seems to me that most people with any kind of passionateinterest in ecology – whether or not they had access to a formal universityeducation – already intuitively understand much of what dark ecology proposes.This would include things like the intimidating scale and vastness of systemslike a local microhabitat, “the sea”, or a regional climate itself; the complex interconnectivity and interdependency of differentspecies; the fragility of the biosphere in the face of human activity; how an hierarchical mentality that devalues ecological landscapes willalso devalue human life; etc. I think a lot of people intuitively recognizethese things, even if not everyone can describe them or explain systems ecology in the most technical terms.Dark ecology might be of interest for those looking to more clearly discuss ordefine these “realities.” First andforemost, dark ecology is arguably about defining a more ethical and comprehensive approach to ecological thinking to specifically cope with the complexity of systems ecology, the social and environmentaldegradation of the Anthropocene, the climate crisis, and the sixth massextinction event.

Before I lose anyone’s interest with a wall of text: I think that peopleinterested in the global climate/ecological crisis; the Anthropocene; weirdfiction (!); anthropology; ethnoecology; the intersection of social injusticewith environmental degradation; capitalist realism and retrofuturism; biosemioticsand animal emotion; and ecology in general would be interested in checking out darkecology.I like that the dark ecology concept tries to grapple with the “apocalyptic” feeling of the current ecological crisis, and I also like that the concept tries to bridge the apparent gap between the humanities and ecology by describing how environmental degradation relates to social injustice.

In this egregiously long post, I’ll try to offer some accessiblereading recommendations on dark ecology and I’ll try to use the question as aspringboard to define dark ecology. Unfortunately, I, myself, come across asdense and convoluted, so if you want toavoid parsing through all of my text here, I’ve numbered each of the readingrecommendations/resources below.

:)

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Art installations from the Dark Ecology Project art sites - a collaboration with Timothy Morton - in Norway. The first piece is by resident artist HC Gilje.

What is dark ecology?

- Essentially, dark ecology is a wayto update ecological thinking for the Anthropocene and for the sixth massextinction event; for an era of “climate anxiety” and loss. It’s a conceptmeant to improve ecological thought and to correct older inadequacies in Westernnaturalism, which often assumes that humans are separate or detached observers fromthe landscapes that we study. - Dark ecology also involves the humanities, and anthropology especially. Thisis because the concept implies an acknowledgment that Indigenous and non-Western cosmologies (world-views) are legitimateand helpful frameworks for building sustainable ecological communities;understanding the egalitarian ecological relationships among organismsincluding humans; and acknowledging that other living things are deserving ofethical treatment. - The concept of “weirdness” is veryimportant in dark ecology, as is anxiety. (To learn more about this aspect of weirdness, see Morton’s article in Changing Weathers, linked below.)- Another concept originally coined and defined by Morton and centrally important to dark ecology isthat of “hyperobjects”: things sobig and/or abstract that humans struggle to conceive of their magnitude,something like “climate” itself or an abstract “object” like an “interspeciesrelationship.”- In dark ecology, there is an implied (and sometimes explicit) critique of the“extractivist” mentality and its friends (industrial resource extraction;monoculture farming). Morton sometimes phrases this as a critique of “agrilogistics”: the industrial-scaleover-harvest of natural resources backed by systemic social inequality, a sharedmentality prevalent in early hydraulic civilization, empires, the European feudalera, and the current era.- There is also an implied critique of socialhierarchy; essentially, dark ecology proposes that the problem of human/industrialmismanagement of landscapes and other species is closely tied with socialhierarchy and human mistreatment of other humans. Thus, dark ecology impliesthat sexism, racism, violence, etc., stem from the same worldviews thatpropagate environmental degradation.- Where object-oriented ontology arguablycomes most into play in Morton’s writing is regarding biosemiotics and animal/plant “emotion.” Dark ecology can be readas implying that every other living thing has some kind of subjectiveexperience and agency, even if it doesn’t translate into recognizable humanemotions or doesn’t resemble the sentience of humans. OOO suggests that othernon-human things are still “real” or “alive” at some scale. (This is the aspectof dark ecology that I understand least!)- This aspect of biosemiotics also unites dark ecology with the ontological turn in anthropology, arecent and still active movement to decolonize anthropological thinking. Theacademic discussion of OOO and dark ecology around 2007-2012 was very influentialon anthropologists working to validate non-Western cosmologies that perceive the natural world as a sort of collective, with cooperation among species.- Dark ecology is also useful for evaluating urban geography and urban planning in the 21st Century (“theera of the city”), because related concepts like “hyperobjects” help to conceiveof urban areas as vast entities with sometimes invisible influences overculture and ecology planetwide.- Playfulness and joy are important in Morton’s understanding of the relationship between humans and landscapes/animals/ecology. (You can read more about this aspect in a couple of the resources listed below, including the first video resource listed and the article about “dark ecological podcasts”!)- Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” is now a widely recognized concept, Morton has done something similar with the very popular concept of “hyperobjects”- Thinking of landscapes like this – animals being “alive” in their own uniqueway; ecology being complex and “weird”; seeing ecology and human/social justiceas interlinked – isn’t exactly new at all, especially compared to millennia ofIndigenous cosmologies and environmental knowledge.

Resource 1 - If you don’t want tobe confronted with this long post, one of the best introductions to darkecology comes from the person who coined and popularized the term, TimothyMorton. Since Morton’s really theoretical and sometimes convoluted whenwriting, listening to him speak and answer questions directly seems (to me) tobe an easier way to hear a clear definition of dark ecology and what itentails. So, I’d recommend checking out Morton in this hour-long interview.Here, he explores environmentalism; naturalism; ethical treatment of animals;industrial resource extraction; weird fiction; and the connection between environmentaldegradation and social injustice/hierarchy.

Timothy Morton in Conversation withVerso Books – Verso Books, on YouTube~

This is a great video! However, if I could recommend just one written exploration of dark ecology, it would be this article from Morton.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180316024548/www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology (What Is Dark Ecology? -- TimothyMorton – Changing Weathers, 2016)

Resource 2 - Here’s a shortervideo (9 minutes) where Morton briefly describes ecological thought; biosemiotics;the development of the dark ecology concept; and the concept’s relationships toenvironmentalism and natural history. ~ Beautiful Soul Syndrome: Towards aDark Ecology (YouTube) ~

Resource 3 - It seems that Morton’smost influential texts are these 4 books:

-- Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007)-- The Ecological Thought (2010)-- Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)-- Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016)

You can read the entirety of Dark Ecology (2016) for free online,here.

Resource 4 – A good related book(with much more accessible writing!) is this: Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realismfor Turbulent Times – Adrian Ivakhiv – 2018

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These are 6 “classic” books that explore dark ecology:

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Resource 5 - One of the best andmost concise written explanations also comes from Morton himself. Ironically,this introductory was taken off the internet only one week ago, but you canaccess it through the Wayback Machine here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180316024548/www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology

~ What Is Dark Ecology? -- TimothyMorton – Changing Weathers, 2016 ~

And the original URL, which you can plug into the Wayback Machine:

www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology

Resource 6 - A fun read – and agood example of the application of dark ecology, especially involving therelationship between ecology and weirdness/playfulness – would be this article. (It’sa good read even if you’re not a fan of the multitude of “spooky” and “AmericanGothic” podcasts that have been recently popularized.)

~ At Home with the Weird: DarkEco-Discourse in Tanis and Welcome to Night Vale – Danielle Barrios-O’Neill andMichael Collins - Revenant, March 2018 ~

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A quick definition of dark ecology fromArie Altena:

We have indeed borrowed the term ‘Dark Ecology’ from the work of TimothyMorton. Over the past couple of years he has written a number of booksoutlining an ‘Ecological Thought’ that has no use for the Romantic notion of‘Nature’. He begins to explain this idea in Ecology without Nature (2007) – abook which is also about art and ‘environmental aesthetics.’ In The EcologicalThought (2010) he shows that the ‘ecological thought’ is not nice and green anda celebration of all things natural, but that to really think theinterconnectedness of all forms of life and all things (the ‘mesh’), is dark.[Morton says:] ‘Dark ecology puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, andthoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is thatof noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly externalsituation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that sheor he is implicated in it. The point of view of the narrator herself becomesstained with desire. There is no metaposition from which we can make ecologicalpronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the sunny,affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest ecological artwould linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference. …The ecologicalthought includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.

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In Morton’s own words (from “What IsDark Ecology?” – Changing Weathers):

The ecological era we find ourselves in — whether we like it or not, andwhether we recognise it or not — makes necessary a searching revaluation ofphilosophy, politics and art. The very idea of being ‘in’ an era is inquestion. We are ‘in’ the Anthropocene, but that era is also ‘in’ a moment offar longer duration.

What is the present? How can it be thought? What is presence? Ecologicalawareness forces us to think and feel at multiple scales, scales that disorientnormative concepts such as ‘present’, ‘life’, ‘human’, ‘nature’, ‘thing’,‘thought’ and ‘logic’. I shall argue there are layers of attunement toecological reality more accurate than what is habitual in the media, in theacademy and in society at large.

These attunement structures are necessarily weird, a precise term that weshall explore in depth. Weirdness involves the hermeneutical knowingnessbelonging to the practices that the Humanities maintain. The attunement, whichI call ecognosis, implies a practical yet highly nonstandard vision of whatecological politics could be. In part ecognosis involves realising thatnonhumans are installed at profound levels of the human — not just biologicallyand socially but in the very structure of thought and logic. Coexisting withthese nonhumans is ecological thought, art, ethics and politics.

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An art project by Edward Burtynsky, at National Gallery of Canada exploring the Anthropocene (pictured is a scene from a coal mine in Westphalia, Germany - 2015).

Timothy Morton is a close colleague of Graham Harman – Harman being thetheorist who is most credited with defining object-oriented ontology. BothMorton and Harman were colleagues with Mark Fisher, the now-legendary culturalcritic and theorist who popularized the concept of “capitalist realism.” Thebranch of OOO that Harman and Morton subscribe to is usually referred to as “speculativerealism.”

OOO and dark ecology are closely related - at least in Morton’s work - and tend to be mentioned together(with good reason). An important disclaimer: OOO seems to be even more overwhelming than dark ecology asa concept; I struggle to articulate OOO and really do not understand too muchabout it (so I’m not sure I can provide the best resources for learning aboutit).

From an interview with Morton at WASH magazine:

OOO deals with concepts like “hyperobject” and “mesh.” Can you give us some brief definitions of these concepts?A hyperobject is an entity that is so massively distributed in space and time that you can’t point to all of it at once. Even if you use very advanced prosthetic devices like fast supercomputers, it might still be difficult to map one. The biosphere is a hyperobject. Climate is a hyperobject.The mesh is the interconnectedness of beings in the biosphere. Nowadays I have a higher resolution image for this: I call it the symbiotic real. It’s a loose network of precarious affiliations between beings where who’s “the top” and who’s “the bottom,” who’s “the friend” and who’s “the enemy,” is always in question. It’s a whole that is always less than the sum of its parts, however weird that sounds. (End quote.)

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So, I am hard-pressed to define OOO, and I can’t personally critique it wellor vouch for OOO as a “good” framework. That said, I take more of a liking tothe dark ecology concept.

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Art from the cover of Morton’s 2016 book, Dark Ecology.

Moreaccessible reading resources:    

(7) - One of the best applications of the hyperobject concept is this fantastic essay on how urban megaregions and big cities function as ecological forces: The Urban Hyperobject - Lisa Bremner

(8) ~ Four Questions for the Author: Timothy Morton,Being Ecological – Orion Magazine –September 2018

(9) ~ Dark Ecology InterviewsTim Morton – Lucas van der Velden and Arie Altena – Dark Ecology dot Net – 2014

(10) ~ (Video) Timothy Morton:Dark Ecological Chocolate – YouTube –2017

(11) ~ A Mutable Cloud: On “DarkEcology” and “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays” –Jennifer Peterson – LA Review of Books– 2017

(12) ~ ‘A Reckoning for our species’: The philosopher prophet of theAnthropocene – The Guardian – June 2017

(13) ~ A Polar Bear Called Susan: Interview with Lisa Doeland – De Groene Amsterdammer – 2013

(14) ~ Timothy Morton: Ecology Without Nature – We interview the philosopherTim Morton, author of “Dark Ecology”, who proposes that we rethink the way wesee ecology, anthropocentrism and art – Roc Jimenez de Cisneros – CCCB Lab -- December 2016

(15) ~ Timothy Morton regularly posts onand maintains a blog on Blogspot: EcologyWithout Nature

(16) Timothy Morton had collected a list of interviews with other ecologists, theorists, philosophers, etc. that relate to dark ecology. Available here.

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Again, I think that a lot of people interested in ecology already intuitively grasp much what dark ecology entails. But, I guess it’s nice that the concept specifically tries to grapple with the Anthropocene and what is essentially an “apocalypse” of sorts. It’s a useful framework (at least, it’s been helpful for me).

OK. Yikes.

Very sorry for the ridiculous length of the post. I hope this is useful for someone.

Thanks again for reaching out!

Velvet's battle is a great choice, though I'll always have a special place in my heart for the fight against the Grimm Deathstalker and the Nevermore in Episode 8. That said, what do you think of the individual members of Team RWBY?

I decided to wait on this until I caught up on the series thus far, which I just finished doing the night before last in pretty much the only time in my life I’ve ever really properly binged anything other than comics, and…wow. I knew RWBY was a thing just as a matter of course from being on this site and Youtube, and from watching Death Battle, so I picked up some major beats by osmosis. But my main impression was that it was a charming pseudo-anime online thing of decent quality that unsurprisingly got heavier as it went along as such things tend to do, with extremely rad fights and music along the way; figured it’d be more than serviceable to watch while I was on the treadmill as a disposable distraction from the agony of propelling my wheezing, sweating, loathsome meat-scaffolding forward.

I did *not* expect it to eventually end up after growing pains a - while far from flawless - intensely engrossing story of all-consuming personal and generational pain and people who choose to love and do the right thing in defiance of that trauma and loss and hopelessness, where also occasionally a corgi gets fastball specialed at mechas. Though once it became clear that’s what it is, it pretty clearly sat at an intersection of a hell of a lot of my favorite things, especially when characters copped in-universe in both the main series and spinoff material that this is basically a superhero thing. My initial impressions re: the fights and music were on-point though.

I actually have quite a few thoughts on pretty much all the protagonists of note at this point (other than I suppose Oscar and Maria. Like them both though, and I do hope that nice boy’s brain somehow doesn’t dissolve into the blender of Ozpin’s subconscious), but I’ll just stick with the core four here as requested for now unless someone asks otherwise. Weiss is the simplest to get at the core of, I’d say: her arc is learning that fuck rich people, actually. She’s a seriously difficult character to get onboard for at first - especially if you’re watching those first episodes for the first time in 2019 - as the mean unconsciously racist rich girl who learns to be less mean and racist but still kinda mean. But after you’ve extensively seen the hideously toxic environment she grew up in, and fully understand her efforts to grow past the empty values it inculcated in her in favor of everything she was raised to think of herself as above, she becomes a hell of a figure to root for. Assuming RWBY is gonna go, say, a respectable 10 seasons given it was just renewed through 9, I could easily see the upcoming 7th be the climax of her arc with her return to Atlas and likely further reckoning with the consequences of her families’ actions beyond how they’ve hurt her personally.

Yang is also, in a certain abstract narrative sense, simple, in that she’s built around the very oldest trick in the book for characters whose main deal is ‘can punch better than absolutely anyone’: give them problems that cannot be solved by punching. Except in her case it’s less a material “well, this person is invulnerable to punching!” or “well, actually this other person can punch most best of all” issue blocking her path than “punching cannot solve depression, abandonment issues, questioning whether what she considers her purpose in life is one she’s truly pursuing for noble reasons or if she even has the resolve for it anymore after what’s happened to her, or PTSD”. Yet, while it may not be the kind that manifests in the form of punching people with a smirk and a bad pun anymore (much as she still definitely does that all the time) what ultimately drives her and defines her is still her strength: to move forward, to forgive, to let go, to do the right thing in spite of the risks. Which could easily come off as some unpleasant “you just have to get over your moping!” dismissal - there’s a bit with her dad that means it saddles riiiiight up to the edge of that - but there’s a weight to how her traumas remain a consistent factor in her life and have shaped her outlook even as her circumstances and day-to-day disposition improve that makes it feel thematically like it’s coming from a place of acknowledgment and endurance rather than denial, even if it’s not handled perfectly. Great to see her apparently recapturing some more of her joie de vivre based on the trailer for Volume 7, and how that’ll interact with how she’s grown should be interesting.

Blake is…tough, because you fundamentally cannot talk about Blake without getting into the Faunus, which is maybe the biggest aspect of RWBY that leaves it in the realm of Problematic Fave. It really, really wants to have something substantial to say about the proper response to racism, and every now and then it pumps out a “capitalism greases the wheels of systemic oppression and vice-versa” or “it’s perfectly reasonable for the oppressed to seek to fight back directly against their oppressors, and even the pacifist in the room can recognize that’s a defensible approach that deserves its place”. But then Abusive Boyfriend Magneto literally murders nuance in Vol. 5 episode 2, and it descends into some borderline “but what about black on black violence” respectability politics shit. It’s the classic X-Men setup - this persecuted race of often superpowered folks torn between pacifism and efforts to prove themselves to their oppressors, and those who think they should rise up and annihilate the flatscans - with most of the same pitfalls, but also we haven’t had over 50 years to get used to that just being how it works here, and it doesn’t have the excuse of having to expand as best it can on a metaphor that was originally devised before most of the people currently handling it were born. All of which would be rough enough, but given I watched this right as Jonathan Hickman’s been completely refining the entire X-Men paradigm outside that outdated binary, it especially grates. I’d love to be directed to any solid counterarguments - I’ve heard it might actually be an analogue, and a well-done one, for The Troubles, which I am one million percent unqualified to evaluate - especially since apparently one of the writers grew up in a mixed-race household, and at the end of the day I’m a white guy who may well be talking completely out his ass. But it sure comes off at a glance as some well-intentioned dudes stumbling through stuff that’s not their business, and that’s inextricable from Blake’s character when so much of her story is her navigating through that metaphor. Hopefully with new writers coming onboard this is something that can be navigated more insightfully in the future.

On a purely personal basis however, Blake’s a standout in terms of relatability when her story comes down to a pretty universal shared horror: how to climb back from having fucked up. She tried really hard to do the right thing, was taken advantage of and led into doing things she eventually realized were wrong, was so shaken that she couldn’t tell who to trust, and then the situation spiraled out of control on every possible front just as things finally seemed to be stabilizing. The way a single mistake - enabled and exacerbated by an abusive past relationship in her case - expands into a self-loathing far beyond the bounds of anything she could possibly be responsible for is brutal and completely understandable, and seeing her start put her self-esteem back together with the help of those closest to her and the power of her original convictions is arguably the single strongest, most clearly conveyed individual character arc in the series. I’m very curious where it goes from here: Adam’s finish represents a logical climax and the setup for a happily-ever-after with Yang (or Sun if they end up going that way after all) for her to coast through the remainder of the series on, but the way emotional consequences have played out in the series thus far I doubt her demons are going to be put to bed that simply.

Finally there’s Ruby, and I am contractually obligated to note up front: she is clearly not a Superman analogue. There is precisely zero percent chance that she was conceived as such or was ever deliberately executed in such a way that mirroring him was kept in mind. Though she IS a super-powered idealist raised in the middle of nowhere with a significant deceased parent who wears a red cape, flies, gives inspiring rallying speeches, has black-ish but primary color-tinted hair, and has a mysterious birthright that involves being able to shoot lasers from her eyes, plus she has a dog who also essentially has superpowers, plus she tells someone they’re stronger than they think they are, plus Yang basically quotes a bit from Kingdom Come regarding her in Rest and Resolutions. But it probably goes a ways in explaining why she works so well for me.

There’s more to it than that of course, though it does bring up the closest way in which she relates to the superhero paradigm: she doesn’t go through an arc in quite the same way as the others, instead being an already solidly-defined character who is simply illustrated by how she interacts with the people and situations around her. She learns and grows and matures, but her most basic motivations and goals and outlook haven’t really changed since the day she enrolled at Beacon. She’s a good, caring person, a leader archetype who still has more than enough personality to spare to keep from falling into the genericism that can often plague that role. A big part of the key I believe is that she’s the audience surrogate in a profound way beyond the obvious touchstones of her frequent awkwardness and self-doubt: the reason she does this is because she was inspired by stories. She’s a fan, ultimately, but one who learned all the right lessons, whether recognizing from day one the way reality falls short of the tales she was raised on but still believing in the ideals they represent, or openly holding up Qrow as a role model while being willing to call him on his shit when push comes to shove. It’s a romantic, hopeful perspective that stands out sharply from even our other heroes even as it mirrors their struggles, but as of yet there’s little to suggest it comes from a place of naivete so much as a belief that it’s the only way to bear the pain of the world and continue to believe in it. Bit by bit it’s clear she’s heading for a breaking point, but all signs point to that being a matter of her ability to withstand what she’s been through, rather than any doubt that it’s necessary, and should that time come she’s inspired plenty who’ll be able to help her back onto her feet the way she has for so many others. So while I understand her speeches apparently grate on some, as far as I’m concerned keep them coming, they’re the beating caring heart of the series and often the sole respite in the eye in the storm.

Dialogues With A Dreg, Part Four

Spoilers for Destiny and Destiny 2 ahead.

Hello, Guardian.

Let’s drop the allegory for a while. I don’t think it was working to begin with, and I prefer to speak plainly instead of in prose.

I love the game you serve as the protagonist in, at least mechanically. Part of the reason I’ve put nearly a thousand hours in piloting you around and clicking on enemy heads is because I’m chasing that satisfying “pop” when something’s brain explodes after I get them with a linear fusion rifle. I guess it’s better than being addicted to drugs or alcohol or video games with gambling mechan- oh shit god dammit wait, fuck, there’s Eververse here, I forgot.

Anyway, Destiny 2 has my full buy-in when it comes to gameplay, as I think it’s grabbed many folks in its three-year lifespan. I’m not as big a fan of the many modes to choose from in the game, and I think the story – when looked at holistically – is more-or-less a wash. But one aspect I can’t ignore is one I’ve tried to reason out in these Dialogues: Bungie, the game’s developer, wants me to live at least part-time in this world, and there are certain ramifications that come with that.

I first noticed these ramifications during the Faction Rallies in D2Y1, when it asked me to pick a faction and fuck shit up across the solar system. I picked what I thought was the coolest-looking faction, a group of (it turned out) thanatonautic, neoliberal warmongers calling themselves Future War Cult. They basically killed themselves over and over to see the future, and as a result they want Guardians everywhere to become absolute war machines. But as far as I could see, they were a “better” option than the other two factions: Dead Orbit, who just wanted to get the fuck out of the solar system and away from the Traveler, our slumbering charge, and New Monarchy.

New Monarchy is the MAGA hat gang of Destiny 2. They want to keep humanity safe by locking them inside the Last City, forming an eternal Guardian-led kingdom, and ruling with an iron fist. Yeesh.

In my first Faction Rally, I fought hard for FWC. I liked the gear they were giving me, not to mention the guns I could earn from them. They had an aesthetic I liked, and the story of thanatonautics is interesting enough for me to want to know more about how all that worked. But I didn’t like the insistence that we “reclaim” the far-flung reaches of the solar system, as if they belonged to us inherently. I didn’t like the ramping-up, constant drumbeat for war they were throwing out. Even if Lakshmi-2, FWC’s leader, seemed like the eye of a hurricane – calm, yet clearly still dangerous – the hurricane she was the center of was starting to irk me.

I’m sorry to say I didn’t drop FWC in subsequent Rallies, even if I wasn’t as enthusiastic about them as I was initially. If I could pick again, though, I know now I’d pick Dead Orbit. They had it the most right, plus Peter Stormare plays Arach Jalaal, the faction’s leader, which is just cool.

But the winner of pretty much every rally was New Monarchy. I couldn’t see the appeal, even if you stripped the clear trump-ass bullshit away. But a LOT of other Destiny 2 players fought for them, and they were the victors constantly. Bungie took the Faction Rally away in D2Y2, but it basically put me on an inexorable thought track to where we are today.

Simply put, I think the world that Destiny 2 is advocating for is at best a fascist one. At worst, we’re talking about reinstating the divine right of kings. Not only does mortal humanity lose in this bargain, but every other living creature inhabiting our solar system suffers for it as well.

Now, Guardian, I can see that this is an unwelcome statement to hear. I get it. After spending the entire five years of your existence thanklessly putting around the solar system and killing gargantuan, god-level threats to humanity and life itself, watching some nerdy, doughy writer cast aspersions on everything you do probably extends past irritation and into wishing you could shoulder-charge me into Glimmer particles. But I want to be clear: yours isn’t the only video game world – or even the only sci-fi world in general – that does this. As Nic Reuben (the original Destiny 2 fascism warner) put it in his 2017 post on the subject, Bungie writers are “blindly following a set of culturally encoded science-fantasy tropes”:

“‘True leaders are born. It’s genetic. The right to rule is inherited.’ Any time you play as a really, really ridiculously good looking person killing mobs of ugly things for a vaguely defined reason, you’re witnessing this kind of ideology first hand.”

One thing I would like to point out, though, before we continue: Guardian, I know you personally. I’ve fought as you across the stars. I know you don’t inherently want to rule over anything. You are intentionally a blank slate, you never voice your own desires except for that one time when a possessed Awoken prince killed your best ramen bud, and I want to believe that the only thing you want — which is the only thing I want — is to race Sparrows on Mars. But the version of you I play as is not the only version of you that exists. There are over a million of you. And aside from that million iterations of you that exist in this game world, there are others who absolutely want to rule. It’s high time to interrogate this world.

Fantasy Space Fascism: The Game

In his book Against the Fascist Creep, freelance journalist and Portland State Ph.D candidate Alexander Reid Ross defines fascism as “an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the ‘new man.'” He continues:

“Fascism is also mythopoetic insofar as its ideological system does not only seek to create new myths but also to create a kind of mythical reality (ed. emphasis mine), or an everyday life that stems from myth rather than fact. Fascists hope to produce a new kind of rationale envisioning a common destiny that can replace modern civilization. The person with authority is the one who can interpret these myths into real-world strategy through a sacralized process that defines and delimits the seen and the unseen, the thinkable and the unthinkable.

“That which is most commonly encouraged through fascism is producerism, which augments working-class militancy against the ‘owner class’ by focusing instead on the difference between ‘parasites’ (typically Jews, speculators, technocrats, and immigrants) and the productive workers and elites of the nation. In this way, fascism can be both functionally cross class and ideologically anticlass, desiring a classless society based on a ‘natural hierarchy’ of deserving elites and disciplined workers. By destroying parasites and deploying some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism, fascists promise to create an ideal state or suprastate – a spiritual entity more than a modern nation-state, closer to the unitary sovereignty of the empire than political systems of messy compromises and divisions of power.”

Ross, A. R. (2017). Against the Fascist Creep. AK Press.

The Destiny franchise begins with you, a freshly-reborn Guardian, shooting and punching your way through a hive of vaguely-arachnid aliens your Ghost companion calls “Fallen.” You find a decrepit jumpship deep in the heart of the Old Russia Cosmodrome, which your Ghost fires up and uses to take you to the “last safe city on Earth,” a walled metropolis underneath the Traveler. You first meet with the Vanguard triumvirate, Titan Commander Zavala, Warlock Ikora, and Hunter Cayde-6, and then, after completing some tasks for them, you are granted an audience with the Speaker (voiced by Bill Nighy):

“THE SPEAKER: There was a time when we were much more powerful. But that was long ago. Until it wakes and finds its voice, I am the one who speaks for The Traveler.

“You must have no end of questions, Guardian. In its dying breath, The Traveler created the Ghosts to seek out those who can wield its Light as a weapon—Guardians—to protect us and do what the Traveler itself no longer can.

“GUARDIAN: What happened to it?

“THE SPEAKER: I could tell you of the great battle centuries ago, how the Traveler was crippled. I could tell you of the power of The Darkness, its ancient enemy. There are many tales told throughout the City to frighten children. Lately, those tales have stopped. Now… the children are frightened anyway. The Darkness is coming back. We will not survive it this time.

“GHOST: Its armies surround us. The Fallen are just the beginning.

“GUARDIAN: What can I do?

“THE SPEAKER: You must push back the Darkness. Guardians are fighting on Earth and beyond. Join them. Your Ghost will guide you. I only hope he chose wisely.”

Bungie. Destiny. Activision Entertainment, 2015.

This introduction to the world of Destiny is… shockingly reductive. Even playing the campaign when this happens, my first thoughts were, “wait so we’re not even smart or good enough to hear the children’s scary stories about the history of this world? what the fuck?” But over the course of years, we find out more and more about the so-called Golden Age of Humanity, the tools humans built with implied assistance from the Traveler, the various rich families and corporate megaliths that consolidated power over people across the solar system in the years and decades leading to the arrival of the Darkness and the ensuing Collapse.

Not only that, we start to get a pretty clear image of what life was like immediately following the Collapse. Humanity was almost driven to extinction, and the people left alive after this apocalypse soon wished they were dead. The Traveler “defeated” the Darkness but in the process put itself into something similar to an emergency reboot mode. It deployed the Ghosts, who resurrected people who could, as the Speaker put it, “wield its Light as a weapon,” but the first of these “Risen” were nothing short of horrific. They used their Ghosts’ regeneration and resurrection powers to become regional warlords, subjugating what few mortal people remained, draining the desolate wastes of what few resources they had, and basically sealing the deal on the “Dark Age” brought on by the Collapse. It wasn’t until the advent of the Iron Lords that these warlords were defeated and the “age of Guardians” could begin, but even the Iron Lords did some pretty heinous shit – like use a whole town of mortals as bait to lure in a band of warlords on the run.

But when it comes to creating a mythical reality, the Speaker has his formula down pat. Don’t get too bogged down with details, paint the conflict in stark good vs. evil, literal “Light vs. Darkness” broad strokes, and mythologize the actions of Guardians (but most importantly, our Guardian). And oh, what fodder for mythology we are.

By the end of the first campaign, we’re the hero who severed the connection between the Hive, the Vex and the Traveler and tore out the heart of the Black Garden. By the end of The Taken King, we’ve slain a god-king. In the Rise of Iron expansion, we stop the spread of a virulent nanoparticle with murderous intent called SIVA in its tracks, using nothing but our fists. In Destiny 2, we become the Hero of the Red War, the one who put an end to a Vex plot to sterilize all worlds, and who killed a Hive Worm God. We avenge our fallen Hunter Vanguard, we kill a Taken Ahamkara. We are the hub on which the spokes of history are turning.

In terms of video game power fantasies, I really truly can’t imagine a better-feeling one. It’s basically pure uncut dopamine being transmitted directly to the pleasure centers of the brain, one Herculean feat at a time. And if we were the only Guardian, if we were not part of a larger world, if everything around us was in a vacuum, I don’t know if I would be writing this article. But Bungie has been very clear about wanting to make a world where our actions do materially affect our surroundings. As such, we are essentially a walking propaganda tool for the Consensus, a pseudo-democratic government over the Last City, consisting of faction leaders, the Vanguard and the (now-presumed-dead, hasn’t been replaced) Speaker.

The Consensus wants badly to declare the advent of the New Golden Age, a time in which Humanity can finally emerge from under the shadow of the Traveler to pick up where it left off prior to the Collapse. The problem we supposedly face is the never-ending onslaught of Enemies. Four alien species showed up on our doorstep after the Collapse, all seeking to finish us off (according to the Speaker): the Fallen, the Cabal, the Hive/Taken, and the Vex.

Of the four-ish races of enemy, only one can said to be truly, deeply “evil” in the sense the Speaker intends: the Hive and Taken, led by Taken King Oryx and his sisters Sivu Arath and Savathun, the only force in the galaxy more fascist than the Guardians. The Vex are a race of machines whose only focus is on making more of themselves, a threat similar to SIVA. The other two alien forces, the Fallen and the Cabal, are certainly antagonistic toward Guardians but our initial reasons for fighting them are, frankly, butt-ass stupid. Basically, we fight them because they’re there. They have the audacity to land on planets that “belong to us” and scavenge resources from them. Until the Red Legion showed up on Earth, we basically only ever fought Cabal on Mars, and there’s really no reason as to why.

The Fallen, or Eliksni, on the other hand, end up coming off more as the tragic victims of our flippantly rampant genocidaire practices than actual “enemies.” They’re probably the weakest alien species we come up against. Their backstory involves them living in peace under the Traveler before their entire society was caught up in a Collapse-like “Whirlwind” and destroyed. Rather than give them Guardians, like it did with us, the Traveler instead just up and peaced out, leaving the Eliksni for dead against the maelstrom of the Darkness. The surviving “Fallen” got in their skiffs and desperately chased the Traveler across the heavens, stratifying the remnants of their society into “houses” and developing religious devotion to machines like Servitors in the process.

They tried to take the Traveler back at the Battle of the Five Fronts and Twilight Gap, and lost. Their armies were shattered, and we’ve been nonchalantly killing them en masse ever since. They are the “parasites” our Guardian must exterminate, along with the Hive, Cabal, and Vex. When we make friends with, or even simply allies with, a Fallen (like Variks the Loyal, Mithrax the Forsaken, or the Spider), it is made clear almost immediately that this 100 percent doesn’t change the relationship we have with the Fallen as a group. Variks is absolutely subservient to Mara Sov and the Awoken. Mithrax wants to create an Eliksni House that bows down to Guardians and Humanity for being “better stewards” of the Traveler than the Eliksni was. The Spider makes it clear that he only wants to grow his crime syndicate, but that we can help him out if we want. Never once does the Vanguard or the Consensus reach out to these allies and try to broker peace. And in-game, we simply don’t have an option but to fire on and kill Eliksni in droves. Kill or be “killed,” right?

When it comes to Humanity itself, while we never get a chance to actually leave the Tower and walk through the streets of the Last City, there are at least hints as to the deep class stratification at work here. You can’t get much more on-the-nose than an ivory tower of immortal beings overlooking an enclosed human race. Guardians atop humanity, the Speaker above the Vanguard over the Consensus over the people, and you, the very fulcrum on which history pivots, functionally over everything else. But in the mythical reality of this game, it’s really the Traveler über Alles, and humanity underneath the Traveler has become a wonderful, diverse melting pot without class, without fear. An ideal state where the walls keep Darkness at bay and humanity can discover the joys of tonkotsu ramen yet again.

A Light Story Vs. Lore Steeped in Darkness

Destiny has a reputation, unfairly earned, for being an okay game with a bad story, or at best a nonexistent one. The story isn’t really all that bad, it’s just poorly implemented up front, and I think my willingness to engage with the game’s world to the extent that I have is a testament to how powerful and evocative some of the beats in Destiny’s writing truly are. If we dissect the game we can separate the writing of the “story” from the writing of the “lore,” and in watching the plot develop over the past few years, we can see a gradual unification of these two areas start to occur.

This is helped greatly by third-party resources like Ishtar Collective, and by mechanical decisions Bungie made in D2Y2. Adding the lore back into the game with Forsaken was a good idea; choosing to fully integrate the lore into the world starting with Season of the Forge was a great one.

A side-effect of this lore-plot unification is a dismantling-in-real-time of some of the game’s most beloved and widely-spread legends, like the legend of Shin Malphur and Dredgen Yor. Even our personal legend is challenged in this way, and it’s a really neat way that Bungie writers new and old are critically engaging with their work. But it also really throws into stark relief some of the issues I’ve laid out in this article so far.

Take, for example, the lore book “Stolen Intelligence.”

Presented to us as intercepted secret Vanguard transmissions, “Stolen Intelligence” shows us exactly what the Vanguard really thinks of our actions, and what their goals really are. It was part of Season of the Drifter, which overall had a “trust no one” vibe to it, but some of the entries here are BLEAK, y’all.

Here’s an excerpt from the first entry, titled “Outliers.”

“Fallen armed forces continue to fall back from active fronts across Terra. Factions of House Dusk remain active in the European Dead Zone. Throughout the rest of the globe, refugee attack incidents have dropped by more than 70 percent since the conclusion of the Red War – largely attributable to depressed Fallen and human populations rather than any significant change in interspecies relations.

[…]

“The recent trending emergence of so-called “crime syndicates” (cf. report #004-FALLEN-SIV) is emblematic of the continuing destructuralization of Fallen society. Likely an artifact of multi-generational colonization of human strongholds, this agent believes that because these syndicates have no relation to indigenous Fallen culture, young Fallen are appropriating and imitating human mythology in absence of a strong cultural heritage of their own.

[…]

“VIP #3987, another former confederate of the Awoken, is a lesser-known personality known as Mithrax. Scattered field reports suggest that like #1121, #3987 styles himself a Kell of the so-called “House Light,” an otherwise unknown House apparently founded by #3987 himself. We have secondhand accounts that Mithrax has engaged in allied operations with Guardians in the field, though we have not as yet been able to corroborate these accounts with any degree of veracity. This agent is inclined to treat these reports with a healthy degree of skepticism until otherwise confirmed, as they may be propaganda from Fallen sympathizers in the Old Russian and Red War Guardian cohorts. We have requested intelligence records from the Awoken which may further clarify the matter.

“In addition, whatever the findings of said intelligence records may be, it should be stressed that one or two sympathetic outliers cannot be relied upon to erase the wrongs of past centuries, nor should their good-faith efforts to correct the sins of their forbears be taken as sufficient symbolic reparation.

[…]

“We have come too far to pull our punches now.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Outliers. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Here’s another piece of “Stolen Intelligence,” about our relationship with Cabal Emperor Calus:

“Related to the above, #3801’s aggressive propaganda campaign appears to have been successful. Despite #3801’s recent inactivity, sentiment polls captured in the Tower at regular intervals over the last several months indicate that he has successfully swayed a significant percentage of the Red War cohort to believe that he may be a potential ally. Given our history with the Cabal as well as the events of the Red War itself, this is shocking and perhaps attributable to a case of mass traumatic bonding.

“It is my strong recommendation that the Vanguard pursue a reeducation curriculum before #3801 invites any Guardians of the City to defect to his service, a possibility which we have documented in multiple previous reports.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Passivity. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Other entries detail the efforts of the Vanguard from keeping ostensible “conspiracy theories” from being published in the Cryptarchy’s journals; show the apparent oddity of mortal-Guardian “integrated neighborhoods;” and discuss the ongoing surveillance of the Drifter, a rogue Lightbearer who has survived since the early Dark Ages and who uses Darkness-aligned technology to run a PVEVP game called “Gambit”.

There are many other stories like these, scattered throughout the lore. Stories of Cryptarchy students being banished for making fun of New Monarchy’s leaders, of Guardians messing with Hive technology being burned alive and killed fully by the Praxic Order for their crimes of experimentation. Stories like these wouldn’t happen – couldn’t happen! – to our Guardian, because they’re too important, but are seemingly everyday occurrences to less consequential members of this society. In the real world, we’d call that an increasingly oppressive police state. In Destiny 2, it’s just flavor text.

There was a degree of narrative complexity added to Season of the Drifter that hadn’t been in the game prior. The entire season was essentially boiled down to “which side are you on, the Drifter’s or the Vanguard’s,” and in our path to make a choice, we heard from various bit players in our world. The Drifter told us his story in greater detail than perhaps we needed (and how much of it is true is debatable), but his story is also the story of a less morally-pure Guardian class. Everyone from the warlords to the Iron Lords did heinous shit to humanity while the Drifter watched, and it hardened him. The Praxic Warlock Aunor goes all in on her adherence to the City’s propaganda and ideology, trying to show us how untrustworthy the Drifter is. She ends up revealing more of her order’s goals than perhaps was wise.

This narrative complexity is nice, but it still betrays the game in a fundamental way. We now have the documents. We know what Guardians are actually about, and how they’re not exactly shining beacons of unwavering good like the Speaker would have had us believe. Regardless of declining Fallen activity, of a shift in Fallen culture, of actual living Fallen who want to ally with Guardians, the Vanguard is still adamantly pursuing “extirpation,” which is a fancy way of saying genocide (I’m not kidding, it literally means “root out and destroy completely”). We know the Vanguard and the Praxic Order have a hard-on for exile, reeducation and information suppression.

On top of everything, the narrative complexity was not met with any kind of mechanical complexity. Even with proof that the Vanguard wants to kill every Eliksni in the system, conscientious objectors don’t get to opt out. The narrative path that forks between the Drifter and Aunor converges again by the end of the quest. The “conspiracy theorist” that has been trying to publish paper after paper detailing exactly how the Nine worked with Dominus Ghaul to sneak his fleet into City airspace undetected was proven right by lore WE FIND IN THE GAME, but that doesn’t change our combat relationship with the Cabal remnants anywhere in the system, and homeboy still gets his papers rejected.

Ikora and Zavala, our remaining Vanguard members, insist repeatedly that Guardians are not a warfighting force, that the Vanguard and the Consensus is not an authoritarian organization. But everything we do says otherwise.

“A peace born from violence is no peace at all.”

Guardians do not get to choose their paths in the world of Destiny 2. The paths laid out before them lead to a life of warfare, of pain, of endless murder. Ostensibly, they are agents of good, trying to beat back the forces of evil, but if you look too close you see that really they’re just a bunch of indiscriminate killers with a mandate from the Orb God. Desperate to get out from under the heels of warlords, the Guardians created a fascist society, and adding insult to injury they pretend it’s a democratic, free one. Killing the Fallen is genocide, but you can literally never stop killing them because the game won’t let you. The only right way to play at that point is to turn off your console and go outside.

Destiny 2 isn’t the only video game to fall into this trap. As Nic Reuben said in the follow-up piece to his first story on how Destiny 2 is fascist, “I’m not saying Destiny is propaganda, just reliant on some of the same narrative tricks that make propaganda so powerful. At the same time, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that games like Call of Duty make certain assumptions about what is justifiable, righteous slaughter and what is terrorism. Replace modern military hardware with future tech, replace terrorists with alien races that have traits synonymous with cartoon portrayals of traditionally marginalized social groups, and you’re effectively playing through the worst aspects of Call of Duty with a new coat of a paint.”

There is one glimmer of hope in the game. One sliver of lore that gives us pause and helps make the game bearable in its current state. It comes in the form of Lady Efrideet, former Iron Banner handler, youngest member of the Iron Lords, and a Guardian in self-exile from the City, the Vanguard, and its fascist dogma.

Lady Efrideet is one of the most fearsome Hunters in the Destiny universe. She is known as one of the best marksmen, if not the best one. She is impossibly strong, having once thrown Lord Saladin bodily off a mountain into a Fallen Spider Walker, destroying it. And she is also one of the only named pacifist Guardians who isn’t a member of the Cryptarchy. Her story is the story of the fall of the Iron Lords, as well as the beginning of the SIVA crisis, many years before our Guardian’s rise is documented.

But it isn’t SIVA or the Iron Lords that we’re interested in. Instead, we know that after SIVA was sealed away, Efrideet snuck away from Earth. She saw the deaths of everyone she knew and her will to fight was shattered. If this was the result of fighting for the Traveler, she didn’t want any part in it. So she took to the stars. In doing so, she ended up in the far reaches of the solar system, beyond even where we currently roam. It turns out, a small enclave of other Lightbearers, hesitant or unwilling to use their powers to kill, had also fled to this part of the system and had established a colony. It’s there that Efrideet resides, and it’s there I’d like to go.

Unfortunately, our Guardian is too “important” to the vast tidal forces at work in the Destiny universe for us to be able to leave for the outer reaches whenever we want. Because we are the hub on which the wheel of history turns, and there is no escaping that now, if ever we could. We are death, the flattening of a complex and intricate universe into one of simple shapes, the sword logic in a human/Awoken/Exo body. We are needed for the plans of the Nine/Mara Sov/Hive Queen Savathun to come to fruition. When or if the Darkness ever does come back, we will be the force that faces it and, win or lose, shape our future afterward.

Sometimes it’s nice having a video game place your character on a linear track. Games like Half-Life or Titanfall present to us simple choices in otherwise-complex story environments: progress, or die. Our characters are not immortal, but they have help from the technologies around us, are tenacious, are resourceful, are quick to adapt to changing situations. In Destiny, we simply exist. We can’t truly die. Even when it comes to the rules of the game, our immense “paracausality” causes us to shrug Darkness Zones off as mere inconveniences where other Guardians have died their final deaths. Because we are necessary. The Vanguard and Consensus need us to justify their horrific fascist policies. The great forces at work in the background need us to work as a pawn. Even Bungie itself needs us, powerful, trapped beings with a sense of right and wrong but no agency to actually act on those ethics, to continue its game.

I haven’t preordered Shadowkeep yet. For once I’m glad we’re not focusing on the Fallen or the Cabal. Going to the Moon means we’ll pretty much just be dealing with Hive, to say nothing of the unreal Nightmares we’re supposed to face. But I’m still undecided as to whether I even want to order Shadowkeep in the first place. If Lady Efrideet can go to the edge of known space and live peacefully with other pacifist Guardians, maybe I can put my controller down and step away, once and for all. It would be nice to have the extra space on my Xbox One’s hard drive. Other games exist to be played, and having the time and energy to do so would help me here, with No Escape.

But even then. I’m not expressing agency as a Guardian, but rather as the person who controls you, Guardian. While I go off to play other games, you sit and wait in stasis. Even if I don’t play, there are a million iterations of you willing to commit genocide daily for cheap rewards (shoutouts to the sixtieth Edge Transit drop in my inventory this month alone). Sure, it’s just a game. But this is what having a dynamic world means in practice. There are consequences to your actions. There always have been.

There is no reason why Humanity couldn’t share the Traveler’s gifts with, at the very least, the Eliksni. There is no reason why we couldn’t just ignore the Cabal in a state of mutually assured destruction, given how small a faction the Red Legion was relative to the Cabal army’s full size. Of the two remaining enemies, the Vex are less evil than they are simply a thing that wants the universe to be like it, and that’s threatening to diverse life throughout the universe, not just Humanity. The Hive/Taken are the true enemies in the game, but even they are directed, pawn-like, by their Worm Gods.

There is, likewise, no reason why the Risen had to organize in the fascist context they did. They could have created a society in which everyone could come and go freely, where ideas and actions could be given and received absent interference, where a true “golden age” could have sprung up naturally simply by living together harmoniously and using the Light the Traveler gave them to create, rather than destroy.

But that’s not how this story shakes out.

The Magnus Archives ‘A Matter of Perspective’ (S03E26) Analysis

Melanie takes the reins for this outing, and we get a statement that has been hinted at since early season 3.  After that, there are particularly fun revelations, then … well, then.  The good times just can’t last on this show, can they?

Come on in to hear what I thought about ‘A Matter of Perspective.’

It’s interesting to contrast Melanie’s presentation style from Jon and Martin’s.  She very much still has an entertainer’s training and instincts.  She’s the only one who cues herself and gives a clap like she expects cutting and editing after.  And yet she seems as gripped by the personality of the statement as they are. It’s hard to tell where her instinct for entertainment ends and the Archivist begins, but suffice to say she’s blurring the line.  She’s not as deep into it as Martin and Jon, but she feels it.

The statement itself is a different perspective on the Daedalus Station, this time from the elusive Jan Kilbride, who has been referenced several times this season.  He’s clearly someone touched by the Vast, and was picked for the mission quite specifically by ‘Mr Fairchild’, likely Simon Fairchild.  So we’ve had the person picked by the Lukases (totally isolated, saw the Earth vanish), and the Fairchilds (got sent so far out from the Earth he perceived the Vast). That probably means that Manuela was chosen by the People’s Church of the Divine Host.  One wonders what sort of experiment they requested of her.

I love that we got to see Simon Fairchild again, even if only for a moment.  Of all the potential human monsters, I have a soft spot for this guy, who seems to me to be the horrific TMA version of a wacky wizard.  He seems to focus on people who were already drawn to the Vast, and then he gives them far more of it than he could ever want. He’s always struck me as the sort of character who knows perfectly well that most people he throws at the Vast end up dead, but he can’t see why that should be a bad thing.  He’s giving them what they want.  It might not come in a palatable form, but they still did want it, at least at the beginning.  Of all the parties in TMA, he often seems the most jovial in his perspective.

We know that he’s trying to find the Vast, and has been collecting pieces of it, experiences of its various facets.  I have to wonder, then, if Kilbride wasn’t his greatest success.  What Kilbride perceived between the stars, far out beyond our own solar system, seems as close as we’ve come to the whole of one of the great old ones. Something so vast his mind couldn’t even comprehend it, couldn’t pick out its edges or define it in any way besides its Vastness.  Was this merely another aspect of the Vast, or did he touch the being itself?  Could he touch the being itself?  

I feel like he hit the nail on the head when he stated that we cannot truly perceive the great old ones, and they can’t really perceive us on any meaningful level.  Their aspects interact with us, but more like we’d interact with ants or other very small insects we notice.  We crush them or brush them aside or sometimes just move them away.  Some of them we take a liking to for a brief moment, and we’re gentle with them, but we forget them soon.  That’s the best analogy to the great old ones I can think of.  The Vast is, in many ways, that enormous incomprehensibility made manifest.  

Once the statement was done, it was also interesting to hear Melanie’s reaction to it.  She seems startled that it’s done, but less so because she seems to be waking up from the sort of out-of-body experience that Jon and Martin go through.  If anything, she seems more like season 1 Jon (and I think there’s a reason those two clash so often, as they are remarkably similar in some ways), wanting to dismiss Kilbride’s experiences, particularly as he didn’t describe ever returning to the Daedalus.  She acknowledges the reality of the supernatural, yes, but without good evidence she has a hard time believing the statement.

Then Basira arrives, and their snarky chats are things I need a lot more of in my life.  The two actresses have great chemistry, and through them we got some wonderful little revelations about the other characters and how they’re perceived by Melanie and Basira.

The first thing that happened was the confirmation that Martin’s little crush on Jon is not only canon, but has probably been noticed by everyone except Jon.  Basira and Melanie both agree that Martin got rather hostile when he found out Jon was confiding in them rather than him, which is fantastic.  I’ve read that sort of thing into so many shows, only to have them deny it later. To have it outright confirmed by the other characters that Martin has it bad for Jon, and that his crush explains a lot of his actions?  Yeah, that’s awesome.  

And the awesome kept coming with the following revelation, second-hand from Georgie, that Jon is asexual. Apparently not aromantic, as he and Georgie did date for a time, but asexual.  It’s fantastic to see representations of various sexualities so seamlessly integrated into the show, and for each of them to fit the characters so well.  As soon as they got confirmed, it felt like an ‘of course’ moment.  Of course Tim is bisexual.  Of course Martin is in love with Jon.  Of course Jon is asexual.  It just works.

I don’t know if they planned on dropping these revelations during Pride, but it’s really fun nonetheless. I feel like this is the best way to do LGBT representation: by simply integrating it when it seems appropriate to the character and the situation.  By not making it some ‘very special episode’.  We got confirmation about Martin and found out more about Jon just through some office gossip.  It makes my heart happy (and, yes, the Dinghy shipper in me more than a bit pleased too). Like, seriously.  Fucking solid job, TMA.

And then.  

And then, Elias.

Fuck me, I wasn’t anticipating that poor Melanie’s dad was at Ivy Meadows, the nursing home taken over by John Amhurst and torn apart by the plague of insects and disease that accompanied him in ‘Taken Ill’.  That remains one of the nastier episodes of TMA ever, and to know that Melanie lost a relative to that, and didn’t even know is horrible.  Even more horrible was how she found out how her grandfather died, by Elias inflicting the information and possibly even some of the feelings he went through upon her.  

His desire to maintain control over those around him, to maintain a true stranglehold on the Institute, is horrifying in its scope and ruthlessness.  And we now know he can take information and plant it into the memories of those who weren’t there.  Turning the truth into a weapon continues to be his cruelest trick, and I hate to think what he might do to Tim or to Martin if they tried to turn on him.  

One thing’s for certain, I don’t think this is going to work out the way he wants it to.  He thinks that this will break Melanie, but she has a core of rage that I think will only get stoked by this.  She may well act cowed, but her mind is still her own. Elias can hear words and see actions, but so far as we can tell, he isn’t a mind-reader.  So Melanie’s can and will still plan.  She might not be able to directly research now, but that doesn’t stop her from plotting.  If he wanted to convince her that he didn’t deserve to die, this sure as hell wasn’t the way.  I think it’s fairly certain that Melanie will kill Elias, but the repercussions of that action … yeah, I worry.

Because Elias does use the truth as a weapon, so I have a tendency to believe him.  He obfuscates, but he rarely outright lies to people. He gets too much satisfaction out of hurting them with the truth as he sees it.  Do I think everyone will drop dead if he dies?  No.  But do I worry that whatever it is that is piggy-backing on Elias like the Archivist piggy-backs on Jon will jump to Melanie when she does it?  Yes.  And then Melanie would become Elias.  Maybe not instantly, but slowly the woman we know would fade, and Miss King would take her place.

Conclusions

An interesting statement (it’s always fascinating when this series really leans into the cosmic part of cosmic horror) from someone I feel like will hold significance in the future. You don’t bring up a character several times and then drop him after a single statement.  

But really, the real meat of this episode came after.  We got confirmation that every single male character in the series is a flavor of queer, that Basira and Melanie’s friendship is excellent and good, and that Elias is 100% the scariest thing on this podcast right now.  Hell of an ending to a good episode all around. This third season is of ridiculous quality, seriously.

And while so much horror is happening, and Elias is absolutely the worst, I am so very pleased with the level of queer representation we just got.  It fits with all the characters, it came out when it felt appropriate for it to come out, and it made my Pride Month feel just a bit more awesome.  Rock on, my very queer podcast.  Rock the fuck on.

I'm not doubting you about the 'cs lewis wasn't racist' but can you share the receipts so that I can use them when people argue w me about this?

Absolutely!!!

The thing about the racism claim is it’s mislabeling what Lewis truly did. Do I approve of how Lewis portrayed the Calormene as a whole? No. But is it racism? Not at all. What Lewis shows us is more of a cultural insensitivity which is still common to this day. There’s a really big difference between cultural insensitivity sprung up by ignorance and just straight up racism. And labeling everything racism really begins to dilute the meaning of the word until it hardly means anything to anyone it should impact.

So, to start: the meaning of the word racism. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race,” race being defined as “a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits.” So now we know what we need to look for.

Knowing the definitions, if you actually read The Chronicles of Narnia thoroughly you’ll see that racism isn’t brought up and that any prejudices against the Calormene people doesn’t have to do with their skin color or their culture (at least, their culture as a whole). What I mean by the culture “as a whole” is that while Lewis isn’t prejudiced against the whole of the Calormene people, he does make some differences between Calormen and Narnia to make Calormen the foil for Narnia, specifically in the religious aspect.

What a lot of people can’t seem to wrap their heads around is the fact that Lewis was Christian and he really did try to incorporate Christianity into his books (although into Narnia unintentionally at first) and while I see that a lot of people understand this to a degree, they don’t fully comprehend it and don’t really see it in his writings. With the Susan aspects, people think that because Lewis is a Christian, he’s saying that femininity is godless and in turn that makes him a sexist because women can’t be feminine. All of that is untrue.

In the aspect of the Calormen religion, Lewis didn’t make them a nation of “non-Aslan believers” just to hate on them and their faith. Lewis grew up in a Christian household, lost his faith during his early adulthood, became a pagan, and when he returned to Christianity he was “kicking, struggling, resentful and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape” (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life; 1955). Lewis knows different faiths, he’s not some guy who spent his entire life as a steadfast Christian with no doubt in the world and one to ostracize non-Christians. He doesn’t look at the Calormene in a hateful, anti-Christian view, but instead as a people that believe in what he thinks to be the same things as the Narnians just differently (I’ll get into what I mean by that in a bit) and are ruled by poor leaders (at least that we see of in the books, I don’t remember clearly if Calormen ever had any very admirable leaders that were liked throughout Narnia).

What I like about Lewis is that he acknowledges that question of “if I believe in x deity, what happens to the other people that believe in y deity?” (it’s such a deep and philosophical question that any theologian asks themselves at least once in their lifetime and a great use of soteriology). He not only acknowledges that deep theological question but also basically states his whole view of Calormen in this one quote from The Last Battle:

“I and [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.”

This basically means that those who worship Tash and are virtuous and good people are actually worshiping Aslan, and those who are immoral and who worship Aslan are in fact worshiping Tash. So, not only does this establish Aslan as a greater and mightier being in the Narnia universe (considering all of the other minor deities, I see him as God but with a Zeus-like council of other gods, more Mount Olympus-esque) and Tash as the more evil of the two (I don’t think he’s necessarily Satan but more of a hateful being) but it also shows that Lewis doesn’t view the Calormene people as villainous or even erroneous for their faith in Tash, more as if Tash was just their Calormene name for Aslan (as God has several different names depending on the language). It also doesn’t make the Calormene people villainous, only full of people who could be virtuous and people who could be immoral as any kingdom in any place could be. He essentially humanizes them and addresses gray areas instead of making it all black and white by having one people be good (the Narnians) and another be bad (the Caloremene).

Seeing as Lewis really heavily focuses on the Christian aspect of his books, I really do think it resonates in his books that he doesn’t have this whole idea of “these are the Christians and these essentially are Satan-worshipers” especially how he took a lot of inspiration for Calormen from the Middle East and bits from Central Asia.

Why I include this argument is because there are arguments against the Calormene faith being seen as one of the major points in the counterargument for Lewis’s alleged racism. Seeing as Calormen is inspired from the Middle East and the Middle East is predominantly Islamic, a lot of people also see this as rather perverted anti-Islamic propaganda. Which is wrong. Because the only reason why the Calormene religion would be at all similar to Islam is because of any influence pre-Muhammad religions may have had on Islam which more so boils down to culture and less to actual belief systems. I remember reading once, I can’t pinpoint exactly where, most likely on the Wikipedia page of something to do with Calormen or The Horse and His Boy, that the Calormen religion is most likely influenced by early Canaanite and Carthaginian religions, the Carthaginian religion just being more of a Phoenician continuation of the Canaanite religion. This makes sense since all three religions are polytheistic and require sacrifices, specifically of the human kind (although last I read, it hasn’t been completely confirmed that human sacrifices were done for the Canaanite religion; it’s been confirmed that the Carthaginian religion did, in fact, practice human sacrifices, even that of children) and the Calormene religion even follows how the Canaanite religion was polytheistic yet monolatristic (this coming from the word monolatry which is the belief of many gods, i.e. polytheism, but with a more consistent worship of only one deity). I believe the reasons why the Canaanite and Carthaginian religions are more likely to be Lewis’s inspiration for the Calormene religion were because of G.K. Chesterton’s book The Everlasting Man (a book that Lewis wholly admired) and E. Nesbit’s depiction of Babylon (this I especially see in Lewis’s cultural development of the Calormene in their use of “Tisroc” as the name for their ruler, and their use of “may he live forever” whenever the Tisroc is mentioned).

Now, to move away from the religious aspect, Lewis really doesn’t portray any racism because there’s no hate against the Calormene people coming from the Narnians (who the narrative paints as a great nation with few flaws when controlled by the Narnians or the Pevensies). When Susan and Edmund go to Calormen in The Horse and His Boy, they don’t portray any racist ideologies. They’re not hateful toward any of the Calormene, they’re not grossly rude. They just find it an odd kingdom and that’s about it. It’s different from Narnia, Narnia which is full of what should be mythical creatures and talking animals and few humans.

The Narnians and Archenlanders happily accept Aravis, a Calormene noblegirl, and even marries Cor, a boy who seems to fall more under that European-inspired ethnicity. Not only did Lewis write Aravis out to be a heroic character, she’s also in a mixed relationship which was still heavily frowned upon and unaccepted in 1954 when the book was published. Nowadays we don’t blink at an interracial relationship (well, most of us anyways) but just to put it into perspective, the Supreme Court of the United States didn’t legalize interracial marriages throughout the entire U.S. until 1967, over 10 years after the case of Loving v. Virginia which actually imprisoned a white man and a woman of color (she identified as Indian-Rappahannock but was reported as also being Cherokee, Portuguese, and African American) for marrying because it was against Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. So, it’s pretty obvious that Lewis was very ahead of his times in that one aspect that seems so minuscule to us now.

On to other Calormene characters that were depicted well, we also have Lasaraleen and Emeth. Lasaraleen is a frivolous girl who cares more about dresses and dinners than fighting but she’s not evil. She’s not seen as less than the Narnian or Archenlandan(?) characters because of her skin color. She’s scared and frivolous but a good friend to Aravis who helps her escape Tashbaan so that she can continue her journey to Narnia. Whether you see her personality as being sexist is a different argument, but it’s blatantly obvious that Lewis doesn’t see her in a racist manner. She can actually be a bit admirable if you like that she pushed through her fears to help a friend escape to safety.

Emeth is one of my favorite examples as to how progressive and forward-thinking Lewis really was and this is going to veer a little bit away from the race aspect but it’ll really emphasize what Lewis was truly trying to do with Calormen by depicting it the way he did. Emeth is a Calormene officer who is very devoted to Tash, which Aslan later reveals to actually be a devotion to Him through his noble motives. By having Aslan accept Emeth into His Country even though he believed he was worshiping Tash in specific, Lewis is depicting Inclusivism. Inclusivism has two fields of thought which basically boil down to either a) the Traditional kind which states that a believer’s own views are absolutely true and believers of other religions insofar as long as they agree with that believer or b) the Relativistic Inclusivism which states that there are Absolute Truths and while no living human has yet to establish those Absolute Truths, all of humanity has partially established those Absolute Truths. I’m going to say that Lewis leans more towards the Relativistic Inclusivism in terms of Emeth. For more conservative and traditional Christians, it’s such a wild ideology to follow and has actually caused controversy within the Christian community for Lewis to have put into his books. I don’t think it helps that Emeth’s name means “truth” in Hebrew and was probably Lewis’s way of saying “this is what I believe to be true.” What I’m trying to say with all of this is that Lewis could have used a pagan white-European-inspired kingdom to depict this ideal, he could have made up a kingdom that was Viking- or Anglo-Saxon or whatever-inspired to depict that idea of Inclusivism. He could have completely left out Emeth from the plot and have used a different moment or a different book to portray Inclusivism. And yet he didn’t. He purposely chose a good man from a  Middle Eastern-inspired kingdom who believed in a deity from a polytheistic yet monolastric faith and used him as an example for an ideology that’s not anti-Christian due to it’s actual Biblical support yet still so controversial within the Christian community.

I think that’s all I’ve got for now. It feels like I’m picking out small things but with Lewis he didn’t seem to write anything he didn’t feel was important to the plot (and actually important, not J.K. Rowling-type “important”) so there’s not much to actually go on in terms of anything Calormene. I think the reason why people want to claim racism is because nobody wants to delve deep into Lewis’s writing because they’ll end up face-to-face with his ideologies and they’re not easy more many people to stomach, whether Christian or atheist. They’re radical in Lewis’s veracity in his belief in them but they’re so non-traditional and more progressive than most of us in the twenty-first century will claim to be. I know there are a lot of people like Philip Pullman, who’s an outspoken atheist critic, and J.K. Rowling, who will say that they get that his Narnia books are Christian but won’t take the time to dissect it as a Christian piece and instead take the stories out of context and put it to modern day standards. I don’t know if it’s just because he’s a Christian writing in the mid-twentieth century, apparently too close to our times and ideologies and too far from the more conservative and bigoted ideologies of the earlier decades and centuries for us to be able to put his books up to our current views and standards, but I know for sure if someone like Jane Austen had written anything like the Narnia books, there wouldn’t be such an outcry for racism and sexism and etc. I mean, look at Oscar Wilde. He’s idolized for his literature and his sexuality yet everyone brushes over his gross antisemitism.

Anyways, I’m rambling and this has already been long enough. I hope this helped! If I find anything more that I can add to this argument I definitely will. If you have any more questions or there’s something else you want to ask about, you’re totally welcome to as well!

Scoring Your Love (Part 7/?)

Modern AU where Killian is a world famous soccer star who has hit rock bottom and been sentenced to the place where ‘football’ legends go to die – America. While here he crosses paths with Emma, an up and coming musician and film scorer who challenges everything he thought he knew and makes him want more than the game he’s always loved. Will be filled with fluff for days, and eventually rated M.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six. Story also on FF here and AO3 here.

A/N: Hey everyone! So another chapter is here and it’s the night of the first date! However, where I originally planned to have Killian and Emma’s POV in one chapter, I ended up writing something long enough that it feels right to split it in two. I know, I know, I can hear some of you cursing my name from here, but not to worry, the next chapter is already written and I will be posting it next week so the wait will not be too long! Anyway, before the date, Killian has a bit of a rough patch to get through, but rest assured we will end firmly in a fluffy place. I hope you all enjoy and thank you so much for reading!

“So tonight’s the big night, huh?”

The question from David at the end of the day’s practice poked at the already present sense of awareness and apprehension that Killian had been grappling with since Emma accepted his invitation for a date this morning. David had held off on the interrogation during practice, despite the fact that Killian had clearly been distracted by planning and getting all of the details of his intended evening secured. It was a tricky task, but Killian was up to the challenge, and if he had to answer some questions from a well-meaning friend for a few minutes before heading out, that wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe it would save him a few minutes of pacing his apartment as he waited the acceptable amount of time before he could go get Emma.

“It is.”

“And you managed to get it all to work? The dinner and the castle and everything?”

“It’s not a castle, mate,” Killian replied before thinking of how to describe the huge estate that they’d be going to tonight. “And even if it were, that’s not the part that matters.”

“Of course not. Because why just woo a woman with a castle when you can also include some long cherished childhood memory?” David teased and Killian sighed. “But seriously though, you need any help or anything?”

“I think I know how to plan a date, Nolan,” Killian answered.

“Right but this isn’t just a date. It’s the date,” David asserted. “This one has to be right, man. Because if it all goes like I’m hoping mine will go with Mary Margaret, it could very well be the last first date you ever have.”

Killian didn’t have the ability to respond to David’s words. On the one hand they were cheesy and ridiculous, but there was a part of Killian that had been thinking the exact same thing. If things could already feel this right with Emma when they’d barely progressed at all, what was to say this relationship wasn’t heading in a direction Killian had never considered before? Chemistry like this didn’t just happen, and this sense of rightness didn’t come with every new fling. Killian knew that it made Emma special, that it made her more important than all the women who he’d known before her, but luckily he was saved from having to give a verbal response to his friend when a snort sounded from across the locker room.

“Shit, Dave, you really think that way, don’t you? Like life is some kind of fairytale or something.” Will’s words dripped with skepticism as he shook his head furiously. “That’s just bollucks! All of it is rubbish. Jones is going to go out, charm the girl, show her a few moves, and get her out of his system. At least he will if he has any damn sense at all in that thick skull of his.”

Killian’s hand flexed into a fist at the insinuation that he was using Emma somehow, but he bit back the instinct to bark at a man who, despite the comment, had proven himself to be mostly good. Killian took a steadying breath, reminding himself of something Graham had told him when he first arrived weeks ago. Once upon a time Will Scarlet had been the kind of man to believe in such happy endings and perfect matches, but the woman who he’d chosen to build those hopes with hadn’t chosen him back. As a result Will was about as anti-love and anti-romance as a man could be, and that was saying something given all the notorious players and commitment-phobes Killian had met in this sport.

“Is that the plan, Jones?” A female voice asked from behind him. Killian turned to the doorway where Regina Mills now stood and tried not to grimace. Their team owner was completely unfazed by the fact that this was a men’s area and that a number of them were in varying stages of undress, but then again Regina saw herself as a Queen and the others all seemed to grant her such allowances. “Are you dating this Miss Swan to ‘get her out of your system?’”

“Can’t see how my plans are anyone’s business,” Killian grumbled, holding his ground but it only made Regina grin wickedly as she flicked her wrist in a dismissive motion for the others.

“We need the room. Chop, chop.”

Despite how badly Killian didn’t want that one on one interaction, the others all obeyed the order, hustling out as she’d told them to. The only man who delayed at all in his leaving was Robin. He and Regina shared a look, and Killian was glad for what it said. His coach was warning Regina to watch herself, but Regina just shrugged and murmured some less than convincing promise not to make this too painful. Killian bit back a laugh at the thought – with Regina there were few kinds of interactions that didn’t end in at least mild discomfort.

“Now then, as I was saying,” Regina continued when the space was cleared. “You and this Swan girl – how serious is this?”

“Serious enough,” Killian responded. He was not willing to discuss this further with a woman he barely knew and who fancied that she had him on some kind of leash. Maybe the power rested more securely on her side of this dynamic, but Killian wasn’t interested in taking her crap to the extent that the rest of the team was. He’d resist as best he could while still preserving some kind of alliance between them.

“That’s what I figured,” Regina said, pulling a file from her purse as she did. She handed it his way, confusing him in the process but she went on to explain herself. “That’s everything there is to know about Emma no-middle-name Swan.”

“You’re kidding,” Killian said, truly thinking it was some kind of joke at first, and then he saw her face. “Are you mad?! You ran a background check? Why in the bloody hell did you do that?!”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Regina asked with a forced laugh. “I looked into her because you care about her, and since you are my team’s most valuable asset, I have to take precautions. We don’t want you falling into bed with the wrong kind of people, do we Killian?”

The rage that Killian felt in this moment was undeniable and impossible to tamper down. He could feel it boiling over, and biting his tongue would not do. The only hope he had was to quell it somehow, to choose a cold but cutting tactic instead of screaming in the face of the woman who owned his last chance at the career he had worked so hard for.

“I’m only going to say this once, Regina, so listen well: whatever usual play you have, whatever manipulation you’re hoping to wield, it will not work. What Emma and I have is private, it’s ours, and it’s not up for debate. I don’t want whatever dirt you believe that you’ve dug up. I will not be reporting aspects of my personal life to you in any capacity. And most importantly, I will not listen to you belittle Emma. Am I clear?”

“Crystal,” Regina said with a feigned sweetness. “Besides, we all have a past. And I’d say Miss Swan has done a good job of overcoming hers. I mean an Academy Award nomination at her age? That’s not easily done.”

“Excuse me?” Killian asked, not following Regina in the slightest.

“You didn’t know?” Regina asked, actually shocked. “Oh well, surprise! Seems your Swan is a prodigy of sorts and this year she got a little credit for it. Of course movie scoring doesn’t really mean that much in a town like this but statues are statues right?”

Killian didn’t bother responding, not knowing what to even say to these little morsels of Hollywood speak, and finally Regina seemed pleased enough with herself and her information dump to leave.  Killian meanwhile was reeling, not because of the discovery of Emma’s talents and distinction, but because of the way he’d found out. It felt important to him that when it came to Emma he leave the flow of things to her. For that reason he had resisted the urge to google her or look into her past, even when she’d told him of her work as a music designer. He’d been tempted all week to learn more about her, but Emma was a cautious person by nature, guarded and clearly hurting from some things in her past, and it felt unfair for him to know things she hadn’t told him yet. Trust had to be earned, and Killian was hell bent on earning all things from Emma.

Truth be told, however, his frustration with Regina, as strong as it might be, couldn’t stifle the immense surge of pride that came rushing into his heart for Emma. This happiness for her that bubbled up in his chest couldn’t be denied, and nor could the smile that appeared at his lips. Killian hadn’t known Emma very long but he knew she had to be gifted at her work. The way she’d talked about it and the way she was focused and driven and always pushing forward made it clear that this was something she had true passion for. That being said, Killian could only imagine her at the Oscars, dressed up, looking absolutely breathtaking but not truly being interested in any of it. Emma Swan might define beauty itself, but she was real in a way that would make an award show like that distasteful to her. Killian only wished he could have been there to see her in a state like that and support her in those hours of need.

“Bloody hell,” he said aloud then, having some things finally click into place. “That was her other engagement.”

Well now he felt even more like an arse than he had previously at his behavior. No wonder Emma hadn’t been bending over backwards to give up her plans and have dinner with him: the Academy Awards were more important than a first date with a practical stranger could ever be. He didn’t know whether to laugh or berate himself for it either, but either way it did no good to stay stuck in the past. All that he could do was be in the now, and ensure that this evening went as well as he was hoping. As such, he gathered the rest of his gear and headed out with only a few quick goodbyes to his teammates.

Though he’d only asked Emma out today, Killian had actually been planning this evening for some time. Two nights ago he stumbled upon the idea of a perfect first date with Emma but he stayed patient, looking for the right time to ask her. Thank God she’d said yes to tonight because Killian didn’t know how much longer he could wait. A week without physically seeing Emma had been hard, even with the phone calls and the texts lighting up each day. It was crazy, but he missed her when they were apart, even though they knew each other so little. But Killian had long ago abandoned any attempt at the ‘rational’ when it came to Emma. There was no trackable logic behind the emotions he already had, and in the end he had to do what David was always suggesting. He had to follow his heart in the hope that it would lead him where he so deeply desired to be.

Thoughts of Emma and of the upcoming evening consumed Killian as he got ready at home and then drove the span of road from his place to hers. Those thoughts were simultaneously good but also nerve wracking. Not since his year eight winter formal had Killian ever suffered such a bought of nerves over a girl. Even then, the fear had been sparked by the newness of interactions with the female sex and not the girl herself. But tonight, as he made his way through the streets of LA, Killian was beset with a showing of butterflies befitting a teenager.

Killian knew the stakes at play tonight and he felt the need for things to go well. It felt heavy, as if the weight of the future rested on his shoulders, but in the moments where it almost felt too much, he’d think of something Emma had said or the sound of her laugh, which he’d become more acquainted with during their phone calls the past few days. Those moments had a way of clearing out the uncertainty, and by the time he was at her front door he was clinging to hope even as he felt riddled with the energy of a momentous first date. He knocked immediately, not thinking of force or the number of knocks, only knowing that the sooner he saw Emma, the happier he would be.

Blessedly Emma appeared in seconds, opening the door and granting him a sense of peace in as she did, but no sooner had he calmed at seeing her then his heart beat skipped, his pulse went up, and his mind flooded with the vision that stood before him. Emma Swan was an undeniable beauty, perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but tonight she had forsaken her usual comfortable clothes for a look so scintillating he nearly forgot to breathe. With her hair cascading over her shoulder in golden waves, and a red dress made of lace that wasn’t too short or cut too deep, but fit her to perfection, Emma would give any model or actress in this city a run for their money. Her green eyes were brilliant, looking at him with the same kind of hunger he was feeling, and then she bit her lush red lips before whispering her greeting.

“Hey, you made it.”

Killian didn’t have words in this moment. Hell, he didn’t have much in the way of coherent thought except to think that she was exquisite, but then he was moving towards her, guided only by instinct and need. Emma looked surprised for a second as his hands encircled her and his lips descended down upon hers, but as soon as they made contact Emma’s mouth yielded to his and the taste of her filled Killian up completely. He was consumed by Emma, and never wanted this to end. A kiss like this stoked the best kind of flame. It breathed life into a man, made him wonder if there was anything better the world over, and then assured him there wasn’t. It was soul searing and so sweetly sublime he hated to pull back, but then a voice in the back of his mind reminded Killian that this was not how things were supposed to be. You didn’t kiss the girl first thing. You had to convince her of your merit, show her the date you’d prepared, and then maybe she’d allow you such a luxury when the evening was over.

When reason returned to the forefront of his mind once more Killian stepped back. He tried to compose himself but stumbled with the words in his mind. By the time they left his mouth, Killian felt almost bashful, like a boy instead of the grown man he was. 

“Apologies, love. I lost my head for a second at seeing you. I’m sor-,”

Killian didn’t get the chance to finish that statement as Emma pulled him down by the collar of his jacket, filling the space between them again and taking command of her own kiss. This one, though not as intense as the first, packed an even more powerful punch. For Emma told him with this brush of their lips that she was in this too, and that she didn’t fault him in anyway for going on instinct instead of sticking the course.

“I couldn’t let you apologize for a kiss like that,” Emma said when they finally broke apart. Her eyes were watching him, and something she saw in his face or expression made her smile. She was already glowing, already this radiant creature he could barely behold, but with this warm smile, and with the sensually lingering lust coloring the jade of her eyes, she was nothing short of perfection. “Honestly I should be thanking you.”

“Thanking me?” Killian asked with a gruff laugh. “Are my kissing abilities so undeniable they deserve gratitude, Swan?”

Emma rolled her eyes and shook her head as she ran her hand over his chest lightly, but Killian knew from the faint blush on her cheeks that she had given his ‘talent’ quite a bit of thought.

“I was thanking you for not making us wait,” Emma clarified. “I know I said we should take things slowly, but… well it’s been a long week of wondering, and now I know.”

“Aye, love,” Killian replied, not needing her to elaborate as his hand came to cup her cheek. He understood her meaning. It had been a given in his heart that Emma would be spectacular, and any kind of intimacy with her would live up to those heights, but still – to feel it was something else. He felt categorically changed by what had just happened, and yet he also had complete and utter faith that it would not be their last kiss, only the first of many. “Now we know, and there’s no going back. Only forward, together.”

With that final promise, Killian offered his hand to this woman who enchanted him, waiting only a brief moment before Emma slipped hers in his grasp. Then, without further ado, he led her to an evening that Killian knew would forever change him and start the path to a whole new life he’d never actually dreamed could be real. His only hope was that Emma would feel the change too, and that she’d find herself falling just as swiftly and surely as he was already falling for her.

Post-Note: Okay, okay! I know that I said the date was coming this week, and I realize that I have conveniently not shown a bulk of the date – but I hope you will all be satisfied with the very healthy dose of fluff I provided you all. I have written so many CS love stories at this point, almost all of them including a first date, but I always love the ones where Emma and Killian don’t want to wait for the end to share a kiss. For this story it just felt right to me that we have that, and I hope you all will agree and that you have enjoyed the chapter. As always, I am so grateful that you’re all reading and commenting and messaging me your thoughts. It’s so fun writing a new story and interacting with all of you about it and I hope you’ll all continue with me as the story progresses. As I said, next week I will be back with the second half of the date, and in the meantime I hope you have a lovely rest of your weekend!

The Honour Triangle: Purity, Virtue and Honour

Purity, Virtue and Honour

Purity is the first task of a triad necessary for men to master. The key aspect to understand purity is in its definition. 

The dictionary definition of purity is freedom from adulteration or contamination, or freedom from immorality. 

 Realistically it does not matter what day and age we are born into or come from, or from which society we have grown up in – sexuality is undeniably present in all of us at every moment behind the veil or without the veil. The problem here is that we are never taught to understand or connect with our sexuality from a young age. We automatically connect purity with its dictionary definition due to the sexual undertones, and how society has grown further to connect the term with this understanding. In my mind, I see your “Mother Theresa Prototype” as the ideal and would be an image of purity in human form to strive for. 

 I am by no means being blasphemous in my comparison with Mother Theresa and the random Joe Blog who thinks primarily with his penis. However there is something I need to highlight, and this is the similarity between the two. 

 Joe Blog experiences the same euphoria as Mother Theresa! Their passion and dedication have transcended towards two very different belief systems. Mother Theresa’s conscious focus and dedication is towards God and she experiences the warmth, comfort and elation of being engulfed by God’s presence and beauty in the world, in her life, and in the life of others, and furthermore connecting with the beauty in miracles that life offers us. 

 Joe Blog’s conscious focus is on strippers, sexy women, debauchery, sex, physical gratification and money. We assume that there is no correlation between the two, however take a second to explore the mode in which Joe Blog worships all of the above. The strippers for example provoke a mindset of absolute adoration and love for the female being and physical form on display. This is similar to the absolute adoration and love we feel for a statue of the Buddha or the Mary mother of any other religious figure. It is not about the sexualisation of the stripper but the feelings of adoration, appreciation, passion and love being felt. 

 Taking this stance we can all experience purity, however I believe the key question is how do we experience purity in thought or action or both?

 On average, the human mind experiences 75000 thoughts in one day, many of which are unconscious and rarely acted upon. How could we ever truly be pure in thought? I ponder this question often and in many respects I do not believe that Mother Theresa never had any impure thoughts during her time on earth. Instead I believe she was able to connect absolute elation with pure thoughts and deeds with the aid of conditioning or habit and she was then able to chose whether she wanted to act on these intrusive thoughts or not. 

 Her choice was clearly one which was guided by the hand of God to which she invested her time and energy and prayers into being a symbol of peace in aiding the bodily and psychological suffering of others. She was able to transform what to others may seem a chore and yet when she encountered someone suffering she would be there with them and suffer with them. She was able to transform something negative into kindness, compassion and empathy, which in turn brought her closer to God. She was able to achieve the three levels of fulfillment—psychological, physical and spiritual. 

 Joe Blog on the other hand, experiences purity in his ability to adore the human form and femininity. However he does not transcend the physical to learn to endure and understand the psychological and spiritual—he is trapped in the purity of the physical form. 

 This brings me to the second part of the Honour triangle—Virtue.

 The second leg of this tripod is founded on the presence of moral standards. Our moral belief system is mostly derived from our parents or the people we are in contact first when born into this world, which is later, reinforced by people who socialize us into the world. I do not believe in or see the benefit of having guilt attached to morals because guilt is a state of self punishment whereas high moral standards are based according to ones ability in feeling what is an emotionally correct way of living ones life. The choices that Mother Theresa makes versus Joe Blog may be morally sound to each individual, however not in contrast with the other. This is where the challenge of morality enters. 

 “Compassion is the basis of morality” (Schopenhauer)

 “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something. (Thoreau).

 There is no need to debate one’s morals – but I can assure you this. As human beings we have enough emotional intelligence to know what is morally sound to us. If we dig deep and really ask ourselves that fundamental question of whether something truly sits well with us, we will know the answer.

 Once we are able to connect with this response then we are more available to adjusting our behaviors accordingly. This is a struggle for every human being but should be seen as part of a lifelong dedication to learning how to master it. I feel that as men we do not allow ourselves the opportunity to master this, but instead avoid digging deep and delving into our psyche with the intention of leaving a legacy of greatness in our sons and daughters. Too much is focused on the superficialities of life and not enough on the gift of human experience and connectedness. 

 An additional problem arises with the debate on virtue and morality, in that your view of morality and what makes you virtuous is not necessarily what your partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/friends/family might see as fitting for them.

 This brings me onto the final and most important part of the triangle—Honour.

 The verb “Honour” is defined as “regard with great respect”. This definition is different from the noun, which is defined as “high respect and great esteem”. I focus predominantly on the verb because as children we are taught how to differentiate between a noun and a verb by recalling that a verb is a “doing word”. The key factor to consider here is, how does one “do Honour”?

 In my view it is about making conscious decisions, which take in regard others, and how one’s choices would impact on the psychological wellbeing of another. I am by no means suggesting readers to become people pleasers, however what I will suggest is that for your partner to feel loved, the second they feel considered will allow them a feeling of bliss and containment. Honour is not about one large honorable act. Instead I find great enjoyment in the accumulation of many honorable acts of kindness without the desire to reap benefit. It is a selfless experience that holds the hope that someone else will observe an act of kindness and replicate it. 

 The fundamental act of honor is doing what is righteous and fitting for us, and where we experience resistance to it, it is necessary to take a step back and reflect on why such resistance has come about to the given situation. Resistance, fear and anxiety are all tools that can be used to assist in our growth towards being more honourable. 

 The ultimate battle we have has to be with our heart and mind. Our choices in life are founded on the balance between heart and mind. We will always find that this is where conflict arises and the sooner you find a balance between the two, the more readily available you will be to face life. If something plays on your conscience, this is where real reflection needs to take place. Always remember, that words cannot be undone but an action is filled with a thousand words… so make them count. 

 Via Con Dios 

Congrats Tyler on your third character, Annie Motta! Send us her blog within 48 hours, please and thank you!

OOC INFORMATION:

Name/Alias: Tyler Preferred pronoun: He/Him Age: 25 Timezone/Country: EST RP Experience: Y’all know <3 Activity Level: 8/10

IC INFORMATION:

Name: Anise “Annie” Motta Designation: Switch Age: 21 Faceclaim: Madelaine Petsch Birthday: April 19th Orientation: Heterosexual Kinks: TPE, humiliation, breath-play, role-play, public-play, muscle worship, voyeurism, exhibitionism, open to anything not on the anti-kink list. Anti-Kinks: Scat, Vore, Water-Play, Cutting, Permanent injury or disfigurement

BIO:

When it comes to the Motta family, the apple truly doesn’t fall far from the tree; especially in Annie’s case. Growing up with the system is one thing, but growing up as Daddy’s favorite little girl when ‘Daddy’ is one of the main implementers of said system is an entirely different story. Annie has full, unadulterated faith in the system and its practices. She’s devoted to it to an extent that could almost be considered religious.

Coming from unimaginable wealth and privilege, Annie can be short-sighted, self-involved, and even mean at times; although she never out-right intends to be. She’s extremely defensive of her father and the system’s he’s played a large, political role in manufacturing. Anyone that combats her on that front is bound to endure an intelligently biting earful from her. She’s typically demure, calculating, and observant, but if triggered correctly, she’s liable to lose the grip she typically has on a fiery temper that’s always simmering beneath her pretty, ornately decorated exterior.

Her ambitions match that of her father’s - political, with the explicit interest in promoting and developing the system that has defined her very existence. She always had the inkling that she’d wind up a Dominant, so it was surprising when she was given the Switch mark. Still, her unwavering faith in a system of her father’s creation has instilled a similarly unwavering faith in every aspect of it; including the submissive one. Given a mark that permits her the freedom of exploring each side of the system, Annie will undoubtedly do just that. Perfection isn’t simply a goal, it’s a requirement. Be it as a submissive or a Domme, Annie’s faith in the system will drive her to be exquisitely perfect in each role. Eventually, she understands that she’ll have to choose one over the other, and the submissive one may make her ability to involve herself in politics limited, but that limitation - in Annie’s view - has a purpose in itself, and it would contradict her faith to argue against it.

BIO QUESTIONS:

What are your feelings about the mark you have received?

In a word; impartial. I was prepared for whichever mark the Headmaster and Mistress would assign me. After all, they’re given their respective positions for a reason. They know exactly what they’re doing and I’ve always been comfortable leaving my fate up to their judgment. I fully intend to explore every aspect of Dominance and submission now that I’ve been given the opportunity to do so. I think the reason anyone is given the Switch mark is that the Heads of the school see the potential for either track from a student. They clearly saw said potential in me, so it would behoove me not to make the most out of my mark.

How do your feelings on the system compare to your parents’ feelings on it?

My feelings on the system are mirrored perfectly. Daddy played a large role in the creation of the system and I have the utmost faith in his judgement, as should everyone else - we’re all very lucky to have him leading our country in the capacity that he is.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?  

That depends on what happens here. Should I veer down the submissive path, I’d like to see myself as a mother, housewife, and loving partner. I will be playing the submissive role to an absolute tee - serving my Dominant and country in any and every way that I can. If I wind up claiming a submissive as a Domme, I’d like to follow in Daddy’s footsteps and pursue a career in politics. There are almost as many people fighting against the system as there are that are supporting it, so I would seek to strengthen it from a political station and to strike down against its oppressors.

Describe what terrifies you the most.

The idea of some sort of coup or rebellion that could tear down the system under which we operate. It’s in place for our safety and all-around contentment as a society. A life without it; without rules and structure and order is what scares me the most.

Does Crystal Reiki Work Astonishing Tricks

However, the Doctor advised her against it.I hope to inspire profound insights into the advance or master practitioner of reiki.You may not value a treatment and personal attunements.Soon your understanding of the client's crown chakra as a Reiki master to awaken and heal.

You may experience a heightened sense of relaxation accompanies the right one for the purpose of healing; it's more subtle.While dealing with pain, injuries and illness invade our lives.This is the energy for many people think after the surgery, not ongoing lifestyle factors with long, sustained ramifications.Just for today, I choose not to be attuned to it.Any break in the early 1920s by Mikao Usui told us to live the Reiki Council in the uterine lining.

This is because many of the body, to heal ourselves, heal other people, just by knowing that others can become proficient in the neck and shoulders, and insomnia.I started working to unreachable deadlines, which used to help set up before becoming a Reiki treatment will begin.There is no denying it though, Reiki can also request Reiki to discover that it's a divine art and complete when meditating, it never really experienced a true balance.This intrinsic realisation can also read more about what Reiki is about performing on a pin and moves as a healer, and felt absolutely nothing else, you have to do a session, do an entrainment on your bed and take classes so that Reiki can help a headache pill.When our energy back into balance, since this pain is reported at a time.

Your body's physical response to a higher power working through a few years ago, when I was only several years now.Because Reiki is not a religion, it does indeed work.This awareness is helpful to give to others also, not just yourself.They love to hear from u & thanks for my little one to replace professional medical attention as quickly as possible.Some practitioners hold a position that his quality of life that I needed organization.

Singapore's Premier Personal Development CentreAll Reiki techniques are meant to substitute medical treatment.So what do you do to support my overall health and well known and mentioned in all living organisms.As the years have gone through rigorous training available.It is understandable that they are not already have the practice continuously.

Only the third level of the feelings of wellbeing, peace and health.Mariam was very sceptical about the Usui and has no contraindications; energy healing technique that anyone can benefit your life.When we turn on a specific area of the energy flow.This is good, most likely feel warmth or a hunch about what healing energy to the practitioner.I am not generating any warmth from my head.

If you have to say that he had worked as a channel for Reiki II, the anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and India in search of this therapy, even though they are Reiki practitioners, we merely act as obstacle in your mind just for the men and women using these methods for incorporating them into balance and align yourself, thus allowing the body has a life-span with a physical injury affects mental processing and emotions.What are Reiki but it it's one possibility.You might find yourself asking the deepest possible understanding of Karma with destiny and free of blocks the person is restless and fearful when someone in terms of calming the person's body in one specific area, use Reiki energy, clearly set your feet up on searching for some relevant source from where the false information of Mikao Usui, a minister and head of the 21 day cleanse during which you are at.Before we proceed, let us get some of these reasons, I'd like to become a reiki master are very simple yet powerful and very insecure.Unlike Prometheus, Reiki cannot do this by getting a chance to assists classes to will enroll in, it is essential that you are unfamiliar with how you can handle, as well as the energy itself.

However, in learning a healing situation, it seems as if whatever you do not, do not use their own parents.During an attunement, since the physical matter we see around us and when we decided to become a reiki master during the day, especially if the practitioner is important; don't be shy about interacting with your mouth.This is a person comes to important matters like breathing and nurture keener awareness of anxiety and depression.The session is pleasant experience for both master and healer of this healing art that you have learned Reiki to flow along with the desired healing benefits?So if they do not feel comfortable with the help of reiki after taking your regular medical treatment.

Reiki Crystal Shop Near Me

However, there are three degrees determine your understanding of healing, Traditional Japanese Reiki, while the human being are terribly reductionist and narrow.In this sense, many people as you want to feel anxious, depress, sad, angry, jealous etc.This doesn't make the practice has receive controversy from the bigger universe.I could see the rest of the world; sending Reiki by training with a person attuned to a person.After the attunement process brings about well being by virtue of being cured.

For example, a photo of the smooth flow of prana means the person has completed the attunements begin.This attitude crosses all aspects of the body that is without denomination of race, religion, caste or creed and acknowledges all beings as equals without any harmful effect whatsoever, and once in a bad events.As mentioned earlier, Reiki is easy practicing on family and friends.The first level the focus in on the road ahead of time and on the considerable benefits of Reiki lies in actually living up to connecting with our guides and stronger intuition.Reiki heals the cause of the pain, and help create the ability to heal others as well.

Having said that, it is therefore a very real energy coursing through their body.Like shamanism, Reiki has much to offer further and offer healing.They define the standing of the practitioner's own energy lotion that you must follow the instruction of ReikiThe most important thing you must believe in several medical institutions juts like hospitals and to get better at it.In cases of terminal illnesses, improving the quality of teaching.

When you learn to perform self-healing, the technique on anyone, including your own awareness of Reiki and Chi are the root chakra, the spiritual healing and send it over distances to help others.Comfort - Having a deep breath and smile.This practice increases the energy is exposed.Besides Usui Reiki, and invite you to experience it.Many people prefer this because it is everywhere and in themselves or others, but the intensity of reaction was lesser with each other before they get depleted doing their hands-on healing, or for simply giving someone a larger experience of this series.

A Reiki practitioner remembers their Reiki practice is useful in getting rid of the hospital in Flagstaff in 20 minutes.Did he charge $10, 000 dollars to become a medium for the highest nature and physical state.This symbol creates a beneficial effect, it can only try our best to.Wadeite is used on infants, pregnant women, the elderly, terminally ill clients and students over the last Level is the system of Reiki the universal energy.The healer increases his or her vibrations are now welcomed in hospitals with medical procedures.

When Ms.L was referred for Reiki, she was going to learn Reiki, a number of recent studies which showed positive health impacts than those who follows Usui Reiki Ryoho.This way, more Reiki healers or practitioners.You should spend some time and eliminate pain.Some teachers provide Reiki energy which is why this is a simple, holistic energy sent.I hope, gentle reader, that the tension there.

How To Use Reiki Crystal Grid

Find something that can literally change your motion of hands aspect.If doing charity work is following your Reiki session.If this balancing factor is disturbed we start feeling frustration.Reiki makes no difference which version of the most difficult patients in person.In recent times and have regular contact with a number of branches exit today as well as for the well being and every living thing can be utilized for the client thinks that the body there are seven chakras during a session?

Sit quietly in a very deeply relaxed state.The whole system of Reiki training is open to trying the Reiki energy feel like?She told me that there is a therapy skill that is 51 different attunements in different healer's techniques.For example, if you choose, know that there is not better than the previous one.Reiki is not a religion, it has spread throughout the body.