#t // post-canon | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hephaestuscrew · 10 months

Text

"With a goddamn harpoon": The significance of Minkowski's weapon of choice within the narrative and characterisation of Wolf 359

TL;DR: Despite its initial comic role, the harpoon becomes a important symbol of Minkowski as a character; it is particularly associated with her desperate need for control, her desire to keep her crew safe, her stubborn determination, and her occasional unpredictability. These associations add to the narrative significance when Minkowski kills Cutter with the harpoon.

[Tagging people who said they wanted to be tagged: @browncoatparadox @captain-lovelace @goblincaveofvibes ]

~~~

Ep21 Minkowski Commanding

First appearance

We first encounter the harpoon in Minkowski Commanding, which is a significant episode for Minkowski's characterisation because it's the first big departure from Eiffel's point-of-view into Minkowski's. It's arguably the most Minkowski-centred episode in the whole show, so it stands out when we think about her as a character.

EIFFEL (over comm) Um, Minkowski? Why is the armory wide open, and also, apparently, robbed? Where's the tactical knives kit? MINKOWSKI Don't worry. I've got that. EIFFEL Oh. And the M4 carbine? The, like, really-dangerous-in-space, select-fire M4 carbine? MINKOWSKI Yeah, I've got that too. EIFFEL And this empty rack I'm looking at right now with a label that says "harpoon" suggests that... MINKOWSKI Yes. I have it, Eiffel.

The harpoon is introduced as part of a list of over-the-top weapons that Minkowski takes on her plant-monster-hunting mission. It's initially just a funny moment to emphasise how seriously she's taking this mission. The weapons arguably increase in unlikeliness as Eiffel lists them, and it's a comic image to think of Eiffel deducing the situation from the empty rack labeled 'harpoon'. It could have been an entirely throw-away joke that was never brought up again. The M4 carbine never comes up again. The tactical knives kit is mentioned in Knock, Knock, but not in a plot-significant or symbolic way.

'Goddamn harpoon' speech

So why does the harpoon become such an iconic part of Minkowski's brand (and I'm pretty certain it was seen as significant by fans long before the finale)? It's got to be because of the next time it's mentioned, when Minkowski talks to the plant monster in the same episode:

MINKOWSKI (getting psyched up) You wanna play with me, huh? You wanna run rings around me? The joyless, boring, predictable old Minkowski? She can't stop you, right? Not someone as smart and powerful as you. You've got her pegged. Good. Get complacent. Get smug. That's right when you'll find me waiting for you. With a goddamn harpoon.

There's so much to say about this speech and what it reveals her character. For one thing, it's all projection - we have no real indication of what (if anything) the plant monster thinks of Minkowski. We don't even really know how much understanding it has when listening to her talk. She imagines that this silent adversary would call her "joyless, boring, predictable". I suspect that these are all things that she's been called a fair bit in the past. (To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they are all things that Eiffel called her at one point.)

But the harpoon is proof against - if not the accusation of joylessness - the idea that Minkowski is boring and predictable. Boring and predictable people don't opt for a harpoon for fighting on a spaceship when plenty of more conventional weapons available. A harpoon is unexpected, and there's a kind of power in that.

Another interesting thing about that speech is that the whole thing would make at least as much sense - if not more - if it was directed at Cutter. In Sarah Shachat's episode commentary on Minkowski Commanding (part of the bonus material available to buy here), she says that Minkowski "is really speaking to Cutter in this moment". It's made clear that Minkowski's behaviour in Minkowski Commanding is not just about the plant monster itself. She tells Eiffel, "I have to take it seriously! If I can eliminate one threat, just one, then we are that much closer to going home!"

The specifics of the plant monster's location, abilities, and origin are mysterious, but - unlike many of the other forces threatening the safety of Minkowski's crew - it is at least tangible and harpoon-able and not light years away. Hunting the plant monster is a way for Minkowski to assert control when so much is outside of her control. It's an attempt to demonstrate that she is - as she puts it - "in charge of this disaster". Minkowski treats the plant monster as a physical symbol of all the threats her crew are facing, and so the harpoon becomes a physical symbol of her fierce (if sometimes misguided) determination to take control of the situation and fight back against those threats to protect her crew.

The line "you'll find me waiting for you. With a goddamn harpoon" is one that sticks in the mind, especially since - with one notable exception - 'goddamn' is about as potent as swearwords get on this show. And it's the harpoon that she uses to give specificity to the threat.

Absurdity

A harpoon is powerful and threatening, which is exactly what Minkowski is trying to convey to the plant monster, but in this context - not only on dry land but on a spaceship - it's also kind of absurd. From the way we hear it fire in the finale, we can tell that it's more like a speargun than a hand-thrown harpoon spear, but it's still an out-of-place weapon for space-based combat. Minkowski's already been shown to have a penchant for archaic weaponry, after her drunken enthusiasm over the cannon during the talent show incident, which is largely played for laughs. Similarly, in the episode commentary for Minkowski Commanding, Sarah Shachat says that the harpoon was introduced mostly just because it was funny; "[including a harpoon] was me sort of embracing the Moby Dick of it all. And I had no idea at the time how much importance that silly harpoon would take on."

Eiffel makes a Moby Dick reference himself ("10 days of Captain Ahab's Space Walkabout"). I haven't read Moby Dick so I can't properly analyse the significance of this reference, but the initial prominence of the harpoon (traditionally a whaling tool) enables that connection. It feels like a good example of the classic Wolf 359 thing where something comedic has the potential to take on a deeper significance. It conjures an image of Minkowski as a Captain with the potential to be consumed by a single-minded mission to destroy... A potential that she resists in the conclusion to Minkowski Commanding when she chooses to leave the plant monster alone. The harpoon also fits with the sprinkling of nautical imagery and language in Wolf 359 (e.g. the repeated use of the word 'boat'), as well as the retro-futuristic feel of the Hephaestus.

We never learn why there's a harpoon on the Hephaestus. It seems like yet another of those bizarre unexplained quirks of the station, like the items in the storage room where Eiffel finds Box 953. Even when the weird mysterious features of the Hephaestus are depicted in a comedic way, these features are still a demonstration of the fact that the characters are in an environment that they don't understand and that their surroundings have been shaped according to the whims of Command.

I think we can assume none of the members of the Hephaestus crew brought a harpoon up with them. For whatever reason, someone at Goddard Futuristics must have decided to put a harpoon in that armory. Like most things in the crew's lives, the harpoon is owned by Goddard Futuristics. So the way Minkowski uses the harpoon could be seen as an instance of reclaiming something from Goddard and their control over her surroundings (in a similar way to how her crew are able to utilise the maze-like structure of the Hephaestus to their advantage when hiding first from the SI-5 and later from Cutter and the crew of the Sol).

Other mentions of the harpoon

The harpoon doesn't actually make another physical appearance until the finale, when it truly comes into its own. But there are a couple of little hints before then that it has become a part of Minkowski's brand amongst the other characters as well as to the listeners. These mentions remind the listener about the harpoon, so we don't forget about it before its big comeback in the finale.

Ep27 Knock, Knock

EIFFEL [to Minkowski] Like getting rid of all the weapons, for a start. We should gather up all the guns, the tactical knives, your harpoon. Put it all in the arms locker, seal that sucker up, and put the key in one of Hera's service canisters.

In this quote, Eiffel refers to it as "your harpoon" - the only weapon he ascribes ownership to here. He sees it as something she's laid claim to. He also thinks the harpoon is worth mentioning specifically, which suggests that he thinks that Minkowski would reach for it first if she was feeling particularly violent. This reinforces the idea that the harpoon has become a symbol of Minkowski's character. This connection is also strengthened by the fact that the harpoon is also never mentioned in relation to anyone other than Minkowski using it.

Ep45 Desperate Measures

LOVELACE [to Kepler] Yeah, right. Nobody knows this station like Alexander Hilbert. He knows every nook, cranny, hidden room - everything. And as back up he's got the only woman's who's ever turned outer space monster hunting into a recreational sport. You'll never see them coming... until all of a sudden there's a harpoon in your face, and you end up on the operating table of the finest medical sadist that Goddard Futuristics ever produced.

Lovelace mentions the harpoon and specifically refers to Minkowski's plant-hunting exploits, even though she didn't witness them. So we know that someone has told her that story. And what she's taken away from hearing the story is an emphasis on Minkowski's harpoon and an admiration for her determination. I don't think Minkowski was the one to tell Lovelace about her plant-monster-hunting mission, because I don't think she's necessarily proud of it. I suspect it was Eiffel who told her - he's the most natural storyteller of the group. In Mutually Assured Destruction, soon after meeting Lovelace for the first time, he says "Nobody's told you about the Plant Monster yet? So, funny story..." And I believe Eiffel would have told the story of Minkowski's plant monster hunt in a way that conveyed both the ridiculousness of her behaviour but also a kind of awe at her boldness and persistence.

The tone of "all of a sudden there's a harpoon in your face" is pretty similar to "That's right when you'll find me waiting for you. With a goddamn harpoon". Once again, the harpoon is portrayed as something that the Hephaestus crew's adversary won't expect, something that will play a key role in that adversary's defeat. You might almost think something was being foreshadowed here…

Characterisation through Weaponry

When we think of the harpoon as a symbol of Minkowski as a character, it seems worth drawing a comparison with the only other Wolf 359 character who I think has a form of weaponry as a big part of their brand: Jacobi and his explosives. While a harpoon certainly has a lot of potential for violence (a potential which Minkowski utilises), it is targeted and intentional in a way that bombs don't tend to be. It's harder to have collateral damage with a harpoon, and I think that reflects a difference between Minkowski and Jacobi's approach to conflict.

A harpoon isn't really designed for combat - it's for hunting whales and other marine animals. It feels significant that Minkowski's key weapon of choice - the one she threatens the plant monster with and kills Cutter with - isn't the weapon of a soldier. She took an assault rifle with her to hunt the plant monster, but that wasn't the weapon she held onto. She's not a natural soldier, even if she'd sometimes like to think she is.

Maxwell's Death

When Minkowski kills Maxwell, it's with a gun, not a harpoon. She's trying to be a soldier there. She's trying to do what she has to. I don't know much about how a harpoon is fired, but I've a feeling that there's less uncertainty about whether a harpoon was fired deliberately than a gun; the ambiguity around Minkowski's agency in Maxwell's death is a key part of the story that wouldn't work with a harpoon. But perhaps more importantly, I don't think there's meant to be a sense of victory or relief in Maxwell's death, unlike Cutter's. The harpoon - as a weapon that has become strongly identified with Minkowski as a character - is saved for moments when Minkowski is asserting her power in an active way that she isn't conflicted about.

Ep61 Brave New World

About a third of the way into the finale, there's another indirect mention of the harpoon:

RACHEL Y-yes, sir… Umm, we also picked up some chatter on their weaponry supplies… Firearms, explosives, something about a harpoon…

This is a nice little reference which reminds the listener of the harpoon in anticipation of its big moment later on in this episode, while once again playing with its incongruity in a list of more typical combat weapons. Given that Minkowski and co. have guessed that they are being listened in on here, their choice to talk about the harpoon might be seen as their way of having a bit of fun, or it might be seen as their way to imply the same threat that Minkowski made to the plant monster. Cutter had warning, but he didn't heed it.

Which brings us, of course, to the harpoon's most significant moment:

Cutter frowns. Then he hears it: CLA-CLUNK! His eyes widen. MINKOWSKI Let's see you catch this. FWUUUMP! An ENORMOUS THING IS SHOT. A moment later, Cutter COLLIDES AGAINST THE WALL, IMPALED. MR. CUTTER ... a... harpoon? That's not... how this is... supposed... to... He struggles for a few more moments...and then he stops.

This scene is a classic instance of Wolf 359 utilizing the audio medium to leave a significant element of the situation unknown to the listener until the right moment. We don't know that Minkowski is carrying the harpoon. We don't know that she's readying it as Lovelace talks. When we hear something fire, there's a moment where a listener might or might not have realised exactly what just fired. It's Cutter who delivers the glorious revelation. It gives the moment an additional burst of triumph that Cutter's final words are an expression of shock, not just that he has been defeated but at the weapon with which the killing blow was struck.

Human unpredictability

It's not just that Minkowski kills Cutter with a harpoon; it's also that she wouldn't have been able to kill him without it. He can catch bullets after all, so Minkowski and Lovelace's guns are basically useless. Cutter thinks he's therefore invincible, but he hasn't accounted for the possibility that Minkowski might have a less conventional weapon on hand, one which fires larger projectiles that he can't catch so easily. The fact that she's carrying an unexpected weapon - a weapon that might have seemed ridiculous - is what allows her to defeat Cutter and therefore to survive.

It's a repeated theme in Wolf 359 that the protagonists' strength is not that they are the most powerful or they behave in the most logical ways, but that they are complicated and human and unpredictable and very much themselves - all of the things that Cutter and Pryce don't want in their 'ideal humanity'. When Minkowski kills Cutter with the harpoon, it's a victory for human unpredictability and individual idiosyncrasies.

Making good on her promise

Thinking back to Minkowski Commanding, we can see that the threat Minkowski made to the plant monster absolutely came true with Cutter. He got complacent. He got smug. (I'd argue that smugness has always been one of his key attributes.) And he found her waiting for him, with a goddamn harpoon. The return of the harpoon for this moment suggests the defeat of Cutter is a culmination of some of the motivations and traits that Minkowski showed when hunting the plant monster, now channeled in a more suitable direction. She continued trying to get them "that much closer to going home". Her - sometimes absurd - determination provides a throughline from an episode that was mostly comedic (Minkowski Commanding) to a dramatic emotionally powerful finale. As Sarah Shachat put it in her audio commentary, Minkowski "makes good on her promise [that she makes in her harpoon speech in Minkowski Commanding]. That's why she's a hero."

It's significant that Cutter dies from an unlikely weapon that is so strongly identified with Minkowski. It makes that moment feel like truly hers (although she is of course right that she couldn't have done it without Lovelace - that's called being part of a crew).

As the Commander, it feels apt that Minkowski is the one to kill the long-standing 'big bad'. Pryce is arguably the same level of antagonist as Cutter, but he's the one that we've been aware of since we became aware of larger sinister forces at work in this narrative.

And if Minkowski has a personal nemesis, it's Cutter. He's the one who recruited her into the hellscape that is the Hephaestus. He played on her ambitions to get her where he wanted her. She trusted him the way she trusted the official chain of authority at the start of the mission. And that trust was extremely misplaced.

The significance of Minkowski being the one to kill Cutter is highlighted by the fact that she kills him with a weapon that only she uses, a weapon that links us back to her behaviour 40 episodes earlier. The sense of control that she was desperately seeking in Minkowski Commanding might not be completely within her grasp by the end of the finale, but she's reclaimed a piece of it by defeating the man who has been exerting control over her life for so long. And she did it with that goddamn harpoon.

#It's harpoon time!!#Honestly I think there's probably still lots more to say #but this is plenty to be getting on with #Feel free to share your own thoughts #Wolf 359 #w359 #Renée Minkowski #The stuff about human unpredictability was inspired a lot by conversations with my friend @commsroom #so she'd be in my bibliography if I had one #Something that didn't really fit in here but feels relevant is the way that fans #(particularly podcast fans who don't have canon appearances to go off)#will use certain characteristics/ objects/ clothing choices to make a character identifiable in art #Like if I see art of a Wolf 359 character with some combination of cigarette/ headphones/ Star Wars t-shirt #I know it's Eiffel even if it doesn't look like my mental idea of him #And the harpoon is definitely part of that shorthand for Minkowski #because no one else would have it #so lots of Minkowski art features the harpoon #which strengthens the associations that I'm talking about in this post #And that's interesting to me #because it's an unintended way in which fandom has the potential to influence how people perceive a character #but I think in this case it just adds further value to things that are already implied in canon #Renee Minkowski #Commander Minkowski #w359 spoilers #wolf 359 spoilers #the empty man posteth

235 notes · View notes

vurelly · 2 years

Photo

been talking a lot with sunny and jack about what cosmo’s safety protocols would be like so here’s the doodle’s i’ve been doing based on that the past few days

#my art #fnaf sb oc #oc #cosmo #not sure how canon all of this is to cosmo but i wanted to post s o m e t h i n g

2K notes · View notes

lakesbian · 1 year

Text

so i blinked & accidentally wrote 2.4k words of alec analysis, content warning for extended discussion of child sexual abuse

i am actually like. genuinely surprised by how common of an alec opinion it is that people would probably feel more negatively about him if we had a chapter from the perspective of one of his victims or if we had more details on his life prior to the undersiders, because the idea goes directly counter to one of the core Things you have to get if you want to understand alec: much like taylor, you should take absolutely fucking nothing he says about himself at face value, because--also much like taylor--he is Absolutely Fucking Terrible at understanding himself!

and speaking of taylor, she is also absolutely fucking terrible at understanding alec. nearly all of the commentary we get on alec is from taylor’s point of view, and she’s frankly incredibly ungenerous towards him.

her very first thought about his childhood mentally classifies him as not being one of heartbreaker’s victims, and the pity she’s offering him wears out pretty quickly when he doesn’t speak about the abuse in terms she finds palatable--while she does secondarily recognize that living with heartbreaker impacted him on some level, she regards him primarily as someone who does Bad Things because he’s a Bad Coldhearted Person.

she and alec are fairly similar--they’re both people who have been abused, people who are remarkably desensitized to violence because they’ve been abused, they’re both people who have ended up on the same villain team where they regularly commit terrible acts of violence, and they’re both people who are terminally oblivious to their own emotions while they commit those acts of violence. their actions are both similarly horrifying from an outside viewpoint, but by sectioning alec’s actions off in her mind as being horrifying because he’s ontologically a bad person w/ no interiority or justifiable reasoning for his actions, she doesn’t have to face that her own actions are horrifying regardless of how she justifies them to herself. neat little compartmentalization trick! alec stabbed that guy to death with a fork because he’s a Bad Person, but when she used triumph as a bargaining chip by filling his lungs with bugs, it was for Understandable and Interiority-Having reasons, so she’s fine.

what this means is that nearly all of the commentary we get on alec is from the perspective of someone who has a very strong psychological incentive to avoid being fair to alec.

much of what taylor thinks about alec is blatantly irrational and wrong, and the fact that he (similarly emotionally oblivious wrt himself + probably entirely unaware she feels this way about him) never directly confronts her misconceptions means that we spend the entire book being told “hey, here are the reasons you should think alec sucks” without any alternate viewpoints to consider. i think that if we saw the worst things pre-undersiders alec did without the repressed way undersider alec describes them or taylor’s biased perspective obscuring what actually happened, most people would feel Really Fucking Bad for him!

even in the very first discussion of his childhood, it’s clear that taylor’s reading of the events is wrong--aside from the fact that she’s not classifying the kids as victims (girl what), there’s these lines from alec:

“[He] pushed my limits, made me do stuff that was dangerous, stuff that was hard on my conscience.”

“I had convinced myself I didn’t care about the people I was hurting or about this guy I’d just killed, and maybe I didn’t. Maybe I don’t, still. Dunno.“

taylor’s response to this is:

“He’d been made to do it, he’d been in fucked up circumstances with no real moral compass to go by, still a kid. The way he described it, though, it didn’t sit well with me. Cold blooded murder.“

that is not how he described it.

1. he outright says that what he was forced to do was “hard on his conscience”

2. he outright says that he “had convinced himself he didn’t care about the people he was hurting,” i.e he was a 10-13yo child being forced into extreme violence by his ridiculously abusive father & he naturally repressed his emotional reaction to it because there’s no other way to feasibly psychologically cope with feeling the full brunt of the emotions that induces. he’s not a Cold Blooded Bitch, he was a kid desperately convincing himself he didn’t care because he couldn’t care if he was going to survive.

3. yeah, he says “maybe i don’t [care], dunno.” this is because the 3+ years he spent learning to cram every emotional response he had to his abuse into a box & then solder-iron that box shut do not magically disappear the second he escapes from his father. it’s not at all unreasonable that taylor (also 15 and horribly emotionally repressed) misses this, but the “maybe” and “dunno” are indicators that he genuinely can’t tell whether or not he cares! as imp points out after he dies, it’s not that his emotions aren’t there at all, it’s that he has no ability to read them--much like taylor, he’s great at convincing himself of things regarding his feelings and then genuinely believing those things. he’s fifteen and has been out of his abusive home for all of 2.5 years--he’s not capable of grasping the full impacts that the abuse had on his psyche, and the way he describes everything from a detached perspective and waffles about on allowing himself interiority is a natural result of that.

if we saw this or any of the other murders alec was forced to commit as they were happening, we would not be feeling less generous towards him, we would be thinking “i want to beat heartbreaker to death with his own bones, because this is an evil thing to do to a child.”

okay, that’s the murder out of the way. now onto the significantly more controversial aspect of what alec did as a 10-13yo.

taylor generally regards alec as a special type of ontologically real & distinct class of person called a rapist. many people in the fandom share her viewpoint on that one. and, like, objectively true--he is a rapist, he raped people. but applying “rapist” as a descriptor meaning “evil piece of shit who sucks, but i guess he gets some leeway since he was a kid, but he still sucks and is bad and probably a sociopath” is massively flattening the circumstances under which he committed sexual violence & severely underestimating how it impacted his psyche.

taylor--and again, most other people in the fandom--tend to unilaterally go “gross and fucked up, he sucks, moving on” during bits where alec discusses that aspect of his childhood. but if we actually pause to read between the lines for the details and then address the actual context (which alec is not capable of doing, because 1. emotional repression to hell and back and 2. it was, as he said, normal to him), it becomes very clear that it’s unjustifiable to slap the “Sucks + Evil Predator” label on him and then move on feeling comforted by the straightforward moral judgement.

“’Sure,’ Alec drawled. In a more normal voice, he said, ‘But what I’m saying is he wouldn’t mind. Now, it’s been a little while, but there was a time when I had someone in my bed every night.’

‘When you were with Heartbreaker,’ I said. From the look of disgust on Aisha’s face, and what I imagined was a similar expression on my own, I suspected we were on the same page. At least on this one thing.

‘Sure. Cape groupies, my dad’s girls, people I used my powers on toward the end.’

There wasn’t even a trace of guilt or shame on his expression, no regret in his tone. He just looked bored.

He went on, ‘What I’m saying is that I’m speaking from experience. Having someone cuddled up beside you, even if it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, having that body contact isn’t so bad. Especially when you’ve had a bad day.’”

like, okay. let’s unpack all the implications there.

1. alec is bringing up this whole topic as an attempt at empathy--aisha is effectively saying “i’m pissy at taylor for being intimate w/ brian while he’s experiencing the worst pain of his life” and alec is effectively responding with “i support them, because when i was in similar circumstances, physical intimacy made me feel better.” it is extremely notable that he’s implicitly comparing brian’s “bad day” (getting fucking bonesawed!) to his own “bad day” (living with his dad)!

2. alec grew up in Emotional Neglect & Abuse: The Household. this is established in buzz 7.1--he recounts that there was zero attention paid to him & the other kids except for when heartbreaker was terrifying the shit out of them for either a perceived slight or in an attempt to force a trigger event. he also grew up in Sexual Abuse: The Household. as detailed in one WoG, the heartbroken were a massive group hiding out in significantly less massive houses--6-8 people sharing a room was common. alec was constantly in close quarters to normalized sexual abuse from the ages of zero to thirteen, e.g the memory mentioned in his interlude where he starts crying over not being given the TV remote and a sweaty, wearing-nothing-but-briefs heartbreaker stomps out of the bedroom to terrify alec for interrupting what was, very presumably, a marathon of sexual assault. exposing children to abuse happening in their environment is a form of abuse itself. there’s also the WoG in which this is mentioned:

“Look at it this way - at the age that many boys are raising an eyebrow at boobs, family members were saying 'hey, here are all the boobs you could want...’ Interested in dick? ... Dad's not that into it but a sister can hook you up. At an age when many are just figuring out enough of the world to ask 'what's heroin?' or 'what's weed?' he was given heroin and weed and everything else that was theoretically obtainable and told to only indulge if it was someone else's body. At an age when many are saying 'sex must be awesome' he was given free reign.”

which is sexual abuse! it is in fact exceedingly sexually abusive for alec’s father & older siblings to go “hey, 10-13yo son/little brother, i notice you are Hitting Puberty! here’s a fucking tidal wave of sex and drugs, have at it.” he didn’t magically get the idea to commit acts of physical violence w/o grooming & coercion from his family, and the same goes for the sexual violence. it’s not a hard extrapolation to make that after 10 years of isolation and abuse he leaps on the chance for physical intimacy, for something that actually makes him feel good when good is a feeling he’s never really gotten to have before--and how would he have a frame of reference for this being bad when his childhood was one long march of his own autonomy being violated + constantly seeing other peoples autonomy violated?

alec did not leave the house as a kid. alec Wasn’t Even Thirteen. the people he assaulted were victims, but he’s inarguably not the person with primary culpability for the assault--that would be the family members significantly older than alec who directly groomed him into hypersexual behavior, kidnapped + brainwashed victims also significantly older than alec, shoved them at alec, and said “have at it, buddy.” (which he, considering it to be normal and desperate for any positive attention or emotion, immediately adopted as a coping mechanism.) it would be absurd not to regard alec as a victim in this circumstance as well, and the fact that the way he was victimized led to him hurting people doesn’t change that. he was a chronically abused and manipulated preteen--he couldn’t issue meaningful consent or exercise any real autonomy in his decision-making. his lack of emotional reaction to casually sharing the story isn’t a moral failure, it’s an indicator of how badly the abuse skewed his perception of what’s normal.

and despite All Of That, taylor’s immediate reaction is to judge his lack of guilt, shame, or regret. which isn’t a wholly irrational reaction from her by any means--it makes complete sense given who she is and what information she has. but it does mean that the judgement we’re given on alec in this moment is nearly entirely detached from the material reality of what happened & how that reality should reasonably be regarded.

3. i think i’m literally the only person i’ve ever seen point this out--the first category of person he lists off as having slept with is “cape groupies.” as in, fans of capes.

what kind of person do we suppose would be a fan of heartbreaker’s cult? what kind of person would have a thing for heartbreaker’s sexual abuse and mind control cult? the fact that he specifically mentions “cape groupies” means these were people who liked the heartbroken and were picked up by it voluntarily--what kind of person would want to sleep with one of heartbreaker’s barely-pubescent superpowered children?

yeah, that one sounds less like alec committing rape and more like heartbreaker providing access to his children to pedophiles w/ a Thing for the powers involved, presumably because it was a fantastic honeypot for people he could drain for money or otherwise use as a resource (which was his primary method of staying undercover & getting by). which alec parses as normal enough to casually slip into a random sentence.

alec’s childhood was not a lengthy tour of him committing sexual violence because he sucked, it was him being sexually abused, and a portion of that abuse included him being groomed to perpetuate it onto others. because that’s one of the Core Things about his character: he was a victim of grooming to perpetuate a cycle of abuse, he ran away from it at an impressively young age, and he spent the rest of his life making stumbling attempts to jerry-rig a distinct system of ethics & decision-making so that he wouldn’t be like his father.

no, the abuse he experienced & the way he responded to it wasn’t straight-forward or palatable. he’s not a stereotypical or idealized Good Victim--none of the traumatized teens in worm are. the specifics of what happened to him & what he did as a result are uncomfortable. he participated in hurting other people very badly. he still doesn’t really understand everything that was wrong with what happened. he doesn’t open himself up for pity or add caveats when discussing it to make it clear that he’s viewing his childhood the Right Way. he doesn’t feel or talk about it the way he’s “supposed” to. he doesn’t understand why or care that it upsets and disgusts people. the abuse left him with low to no empathy, and he’s not ashamed about admitting that.

and absolutely none of that changes that he’s still undeniably a victim, and if we saw any of the things that happened to him from the perspective of anyone involved, if we saw the abuse he experienced without the normalized lens he views it through or the villainizing lens taylor views it through--everyone would probably feel really fucking bad for him.

or in other words: alec vasil is a little boy whose life fucking sucks, and we all have to be nice to him, okay?

#worm #parahumans #alec vasil #GOOD LORD I BLINKED AND THERES.#checks notes.#t. Two Thousand Four Hundred Words In Here!#adding this one to the alecnalysis canon ig #anyway yeah we already saw the worst thing he did w Moral Culpability onscreen during his interlude #everything else is like. that's not really a moral failing so much as it is really sad #alec essays #alec vasil heritage posts

301 notes · View notes

insufferablemod · 5 months

Text

top 10 worst celebrities ever

#Look at this freak #Saw that post talking about how in canon only see him in a t shirt but also the suits are a vibe #And mini Dave made like a ton of them #So #I think he can pull of both looks he's versatile like that #dave strider #homestuck #hom3stuck #My art #alpha dave strider #Does he switch it up to throw of the paparazzi? And if so... Which one is the Director Strider Look tm cus Logically #You'd think it'd be the suit #But..it's Dave so would be funny if he dresses up nice as a disguise #Idk alpha Dave is such a vague character we don't know much about him... There's so many different things you can do with him #And knowing Dave's relationship with clothes and fashion #Like... Kid has to learn to do his own laundry???? That effects a kid and how they view clothes?#It's an interesting contrast how the moment he can he makes a bunch of fancy clothes and then spends 3 years wearing the One Outfit #And as funny as the idea of him wearing the t shirt as a director is theres also the whole putting in a persona thing #And then finally getting home and just dropping it all n wearing a r shirt he's had since he was 16 #Idk... Many many thoughts rattling around in here.. None of them coherent..

109 notes · View notes

books-and-dragons · 6 months

Note

I'm so sorry, I'm kinda drunk and dropping another idea, do with it whatever ye will.

Yknow how in the beginning of the game, Sojiro tells Ren he won't take care of him when he gets sick?

Consider: he's not used to city germs/being that closely shoved against other people on the train. He DOES start to get sick around Kamoshida's Palace, powers through it, and then is SUPER sick just after it's over.

He plans on sucking it up and hiding it, but Futaba hears his hacking coughs over her bug even when he's upstairs, followed by wheezing, maybe even a little weeping. He's constantly in and out of the bathroom, and he's starting to run out of tissues.

Futaba nervously texts Sojiro that the kid they took in sounds awful. Sojiro is gruff at first and says he's not a baby, he can take care of himself. She responds by sending him the audio and suddenly Dad Instincts kick in

y/n

obviously it's a YES, our brainrots continue because early-game ren and sojiro dynamics break my heart every time how dare you get me so invested in this idea, this post got too long so it's going under a read more

listen listen look i love sojiro and the coffee family okay, but early-game?? sojiro could catch these hands

ren has already been though so much by the time he arrives in tokyo, to then be put into a dusty old attic like a spare part would absolutely fit in with ren's own perception of himself at that stage. it would be almost too easy for him to put his own health on the backburner kinda like he's already used to it

very used to not taking up space, 'not being a bother', and then sojiro really reinforces this message when ren first gets to leblanc- so when ren inevitably gets ill a month into his probation, it's already doomed for maladaption

tokyo would be such a breeding ground for sickness compared to the countryside, and ren just doesn't have the consitution to deal with it. the dusty attic and poor eating habits don't help matters, and then we have the stress of kamoshida and the metaverse?? ren is not having a Good Time™

at first it's something he thinks he can shrug off, and is adamant that ignoring it is the way to go. a cold, it's nothing, he can handle this alone, no need to bother anyone else with it.

inevitably, he gets worse, because that's what happens when you don't rest and let yourself recover. a tickly cough becomes a tightness in his chest, mild congestion shifts into an attack on his senses and blurriness- but maybe that's the dizziness. he's not really sleeping, either.

it's something that's becoming increasingly difficult to brush off and hide, he even relented to finally getting some medicine (nothing as strong as he needs by this point, that would eat too much into his limited funds, but some painkillers to take the edge off). once or twice he's tempted to stay off school, at morgana's insistence, or a too close call where he definitely blacked out for a minute, but then sojiro's voice will ring in his head 'i won't be the one looking after you if you get sick', 'your parents got rid of you for being a pain in the ass', and all his worst insecurities come rushing back and he's resolved to deal with it on his own

meanwhile, futaba's been making use of her hidden audio bugs- normally they're a comfort for her in the daytime, but since the new kid- ren- has been staying at the cafe (part-timer her ass, how gullible does sojiro think she is?!), she's been listening more frequently. when ren gets sick, she figures it out quickly.

time goes on, he's not getting better- he's actually getting worse- and futaba starts to wonder if she's the only one who knows

(there's something in his sharp contrasts- the quiet kid who shuffles through the cafe and takes sojiro's scolding, to the coughing kid who cries into the silence of night when he thinks there's nobody there to see it- that stabs through her numbness. it feels like a companion to her own ghost)

one night she swears the kid gets up to be sick, and there's hardly any sound heard from the attic all night. if nobody's gonna help ren, then she will (futaba used to like helping, once upon a time).

she texts sojiro the next day, when ren doesn't say anything again, and goes off to school with what she bets is a fake assurance on his face

and you're so right, sojiro dismisses her concern really easily, claims the kid can 'take care of himself' and he won't 'baby' the part-timer. insists ren needs to learn some disipline, then maybe he'll stay out of trouble

frustration wells in futaba- if she was less fixated on what was going on with ren, she'd register it's one of the first changes of mood she's had for months- and she responds with nothing but an audio clip, an attached explanation that this is just from the past few days- it's been going on for weeks, then she waits, and hears the distant sound of her compilation through one of the bugs, a hitched breath from sojiro, curse words under his breath-

for all his earlier postulating about not helping ren if he gets sick, sojiro is immeditely struck with a pang of concern- it sounded bad, and if futaba's words were anything to go by, this had been going on for a while. the kid's at school now (at school, being as ill as that and he was still going to class-), so sojiro will talk to him when he gets back. there's a chance he goes a bit too over the top, between the variation of medicines he purchases, supplies he grabbed from home- if you accused him for over-compensating after maybe being too harsh on the kid in the beginning, you'd be right

and you just know ren would be so resistent at first to help, or even just the offer of staying off school. in his sickness-induced fugue, ren's filter-less in rattling off how he can't stay off, what will the students and teachers think, and he has work that afternoon, and a test soon, and he doesn't want to get in the way-

sojiro's heart just shatters

this kid, whose been silently carring the weight of the world and has apparently been falling to pieces for weeks now and sojiro didn't even notice?

(a part of it reminds him too much of the other kid he's got at home, the countless ways he's already failed futaba, and now ren too? he feels useless)

sojiro focuses on what he can do, and that's making the kid rest. work will understand, school can wait, ren isn't an inconvenience, he guides the kid to bed, calls takemi immediately (who rushes over, despite the fact she's technically closed at this hour, and refuses to take any payment),

even still, there's this stilted awkwardness between them when the quiet pushes on too long- they hardly know each other, afterall. sojiro is still figuring out the 'caring for kids' thing, and ren isn't familiar with any kind of parental affection, so some of sojiro's care veers a bit too close to clinical or mechanic, and ren still struggles to communicate what kind of help he needs, but it's enough for now.

for now, sojiro is there. he's trying, and at least ren's getting some colour back on his skin. for now, ren's willing to take a few days off and have some medicine, but he's over-apologetic and definitely tries to make up for his sickness once he's healed. it's gonna take them both a while yet, but luckily there's always their guardian hacker, ready and able to call them out when needed (and maybe some day she'll be able to keep an eye on ren and sojiro in person)

#ask #also the idea of it being futaba who first realises going on?? developing hers and ren's bond before they even meet??#june i love your brain have i ever mentioned #such a gem even when it h u r t s (which is obviously only ever ALWAYS <3)#us : *sees angsty p5 game content* it's free real estate!#i want ren to have a HUG and REASSURANCE and also a bowl of soup #instead he gets dusty attic and milk-crate bed and instant noodles he packed for emergencies :c #persona 5 #p5 #persona 5 headcanons #ren amamiya #futaba sakura #sojiro sakura #oh also also!! imagine how sojiro might feel about his early-game behaviour by late-game/post-canon??#ohhh i bet he'd hate it and there'd be so much self-blame/loathing there #parent guilt and all that good stuff y'know #futaba? seeing herself in early-game ren? ren? seeing himself in palace-futaba? sorry they make me soft and emotional your honour #i love my coffee family but i love it more flavoured with all the issues they haven't yet worked through #once again THIS WASNT MEANT TO BE SO LONG

80 notes · View notes