#that is deeply rooted in making assumptions based on body types
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Mistakenly Saving the Villain - Chapter 2
Original Title: 论救错反派的下场
Genres: Drama, Romance, Xianxia, Yaoi
TW for this chapter: Brief description of suicide
This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.
Chapter 2 - Problem-Solving by Elimination
Scholar-Tyrant Song sat in the examination room, his mind blank.
The types of questions at the Banquet of Beauties were more terrifying than Goldbach’s conjecture. At least he would not panic if being questioned by his professor on Goldbach's conjecture.
The Langgan Terrace of the Golden Pheonix Manor was extremely luxurious and beautiful. There are countless cultivators and beautiful women flying in the depths of the clouds. Every guest was more beautiful than the last, and carefree laughter and obscene words were thrown around.
Song Qingshi silently recited his lectures on the human body structure, physiological hygiene, mouse breeding and other courses twice in his heart, finally recovering the calmness of a high-ranking medical student. Thinking about the lab mice he had bred for three years dying off, the scene in front of him no longer meant much.
There are two kinds of divine fires in the original person's body. The first was the Red Lotus Fire used for refining his alchemy, and the other was the Underworld Ghost Fire used for killing people.
Song Qingshi's expression became one that could repel others from thousands of miles away. He released the Underworld Ghost Fire from the palms of his hands, causing the flames to continuously jump at his fingertips and change into different shapes.
Fen Shen and He Ti ancestors are the treasures of all the cultivation sects. They did not usually involve themselves with the mortal world. The Nascent Soul cultivators are all big shots walking carefree in the immortal world. Not to mention the danger of the cutivating path; no one could guarantee that they wouldn't need to ask a doctor for help. Neither righteous cultivators or demonic cultivators were not willing to offend the Medicine Master Xianzun easily, let alone mock his perverse character.
When the cultivators saw the Underworld Ghost Fire, they knew that he was in a bad mood and kept their distance.
Song Qingshi was able to keep a clear area around him. He cut off the cultivators who approached him to make friendships. Then he released the powerful spiritual thoughts of a Nascent Soul cultivator and quickly took in all the beauties at the banquet. He looked carefully and tried to find the protagonist in the crowd.
However, Yang Yuhuan was thicker, and Zhao Feiyan was slender. Everyone had different standards of beauty. Song Qingshi was of the kind of person that was not very reliable. His eyes were quickly dazzled, only able to think that all of them were beautiful during the dinner. Even the maid who poured the water was graceful and beautiful. She was more beautiful than the stars on TV. He couldn't tell who was better looking.
But this stubborn scholar will never admit defeat!
Song Qingshi tried to use the process of elimination to solve the problem. First, he determined that the protagonist was a man, excluded all the maidens during the banquet. Then he needed to make a list of key observations, verifying claims, making careful assumptions, and removing the beauties that did not meet the standards one by one.
The twin brothers brought by the Sect Master of the Blood Demon Sect were extremely beautiful. Jade-like skin, fragrant, and passionately devoted, just like two identical lotus flowers on one stalk.
There can't be two protagonists, cross it out.
The young man brought by the immortal master Longhu Sect is also super cute. He is so childish and adorable, holding his immortal master in his arms and acting like a baby. The immortal master loved him very much, doted on him, and he even hand-fed this junior immortal his food during the banquet. He kept calling him "baby".
The protagonist is supposed to suffer a miserable fate. Cross it out.
The foreign monk from Beizhou used a mysterious iron chain to lead along a handsome man covered in wounds. He stumbled and followed the foreign monk obediently. But underneath, his body revealed a rebellious aura, like being an eagle with his wings tied but still wanting to break free and fly away.
The protagonist is a beauty, so he wouldn't be so heartless, cross him out.
. . .
Into the depth of the night, the whistful music of the Banquet of Beauties had long been replaced by debauchery. Many people took the beauties away from the tables, and the scene became more and more unbearable.
Song Qingshi did not want to peep into other people's private affairs, for fear of seeing something provocative and getting an eye stye. He kept his thoughts away from extra events and kept it focused during the dinner. Then he heard the foreign monk show off the man he had brought with him to the young master of the Hidden Moon Sect: "He was even a famous general in the human world. After he was defeated and captured, he was sold to me. He's an arrogant person, who resists even under the threat of death. He is very exciting to play with."
The Young Master of the Hidden Moon Sect introduced a soft and coquettish young man, and smiled: "A proud person has the taste of being proud, but there is also the taste of being well-behaved. Let's switch and try it out?"
The foreign monk hesitated. The Young Master of the Hidden Moon Sect cast a wink at the slave.
The charming young man immediately snuggled up on the monk’s chest and begged coquettishly: "I truly like majestic bodies of strong masters, please love this slave well."
Fan Seng was ignited by the tender words of this young man, and he readily threw the chain in his hand to the Young Master of the Hidden Moon Sect, and took the young man to the side hall. The Young Master dragged the chain fiercely, and forced the gray-faced man toward the secluded part of the garden.
There were many scenes like this during the dinner, and no one had pity for these tragic beauties.
. . .
Song Qingshi had already learned from the memory of the original body that the spiritual energy of the human world was thin. The lifespan of mortals was short, and the spiritual roots were occasionally weak. Just having a base foundation was like reaching the heavens. Some kind-hearted cultivators will accept mortals as disciples and give them the opportunity to ascend to immortals. Ten thousand years ago, there was a mortal named Mo Yuan who was extremely talented. He just relied on swordsmanship to become a Nascent Soul cultivator. His techniques rivaled the Fen Shen ancestors, and was thus called the Sword Sovereign.
However, the road to immortality was to fight for one's life with the heavens. It had difficult steps and repeated failure was common. Killing someone for their treasures occured from time to time. It was difficult to restrain their behavior with morality.
Weakness is the original sin. Mortals were like ants.
Even if it was the Sword Master Mo Yuan who took care of him, he could only lay down the rules among the elites of the immortal world. He ensured that the mortals who successfully built a foundation base were treated as cultivators and no longer playthings and slaves. But demonic sects and cultivators never cared about the rules. Not even just the mortal cultivators, the immortal monks also suffered in their hands. Their evil deeds were too numerous to count.
Golden Phoenix Manor was regarded as a famous sect in the immortal world, and all the cultivation furnaces in the Manor are of made and purchased in the mortal world.
So even if Song Qingshi couldn't tolerate what happened here, he couldn't interfere. He was slightly grateful that the identity that the system arranged for him was not a mortal, otherwise he would never survive two chapters, let alone save the protagonist.
Fortunately, it was just a virtual world. . .
Novels were all evil works; textbooks were the righteous materials in the world! The professor was correct in confiscating the novels of all the girls in class! If he had the opportunity to become a professor, he will not allow students to read novels! Help them to avoid their Three Views being poisoned!
Song Qingshi sighed silently.
Suddenly, a curse came from the garden. It was the Young Master of Hidden Moon Sect who dragged the stubborn man's corpse and returned with a disappointed face. The man's shirt was torn open, revealing his bruised body. His body was riddled with scars. He had taken a stolen silver chopstick, pierced his throat deeply and killed himself.
The silver chopsticks were very blunt, and it would be extremely difficult to kill yourself with one of them. You couldn't stab yourself with one without exhausting all your energy, which shows his determination.
Seeing this, everyone in the banquet joked. They laughed that the Young Master couldn't even take care of a mortal.
Hearing the disturbance, the monk left the charming young man and hurried back out of the side hall. He saw that the person he had brought was dead. His brows furrowed and his face was full of anger. The young master of the Hidden Moon Sect was even more angry than him. He turned the dead man over, revealing his back covered with lashes, and questioned the monk: "Why didn't you mark this little slave of yours with an Acacia Seal? How could you let him die?"
The foreign monk was stunned by his question: "What is the Acacia Seal? Some new thing from the Central continent?"
Seeing his ignorance, the cultivators couldn't help but mumble that Beizhou must really be a barren land considering that they didn't even know that an Acacia Seal is a well-known thing in the world. The monk was lost during this whole conversation and the Young Master was discouraged. He pulled the monk, hating iron for not making seal, explained the beauty of the Acacia Seal: "The Acacia Seal is a method created by Huanxi Xianzun. The owner can print it on the back of the furnace, and the body and soul of the furnace transfer into the hands of the owner. No orders are needed and it cannot die without permission."
Song Qingshi had found important information. He swiftly concentrated on this discussion and listened carefully.
Hidden Moon Sect's Young Master took out a red bead from his space bag. An idea sparked in his mind. He turned the bead in his hand. The charming young man who was standing next to the monk immediately knelt down and started to bark.
The monk waved his hand, disgusted and said: "It's so obedient, even if you try something new once in a while. If I raise them like this, I would get tired after playing with it for a few days."
"There are a lot of usages in it. You would know if you had used them yourself. This Young Master isn't going to list them all for you." The Young Master withdrew from spiritual mind he had put into the bead, and the young man crouching on the ground stood up. He was used to being humiliated in front of a crowd and blushed. After a while, he faded from his shame and stood behind his master with his head down.
Seeing that the monk still didn’t understand, the young master of the Hidden Moon Sect still educates patiently: “The most important thing is that unless you let the cultivation furnace die, the cultivation furnace will never die against your will. If you brand this little slave with the Acacia Seal, wouldn't it be more fun to make him unable to kill himself and then slowly break down his pride?"
The foreign monk had an epiphany. He nodded and agreed.
The young master of the Hidden Moon Sect erased the spiritual mind of the cultivation furnace's bead in his hand. He threw it to the monk, and said graciously: "Since the young master killed your beauty, I will will compensate you for it. You can take it and study the beauty of the Acacia Seal. Once you start, you won't be able to start."
The monk was overjoyed, and even boasted: "The Central continent people are really bold, this Black Vulture has made you a friend!"
The charming young man's face instantly turned pale. He looked at the original master desperately, looking like he had something to say, as if he wanted to beg, but in the end he didn't say anything, and went with the monk in tears.
The jewels were corrupted and it was like broken jade.
This extravagant feast had finally reached its climax.
The disciples of Golden Phoenix Manor concealed the radiance of the luminous beads above the temple, and let the darkness envelop the entire Langgan Terrace.
The guests raised their heads in amazement. They saw fireworks from several spells across the darkness, blooming in the air into a radiant golden phoenix, dancing lightly, announcing that the performances of the feast were about to begin. Jin FeiRen raised his wine glass and invited guests to share in the festivities again.
Song Qingshi marveled at the beauty of the Phoenix Dance, and admired it for a long while. Then he discovered that a young man in white clothes appeared next to Jin FeiRen. The young man had very clean and beautiful features, like green bamboo in the mountains, a bright moon in the sky. A layer of cold frost covered in his low eyebrows, his hair falling like a waterfall around his face. It was tied back with a ribbon. There were no other notable features on his whole body, but he still easily retained everyone's lingering gazes.
The tall and handsome owner was smiling and gently scratching the young man's palm with his fingers, praising his treasure in a gentle and soft voice, trying to get him to smile.
The young man turned his head away, despite the teasing. He didn't even want to spare him a glance.
Jin FeiRen twisted his head forcefully, and forced his hands behind his back with only one hand. He held him close in an embrace and kissed his forehead and the bridge of his nose carefully. Then he bit his lips hard, as if to he wanted to swallow him whole. The teenager struggled with pain, Jin FeiRen smiled and released him, leaning close to the youth's ear, and asked softly: "Do you want to learn the rules again?"
The young man froze for a moment. He stopped struggling, and sat obediently into Jin FeiRen's arms.
Was this the protagonist?
Song Qingshi secretly watched for a long time. He finally suppressed his social anxiety, ready to speak, and then LingBao Xianzun who had a good relationship with Jin FeiRen walked over and asked with a smile: "This is the new treasure of the Manor Lord? Is he pure? Does he have a good Yin constitution, a single spirit root of the water system? How about giving him to me to taste tonight?
Jin FeiRen glanced at the embarrassed and angry expression of the youth in his arms, gave him a squeeze, and refused with a smile: "Although he is just a toy, he suits my heart and it would be inconvenient to give him to you. Later, I will give my friends some top-quality products, all of them newly branded with excellent physiques and very clean."
LingBao Xianzun carefully looked at him. "Is your furnace still a virgin?"
Jin FeiRen said: "I don't want to treat him like an ordinary furnace."
Song Qingshi had already heard more obscene words tonight than he had in his lifetime. He understood everything that should be understood or even things that shouldn't be understood. He also understood clearly what a furnace was.
He watched as Jin FeiRen was pouring wine for the young man during the banquet, and he was a little unsure whether this was the protagonist. Although the white-clothed boy seemed to be more attractive than the other beauties present, the system had explained that the protagonist needs to be rescued from his miserable fate. Now Jin FeiRen was quite fond of the boy, and every beauty in the Banquet of Beauties was many times worse off than him. . .
Song Qingshi was anxious pondering these questions. . .
At this time, the phoenix finished its dance in the air, and fell into the crowd with a stream of light.
The light faded away, and a huge golden, carved bird appeared on the Langgan Terrace. On this bird frame was a beauty beautiful enough to destroy a city.
The gold fetters inlaid with jewels encircled his pure white ankles, and were tied to both sides of the bird frame with long thin golden chains. His upper body was caged with almost transparent thin fabric, and he could vaguely see the magnificent scenery decorated with gold jewels and jade underneath. On his lower body was a long dress in the shape of phoenix tail feathers made of gold and red feathers. His hair was adorned with pearls resembling mermaid's tears, the enchanting Acacia Seal on his back hidden by his long hair, flowing in the breeze. It was as beautiful as a phoenix with rich colors, the human peony in the world.
He held a jade flute in his hand, his thin lips slightly open, his beauty almost unnatural. The dark golden phoenix eyes seemed to be smiling but held no emotion, and he greeted the audience. Song Qingshi sat up straight. He recognized that this was the beauty in red that he had seen by the river bank.
When the red beauty glanced over at Song Qingshi, his eyes stayed for a while, then slid over as if he didn't recognize him.
Song Qingshi looked at the young man in white clothes on the left, who looked like a bright moon, and the beauty in red clothes on the right, who looked like peony in his prime. He was panicking; he couldn't tell who was more beautiful and more like the main character!
The exam questions of the system teacher were too difficult. . .
Is Scholar-Tyrant Song going to fail his course?
#mistakenly saving the villain#chinese novel#chinese bl#english translation#song qingshi#mistakenly saving the villain translation
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How Acupuncture Can Assist Your Entire body
This report appears at the overall health rewards of acupuncture remedy and how acupuncture can assist your human body.
Acupuncture is a well-known remedy procedure for a extensive range of wellness circumstances. It is a drug-cost-free approach that involves inserting slim needles through the skin at acupuncture jacksonville fl particular physique details. So, when and in which did it originate from? How does it operate? What are the well being advantages of acupuncture treatment method? Does it have any side effects? Read through on to locate out every thing you need to know about acupuncture.
When and the place did it originate from?
Acupuncture is the oldest type of therapy relationship again to all around 2nd century B.C. Its roots can be traced back again to China in which it commenced just before spreading to other components of the globe. In spite of the speedy expansion and inventions in the health-related area, Acupuncture has proven its worthiness and its nevertheless currently being utilized along with modern day medical practices.
What well being problems is it used to combat?
Acupuncture is used to fight numerous overall health conditions associated to the digestive, reproductive, and respiratory methods of the body. This sort of conditions incorporate acute bronchitis, continual tonsillitis, migraine, infertility, reduced back again pain, bronchial bronchial asthma, continual sinusitis, rheumatoid arthritis, facial paralysis, spasm of the cardia and esophagus, and a lot of a lot more. This procedure can also be employed to overcome addictions this kind of as cigarette smoking and alcoholism. Acupuncture corrects imbalances in the major organs of the human body which is the principal origin of numerous conditions consequently stopping their growth.
How Acupuncture Performs
Acupuncture is based on the assumption that most health circumstances create owing to blockage or interruption of the body's lifestyle vitality flow. This interruption or blockage of stream outcomes to the accumulation of fluid in some parts of the human body ensuing in inflammation and discomfort owing to excess strain. A blockage also cuts out the source of nutrients to all areas of the human body top to malnutrition. This makes one come to feel tiredness, weak and even encounter gradual healing if they have accidents on these components.
Acupuncture eliminates blockages in the entire body therefore relieving discomfort and inflammation, making it possible for vitamins and minerals to reach all physique components hence creating a single to be relaxed. The body's vitality balance is restored creating 1 feel vibrant and energized. This treatment method method involves inserting fantastic needles into particular points on the body named acupuncture details. Depending on the issue being handled, the details of insertion and the number of needles may range from a single individual to one more. The needles used in the therapy are pre-sterilised and must be utilised only after. They are inserted just underneath the skin or further to achieve the muscle exactly where are they still left in place for about 20 to forty minutes. In some cases, the needles could be rotated or stimulated utilizing a mild electric powered recent. At the end of the session, you will get a deep sense of leisure.
Does it damage?
The process is not agonizing, but one may experience a tingling or heat sensation when the practitioner is inserting the needles. If you expertise too a lot soreness, numbness or any other type of distress, allow the practitioner know immediately.
Advantages of acupuncture?
No important side outcomes as in contrast to employing medicines
Can be combined with other forms of treatments when carried out properly
One receives personalised treatment in accordance to their demands
Functions each as a preventive and remedy evaluate
One can easily continue with their standard lifestyle even when going through this process
These are all very good examples of how acupuncture can support your entire body.
Facet outcomes of acupuncture
Soreness, bruising and bleeding on the factors of insertion (Dangerous for patients with a bleeding condition or customers of blood thinners)
Other alarming facet effects of acupuncture process mostly arise from inadequate hygiene and training of the practitioner. Such include
An infection due to the fact of using unsterilized needlesof inner organs specifically the lungs which can collapse
Improper angle of inserting needles or undertaking it as well deeply ensuing damage
Why Acupuncture can be a much better technique to healing than making use of contemporary western medications:
Present day western medicines have aspect outcomes that sometimes even outdo the situation the drugs are intended to take care of. This indicates they will do a lot more damage than great, especially when utilised more than a lengthy time period. Acupuncture, on the other hand, doesn't go away powering important aspect-effects if it truly is carried out properly by the correct specialist. One more excellent illustration of how acupuncture can assist your human body.
Business Name: Be Well Healing Arts
Phone Number: 904-990-3228
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Excuse my ignorance, I agreed with much you said about the “old” trans person’s post, however I don’t see the problem with not being attracted to someone due to their sexual parts. I don’t think it’s sexualizing someone and it’s inherently biological to be attracted to or not attracted to a sex. To be clear I am bisexual and attracted regardless but I know plenty of straights/gays who are steadfast in their attraction to the preferred sex, regardless of gender or other traits
There are many posts on here which explain it better than I could, but just to summarize their points:
The discourse surrounding individual preferences is largely a distraction from the more pressing issue of cissexist society treating trans people’s bodies as inherently repugnant (particularly transfeminine bodies, which are not only depicted as the subject of mockery and ridicule, but also as a very common horror trope).
Its use as a distraction tactic is most obvious when trans people attempt to discuss how our bodies are sexualized (and how this sexualization is used to further dehumanize and marginalize us) before people start bringing up their personal sexual preferences without any regard to the systemic issue being analyzed.
This discourse is used as a way to implicitly justify our marginalization by concern trolling over consent and sexual compatibility. What these people really want is to delegitimize our experiences so that the cis people who would be attracted to us equate us with our assigned sex (and the pericissexist assumptions that come with it).
Additionally, when trans people in these discussions bring up how having sexual preferences on its own do not make someone transmisic, this point often goes unaddressed by those arguing in bad faith.
A lot of people wouldn’t even consider dating a trans person because they’re trans, regardless of assigned sex.
Transness is not the whole of a trans person’s identity, and trans people can look like anything and have any type of body. If sexual compatibility is that important to someone, their emphasis should be on the actual body of their potential partner and not the cissexist assumptions they’ve made about our bodies based on stereotypes.
Pericisnormativity can (and does) deeply impact the assumptions one makes about sex, sexuality, and the human body. Deconstructing pericissexism involves more than just saying “trans men are men and trans women are women”; it involves rooting out these biases within ourselves, which sometimes means reevaluating what assumptions our preferences are founded on. (I really, really recommend reading this post all the way through.)
Not to mention the fact that trans people pretty regularly prioritize their relationships with other trans people over their relationships with cis people, and no trans person would actually want to be in a relationship with someone who finds their trans body repulsive. To only be concerned about cis people’s sexual compatibility with trans people and not vice versa suggests that your understanding of trans people’s sexual agency is...lacking.
#genital preferences#dating preferences#transmisia#transphobia#transmisogyny#anti transmisogyny#transfeminism#ask to tag
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i just saw someone reblog your post that was kind of outlining something you wanted to write about the reflection of what porn means about society and i would love to read that. you're absolutely correct that most analysis of porn and society come from swerfs and terfs and they're absolutely terrible if you look beyond surface-level anything. oh but also please never make me read the phrase "regular degular people fornicating" ever again lol
So…thank you for waiting. The first thing I’d like to say is…*clears throat*
TERFS/SWERFS absolutely suck and their awful rhetoric and invasive presence obstructs discussion of women’s right. TERFS are the footwomen of the patriarchy and absolutely brainwashed, useless voices.
Now that that has been said…
Regular degular poeple fornicaiting. :D
Okay enough silliness, here’s my point. Usually critique of porn comes in two main flavors: “Porn is terrible and inherently sexist, a perverse product of patriarchy” and “All porn is good, actually and critiquing it is prudish and un-progressive”. And I would like to, as usual, submit that the actual truth is somewhere in the middle:
Porn is entirely neutral, and what porn looks like in a society has everything to do with the content of the people’s minds. The content of their minds is heavily influenced by that society’s social mores, habits, etc.
TL;DR - porn is a product of culture. if the porn is bad, that’s the culture’s fault.
The idea that porn is bad and wrong, all of it, is nothing but an extension of the sexual shame colonizers have been peddling along with their sham Christian moralism and oppression for centuries. Our culture fancies itself very open, free and liberated- hence porn and violence can be found in spades bc ~FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION~ but literally everywhere you look, people have complexes about sexuality that are deeply rooted in sexual shame. I want to note here that repression almost ALWAYS causes not an overall lessening of the repressed subject, but a diverted (perverted here is a relative word) and intensified expression of that subject elsewhere.
As a sex worker, when I came into the fetish world, I had the assumption that fetishes in general were like, a conscious type of self exploration done in the spirit of play. What I found was that ‘fetish’ is sometimes that but generally an unconscious mess of psychological expression that people think they don’t need to be critical of because it’s fantasy. To keep this short, most of the fetishes that could have a cathartic or expansive effect on a person’ are actually just sort of like, dead-ended expressions of the world we live in instead of being creative ways beyond it.
Ultimately these ‘fetishes’ and ‘fantasies’ are really anything but. They aren’t fanciful non realities at all- they’re actually sexualized versions of the oppressions we all know and suffer. And that’s horrible.
The issue with porn, then, is that it reflects the minds and desires of the average person involved with its making and consumption. And in a world where (mostly but not all straight, mostly but not all ((but really really mostly here)) white) men disproportionately have voice, power and resources, then they are who porn is about and for.
‘Porn’ is terrible becuause a society with this kind of power imbalance is terrible.
THere’s an aspect of the mind/body where like…anything you like or are attracted to, there’s a part of you that can eroticize that feeling of attraction into something that may be experienced as more and more sexual the more it’s repressed/ignored. If you think of love as attraction, and attraction as neutral, then you can understand how, then, the very things our patriarchal society loves, celebrates and represents can end up eroticized into sexual fantasy and content. If power is good, then expressions of power feel good, somewhere in the mind/body. If violence is good, then expressions of violence feel good. If maintaining male dominance is good, then expressions of male dominance feel good. The simple fact is that if an individual is taught that expressing some quality *is good*, that thing is remembered as so because of the positive reinforcement.
Somewhere in their mind, the conditions of that moral quality are associated with feelings of pleasure, positive stimulation, excitement, arousal (think neutrally here as ‘increased excitatory interest’), and feelings are felt by the body. In a certain way, then, the production/creation of porn based on patriarchal male desire and its offspring (fetishization of feminine subjugation, fetishization of racism, fetishization of gender roles, fetishization of sexual shame as a domination tool, fetishization of abuse etc), creates a feedback spiral that ends up ritualizing and reinforcing those things.So we lose a huge opportunity for healing and growth as a society when either of the following positions are taken:1) Porn is bad (sinful, dirty) and shouldn’t exist– this will only further repression and reinforce sexual shame.
2) Porn is good and also 100% fantasy/meaningless fun. Critiquing or questioning it is oppressive, prudish– this is what people with unresolved mental issues say to keep from having to examine what their porn consumption/fantasies are saying
The fact that pretty much all porn that exists in main (and many side) streams is fetishization of exploitation, celebration of male dominance, the degradation of the feminine or eroticized personal trauma is really really telling. But we can’t do anything about that in terms of helping people grow into a healthier way of experiencing/expressing sexuality if we go ‘Porn is bad so let’s get rid of it! Shame shame! Criminalize!’
Speaking for experience, people, specifically men, can actually be trained away from harmful porn and harmful positive associations (being turned on by violence is not, actually, ideal) and to something more relative. Of course they can- recovery is human, people change and relearn things. The complication here though is that the porn industry and the broad presence of mainstream and even indie porn exist within a capitalist market. Capitalist markets are by their very nature a) exploitative and b) manipulative, focused on controlling and exacerbating the consumers needs and desires. So the porn itself, its content and marketing, will overtly to explicitly imply to its viewers/buyers that they need it, that it is good the more you consume, that its extremity and ‘extra’ness is what makes it good, and that it is an addictive indulgence.
I have a lot more I could say about this but it would have to go all into fetish, content and psychology so I also want to say this: Understand that this is not a situation in which men actually benefit. In fact it gets them to perpetuate their own trauma, their own internal oppression. Encouraging them to mistreat their bodies, to have a dysfunctional view of sexuality, to degrade the feminine (something ALL people have) via the degradation of women– this by extension harms their minds deeply. Porn as it is is simply a recycling and eroticization, and extension of society at large. Thus it of course simultaneously revels in the exploitation of the feminine and turns men into tools of sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic oppression, coding into them the positive reinforcement of social mores so that they support and perpetuate them.
Lastly: The idea that what one fetishizes/consumes doesn’t say anything about them is FALSE and its often a subconscious expression of the mind aimed at resolution. Whether its fanfic, art or videos it’s all porn and yes, ones fantasy mind is actually a manifestation of their mind in general. The world of fantasy is meaningful, actually.
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5 Practices for Nonviolence
" There is no other way to tranquility, tranquility is the way."
― Mahatma Gandhi
The timeline of history has actually observed a gradual as well as constant expansion of human awareness. We have actually considerably expanded in our understanding, grew our understanding of who we are as well as our area in the cosmos, and constructed thriving communities to sustain our values as well as ideals as a species.
Unfortunately, one aspect of our organic heritage that we have yet to go beyond is violence. Violence has actually been as well as continues to be a plague on our world that causes unimaginable pain and suffering. Whether it takes the type of battle, terrorism, personal assault, residential abuse, or ecological damage, we have actually regretfully come to be much also accustomed to the suggestion of our world being a hostile and fierce area. Till violence touches us directly, we often neglect it or wish that we can somehow remain out of its reach.
What Is Violence?
While in the context of human history, violence is a complex and multi-faceted concern, in the majority of standard terms, violence is any type of actions entailing physical force planned to harm, damage, or eliminate somebody or something. However, violence isn't just restricted to physical activity as both your speech as well as thoughts can be violent and damaging in nature.
As to its beginnings, physical violence has its origins in the extra primitive battle or trip feedback of your nerves. This fear-based state of understanding generates high amounts of stress and anxiety hormones, boosts heart price, blood stress, and also respiration degrees, as well as locks you right into a continuous risk attitude by rerouting the blood flow far from your mind's frontal cortex to the amygdala, a component of the mind's limbic system liable for feelings as well as survival reactions. In this hyper-reactive state, you are in a consistent self-protection mode in which you frequently fire initial as well as ask inquiries later.
Making matters worse, the a lot more routinely you trigger the fight or flight response, the more you rewire your nerve system to the assumption of a risk, even when one does not exist. This action lays the foundations for anger, hate, intolerance, hostility, and violence in all its kinds.
However, regardless of the typical notion that your fight or trip action and reactive biological inheritance dooms us to be a violent varieties, the world's terrific wisdom practices disclose that our true fate is to go beyond physical violence and progress into a serene and also lasting culture. Indeed, falling short to do so may place the future of mankind as well as our planet in peril.
In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the initial of the Yamas, or codes for living an ethical life is Ahimsa, or Nonviolence. This practice relates to all aspects of being, believed, speech, as well as action. This is a foundational factor of departure in growing peace in our globe. When everything you believe, claim, or do is rooted in nonviolence, the globe becomes much more peaceful consequently.
But simply how do you exceed the idea of ahimsa to actually living it? In chapter 2, knowledgeable 35, Patanjali directs out that, When we are securely established in nonviolence, all beings around us stop to feel hostility. This isn't an allegory. If you recognize that, at the deepest degree, the universe is a field of awareness, then you, as component of that field, can influence it via your interest and purpose. This way your individual awareness has the power to affect global awareness in the instructions of peace and also healing.
Meditation as the Remedy to Violence
The most effective tool you need to root out physical violence within yourself is reflection. By activating the relaxing awareness reaction, you down-regulate the fight or flight devices that maintain you in an endless state of tension, anger, over reactivity, hostility, and violence. In time you begin to re-shape your nerve system towards an extra calm state of recognition in which the greater mindsets of reason, persistence, understanding, empathy, as well as forgiveness can hold.
Making meditation a regular component of your life is the primary step to opening the jail of the fear and also hostility-based fight or flight response. A basic and also comfortable reflection method you can attempt is the So-Hum Meditation.
5 Steps to Deepen Your Feeling of Peace
Once you have actually started to make meditation a regular part of your life to open up the entrance to peace, right here are a couple of actions to take your experience of nonviolence and tranquility deeper:
1. Create an effective intent for tranquility. As the start of your day or prior to entering into reflection, create a powerful intent for peace in your life. Devote to believing relaxed ideas, speaking relaxed words, and also doing something about it based in tranquility. One of the most powerful affirmations of these high qualities exists in the kind of the Peace Petition of St. Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me a tool of Thy peace,
Where there is disgust, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is mistake, the fact,
Where there is doubt, the faith,
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light,
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I might not a lot seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be recognized, as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in offering that we receive,
It is in absolving that we are absolved,
And it is in passing away that we are birthed to everlasting life
Let this purpose (or any type of other variation you choose to make use of) prepared for your thoughts, speech, and activities as you relocate with your day.
2. Adopt the 7 Practices for Peace. In his book, Peace is the Way, Deepak Chopra outlines seven steps to becoming a diplomat. These are effective steps that help you to perform your life abreast, with tranquility as the driving viewpoint. By adhering to a particular method for each day of the week, you move more detailed every day to making peace real in your individual life. The 7 Practices for Peace are:
Sunday: Being for Peace
Monday: Thinking for Peace
Tuesday: Feeling for Peace
Wednesday: Speaking for Peace
Thursday: Acting for Peace
Friday: Creating for Peace
Saturday: Sharing for Peace
3. Activate your heart chakra. According to Yoga Exercise Ideology, your refined composition includes 7 main energy facilities, or chakras, situated along the network of your spine. Each chakra is related to special psycho-physiological features that tie to particular organs and also feelings. The heart chakra, or anahata, lies in the center of the upper body, straight behind the breastbone. This power facility is the seat of love, concern, forgiveness, empathy, as well as tranquility, and also when open and energetic, it radiates these qualities into your life. As a supplement to your reflection technique, attempt the following:
Upon conclusion of either the So-Hum or Primitive Noise Meditation practice, relocate your interest into the area of your heart chakra, located in the facility of your chest.
In your mind's eye, visualize a gently beautiful round of emerald thumbs-up in the area of your heart.
Now calmly begin to duplicate the rule of the heart chakra, YUM.
With each repetition of the rule, really feel the chakra pulse and emit recovery green light to every cell in your body.
Continue this practice for 5 to 7 minutes or for as lengthy as it feels comfortable.
4. Practice the Heart Sutra Meditation. A somewhat subtler and also innovative practice is referred to as the Heart Sutra Meditation. Words sutra is related to the word suture, which explains attaching items of towel with each other by embroidery. In the Yoga exercise practice. a sutra is a strongly concentrated stitch of intention that has transformational power on your consciousness. The heart sutras in particular can help to produce an enduring change in your recognition towards ahimsa.
The Heart Sutra Meditation is most potent immediately following a duration of quiet meditation when your recognition is deeply established in stillness.
As with the previous method, upon finishing either the So-Hum or Primitive Noise Reflection, relocate your attention into the area of your heart chakra.
Now, calmly repeat the adhering to 4 words (sutras) four times each, spaced 15 secs apart: Peace, Harmony, Giggling, Love.
With the rep of each sutra, imagine dropping a stone into a still pond, producing ripples that spread throughout your consciousness as well as out into the world.
Practiced frequently, the Heart Sutra Reflection will enhance your experience of peace, mercy, concern, laughter, harmony, and love. In this method, tranquility becomes your vital state of being as opposed to a state of mind you are attempting to maintain.
5. Practice the Meta Prayer. The Meta Petition is a form of Buddhist reflection that you can use to knowingly expand concern to on your own, then others in your life, and afterwards to the globe around you. It takes your focus from your localized self in time and space, and also progressively expands it to your neighborhood area, the global environment, and also the whole world. It is a powerful tool, emitting concern into the world that can be customized to fit your personal scenarios. Used either as a standalone contemplative practice or at the final thought of a duration of meditation, the Meta Prayer below will help to strengthen your feeling of empathy and ahimsa with the entire world.
May I live in happiness
May I be risk-free from inner and outer danger
May I be healthy and balanced in mind and body
May I live my life with ease
May (a close buddy or member of the family) reside in happiness
May (a buddy or household participant) be safe from internal as well as outer danger
May (a close buddy or relative) be healthy in mind as well as body
May (a buddy or family members participant) live their life (or lives) with ease
May my regarded enemies stay in happiness
May my perceived opponents be safe from internal and external danger
May my perceived opponents be healthy and balanced in mind and also body
May my perceived adversaries live their life (or lives) with ease
May (an area, city, or location) reside in happiness
May (a neighborhood, city, or place) be secure from inner as well as outer danger
May (a neighborhood, city, or area) be healthy and balanced in mind and body
May (a neighborhood, city, or location) live their life (or lives) with ease
May the world reside in happiness
May the world be safe from internal and also outer danger
May the world be healthy and balanced in mind and body
May all development recognize its very own Devine nature
May we all live our lives with ease
May most of us gain knowledge for the benefit of all beings
These devices, along with the routine practice of reflection, will certainly aid to gently shift your recognition towards peace as well as living ahimsa in all areas of your life. Utilize them to personify the tranquility you desire to see in the globe.
Join Dr. Deepak Chopra and even more than 40 of the world's preeminent thinkers, thinkers, medical professionals and scientists to journey into life's deepest secrets and also seek solution to its biggest concerns at our Sages and also Researchers Symposium. Click on this link to find out more.
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Hello! I'm sorry if I'm bothering you, but have you watched the Alita Battle Angel movie? If not, the synopsys is that an old doctor finds a cyborg bust in a scrapyard of trash that is dumped everyday by the floating city above, called Zalem. In your latest musing you mentioned something about trash being dumped from Atlas. What would you think if Upper Atlas were similar and it would dump trash in a scapyard, in Lower Atlas? And the workers there making use of it however they can?
‘SupYellow.Always a pleasure to hear from you so no worries there fam. Unfortunately I have notseen Alita.But I definitely want to since I’ve heard positive things about it; both themanga and the recent film adaptation. Despite knowing jack about the series, Ido like the idea you present here.
It wouldn’t surpriseme if something like that were possible with Atlas. It’s funny. Folks keepreferring to Atlas by Upper and Lower. Wouldn't Upper Atlas technically be just Atlas while the lower sector is the remnants of Mantle?
That’swhat I assumed it was. The lower city being Mantle below, unless I am deeplymistaken. I like the idea of Atlas dumping their trashinto Mantle with the People of Mantle living the life of scavengers;only managing to survive due to their resourceful nature by crafting workingmachinery and equipment from whatever scraps of and parts they managed tosalvage and/or pilfer from the junkyards dumped from Atlas.
It’dbe interesting if Atlas has become rather snobbish and discriminatory towardtheir Mantlese brethren over the years to the point that they don’t even donate their broken or unused materials to Mantle’scitadel, only granting them use of whatever they can scavenge from the massivepiles of junk they dump into their kingdom periodically. Like the rich andelite only granting charity to the poor by allowing them to take what they canfrom their trash bins for the week and considering that an act of generosity.
Imagine if … the Atlesians are the typeswho have grown so spoilt from their riches that they no longer see worth in their products anymore. To Atlas, it’s allabout advancement.Forwardever, backward never and when theold outdates the new, the old is disposed of so that the new can rise up andthrive. Take over even and lead them successfully towards a bright future. Itwouldn’t surprise if that is the mantra of Atlas because that is precisely whathappened with Atlas and Mantle’s history. Atlas rose up to the point that it overshadowed Mantle and rather than aid those left behind intheir predecessor kingdom, it seems that Atlas has lost all touch with itsroots.
Allthe more reason why I’m digging the concept of the People of Mantle being scavengers—thegood kind who see worth ineverything around them, since their generations have been forced to survive onso little for so long and thus become more adaptive and more appreciative ofwhat they have and cherish. And becauseof that, they are able to make wonders with what bit they can use from the UpperWorld.
Thisalso makes me think of a really cool hunch I have concerning Penny Polendina’sfather/creator. For the sake of my musings, I’m going to refer to him as Dr. Japheth Polendina until his official canon name is revealed. If mymemory serves correctly, Gepetto isthe Italian form of the name Japheth whichis a name of Hebrew origin meaning ‘expansion’.
I think Japheth is afitting pseudo-name for Dr. Polendina since my assumption is that he is a greatand well-renowned scientist and inventor in Atlas whose inventions hascontributed towards the kingdoms’ advancement. Makes sense, right? Beyond that,another theory I have is Dr. Polendina is unlike a lot of Atlesians . Itwouldn’t surprise me if Dr. Polendina, like many from his generation (MariaCalavera and Nicholas Schnee) was born after the Great War and contributedtowards Atlas taking over from Mantle.
Howeverunlike other Atlesians who seem to have discarded theirMantlese heritage and traditions, Dr. Polendina still holds stubbornly onto his.I like the irony of Dr. Polendina being old-fashioned despite being the inventor of so many creationsthat helped Atlas move forward. I think that could be a cool contrast to hischaracter. I like the idea of Dr. Polendina being a smart yet modest and humbleold man (maybe even a lil cuckoo for coco puffs), who doesn’t just create foradvancement but rather help humanity because he genuinely sees wonder and value in everything around him. Despite it being a traditionhis younger associates don’t understand and have tried to beat out of him foryears, y’know since they all mostly consider him a fossil and only keep himaround for his unique genius. Nonetheless Dr. Polendina sees worth in everything—includinga lifeless robotic husk he treated and loved like a daughter. That’s my theoryfor Dr. Polendina if you or anyone who were ever curious.
Ithink an anon-ninja once asked me what elements of Gepetto/Pinocchio I think will be incorporated in V7. Well I thinkthat’s one of them. I’d love to think that Japheth also shares a history with Arthur Watts.I can’t help this nagging hunch I have that Arthur Watts was probably the formerapprentice of Dr. Polendina who he loved like a son.
Inthe Pinocchio tale, Geppetto was an elderly woodcarver whoseemed to not have any former children of his own hence why he createdPinocchio and wished for him to be a real boy.
Imagine if it was the same for Dr.Polendina. Whatif… Japheth was a man who had dedicated his life so much toadvancing Atlas that he never got the chance to have the thing he wanted morethan anything—a family or at least someone to love him like one. Picture Japheth living a depressing life where he losttouch with his former family in Mantle and the closest thing to a family he hadin Atlas was a former apprentice who he cherished like the child he never had whoended up betrayinghim before disappearing entirely,believed to be dead (i.e. Dr. Arthur Watts) and lastly, Penny—the android heloved like a daughter but also ultimately lost.
Ican go on and on about my theories for Dr. Polendina but that’s the theory Imainly wish to share here. As you brought up Alita, it made me think ofsomething interesting. I have this Penny-centric theorywhere as soon as our heroes arrive in Atlas, they soon discover, much toRuby’s shock and disgust that Penny was made into a line of sentient service androidswho was being mass produced and sold to the People of Atlas.
Picture Detroit Become Human but with just Penny asthe sole android series. RWBY Chibi S2 kindof teased the concept of Penny being sold as a doll. So what ifthat will be the case for V7? What if…in current Atlas, Penny is now a popular brand of service androiddolls sold to the Atlesian public to perform many different roles insociety. Picture Penny being like the Barbie Doll of Atlas exceptthat she’s a life-sized sentient machine. Picture all kinds of Penny models beingsold each programmed with a series of different functions tailor made to fitwhatever role her user/buyer bought her to perform.
Imagine Ruby standing in acity populated with different Pennies—-Waitress Penny, Nurse Penny, Traffic Cop Penny, TourGuide Penny, etc.—who all look and sound just like Ruby’s Pennybut isn’t her. And what’s even more horrifying to Ruby is what Penny’s legacyhas dissolved into. Back in V3 I believe, Penny told Ruby that she wasoriginally made to protect Remnant. She was made to be a hero. The first of her kind tobe used to protect humanity.
Imagine howmuch of an insult it would be if this is what Ruby finds out Atlasdid to her friend after she was murdered. Not remember her as a hero butbasically a living toy to beused and abused as her consumers feel.
That’sinsane!Which is all the more reason why I want this theory to come true. I was askedlong ago by a FNDM fam about how Ruby would feel if she saw Penny locked away insidesome pod inside a laboratory. I never got around to actually answering that questionbecause Tumblr buried the original response post I was going to edit. If thatuser happens to read all of my answer posts, here is my answer to your questionnow.
Rubyreacting to a rebuilt Penny being locked safely inside a pod? Ahahaa! How about I giveyou something grimmer?
Ontop of Atlas mass producing Penny and treating her like a plaything rather than the heroshe was meant to be, you wanna know my theory for what they did with originalPenny?
Myhunch is that originalPenny is put in the trash. Meaningthat after her body was returned to Atlas, there was a meeting between themembers of the Atlas Council debating on whether or not the military projectPenny was born from should be terminated or not. Even though Ironwood is the mainauthoritarian from Atlas that we’ve met so far, I’d like to think there is another topleader calling the shots whoIronwood actually serves under.
Ifthe Atlas Council is anything like Vale’s, then there are at least threemembers on the council governing the Kingdom. From what I remember back in V4,Ironwood says he holds two seats on the council. This leaves the third and lastseat and it’s here where I think we’ll have a new authoritarian character who Ironwoodlistens to.
Basicallyit was this Atlas Council Member introduced and signed off on the idea ofturning Penny into a doll to be sold to the public. I don’t know of any puppet masters in any knownfairy tales but perhaps this Councilman, as I’ll refer to him in mymusings, could be based off of the Coachman from Pinocchio. In the 1883 book TheAdventures of Pinocchio, the Coachman was a villain who kidnapped children tobring them to Toy Island in which the bad children turned into donkeys.
IfFNDM fam thought General Ironwood was a cross due to his deep authoritarian waysand leadership then imagine someone worse than Ironwoodbut lacking the compassion. Picture… the Councilman being the type to make ajackass out of the General Ironwood since Ironwood generally has torun everything by him and the Councilman has Ironwood wrapped around his pinkie,especially now that he hasn’t been well—psychologically. I actually kinda digthis idea.
Sothe Councilman convinces Ironwood that the best way to dissolve the mess the Vytalescapade left on the military and the People of Atlas following Beacon is to turnPenny into a doll series—allowing her to fulfil the purpose she was made for.Serving humanity by serving humanity as a service doll. There are even Penniesbeing used by the military.
WhileDr. Polendina wouldn’t sign off on something like this—imagine it being oneof those uncomfortable scenarios where one’s hand is forced because they arebacked into a corner by people trying to either bullyor manipulate them. In the case of Japheth, it was both theCouncilman trying to bully him into doing his job for the military and Ironwood,though sympathetic towards the doctor and his loss, still trying to somewhatemotionally manipulate the man into doing as he and the Councilman ordered byusing Penny and the reasons she was made in the first place as his motive.
It’snot a nice game but in the end, against his wishes, Dr. Polendina had no choicebut to hand over his research and the original body of Penny and concur as themilitary—mainly the Councilman did what they pleased with her.
Andin the end, once they were done, they didn’t even have the common courtesy toreturn Penny to her father. Instead, like many things in Atlas, Penny wasdiscarded and her remains ended up in the junkyards near Mantle. I even have away RWBY canincorporate Monstro into the Atlas Arc. You know how in Pinocchio,Gepetto got swallowed by the giant whale?
Wellwhat if…at some point, the heroes visit Lower Atlas on their voyage towards Mantle. Mytheory is that at some point during the Schnee Family Affairsstoryline of the Atlas Arc, Weiss will go in search of her missing grandfatherNicholas Schnee and her searches will take her and her friends down from Atlasinto Mantle’s depth. During their voyage, the group end up in the junkyardsbelow.
Apparently,people aren’t allowed to go in the junkyards. Part of it is due to Atlas being stingy towards Mantle even with their junk and anotheris for the reason that there is a massive Grimm known to roam the junkyards.That monster is GrimmMonstro—a colossal land whale type Grimm that burrows undergroundand swims through the sea of garbage in the junk piles looking for anyunsuspecting victims to rise up and swallow.
I have this idea where Ruby andOscar are swallowed alive by Grimm Monstro and it’s in the belly of the Grimm where Ruby discovers Penny’s originaldestroyed body. Perhaps…as a better alternative, that’s how she and Oscargot swallowed in the first place. Ruby spots OG Penny while in the junkyard.Goes off on her own to retrieve her despite Oscar’s initial warnings that somethingfelt off about the junkyard however Ruby ignores hisadvice. Ruby makes it to Penny’s body in time for Grimm Monstro to rise up.Oscar jumps in to rescue Ruby. The two try their best to outrun the giant Grimmbut end up getting swallowed alive. That could be FREAKING EPIC!
Little Red Riding Hood and PrincessOzma working together to escape Monstroand save themselves plus Pinocchio is a future RWBY episodeI’d love to see for Atlas. YES PLEASE! Sign my ass up!
Andif all that comes true, we could even get Ruby and Oscar working together to revive original Penny.
Ifmy theory about Oscarawakening his inner mechanic and inventor comes to fruition, imagine Ruby begging Oscar to help her revive her formerfriend using his skills. Knowing and fully understanding how much this means toRuby, Oscar accepts and the two rosebuds get to work together. I would lovethis so much!
Ithink this could be really cool especially if after Penny gets successfully restoredthrough Oscar’s know-how, she starts calling Oscar ‘brother’. I’ll give you three veryimportant reasons why I love this idea.
Firstly,I’ve seen some fans comparing Oscar to Penny so me, being the proud Pinehead and Polendiva (Penny Polendina fan) that I amstarted to dig the idea of Penny and Oscar having a brother-sister dynamic.Like after Oscar helps rebuild her, Penny starts treating him like he was her big brother.Not father since Dr. Japheth is her father.
Secondly,I like Penny calling Oscar ‘brother’ because of the obvious, very on the nosecall back to FMA. Come on! You know how much I love those.
Andlastly, I love this idea because it appeals to another Pinehead headcanon I have where Oscar becomes an apprentice under Dr. Polendina anddevelops a father/son bond with the old inventor. I did say I wantedOscar to have a godmother type character who adopts him in Atlas. Perhapsinstead of a fashion designer, it’s an genius inventor who acts as hisgodfather.
Penny andDr. Polendina both adopting Oscar into their family = HELLA FREAKING YES.
You know my mantra. #EverybodyAdoptsOscar
I’dlove to expand more on this idea some more but I think I’ll save it for anothermusing. This response post is long enough. But for what it’s worth, I hope youlike my answer Yellow.Let me know what you think if you can pretty please. Would like to hear yourthoughts on my thoughts.
~LittleMissSquiggles(2019)
#squiggles answers: rwby#oscar pine#ruby rose#penny polendina#rwby theories#rwby v7 theories#rwby volume 7#rwby v7#yellow-eyed-green-crocodile#pinehead headcanons#squiggles pinehead headcanons
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TERFs: What you (don’t) want to know
CW: Overt discussion of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and acknowledgement of sexual topics.
So, for better or worse, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time observing (through chance encounter of via indirect commentary) TERF communities. TERF communities and rhetoric are something of a problem in-vogue right now, as, while TERF communities are generally fairly small, they are very vocal, and have managed to insidiously insert themselves into mainstream queer and feminist discourse through surface-level mimicry of progressive rhetoric. This is especially becoming an issue in my country, the UK, which is unfortunately now garnering a reputation as a hive-bed for TERF groups, something which has attracted some media attention as of late.
Given this, and because terfs thrive on misinformation campaigns, I thought I’d write up a sort of Q&A cheatsheet breaking down ideas about the “terf” movement and dispelling myths, malicious or otherwise. I think that confronting these people for what they are, and not letting them control the terms of the conversation by misrepresenting themselves and their opponents, is important as we strive for trans equality, and as a trans woman it’s a cause fairly close to my own chest. I may be putting a target on my chest a little by making a post like this, but then that’s par for the course. Also, keep in mind that this is all based solely on my own observations, experiences and reading, and you should probably seek out perspectives from other trans, feminist and queer people for a more diverse set of views. I am not an expert, and have probably made at least some mistakes as I’m not super knowledgeable in all these areas, so keep that in mind (and feel free to message me if I’ve made any really glaring errors).
So, here’s what you (don’t) want to know about The TERFs. (Long post under the cut: be forewarned).
What is a “TERF”?
TERF is a term used to describe a loose collective of conservative-leaning transphobes who couch their transphobic ideas within the framework of radical feminist rhetoric. The term “TERF” stands for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”, and was popularized over a decade ago by a cis feminist to distinguish these transphobic individuals from more mainstream and intersectional feminists and radical feminists (a common lie spread by TERFs is that the term was create by trans women to attack them - this is not the case). TERFs often self-term themselves “gender critical feminists” as a euphamism for their particular brand of transphobic ideology.
TERF ideology has its roots in second-wave feminism, including the writings of people like Germaine Greer (now fairly infamous for her transphobic views), and the work of long-since discredited pseudoscientist Ray Blanchard, known for his characterization of transgender people as motivated by sexual perversion in the 80s and 90s (and who now spends his time complaining about trans people watching anime on twitter).
The core tenets of TERF ideology are that gender is synonymous with gender assigned at birth, chromosomal type, and one’s physical genitalia. TERFs believe that sex is a strict binary, and that the role of women in society and the origins of misogyny are defined by one’s genitalia, and/or one’s capacity to reproduce. As such, TERFs believe that trans women are men who are “appropriating” the experiences of “real women”. This is a view fundamentally incompatible with the consensus in the scientific fields of genetics, reproductive biology, gender studies, and with almost all mainstream intersectional feminist discourse. Despite this, TERFs tend to ignore all evidence that contradicts their claims, as their primary motivation (as with most bigots) is to justify their pre-existing prejudices and avoid self-examination that contradicts their prior beliefs and assumptions. As well as transphobia, the implications of terf rhetoric are frequently variously misogynistic, homophobic, and racist, despite attempts by terfs to decry this (more below).
While gender roles are a social construct, and gender is definitely informed by societal context, the nature and expression of gender is in reality unique psychological experience and identity that may be related to one’s sexual characteristics but is not defined by it. The human experience of gender is a broad spectrum, with different ideas and experiences of gender existing in different cultures and communities across the globe.
Are TERFs feminists?
“No” would be a simple answer, but at the risk of falling prey to “No True Scotsman”, I will say that it depends on how you want to define the term. TERFs justify their ideology with the rhetoric of feminism, and claim that their perspective is based in a radical feminist deconstruction of gender. Their basic logic can be boiled down as such; “1. Gender, as a psychological experience, does not exist. 2. As such, the terms “man” and “woman” derive solely from one’s genitalia (or, depending on the context of the argument, chromosomes), and the axis of misogynistic oppression solely derives from one’s genitalia. 3. As such, trans women are not “true” women, and claiming that they are is misogyny and/or erasure of women”.
While this breakdown may entice cis people who haven’t examined concepts of sex and gender any more deeply than they did in their school biology lessons, this definition of manhood and womanhood is deeply reductive and is in and of itself misogynistic. Particularly concerning is the insistence of TERFs that womanhood is defined solely by one’s genitalia, or, as it is sometimes framed, one’s possession of a womb or ability to bear children. TERFs will often complain that describing people’s bodies in neutral, ungendered terms (e.g. “a person with a vagina”) is somehow objectifying, yet one of their core beliefs is fairly degrading idea that the be-all and end-all of womanhood is one’s genitalia, and one’s “role” in the reproductive cycle. This sort of Victorian era conception of gender is deeply rooted in misogynistic ideas about the role of women in society, and it is the sort of rhetoric responsible for legislation such as the recent horrific bill introduced in Utah which defines a woman as somebody with ovaries and who have “external anatomical characteristics that appear to have the purpose of performing the natural reproductive function of providing eggs and receiving sperm from a male donor.” It should be fairly clear that this sort of definition of womanhood as being defined by one’s “purpose” to reproduce is deeply reductive, sexist, and would be harmful (and erasing of) intersex people and cis women who are infertile or who have surgeries such as hysterectomy, even prior to considering the impact of these ideas on trans people.
On the topic of intersex people, it should be noted that their mere existence is a refutation to the TERF conception of gender as an absolute binary set before birth and static throughout life. TERFs tend to reject intersex people as “outliers” or aberrations when this point have brought up, and more recently have switched to the tactic of claiming that any trans person who tries to discuss intersex people during debates about sex and gender is “co-opting intersex narratives”, which is in essence an excuse used to stall debate on the subject and avoid addressing it.
More broadly with respect to feminism, in addition to the misogynistic implications of the TERF worldview, their brand of feminism is widely denounced by more mainstream feminists as being outdated, offensive and non-intersectional, as well as harmful to feminism as a whole. Here are a few articles talking about this; 1 2 3.
Is “TERF” a slur?
This is one of the most widespread myths spread by TERFs in order to delegitimize criticism, and to provide a pretext upon which to report and silence people who are attempting to discuss TERFs and their ideology. TERFs will claim that the word “TERF” is a slur created by trans women to persecute them. Usually, they will claim that the word is a derogatory term for women in general, or sometimes for lesbians.
This is blatantly false. Firstly, TERF is a neutral acronym that was popularized by a cis feminist to distinguish TERFs from other, non-transphobic feminists. It is an abbreviation of a description of their movement; self-described radical feminists who campaign for trans exclusion from women’s spaces and womenhood as a whole, as such, they are “trans exclusionary radical feminists”. TERF is often an insulting term, but it is such in the same way that being called a homophobe or a racist is “insulting”; it is insulting because it has accurately descriptive negative connotations.
The insistence that TERF is a slur, that TERF just means “lesbian” or “woman”, is a weapon used to shut down discussion, and a shield used to hide the fringe nature of their views. TERFs will often claim that all women are terfs, or that all “real” lesbians are terfs, and so that people using the term TERF are using it as a general slur for lesbians or women. This ignores the meaning of the word, and the reality at whom it is aimed. Not all women are terfs, not all lesbians are terfs, not even all transphobes are terfs. TERF describes a very specific subset of anti-trans activist, and the idea that it is a slur against other marginalized groups is to terfs simultaneously a useful lie and also a comforting self-deception that allows them to believe that their beliefs and community is far more widespread than it is, and that criticism of their ideas is rooted in some external bigotry rather than in the flaws in their own rhetoric.
Does “TERF” mean lesbian?
No. As explained above, this is an offensive lie spread by TERFs to further their own ends. Lesbians who I have talked to about this are generally disgusted with TERFs trying to associate themselves with them and misrepresent their community as being transphobic. While some TERFs may be lesbians (although they far from all are), they do not speak in any capacity for the lesbian community, no matter how much they may pretend to.
It is worth noting that TERFs have a history of erasing lesbians. TERFs claim that the only “true” lesbians are cis women who are solely attracted to women who were assigned female at birth. As well as (inevitably) denying the identity of trans lesbians, they erase the identity of cis women who identify as lesbian by claiming that any lesbian who is attracted to any trans woman is not a “real” lesbian and is instead bisexual. This, once again, is a nonsensical and abhorrent attempt to redefine terms to fit their own worldview.
Are TERFs conservative?
TERF rhetoric aligns very closely with conservative ideology regarding sex and gender. Although TERFs describe themselves as as feminists and as such see themselves as being “progressives” in a sense, they tend to have a distaste for the left as generally rejecting of their views, and ally themselves with right-wing conservatives in order to pursue their goal of marginalizing the trans people and seeking rollbacks of trans rights and equality. It is common to see TERFs “lament” that far right figures with deeply misogynistic perspectives on gender equality and other social causes are “the only ones” who agree with them, without stopping to reflect upon what implications this may have for the nature of their own beliefs.
As right wing sources and media are usually the only sources which backup their views on trans people, TERFs frequently share right wing or even far-right articles and writers to fuel their transphobia or to be used as “evidence” when arguing against trans rights. TERFs will often collaborate with right wing groups in order to further their fight against trans rights, even when such groups also pursue agendas contrary to the causes of gender equality, body autonomy and LGBT+ rights that they claim to support. A prominent example of this was exposed recently wherein a major TERF group was found to be engaging in legal action in partnership with ultra-conservative evangelical Christian group “Focus on the Family”, known for their opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion access, and women’s equality, in order to lobby against legal protections for trans people in the US. In another recent example, conservative group the Heritage Foundation paid for two prominent British TERF “activists” to be flown to America in order to interrupt a meeting between Sarah McBride, national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign, and a colleague, in order to harass McBride for being transgender.
The nature of this relationship, wherein TERFs collaborate with, exchange funding with, and base their ideology on the publication of right-wing figures and groups, means that despite their cries to the contrary, TERFs as a movement should for all intents and purposes be considered right wing.
Are TERFs racist?
Writing this, I am a white trans woman and as such do not want to speak over trans women of colour who will have more nuanced and better informed perspectives on the links between TERF ideology and racism/white supremacy. You should definitely seek out the views and writings of trans people of colour who will be far more qualified to talk about and knowledgeable about racism in TERF circles than this one white trans girl. However, for the sake of this post I will provide a brief overview of some of the trends I have seen both in person and pointed out by others.
TERF’s feminism is by definition non-intersectional and tends to have a poor relationship with and understanding of how racial oppression intersects with feminist issues. A recurring theme in TERF politics is a condescension towards Muslim women and the stereotyping of actions of men of colour. TERFs also erase the particular intersection of transmisogyny and racism that trans women of colour experience by merely blaming their oppression on their actions as “men”. Moreover, TERF views about the gender binary are also ignorant of the diverse cultural conceptions of gender that have existed and continue to exist around the world that do not fall into their narrow binary. As did their colonial cultures before them, TERFs seek to apply their own binary conceptualization of gender to anyone and everyone they come into contact with. TERF-brand feminism is conceived therefore from a white, Western perspective and makes little effort to break free of this.
It is difficult to find articles discussing this aspect of TERF ideology specifically, but here are a few links in which instances of this are discussed. Examples are not difficult to find in documentation of activities undertaken by TERFs. I will also link this twitter thread that discusses TERFism as a gateway to white supremacy via the entry-point of transphobia.
What do TERFs think about trans men?
While a lot of discussion of TERF viewpoints centers their transmisogyny as the most visible manifestation of their transphobia, TERF ideology is also hostile towards transgender men, albeit in different ways to their hostility towards trans women.
A common TERF myth is that trans “genderists” are seeking to forcibly turn gender nonconforming cis people trans by “convincing them” (sometimes termed “brainwashing them”) into believing that they are of a different gender. As such, a common TERF belief about trans men is that they are simply GNC cis women, often characterized as “butch lesbians”, who have been “tricked” into thinking they are men by “transgender ideology”, or who seek to become men because they seek to escape misogyny. As such, a TERFs are often condescending towards trans men, pretending to empathize with an imagined plight of a “deluded woman”, while at the same time aggressively misgendering them and erasing their identities as trans men. While this idea bears no resemblance to the actual experiences of trans men, TERFs tend to have very little exposure to trans masculine people in general, and so, much like their conception of trans women, their ideas about the issues trans men face are largely based in a collection of myths that they themselves have invented.
This is not to say that TERFs will not be more overtly aggressive towards trans men; an alternative narrative peddled by TERFs about gay trans men in particular is that they are “fujoshis” who are obsessed with fictional gay couples to such an extent that they are compelled to try to become gay men. This idea is so blatantly absurd that it practically denies any sensible analysis even from a critical perspective, so I will leave it at that, however in this manner TERFs characterize trans men who they wish to attack with their more traditional aggressive, sneering countenance.
What do TERFs think about non-binary people (and queer people)?
TERFs do not believe that non-binary people exist. TERFs believe in a strict, immutable gender binary, and similarly to many people on the right and the “anti-SJW” crowd, they tend to characterize nonbinary people as all being teenagers who have been “deluded” by platforms such as Tumblr, and by progressive leftist spaces in general.
More broadly, TERFs have a narrow and regressive conception of sexuality and gender identity, and do not generally accept the existence of LGBTQ+ identities beyond Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual, which they view as being “rooted in biology”. Asexuality and pansexuality, as well as other identity labels and any non-binary gender descriptors, are dismissed offhandedly as being fads.
TERFs seek to gatekeep membership of the LGBTQ+ community by erasing the existence of people who do not conform to their strict definitions of “Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual”. This includes reclassifying gay and lesbian people as bisexual if they have any sort of attraction to trans people, and a broader attempt to expunge any terms that might allow people wiggleroom within this rigid categorization. The push to reject the reclaimed term “queer” in LGBT+ communities of late has been largely fueled by TERFs, who ridicule queer people (see this post for a relevant discussion) and try to repopularize the characterization of “queer” as a slur as a tactic to drive out non-cis people and those who identify with sexualities that they do not recognize. This is part of the overarching TERF strategy of attempting to control language and narrative to further their ideas.
How can I recognize a TERF?
Many TERFs advertise themselves as such and can therefore be avoided fairly easily. Common themes found on dedicated TERF blogs include usernames and bios with references to radical feminism (which, while not being synonymous with TERF, is a label that they have heavily co-opted), references to XX chromosomes or genitalia, or even straight up declaration of their own “terf status” in their sidebars or blog descriptions.
That said, there has recently been recognition of the fact that TERFs are actively pushing their viewpoints on “secret” blogs without any overt references to their TERF ideology in order to spread their ideas and draw people who don’t know better into their toxic rhetoric and movement. However, even then TERFs can often be recognized through the collection of specific terms and dogwhistles that they favour in their rhetoric. Here are some examples of red flags to watch out for in discourse:
Trans women/men being referred to as TIMs or TIFs (trans-identified males/females), also sometimes as “Timothies” and “Tiffanies”.
The term “Gender Critical” or “Gender Critical Feminism”. This is a euphemism synonymous with TERF favoured by members of their own community.
Reference to Trans-Rights Activists (TRAs, designed to sound like “MRA”).
Loaded references to “trans ideology”.
References to “genderism”.
A particular focus on crimes committed by a few selected trans people used to smear the entire community.
Discussion of “men trying to enter women’s/lesbian spaces” is often a euphemistic reference to trans women as the “men”.
The same can often go for broad declarations that lesbians “should not let people tell them that they should be attracted to men”. While this is of course true, I’ve seen this in many instances be said specifically with the undertone of excluding trans women as the “men”.
The term “womyn” or “wombyn”, used by TERFs to differentiate their concept of a “real woman” from women including trans women.
Radical feminism being discussed in relation to any of the above points is a dead ringer for a TERF.
This is of course far from comprehensive, and TERFs have become good at hiding their ideas within the wrapping paper of feminist rhetoric and the language surrounding other types of progressive activism. The best policy is just to be sure to pay attention to how people discuss gender identity and transgender people, or perhaps how they pointedly don’t discuss them when they are expressing their ideology. Keep in mind to watch out for ideas that seem to stem from the above arguments.
Anything else I should know (and what can I do)?
I am going to stop here to avoid this post becoming even more excessively long than it already is, but it should be kept in mind that this is a far from comprehensive examination of TERF ideologies and rhetoric. I have, for instance, not touched on SWERFs and the attitudes of these communities towards sex workers, which is an ideology that often goes hand-in-hand with TERF ideas, nor the extent of the TERF communities on platforms such as reddit or Mumsnet, not the prevalence of TERF writers and thinkers in some parts of the news media, nor the actual members of TERF groups themselves, nor have I done anything more than scrape the surface of the extent or implications of TERF beliefs and activism. Others have written at greater length, in more detail, and far more eloquently than I ever could on these subjects and more besides, and I will link some additional resources below for people who want to investigate some of these things in more detail, and get perspectives more diverse than mine (I am only one person, and I am far from an expert on all this!).
Overall, though, the key takeaway from all this should be to spread awareness in the public sphere of the nature of TERF beliefs, the form that their “activism” takes, and the consequences for trans people and other marginalized groups. TERFs thrive on misinformation and control of the narrative, and add to their movement by preying on the lack of knowledge of easily influenced young newcomers to feminist and LGB movements. The best way to combat this is to spread awareness and knowledge, which is especially important as TERF perspectives gain more traction in the public sphere. Transphobia is above all things fueled by prejudice, fear of the other, and ignorance, and all of this can be countered by spreading trans narratives, boosting the voices of trans people and sharing truths about trans lives and trans experiences.
Some more good resources about TERFs and their transphobic activities/movements:
The TERFs
TERF on GeekFeminism
GenderCynical��(cw: analysis of some distressing content)
TERFs on the Transadvocate
Trans-exclusionary radical feminism on RationalWiki
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CHARACTER SHEET .
BASICS .
full name . sally elizabeth mcknight
pronunciation . sa - lee , ih - liz - uh - beth , mik - night
nickname . thorn , honey ( father ) , rosebud ( mother ) , sal ( other family , occasionally band mates )
height . 5'8"
age . 23
zodiac . sagittarius
spoken languages . english , spanish , french ( self taught because they're some of the most commonly used languages in the world & made touring easier ) , novice knowledge of welsh .
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS .
hair color . black with red highlights , lower back length . it's naturally wavy & tousled but usually straightened
eyes . smokey turquoise
skin tone . white , almost quite literally aside from her slight pink undertones . doesn't tan in any way shape or form , only burns
body type . classic hourglass . full bust , slender waist , wide hips
accent . none in particular , perhaps a slight bostonian one when in boston as it rubs off from the locals . her voice is more often than not stays in its consistent breathy , warm , & sultry tone .
dominant hand . right
posture . straight & reading confidence often , though when nervous can slope her shoulders & fiddle with fingers
scars . none ( verse dependent )
tattoos . thorns & roses across lower back , triple goddess symbol on inner right wrist , horned god symbol on inner left wrist ( additional tattoos verse dependent )
most noticeable feature . her mysterious , bedroom eyes & sweet , dimpled smile
CHILDHOOD .
place of birth . salem , massachusetts
hometown . oakhaven
birth weight . 5 pound , 5 ounces
birth height . 8 inches , 3 cm
manner of birth . born at william griggs hospital on december 1st at 3am
first words . " no ! " ( because it's what she mostly heard followed by ' -- sally , don't play with that ! ' )
siblings . one older brother , levi mcknight
parents . father , arthur mcknight & mother , emily mcknight
parental involvement . thorn's parents were & are incredibly involved in their daughter's life . not to an unhealthy measure by any means but they're supportive endlessly & are immeasurably proud of their daughter . thorn's incredibly protective of her parents , even to the point where she still holds a mild grudge on the mayor for trying to pin the whole witch's ghost scheme on her father . there's a definite softness that come out of her from her parents , addressing both as ' mommy & daddy ' , her mom packing lunches for her when she's in town , helping at her father's pharmacy & mother's vet clinic . there's a very clear , very loving bond among them
ADULT LIFE .
occupation . musician ( lead singer / guitarist of the hex girls ) , entrepreneur ( owner eco-friendly cosmetics , skin , & hair care line , ' midnight forest ' ) , editorial & runway alternative model for freak beauty modeling agency , student at salem state university
current residence . salem , massachusetts ( oakhaven )
close friends . kimberly " luna " moss , muffy " dusk " st . james , fred jones , daphne blake , velma dinkley , norville " shaggy " rogers , scooby - doo
relationship status . single ( verse dependent )
financial status . millionaire . has the potential to be wealthier but is quite generous when giving to charity .
driver's license . yes , for both basic automobile & commercial ( personal car & the hex bus )
criminal record . ( oh boy ... ) trespassing , illegal protest , disturbing the peace , resisting arrest , assaulting a police officer , & arson . all done during her late teens - freshman year at uni . all charges aside from arson were done out of protest against animal testing , fashion industry use of threatened & endangered animals , & destruction of natural resources . arson was accidental .
vices . ben ravencroft's past works before his mysterious disappearance , very mild jinxes more played off as pranks on people that annoy her
SEX & ROMANCE .
sexual orientation . bisexual
romantic orientation . biromantic
preferred emotional role . switch
preferred sexual role . switch
libido . very healthy . she's a stressed woman & it's a good way to work it all out with or without a partner . although it can be swayed come the time of year , come the spring / summer months the sun is at its all time high , her ruling goddess , the mother , is at her sexual peak & so is thorn . the autumn & winter months tend to slow her down though since she's not nearly as powerful but if given the right partner with enough stamina to tap into she's more than fine .
turn ons . adventurous , intelligent , romantic , sense of humor , a take - charge attitude ( or at the very least having the guts to stand up to her & put her in check ) , soulful eyes , probably the ability to kick her ass , any kind of musical talent
turn offs . uncommunicative , selfish , distant , dishonesty , close - minded , a quick sense of over familiarity ( ex. calling her ' sally ' FAR too soon , the assumption anyone knows her only based on media depiction )
love language . when in a serious enough relationship she's openly physically affectionate to the point where she actually won't realize she's even doing it . reaching out to hold hand / arm , playing with fingers , with hair . she's not particularly shy about leaving her mark behind by means of her lipstick along lips , cheeks , forehead if the time feels right . more subtle means conveying her affection usually come by batting lashes & / or a soft , dreamy sort of look in her eye .
relationship tendencies . she's ... had it rough . for starters she never had a real love interest until she went to college as as a child / teenager she never felt comfortable in her own self / skin enough to even bother . & at the time no one was exactly beating her door down to ask her out as she was deemed ' the weird girl who talks to trees . ' come college when she fully filled out things went fast & she was became so occupied with the band that she needed someone who would understand she's extremely serious about where she wants to go with her life & hadn't managed to find that person . so it was a string of people who just didn't care too much about what she did & were distant but able to catch her long enough to fill the void . she WANTS someone to care but allows her her freedoms , trusts & respects her
MISCELLANEOUS .
character's theme song . i'm a hex girl ( obv ) , witchy woman - eagles
hobbies to pass the time . reading , exercising ( yoga , dance , hiking ) , journaling , gardening , listening to music
left or right brained . right brain with left brain influences . right obviously leads with her career as a musician having to be creative & imaginative , however left takes influence when it comes to her professional side & logical thinking to solve problems in a manner that would get the job done . feeling takes much influence in her magick , being an empath & having deeply rooted emotions , but on the other side a love of science ( namely biology & the make - up of plants , animals , & medicine ) lean left brain heavy .
fears . ghosts , being trapped , inadequacy
self confidence level . it's HEAVILY dependent on what area of her life we're talking about . if we're speaking music , it's a solid 10 / 10 . she KNOWS her & the girls are damn good & won't be told otherwise . on a personal level it's quite poor . she has trust issues & doesn't doubt that aside from people that've been there for a long time , people will take the opportunity to do her dirty . while she's getting better on the magick front of things she still has a lot to work through because aside from her work , her confidence does need a lot of repair , which is probably why she's a bit of a workaholic . only thing she feels fully comfortable with
vulnerabilities . her family ( the girls included ) , her large heart , insecurities , & stubbornness
TAGGED BY : @lxdrlappen
TAGGING : @yunhuntress @baddeleyite @bloomshops @sclskinn & you ♥
#*:･ﾟ♫ ✧ ❛ ѕнe loved мyѕтerιeѕ ѕo мυcн ѕнe вecaмe one ⁽ headcanons. ⁾#*:･ﾟ♫ ✧ ❛ a wιтcн'ѕ тrιalѕ ⁽ dashboard memes. ⁾
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two sides.
summary: au fic. after t’chaka’s assassination, t’challs seemingly vanishes. erik, who has lived in wakanda since his father’s death, acts in his place as ruler. nakia attempts to bring t’challa home.
characters: nakia, erik, t’challa with mentions of others.
pairing: t’challa/nakia ; blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hints of one-sided erik/nakia.
word count: 5000+ I’m sorry to mobile users!!!
notes: aka the lion king-inspired au that nobody asked for with some twists thrown in. primarily focused on nakia with a side focus of erik. i’m not 100% thrilled with the ending, but that’s probably me being picky. keeping this as one part for my own sanity.
mini-character study on erik and nakia.
(reposting because for some reason the summary is showing up weird in chrome for me, but i’m tired of fighting with it.)
The King is dead.
It was a meeting he’d done hundreds of times before, this time taking T’Challa and Erik with him, practicing diplomacy being his reason. They’d spent days preparing before their departure to the states to meet with other world leaders who, somehow, still believed that royals who looked like them could belong to a third world country in their eyes. Their secrecy frustrated Nakia who believed truly and deeply that meetings such as this would go much better if only people knew what Wakanda could give to the rest of the world.
Then, the unthinkable happens: an explosion. It’s not long after before T’Chaka is revealed to have been killed and Erik is returning with the body, no sign of T’Challa. When asked where the other young prince had gone, Erik shrugs. “Hell if I know,” he said, his American accent and manner of speech stood out amongst those around him. They may have removed him from America, but his roots stayed true.
In the moments and days that followed, Wakanda is thrown into a state of temporary chaos and uncertainty.
Staying within the walls of the palace is stifling, at best, for Nakia. She’s a spy, she’s not meant to be in one place for too long. She loved her country and her people deeply, more than anything so that was precisely why she couldn’t stay; it wasn’t for lack of loyalty, if anything, it was the exact opposite: she was loyal to a fault and wanted what was best for her people.
They were technically her people too, after all. She wasn’t a princess, per se, but she was considered an heir to the River Tribe, meant to take a place on the council when the time came, just a W’kabi was meant to do as part of the Border Tribe. T’Challa, W’kabi, and T’Challa had grown with one another, each groomed and prepared for their respective duties, none of them quite prepared for the title they were meant to inherit.
And Erik is… well, Erik. Always hidden and secretive, a mystery to most, T’Chaka had brought the boy back with no real explanation as to what had happened to the boy’s father. His proper name, the one nearly stolen from him, is N’Jadaka. He prefers to go by Erik most days, however, when he’s slinking about the palace. Nakia often wondered if he was this quiet prior to his father’s death. Erik was brilliant from the time his existence was made known, even by Wakandan standards. His prowess was far beyond his years.
As a young boy, there was still something about his presence that left Nakia feeling strangely uncomfortable. It was the way he paced about, not unlike a caged animal. It was the emptiness behind his eyes, a harsh contrast from the warmth T’Challa provided in his own. His temper was barely controlled, and Erik was prone to outbursts that could happen at any given moment. Those around him had to walk on eggshells to keep him from exploding. Nakia couldn’t fault him for his anger, however. Perhaps if she had been through similar traumas, she’d have been just as angry as him. Sometimes, Nakia wondered if he was angry in regard to the throne and the assumption T’Challa would be King, with Erik barely being considered a contender. That, she knew, would upset her as well.
But, even as a child, Nakia knew she was destined more than a seat alongside the King, even if Prince T’Challa would, most likely, be the King she was serving. Nakia studied and studied, learned foreign cultures, trained in battle with the Dora. She would eventually train with the War Dogs as well, something that broke the traditional mold. Her duty was supposed to be as an advisor and a decision-maker, not someone who was barely a presence.
As a spy Nakia knew her place in the world and wanted to take her chances while she still could. She could make a difference in the world, outside of the borders of Wakanda, and not only help collect information for Wakanda, but she took the chances to help those who needed it the most. Nakia was able to come and go as she pleased, making her seem like she was a flighty risk, but there was little she could do to change the perception of those around her. Her heart belonged to Wakanda and every thing she did, every move she made, was based upon this fact.
With T’Chaka dead and T’Challa missing – his kimoyo beads seemed to be removed as well – it’s difficult to make decisions about where to go next. T’Challa is the rightful and proper heir, they’d known and planned for this for years, but they never made a plan for what to do if something happened to him.
It was the look on Shuri’s young face that had made her stay for the past few days, alongside comforting the Queen. Ramonda had been another mother to her throughout the years, providing encouragement and support, even when Nakia’s relationship with T’Challa… changed, for lack of better word, and nobody was certain as to where they stood and what to refer to the pair as being.
For Nakia, they were just… T’Challa and Nakia, Nakia and T’Challa, and that was that. Words and labels didn’t matter between them. It was another deeper level, an unspoken connection and bond, and that was something she’d held onto for as long as she remembered. And she wouldn’t, couldn’t, allow herself the time or steal away a moment to grieve. Grieving meant facing this and accepting the reality, that T’Challa may really be gone, and it wasn’t something she was ready to face. Not when – not when things were so unfinished between the pair of them. She had so much more to say, more she wanted to do with him, and it was their connection that she held onto. In the back of her mind, she just felt he was still out there, somewhere.
Nakia’s restlessness was growing again and something didn’t sit entirely right with her. It was unlike T’Challa to not return home and Erik was more dismissive of this fact than Nakia felt he should have been. He moved about the palace as if nothing happened, easily slipping into the roles T’Challa held as prince. It didn’t take a spy’s knowledge or experience to tell that this wasn’t right, that there were more questions that needed to be answered.
“Erik,” she said one day as she approached, her brows knitted.
“Your Highness,” he corrected her, a certain smugness in his tone that Nakia picked up on immediately. Erik raised his brow and tilted his head to look at her. “You got something to say? Or you just gonna bug me? I’ve got better shit to do right now than have you all up in my business.”
Nakia stood her ground, determined to be unbothered and unwavering. But she was a spy, after all, slipping into disguises and roles. It was something that she could do as well: change tactics, angle, and approach. She needed him to trust her… as much as he was able to trust someone, anyway. She wasn’t sure how much he can do that. “Your Highness,” she repeated in a gentle tone, letting her body not be held as tightly. Nakia visibly relaxed herself and gently smiled. “I am simply concerned for you, your Highness,” she went on. “Losing your uncle and your cousin. It’d be difficult for anyone.”
His eyes were on her. Nakia had long noticed that there was something predatory about the way he observed situations and took in his surroundings. There was something about the way he moved as well, a prowl more than a walk or a run, and his movements were not unlike hers, sometimes, when she’s all cooped up with nothing to do, aching to be out in the world. Erik’s lips curl upwards, just for the briefest of seconds, but she’s observant. She catches it.
But, he straightened his back and rolls his neck. “Shit happens,” he said simply. “Where I come from, that’s just another fucking day. Same bullshit, another place. “Y’all aren’t that much different from us.” He paused and shrugged his shoulders, his eyes. “People ain’t about to change. Doesn’t matter where you go, everyone’s just looking to get their own. Everybody dies. Part of life. May as well get used to it.”
She took note of us words; even after all these years, he hadn’t shaken his “us versus them” mentality. At the end of the day, in Erik’s mind, he was still an outsider, and this wasn’t really his home. Nakia couldn’t fault him for that. Even if Erik’s father had promised to bring him here, even if he had been told endless tales of Wakanda, it wasn’t where he came from and he still felt an attachment to the place he knew as home. Hell, he hadn’t had a choice in coming here. Wracked with guilt, T’Chaka had whisked the boy away without any type of question or say in the matter.
In many ways, Nakia could understand Erik’s angers and frustrations.
When she didn’t answer, Erik moved closer to her, eyes focused intently. He was searching her face for something, anything to give away her motivations and intentions, but Nakia held her ground and eye contact with him. When he’s mere inches away from her, he stops.
His presence is intimidating. Erik is all height and muscles and firm build; a warrior’s upbringing and the result of years and years of training. Even through his clothing it’s apparent; clothes that cling just so to his muscles and cling to his figure. It’s a tactful thing, she knows, and it’s not unintentional. When he hovered over her, she craned her head back to look up at him.
“What’chu worried about me for?” He demanded to know, leaning into her. “None of y’all paid me that much mind before now.” A pause. “People asking me how the fuck I’m doing doesn’t mean shit when –” He stopped to scoff, taking a small step back from her. He huffed. “And I’m supposed to believe y’all give a fuck now? Just because—"
“I am sorry, Erik,” she said, cutting him off. His words are a small jab of pain, a tiny insight to a side of him he doesn’t show much of to people anymore. Over the years, he’d grown angrier. More closed off. T’Chaka and Ramonda had always hoped he’d warm and open to them but he’d grown more distant. “Nobody should have to have gone through what you have. Any of it. It’s not fair.” There’s a truth to her words, Nakia didn’t lie, but she could certainly play into a situation.
He was still studying her face, her expressions, brown eyes darting back and forth. Nakia wasn’t sure what he was trying to find. “Why do you do it, Nakia? Defend these assholes? They do—they don’t fucking deserve it of it. Shit, look around. Shit could change the world, make an actual fucking difference, not some bullshit peace talks and meetings. Actual fucking work that matters.”
His question startled her and she blinked. He wasn’t entirely wrong, was he? Nakia could, on some level, understand him. “Because, your Highness, I believe in Wakanda. I believe in our people.”
“What about the rest of our people?” He snorted. “Getting gunned down. Starving. Suffering ‘cuz some bastards bought and sold the rest of our people while Wakanda watched.” Erik didn’t step back when he spoke. “Where the fuck was Wakanda then? And now? Like I said, shit stays the same. Just put another fucking name on it, another face. And we’re supposed to take it? Nah, fuck that.”
Nakia sucked in a sharp breath. “Wakanda is not perfect, I agree, but—”
“Then why the hell you protect it?”
“Because I believe in what Wakanda can be, that it can change.”
It was then that Erik’s lips curled into a smile. It’s not warm. It’s not comforting. It’s dangerous, really, and Nakia has to keep from backing away from him. “Good. ‘Cuz so do I.”
“Excuse me, your Highness. I should go,” Nakia said before turning on heel. His words didn’t sit well with her, they didn’t feel right. Something about the encounter had been sinister and concerning to her, his words ringing in her head.
Things changed quickly after that. Power shifted. Erik was the acting head of Wakanda while the search for T’Challa continued. There was the proper mourning period for T’Chaka that had to be adhered to in the meanwhile as Wakanda struggled to find their way through this.
Nakia went back to her normal lifestyle, in and out of the city, running about the world, using her skills and effort to make an impact and make a difference. With Erik in charge, Wakanda was feeling less like home and more… akin to a prison, really. It’s a slow, subtle, change at first. Changing tactics. Changing interactions with the outside world. Years of progress and development, isolated from the world, and Wakanda was slowly exposing itself to everyone. The changes were little by little, but Nakia was able to take note of them.
And months later, T’Challa was still… gone. No signs of him. It wasn’t the T’Challa that Nakia knew to abandon the throne and his people, but maybe his father’s death had struck the young man harder than anyone could have imagined. Shuri and Ramonda were not only left to monitor their father and husband but a brother and son as well. The more days that passed, the more it seemed as if they would never be able to find him.
But Nakia hadn’t given up.
She found herself in Austria first, the place that had started… well, all of this, and it was there that the rabbit hole began to get deeper. Across Europe she went, sending false reports and messages back home to cover her trails. She even made the rare appearance back in Wakanda to officially report in, just as she always did.
It was in the council room one day and the events that had happened that made her realize fully how much worse things had gotten. For weeks she had been gone, following leads and clues, before coming back to find Erik on the edge of war. Nakia had slipped silently into the room, listening quietly to Erik’s plans. “Why should Wakanda stay in the shadows?” His voice is dark, angry even, but laced with passion. Nakia can see Okoye, her body tense. Unlike the War Dogs, the Dora may have a had a stoic tendency, but they weren’t quite as bound to being… detached. Being passionate about the throne and their country was what drove the Dora.
“Your Highness,” Okoye says, her voice disapproving. “It is not safe. Not with the previous—”
“—is he here?” Erik snarls.
There’s an uncomfortable shift in the rest of the council at his words. Nobody’s quite fully acknowledged T’Challa’s long absence.
The room feels cold despite the sunlight pouring into it. The city sparkled and shined far beyond the throne, waterfalls and forests in the far distance. The buildings and trains, unlike many other cities, didn’t mar the natural beauty Wakanda was overflowing with, no, they added to it more than anything. Blended in. They had worked to make sure it fit and flowed perfectly. Not a building out of place, not a mark on the country’s simple beauty.
Nakia can see Erik glance at each of them. “Oh…” he sits back and snorts. “Y’all still think he’s coming back. He fucking abandons y’all and the throne and you’re still in here thinking he’s about to come back?” Erik scoffed again and stood, his voice raising. “Y’all can’t see? That li’l bitch got scared and he ain’t comin’ back. Couldn’t keep his daddy alive. Couldn’t handle it. And y’all want him as your king? Nah, that ain’t how this is gon’ go.” The more he talked, the more he slipped into his ‘old’ voice. “We doin’ this. I’m in charge and y’all gon’ put some respect on that.”
‘This’. Nakia’s not certain what his plans are but based on the council’s responses. She paused before approaching as if she had heard nothing. “Your Highness,” she said in a light tone. Erik’s eyes flickered to her and something in his face softened. She wasn’t sure what that mean. “I was told you wanted to see me.”
In some ways, for a brief second, it reminded her of an expression T’Challa sometimes wore and it ‘brings back that familiar aching in her chest that thinking about him does, almost every single time.)
“This meeting’s over,” he said with a dismissive hand wave at the rest of the council and then he pointed at Nakia herself. “You. Come here.”
The rest of the council disappeared with Nakia giving a nod to her father as he walked past her.
And it was easy, slipping back into a clueless act as she approached him. “I’m sorry I could not come sooner. I was—”
He cut her off. “I know where you been,” he said, moving back to the throne. Nakia was smart, knowing and seeing it to be a power move, but she wouldn’t let herself be shaken. Instead, she watched him quietly before he spoke again. “What I don’t like is you getting all involved in my business and shit.”
She offers him a questioning look.
“You think I don’t know who you talkin’ to? You think you the only one with skills, Nakia?”
A pause. Talking to him could be like a game, planning moves. Playing into them or calling his bluff. Treading carefully. “Of course not, sir,” she responded. “I am simply doing what is required of me.”
“Then why you goin’ places that weren’t authorized.”
“Sometimes, the job requires it. I know this is new for you, but—”
His eyes flash, dangerously. “Are you doubting my abilties?”
“No, sir. I simply—”
Erik stands abruptly, swiftly moving towards her. Another power move. “You go where I tell you. You do what I tell you. Understand?”
“Of course, sir.”
He’s closer now, leaning in to her. “I always liked you, Nakia. More than the rest of them. Always trusted you,” he said. His hands ghost over her arm, his eyes scanning her body before meeting her own. A predator, she thought again. Every move calculated and planned, zeroing in on its prey. “Only fucking genuine thing in this place. Rest of it? A fucking lie. But you know that, right?”
Nakia took a small step back, away from his hand and breaking their eye contact. “What were you speaking about, before I came in?”
Another curl of his lips. “Plans I got,” he responded simply. “Wakanda can’t stay hidden forever. Things that stay in the shadows, they always eventually come out.” He’s studying her carefully and, for a second, Nakia wondered if he knew. “I’mma help our people, Nakia. All the shit they goin’ through? All the shit Wakanda let them go through? That ends. Our people fucking deserve better than this shit and Wakanda can help them with that. We’re going public.”
She wondered if he knew she was searching for any sign of T’Challa, anything that could make him come back to her. Come back to them. And the thing was, she still didn’t disagree with him, not entirely, but she wasn’t certain she trusted his methods.
“And, Imma need you with me when that happens,” he goes on. Nakia ‘s stomach lurched, and she took another step back.
No.
“I have to go, your Highness,” she said before backing out of the room, the implications of his words startling her.
She had to find him. She had to find T’Challa.
(She tells Ramonda and Shuri before she disappears again, slipping out in the middle of the night, with little warning to anyone else. The fewer people who knew the better. The settings on her kimoyo beads were adjusted by Shuri beforehand, leaving her less likely to be tracked and detected, but still providing her with some sense of direction).
Her search continued. A part of her felt guilty for seemingly slipping out of Wakanda so easily. As a spy, she did this often, but circumstances had changed, and she had a new goal.
It was late night, bordering into morning when she slipped out of Wakanda’s borders. Red and gold and yellow danced across the early sunrise and she wondered when she’d see it again. Could be weeks. Could be months. That was another feeling Nakia was quite used to, but this time… well, it felt entirely different.
A part of her wasn’t certain she’d even have a home to come to if Erik had his way.
Nakia found herself curled up in a bed in a hotel room. New York City. She’d been here plenty of times before, but she’d tracked down names, now. Faces. Places. Followed her gut and her instincts to a “Tony Stark”. That meeting had been… something.
There was a reason she was a spy and not a diplomat, though T’Challa had seemed to think she’d be decent at the latter.
For the first time, or at least the first time she allowed herself to acknowledge, Nakia missed her family. She missed the River, her River, and tying her skirt above her knees and wading into the water when the sun beat her skin, sending her temperature rising. She missed splashing it onto her face, the fresh and cool feeling making her feel renewed. The water reeds nearby that were sometimes a nuisance, she missed those as well.
She missed sitting at the water’s edge with T’Challa. His spot, a cliff that overlooked upon land that seemed to stretch out for forever. Her spot was along the river’s edge, a waterfall crashing into rocks and the bubbling sound it produced. It was enough to lull her to sleep, laid out on her back and lazily stretching her arms over her body. She’d look over at T’Challa and see his flustered look as she caught him staring at her.
And she’d smile lazily, brown eyes shining brightly at him. “It’s okay,” she’d tell him as she sat up again, keeping their eyes connected. T’Challa would be all awkward, shy, smiles as she kissed his cheek softly.
(They were young. Their relationship was complicated. They’d had so many firsts with one another and there were so many other firsts she had wanted to keep having with him. But life was complicated, and it got in the way. She’d long since accepted that fact).
The reality was she was holed up under an alias, one of many she had, in a hotel. She knew that Erik would be using all types of Wakandan resources to find where ‘his’ spies were and keep tabs with them. Even with Shuri’s altered technology, she could only run for so long.
Time wasn’t her friend.
New York seemed to hold answers, however, and this… this felt right. With all of the research she’d done and intel she’d gained, it seemed like the sort of place T’Challa would stick himself. It was enough for him to blend in, but he still had… those Avengers, as they called themselves. And, besides, Tony seemed to be a terrible liar, brushing things off with a joke or a flirt, she could read him just as easily as she could anyone else. But she played dumb and innocent, she kept it smooth and simple under the guise of ‘seeking employment’. An easy enough lie to tell, she had decided, and it worked. Mostly.
The training and education she had received in Wakanda was beyond anything in the states. She was able to forge enough of an identity to be reliable. Quick communication back with Shuri ensured records of her lie properly existed.
She wouldn’t – couldn’t – cut off ties with the family. Mostly Shuri; the girl was still quite young, but a genius beyond her years. Nakia couldn’t imagine doing a mission without her. Their correspondence was hushed whispers into their tech with Shuri making quips about how her father liked movies where they did this sort of thing, her voice laced with a happy sadness at being involved in something like this.
Nakia made a note to hug her when the – when they – got back.
Work was meant to start in the morning; a temporary position, she was told.
Hours pass and then days, Nakia searching for answers inbetween running tasks. She eventually spotted a familiar form entering an elevator and she slipped in from behind before pressing the stop button.
“Nakia?” T’Challa’s voice is startled, filled with surprise. He stared at her with a confused expression and there was something akin to guilt behind his eyes. He looked different. A little more reserved, maybe, more drawn into himself. His eyes search her. She could tell he was calming down from being caught off-guard
She’d been right, and her actions had not been in vain. She had known that deep inside and it was why she had been so damn stubborn over it. Nakia didn’t give up easily, not on anything, and it was a core to her entire being.
“T’Challa,” she let out a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. “T’Challa, what are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, deflecting the question. She wondered if he realized he repeated hers.
Nakia frowned. “I’m here to find you,” she said. “Your family, they are… they don’t know what happened to you. Nobody does. After what happened with your father—” She can see his body stiffen, but she continued on. “—people need to know you’re alive.”
“I couldn’t keep him alive, Nakia. What kind of king is unable to protect their family?”
“And you are protecting them by leaving them?” The only other sound in the room is the sound of her heels as they clink against the floor. “By leaving them alone?”
He paused. “It was never my intention to – I fully intended to come home when I was finished here. But things got in the way, Nakia, and I—”
“That’s not an excuse, T’Challa! Nobody’s heard from you. We’ve – I’ve – been so worried. We didn’t know what was going on”
T’Challa buried his hands in his hands. “I am sorry, truly,” he said before he looked back up. “But Erik, he was meant to tell you – I thought you knew. We agreed, speaking directly would be too difficult about it and mother would try to change my mind. I realize now that it was not the correct choice to make… but he was meant to tell you.”
She believed T’Challa, of course. T’Challa didn’t lie and she sometimes wasn’t certain if he was fully capable of it. It was one of many things that made them entirely different people.
“And your kimoyo beads?”
“I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Shuri or mother. Or you,” he answered. “I’m not strong enough for that, Nakia.”
She sighed. “We can continue this conversation later, but you need to come home. With me. Erik… he is planning something, I’m not certain as to what, but he is jeopardizing everything Wakanda has accomplished. His temper and his anger, they are not safe. And he lied to us, all of us. He allowed us to believe you—” Nakia choked on the words and shook her head. “—he is not fit to lead.”
T’Challa frowned.
Nakia couldn’t help herself much longer, throwing her arms around him and burying her face into his chest. This was good, this was comforting, this was a feeling she hadn’t realized she missed and that she needed. His hand cupped the back of her head as she listened the steady beat of his heart. “Come home, T’Challa.”
“… okay.”
The journey home was simple. Hours on a plane with idle chatter and then slipping into the country’s borders before they were home. Properly home.
There were whispers as they slipped through the halls of the palace and make their way to the throne room. They entered and Erik’s scowl could be felt from across the room when he realized who it was. The other council members, including W’kabi and Nakia’s father, appeared to be a mix of confusion, relief, and surprise. Nakia couldn’t fault them.
“The fuck you doin’? Thought you were raised better than that and had more manners.”
T’Challa’s demeanor changed. His back was stuff, his head held high, and he walked with an air of confidence and self-assuredness. “N’Jadka, “ T’Challa said, his voice firm. “What is it you think you are doing?”
Erik’s lips curl into a smile again. “What you was afraid to do,” he responded. “And what every other person who’s been on this throne was scared of doing. I’m rulin’. Puttin’ Wakanda on the map.” A pause. “You really think you can run away for months and just come back like that ain’t wrong? Like you can walk on in here and act like nothing’s changed? You been gone a long time, cousin. It ain’t the same Wakanda it is ‘fore your daddy got himself killed.” His lips curl up even more. “’Least now you know how it feels to have your daddy killed and not be able to do a damn thing about it.”
Nakia frowned and tightened her brow. “T’Challa, she whispered. “You told me he was supposed to inform us you would be staying behind, but he didn’t. Think about what he just said. You don’t think–?”
T’Challa looked down at her and then back to Erik. “You didn’t answer my question,” he stated. “What is it you think you are doing?”
“Ah, no, you see,” Erik shook his head. And get you involved? You are just like your daddy. Gotta be the one in control all of the time, not give a fuck about other peoples’ lives and opinions. Nah.”
“N’Jadka, this is wrong,” T’Challa took a step forward. “And I think you know that. There are better ways—”
“What better ways,” the man asked in response. “People ain’t answerin’ to talkin’ it out. Thoughts and prayers. Buncha bullshit, people need answers they can fuckin’ see.
“N’Jadka—”
Erik rose angrily. “Who the fuck gave you the right to call me that, anyway? You really think it’s like that? That we’re somehow equal? Fuckin’ bullshit.” He was in T’Challa’s face now, but T’Challa doesn’t flinch. “You got any fucking sense of shame? I’ve spent years bein’ compared to you and now I’ve got my chance to prove I’m better than y’all, you gonna show up after disappearing for months and pretend we’re equal? That you deserve any of this? Bullshit.”
Nakia took a small step forward. “There are other ways, Erik,” she said gently.
His eyes go to her. “’Course you defending him and on his side,” he said with a laugh. “Why wouldn’t you? Always did like him better… ain’t no different from anyone else here.” A pause . “But you get it, Nakia. What Wakanda is and what it could fuckin’ be and how we can make a fuckin’ difference. The only one here who understands that shit. The rest of them, they don’t fuckin’ get it like we do.”
There’s a change in T’Challa’s stance at Erik’s words and Nakia had to fight the urge to give him a hug. Or even a squeeze. “But, Erik,” Nakia took a chance and stepped towards him. “Whatever you have planned… we can do it differently. Better.”
Erik scoffed. “Do you really believe that? Do you really fucking believe they give a shit about anything outside of these borders? Your king couldn’t even handle his daddy dying, that was the first fuckin’ test. How is he supposed to handle anything else?”
“I made a mistake,” T’Challa answered. His voice was tight. Controlled. Determined. “And for that, I have regrets. But you. You attempted to take the throne from me. Why?”
“Because,” Erik said slowly, his gaze moving to T’Challa. “Challenge day? Pointless bullshit. Would have beat your ass, anyway. Got a chance and took it. Thanks to you, T’Challa,” he started out his expression lighting up a little. “Whole world is about to know the strength of Wakanda. All these years, watching. That about to change.”
Nakia knew T’Challa. She could see the tenseness in his body, the way that he clenched his jaw and the way he was holding himself. He was understandably upset.
“The challenge never occurred,” he said, holding his voice steady. “And I never forfeited the throne. It is not yours to take, N’Jadka. It is not our way.
“Yeah, your way is ignoring the rest of our people. We got our people out there, across the world, suffering. And y’all sitting on all the answers? Shit ain’t right.” His voice is such stark contrast to T’Challa’s, Nakia noted, from top to bottom. It’s rough and laced with profanities, emotional, and strongly tied to his American home. T’Challa continued to hold himself as he had been taught to do since they were kids.
“You are right, Erik,” she said. Time to try again. “It is not right. It is not fair. Those people, they deserve more and better. I am certain your intentions are to help them, but Wakanda is not to blame. Your anger is fair, but misplaced.”
That caused him to stop moving about and to stare at her instead. “And what if you’re right?” He asked, frowning. “How we gonna trust him—” He nodded towards T’Challa. “Someone who doesn’t understand?”
“We figure it out along the way,” she answered. “Together.” And then, another type of appeal. “We could use your brain, Erik. You know what it is like out there, more than any of us. We do not have the experience or knowledge that you do. You are able to help us in so many ways.”
T’Challa remained silent and Nakia wondered what was going on in his head. If he was even prepared to properly be here; it had been weeks, after all, nearly half of a year. It was his first time seeing everything in this new light, the light of a perspective king, and Erik…. Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong.
She can see the wheels turning in Erik’s head. “How do I know this isn’t bullshit?” He asked, glancing between T’Challa and her. “That you ain’t just gonna turn on me? Lock me up.”
“Because,” she answered. “If you wanted to betray us, you’d have done so long before now.” She shook her head. “But you should have told us about T’Challa. I cannot promise the council will not punish you for that, but I am certain the punishment will be appropriate, so long as you do what we say.”
Nakia could hear T’Challa clear his throat. “N’Jadka,” he started out. “Why would you betray me so?”
“Your daddy wouldn’t listen. His daddy wouldn’t listen. What makes you any different?” Erik’s voice shook. “The fuck makes you any different than them?”
“I’ve always wanted to help you, Erik, but I can not allow this to go unpunished. The council will decided the proper course of action.”
Erik stared at him and Nakia was reminded, once again, of an animal under stress. He was on the defensive this time. It gave the chance for W’kabi to slide in to place handcuffs on Erik who, surprisingly, didn’t protest as he was led out of the room, though he threw angry glances back over his shoulder. Nakia wondered if this was simply part of another plan, a bigger one.
Nakia let out a deep breath and buried her face into T’Challa’s chest. He stayed solid. “Do not listen to him, T’Challa,” she said. “You are a good man. You are not bound by your family’s mistakes. You forge your ow—”
Her words were cut off when T’Challa pressed his lips to hers, the rest of the room forgotten, and he rested one hand on her neck and brushed his thumb across her cheek. Their lips moved together effortlessly and she covered one of his hands with her own, eyes fluttering shut.
The only words that left his mouth when he pulled away from the kiss:
“Thank you.”
“For what?” Her voice was breathless.
“Finding me when I could not find myself.”
She simply smiled. “I would never let you stay lost for long.”
#black panther#black panther fanfiction#t'challa#nakia#erik killmonger#t'challa x nakia#nakia x t'challa#otp: king and lionheart
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Mobile Banking Industry 2020: by Scope, Size, Opportunities and Growth Rate analysis
Market Research Future published a research report on “Mobile Banking Industry Research Report - Forecast 2023” – Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.
Market Synopsis:
As per Market Research Future (MRFR)’s analysis, the mobile banking global market is set to expand at a moderate CAGR during the forecast period. Mobile banking services are widely accepted by the customers all across the world owing to the convenience offered. It also ensures the completion of a transaction in minimum time that would take hours otherwise. Banks are capitalizing on internet services for leveraging their schemes and attracting larger customer bases. This, in turn, is anticipated to revolutionize the growth trajectory of the Mobile Banking Industry.
With the advancements in the internet technology and expansion of its access, the banking industry is also catching up with the developments. Nowadays, banks are endeavoring to make all the banking facilities available from door to door for gaining a competitive edge over competitors. The large-scale market presence of smartphones is further expected to support the vision, thus, augmenting the Mobile Banking Industry.
Governments all over the world are emphasizing on the promotion of the cashless economy to check evasion of taxes. This is presumed to support the development of the mobile banking market over the next couple of years. Furthermore, the deeply rooted penetration of smartphones into the lives of the global population belonging to all age groups is supposed to have a positive influence on the growth of the market.
Although cyber-attacks pose threat to customers’ privacy, proper regulations have been enforced for the protection of sensitive information. Nevertheless, extra charges levied by the banks for offering these services are presumed to hamper the growth of the mobile banking market over the assessment period.
Get More Details of Report @ https://www.abnewswire.com/pressreleases/mobile-banking-market-size-share-2019-industry-analysis-by-growth-emerging-technologies-segmentation-opportunities-sales-revenue-competitive-landscape-and-regional-forecast-to-2023_450017.html
Key Players
The prominent players in the Mobile Banking Industry are – Temenos Group AG (Switzerland), Nymbus Inc. (U.S.), Neptune Software PLC (U.K.), Strands Inc. (U.S.), Capital Banking Solutions (U.S.), Dais Software Company (Bulgaria), Ebanq B.V (Netherlands), Apex Software Ltd. (Kenya), Fisa System (U.S.), among others.
Market Segmentation:
The segmental analysis of global mobile banking has been done over several segments, such as Solution, Technology, and Deployment.
The mobile banking market by the solution segment includes mobile banking features, customer management, mobile trading features, mobile payment features, and others.
The mobile banking market by technology segment includes standalone mobile applications and Wireless application protocol (WAP).
The mobile banking market by the deployment segment includes on-cloud and on-premise.
Regional Analysis:
The study of the global mobile banking market has further been conducted over crucial regions of Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Rest of the World.
The regional market of mobile banking is backed by the increase in demand for adopting mobile banking through smartphones and sales-related activities in the North American region. Customers here are actively using mobile channels to interact with the banks rather than visiting the banks.
In Europe, the scenario of the market is the same as several countries are becoming the fastest growing regional markets in support of faster transactions and mobile payments being done by the bank. This has led to a surge in the adoption of mobile banking used by the Europeans to make transactions, thus supporting the progress.
In the Asia Pacific region, the growth of the market is taking place in main countries such as India, China, Japan, and others. These countries are developing several means of banking on mobiles with high internet services as a part. Also, the hike in investment by banking bodies is expected to make sure that the market gets better backing in the coming years.
Get Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/mobile-banking-market-2906
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Market Introduction
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Scope Of Study
1.2.1 Research Objective
1.2.2 Assumptions
1.2.3 Limitations
1.3 Market Structure
2 Research Methodology
2.1 Research Type
2.2 Primary Research
2.3 Secondary Research
2.4 Forecast Deploymentl
2.4.1 Market Data Collection, Analysis & Forecast
2.4.2 Market Size Estimation
Continued…
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At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.
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A letter to my high school self...
(My femininity, sexuality, and cultural identity has been a little more sensitive lately from outside triggers. The past two weeks I’ve battled internal conflicts of what it means to be a woman, an ally, and a person of color. This all relates to my experiences living abroad and processing any kind of resolution. I realized that a path to moving forward is acknowledging who I used to be, and the person that is evolving now.)
***
Dear 17 year old Stef,
You wrote your college Personal Essay based on your experience living with 16 other people under one roof--aside from your immediate family, you shared a home with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins from the motherland. It wasn’t until these last few hours I’ve realized why you likely didn’t get into the schools you wanted to based on said essay.
I, your 31 year old self, along with your mentors and teachers, would all probably agree that it was an engaging topic. Not everyone can relate to that kind of living situation and it was a unique experience with your family. However, your perspective didn’t showcase what you’ve learned from this experience and how it has influenced you for the better.
You were under the impression that you were entitled to some kind of privilege that you did not have. Not entirely. Not then, anyway. I’m not sure when you became aware of the term “Model Minority” but at some point in high school, you thought this applied to you, especially around the time of college admissions. In some cases, it did. You lived in an affluent neighborhood in a sizable house (granted, it was to accommodate the 17 people under it). Your parents’ dual income made you ineligible for certain financial aid. You attended “California Distinguished” schools. You were eligible for the GATE program in elementary school. You participated in extracurricular activities: Modern Jazz, Filipino folk dancing, Taekwondo, Field Hockey, and Video Production. You had a diverse group of friends. All of these facets definitely contributed to your successes.
However, in other ways this “Model Minority” stereotype didn’t exactly fit you either. You are of South East Asian / Pacific Islander descent. You were born in a developing neighborhood that wasn’t immune from local crime. Your grandparents, relatives, and neighbors looked after you and your brother while your parents worked full time jobs with overtime, picking up very early and very late hours. You were brought up in a Filipino-Hispanic Catholic Church. Let’s be honest, your SAT scores were shit. You didn’t do well in math, science, and US history. You didn’t read a lot (outside of required reading, which is weird because you love to write). You had test anxieties, trouble focusing, and being self-disciplined. You snuck out of the house. You were boy crazy. You shared your body with others who didn’t deserve it. You risked unwanted pregnancy. Your family’s cultural values did not match those of many of your classmates. You were highly depressed, and had suicidal thoughts. Who knows what other mental illnesses you would’ve been diagnosed with if you had looked into it, but that’s no ones fault.
Undoubtedly you have privileges and disadvantages. You’re a smart girl, you were aware of both. I’m proud of the opportunities you’ve seized and the ones you’ve created for yourself. If privilege was a contributing factor to our success, then I’m grateful. But Stef, it’s the minority that you belong to that you’ve suppressed and hidden. I’m glad you’ve adapted and risen to be who you are now. It got us a great job in New Zealand and avenues to explore other cities. You’ve hidden the person you are at heart as well as her voice. You’d be happy to know that person has come out more since high school.
I’m going to share something with you that you don’t realize: you’re trying to be white. I know. You think I’m wrong. Even 23-30 year old Stef thinks I’m wrong. I don’t blame you. You noticed others around you advancing in ways you thought would be accessible to you as well. Yeah, you kind of dicked around and let responsibilities slip through the cracks. Yet there’s also no denying that you weren’t treated as fairly because of things beyond your control. You’re also aware of others with even lesser opportunities than you, and I appreciate that.
I know that we can’t undo the past. Even if we could, I may not be writing this to you or be where I’m at now. It could be better, it could be worse. I wish I could go back and tell you:
- Don’t be ashamed to check box “Filipino/a” on ethnic censuses (as opposed to “Asian, other than Pacific Islander”)
- It’s great that you did activities, like going to the park and pool, with your younger cousins. Also, let them discover American things on their own terms.
- You’ve made mistakes. It’s okay. Don’t let them deter you from your passions.
- Try not to get caught up in comparing yourself to others. You progress at your own pace, and it doesn’t make you any less gifted or capable. In fact, you’ll come to find later that you’re quite weird, which you love about yourself and others love too!
- Yeah, I know... Emo, New Wave, and indie rock seem cool. They are fun. So is country and heavy metal. Girl, R&B and Hip Hop are cool too. Don’t be shy to blast your Blaque, Luniz, and Aaliyah CDs (ProTip: 90s and early 2000′s R&B makes a HUGE comeback. It’s kind of obnoxious, really). And guess what, later you DJ the type of music you grew up on! Pretty neat, right? Also, your love for The Carpenters and the like never dies. You still slay at Karaoke, too (hint: Bjork).
- Boys are scum. Some men you meet later are worse. They come inside you without permission. They make crude comments about how you look. They force themselves on you. They make assumptions about you and your sexuality. Some women aren’t too great either. I don’t know how to protect you from them. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. Hang in there. You do meet some very good ones. You really challenge them, though. They’ll come through for you. More importantly, you’ll come through for yourself.
- Cut your parents some slack. Know they’re cutting you some slack, too. You love them. It doesn’t feel like it, especially at 17, but they love the shit out of you.
- Speaking of parents, there comes a point in your adulthood where you just start to figure things out. This is later coined as, “adulting.” Note: it’s nowhere near the same as your parents’ version. So don’t get caught in with their expectations on you as an adult either. I think they end up coming around anyway. It almost doesn’t matter what Mom and Dad did or didn’t tell you. Ironically, you’re not keen on learning but you’re pretty damn good at it when you want to. (Also, “keen” is a word you pick up in NZ).
- Your family was relentless in spending time together, despite how crazy they drove you and vice versa. I know... Cherish it.
- Friends will come and go. Some are gone forever, indefinitely, or come back. Value all of your friendships. And don’t be friends with just “westernized” ones.
- Pay attention to politics. You don’t always have to participate, but be aware of what’s going on around you. You’ll see that it affects the people and communities you care about deeply.
- It’s okay to value yourself. Care for yourself. Love yourself. (It’s not always easy, but you do).
I’m proud to say that you’ve consistently been a real individual. You have a uniqueness about you and please try to accept that. Looking back on your Personal Essay, I know how living with 16 members of your family influenced you. You develop a deep care for your personal identity and those similar to you. You appreciate trips back to the Philippines more, and find ways to connect a little more with the family who live there. You empathize / sympathize with various minority groups in their struggles for equality and visibility in the world. You love your family more and slowly find ways to re-connect with them. Ultimately, you’ve helped me stay true to us and appreciate our Southern Californian, Filipina-American roots. I hold onto the things we love dearly. It helps me translate our perspective into other countries and how we relate to the local citizens, immigrants, and (especially) indigenous groups.
Stef, we’re totally doing okay. We may not have gotten into a top university, but we fucking kill it at the school of life.
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Externalization
Yeah, I hear you man. You are externalizing.
I hear that too, brother. And you are externalizing.
Yeah? Well, you may be only speaking metaphorically, but guess what? You are still externalizing, nonetheless.
When we talk about deconstructing our preset conditioning that dictates to the consciousness where to focus the attention, it's important to understand just how crucial this maneuver is towards redefining the old description of reality with the truth of existentiality. And this is no easy task, for the old description of reality is deeply engrained into us, and we are even trained to automatically defend it's position without giving such fortifications any thought. So you can clearly see why, despite a possible initiative to undertake such an endeavor, that it's going to be a very difficult task to employ.
Indeed, it will be a very arduous road to take, but do yourself a favor and don't waste time trying to take any shortcuts, for they don't really lend towards accomplishing the objective at hand. This is most usually evidenced by assumptive efforts to try and circumvent various paraphernalia of indulgence, but this is misspent effort; for the way to master cravings is not attained by avoiding external objects of desire. Remember, avoidance, despite the impression of refrain, is still an attachment, for it still invests in the desire for specific outcome, and therefor isn't conducive towards the necessary detachment required to facilitate the sublimation of the attention. The attention must be re-directed by way of applied implementation, and so the awareness must learn to do this empirically. So it needs attachments to practice on. Removing the objects of desire doesn't get the job done. And forcing someone to do what they don't wanna do, because someone thinks they know better then someone else, won't get the job done either. It has to be a willing enterprise that is fully prepared to confront obstacles and address them accordingly.
So the way to begin to reel in the attention, so to speak, is to reframe how we believe reality is produced. We are conditioned from a very young age to over look our own awareness, the conduit from which the stream of projections manifest, and to focus exclusively on the reflections, that is, the so called external phenomenon. This conditioning is what is known as externalization. It's a conditioning that takes no responsibility for reality; due to a false outlook that distances itself from that which is looked upon. Hence, imaginary separations are established, and the facets of existential reality become compartmentalized, and therefor are, for all intents and purposes, no longer recognized as existential, therefore deemphasizing the attention from it's own agency and redirecting it towards getting stuck on the projected perceptibles, which are no longer seen as projected reflections and, thereof, are only appreciated as externally existing fixed configurations of content.
From here, the delusions of illusion are inaugurated. This is where the finger is pointed outwards from, in an attempt to explain that which is being manifested from the mind. And when I say "mind", I do not mean any ingredient of reality. Whenever I say mind, I am referring to that which precedes the body, the brain, the emotions and the perceptions. This is where it begins to become very difficult to navigate our way back out of, towards the truth of reality, and by the time we come of age and are in a position of increased autonomy to do so, it is often already too late. Then. it becomes a matter of intervention, which is where I come in. And I say unto you, stop pointing outwards. Stop searching outwards. Stop blaming outwards. Stop externalizing. You are looking in the wrong place, and are concerned with exactly the last place that needs to be addressed. You may explore the external world from here to eternity, and search through content from soup to nuts, but all you will be really doing is sifting through layers of appearances. Understand that the spiritual journey doesn't even begin, until you start to look introspectively, towards the source of all these things.
“Look inwards for the source? Sage, it sounds like you are saying that men are gods.”
What man? What god? These are both equally inventory items of illusion. Obviously men are not gods, for we are limited and very powerless, but that's mainly due to the self imposed mental enslavement; the kind of mental slavery that looks to assign power and authority to some external property. And looking outwards towards external properties will only trap the attention further and further, for this is the nature of details; they ensnare you, and reveal even further details to sink you deeper and deeper into. And it never has an end. For every answer illusion provides, 10 more questions will arise. And all the while, the vehicle from which you are operating, of which you have only a limited time to negotiate the situation, rapidly fades away; and before you know it, the end of your form will have arrived, and you will die chasing phantoms.
So this is why it is important to make some tracks redirecting the attention. So far, you have only shifted your attention between a variety of different inventory items, and I am not asking you to focus your attention on another inventory item. I am asking you to redirect the attention towards itself. Not to YOUR self, but to ITSELF, meaning, not towards your ego, or your personification, but towards awareness itself. This is all part of understanding the nature of potentiality; you don't get caught up in attaching to it's appearances. If you do, you will certainly be at it's mercy, which in itself, is yet another distraction that snares the attention; as it reinforces the idea of the inventory by verifying itself to the attention via contention. This is another trap, for fighting against the external, while overlooking it's root cause, doesn't improve one's chances of self recognition, which, in turn, further convolutes the situation by the inevitable use of deductive reasoning based on premises that simply aren't true, and before long, one will be fully entrenched in the game of grasping and avoiding, whilst fighting adversity, all of which, keep one mired in illusion.
As with details, adversaries will increase the more the attention is placed towards them. This is where people find a plethora of excuses for not looking inwards:
“Introspection isn't going to stop the tyrannical governments of the world from spreading corruption and seeking to enslave us under a totalitarian rule.”
“Introspection isn't going to put food on the table, nor provide any practical means by which to make the world a better place.”
Can you see how these are the wrong areas to address? These concerns can be dealt with by you, personally, by looking towards where they originate from. This realm is a training ground, not a place to seek repose and security. This realm is necessarily going to stick unfairness and injustice in your face, any chance it gets, but this is exactly the trick used to fixate your attention on the perceptibles, and keep it away from the truth. Almost everything in life is this type of device.
“But what about the conspiracies! The symbolisms! The phonetics! The double meanings! The anagrams! The ancient texts! The evil that seeks to enslave us!”
Sigh.
You are reading into the inventory items way too much. All the language, memes and symbols reflect the psychology and the zeitgeist of your current state, which is manifested as a world full of confusion, paranoia, demonization and righteous indignation. These are all the apparatuses of your addiction to externalization, hence the complaints about all of this is more of the same: scheming ploys to try and get the conversation right back on the external inventory again.
Look, it doesn't matter how dramatic you try to make the cosmic horror narrative out to be, it's still a projected externalization of the inner state that created it. All of these types of assertions are insights into your own subconscious mind, that you are projecting outwards and alienating from yourself as external phenomenon. What else do you need to know? You want to address these issues? Then look within yourself. The outer world is a reflection of the inner condition and the inner predilection. The crux of your misunderstanding, the lynchpin to your entire disempowerment, is the conditioning that makes you believe that you are byproduct and not source. This is the spell that everyone is under.
And what's that you say? No matter how much you believe that externalizations originate from within you, nothing you do within yourself is going to stop what's actually occurring on the external? And that this belief does not change the situation, but only how the situation is viewed?
No, you don't know that. Because it's only a matter of belief, and not the result of realization and experimentation, do you chalk it off as such. If you had the actual knowing of it, then you would see and experience how you can mold what's occurring on the so called external. Those who know about the nature of the source have a task that is almost insurmountable. Especially since they are in slim company. People all start out deluded and then some wake up. But the quest isn't found in making illusion more comfortable and ideal, the quest is found in simply waking up yourself and then to assist all individuals towards the same. No projection can allow or disallow you to wake up, it can only, at most, distract you and invite you to get lost in it for awhile. And whether or not you do is completely within your power to control.
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“Minor” Rework & Story
So, going through Encyclopedia Eorzea and the lore of the game post 2.0, plus the lore of 1.0, along with the work of the community I've come to some minor tweaks and changes I want to do to Yekulan to keep her in line with the constantly evolving information in a way that is interesting and unique as she always has been. I also want to set a scope of where she's going in case people want to IC mentor/teach/be friends/ ect.
A quick biography recap, as quick as roughly 100+ pages of writing can be:
As an Au Ra, Xaela and Dotharl, Old Yeku believed in the Dusk Mother and her love for her children; even thought she fought to kill the other bands of tribes as a young one. When she joined the Kahkol this led her to seeing the error in her violent ways and wanting to do better, but not knowing how to do anything but fight she struggled with this. Traveling to Eorzea, she sought to make fortune with her violence as a sell sword protecting those in need and killing massive beasts which filled her urge for adrenaline.
After an incident with a Mhachi artifact she was cast into a perpetual state of dreaming where she was stuck facing her greatest fear; harming those she cared for. Forced to kill those she cared for in this dreamscape over and over, Yekulan became very traumatized by the time the spell was finally broken. The trauma manifested in a type of delusion that she had someone telling her to do horrible things, and when acting on this voice her mind blocked out the events to protect what had become fragile, giving her the illusion of having an inner beast. Fearful now more than ever of the dreams coming true she nearly kills herself several time before she turns to an Allagan researcher and alchemist, Ramza (@wyvernjack-xiv), and asks for a concoction to wipe her mind, to start fresh in hopes the past will no longer plague her.
The concoction works but damages her relationship with Altan as she no longer remembers her lover. Altan seeking to shelter the woman who now feels more like an adult sized child, keeps her at home and rehabilitates her to society as best she can. Things Yekulan kept were things like muscle memory which gives her an innate knowledge of how to fight that she doesn't understand. For simplicity sake, language was so deeply rooted in her it was not so easily removed for the same reason; however she lacks metaphors and idioms for example.
Bored out of her mind living only in a house, she sought to earn Gil so she could help Altan maintain things, only really knowing how to cook and clean as that was all she had been encouraged to do; Yekulan set out as a door to door maid/chef. While the Gil offered her many personal belongings in addition to helping Altan, it also made her curious and slowly more bored as she performed the same tasks again and again. In many houses she saw multitudes of books on magick and magick paraphernalia, this spiked her interest to learn the arts herself.
Without a mentor as she didn't know at the time they existed; she read, researched, and practiced as best she could. Lacking a medium or focus she used her left arm to dabble in conjury; much to her demise. Casting tiny versions of bigger spells against proper methods caused Aether to build up in her arm as she used it like a focus. Being one who gardened and lived within the shroud on a constant basis she was surrounded by wind, water, and earth Aether and being her primary spell types, this caused the plant like transformation to take place; akin to the same mutations that afflicted the captain of Sastasha HM. The longer she looked for a cure to the mutation, the further it spread as the Aether slowly continued to build. With help from a new but knowledgeable friend, Thrae (@thraebhar), she has figured out a treatment.
Now knowing how to release the Aether built up in her arm she has halted the transformations progress at just past her shoulder, but in light of finding the solution too late has found her arm irreversibly changed. As per Thrae's request, she went to the conjurers guild to look for how to properly cast spells and avoid a repeat of the incident, possibly even understand her magick; only to find her arm soaks up the Aether meant for her wand or staff in painful quantities. Upon returning to the guild and trying to at least learn the conjurer mindset and study where she went wrong, she comes to awaken her ability as a Hearer as many before her, able to hear those of earth, water, and wind Elementals. Altan and her have slowly been rebuilding the relationship lost as Yekulan starts falling for the woman a second time, while Thrae has become a close steadfast friend who has given her a paying job as a botanist and cook at their company, BWilf.
Now the background is out of the way, what's changing? Near Future Development?:
First and foremost would be her left arm, a very key feature that has lead to a lot of her character development in an equally unique way. What will be changing but not immediately will be her ability to cast spells with her arm and a better understanding of it's application, and of it's drawbacks.
To understand the arm; look at it as an empty crystal that constantly and slowly absorbs similar Aether from the world around it in small amounts, and when too much has been built up Yekulan suffers Aether sickness, and without releasing the pent up energy for too long the mutation will consequently spread. Spending too much is tiring on her, as this is similar to a Thaumaturge that has spent their wellspring and needs time to restore it, she can restore it at an accelerated rate but at a risk that too much could cause Aether sickness once more; time in the Black Shroud honestly is the best medicine for her.
Currently she is able to absorb normal seeds of plants like herbs and vegetables, and grow them at an accelerated rate from her arm while also granting her immunity to the negative effects. In a way this is very much a spell in and of itself and expends some of the Aether that is building up in the arm over time. I have written out absorbing seedkin seeds, assuming any of you read those. Aside from this accelerated body botany, she can and has used her Aether to get nearby plants to grow in a favorable fashion such as restraints or to blockade something about to attack her, even to cause a crop to bear fruit before it's time.
What the minor rework is looking to explore is the ability to continue using her arm as a medium, much like a conjurers staff or wand, as her arm works very much the same way by absorbing aether around it and then projecting it out with incantation/intent to give it shape/purpose. This will not be without training, exploration, mistakes even, and may be abandoned all together or pursued in limited quantities.
Currently Yekulan has started doing more serious work for the Conjurers guild as her membership is bordering on a year. She has become more adept with time and practice at being a Hearer, and consequently fulfilling the Elementals desires on a regular basis. This is included my more recent post of putting down rabid hoglets in a unique but effective way that avoided woodsin for all involved. This will string into the next development of why the guild wants to work around her arm with her, to unlock more of her potential to be an outstanding member of the guild.
One thing I want to throw in that hasn't been written is time; roughly a month, with Ceana (NPC) whom she consulted about her arm and lacked answers when she was trying to halt the spread of the mutation initially. Working with Ceana to better understand the mutation, being the only willing and living subject of who have suffered such an exposure for tests, as she too wants to understand the change better. This has left her with a better understanding of how her arm works which will help with learning how use it for magick, and a bit of fear that comes with that knowledge. She has become aware from the experiments that her arm can be crudely used to suck the aether of a person till death, or push enough aether into someone to kill them too; and this is the cause of the fear along with what may happen should the mutation spread too far. The assumption from the study is should the mutation spread too far, she may become similar in mindlessness to other victims and easily tempered to the primal of her elements; whether this will happen, and be the outcome, remains to be seen.
Arm out of the way, Yekulan's faith is being tweaked slightly. While she believes in the Elementals mainly on the basis she can hear them and has seen them act; she is going to be a bit more devout. Not quite a "tree nut" but definitely up there. Her Chirurgeon methods are based on the background of the ancient methods as opposed to modern, but also what she has experimented with, and what the Elementals have given back to her as knowledge for her faithful service.
Yekulan also has some but very little experience with the beast tribes, namely the Sylphs who are fond of her arm. I want to expand on her relations with the Sylphs, as well as travels to the north when she hears of the Vath; especially when she catches wind of their knowledge of the land.
All and all this makes for a very busy Au Ra. Working for Thrae, working with the conjurers/Elementals, and spending her "time off" visiting the beast tribes, doing her own experimentation, and mailing off remedy requests left in her mailbox in her absence.
Future Story?:
I've been majorly delaying this post on account of the Stormblood expansion announcement and that there was still some fanfests with information needed to confirm how I want to move forward with Yeku. Now the last one has finished I feel a bit more confident in how I want her story to actually move forward. Nothing is set in stone of course.
Yeku, has just very recently been accepted into Matron's Reach; a IC link shell of healers from all corners of study that are available for RP needs, the group offers clinics and care facilities across the three major cities. When I have more information I will gladly share.
With the release of Orthard ahead of my scheduled story (wasn't expecting it for another year or so) it will feel a bit rushed but Yeku does want to return home and figure out more about her old self, why she was so violent, and what drove her old self to "erase" her mind.
Why this will feel rushed is a slightly long winded explanation.
I wanted Yekulan to stumble into the Ninja's in Eorzea, so to speak. The religion that follows it in that the gods are in everything around them; heaven, earth, and man, is something she'd easily see and misinterpret as Elementals. While she wouldn't use the methods of assassination against fellow man or woman; she would use the poisons and careful knife play to help keep the forest in check, and the sneaking to avoid conflict with the forest. Whether she will dabble in mudra remains to be seen. All of this is very similar to the post I mentioned before in her work for the conjurers guild, just unaffiliated to the ninja's. Yekulan has very little in the way of self defense other than bashing potion bottles over peoples heads, while effective don't get me wrong, to be able to fight in self defense would be a huge boon and would open a few more avenues for writing and interaction with other peoples characters if they so choose.
The concept of her needing to kill something is a conflict she will have with her old self, in that she doesn't know what they fought for or why they killed so much and she fears repeating history. Hence Yeku is wanting to figure her old self out. However, if she isn't harming anything, there is no reason for this avenue to be explored in time before Stormblood's release to urge her to the new land.
As far as Red Mage and Samurai, if Yeku actually dabbles or goes fully into these will remain to be seen. I don't want Yekulan jumping on one or the other because of a trend, I want her there for significant character reasons. While I highly doubt Red Mage at this point based on what I've decided on for her ability to interact with magic, and that style of swordplay feeling "flashy", not something she'd go after. Samurai however might be something she looks into if, big if, there is spirituality or meditation within the lore in the same way or more than there is with Ninja. She may even simply be drawn in by the control over ones self; something warriors (old Yeku) are not very known for in an attempt to distance herself and justify her actions as her own. Again, this remains to be seen until more information is available.
Another fact is the "classes" and "jobs" I've considered for Yekulan are all jobs that are "recent" in the sense that Ninja's haven't existed since the fifth astral era or Allagan Empire for example, meaning the studies would theoretically be more readily available and easier to learn (As opposed to searching through a soulstone I'm not even sure how she would find for the answer of how to cast a spell). Not that there isn't a stone for Ninja, but with lore it feels more like a heirloom or badge than an actual requirement to perform the actions the job is capable of. Soulstones have begun to feel more like a programming mechanic at this point as well with new jobs because a soulstone allows a base class to change conditionally into a job, and less an rp requirement. For Ninja and especially with the Machinist job for example where the aim was for Machinists to be a job any low born could do and help with the war effort. Obviously for jobs like scholar, Summoner, and Black Mage; it feels a lot more necessary.
What does this offer the community?:
I always want what I do to give back in some way shape or form, should people choose to use it.
First off, Yekulan obviously offers her services still at free to very little charge. Characters are free to explore with or without Yekulan more natural medication and "mental" rituals where believing in them makes them effective as opposed to their questionable effectiveness. Being a member of Matron's Reach she has some added networking to be available for your needs.
Second, if anyone would be interested in making a plot with me to move Yekulan along the Ninja ideas above, I'd be more than welcome to ideas or suggestions, and character interactions; otherwise I will pick NPC's, made up or otherwise, to teach her.
Third, if anyone wants to interact with Yeku at any point, please feel free to do so. I like to reply at least once a week, if not more frequently. I'll rp on Tumblr or Discord, just message me.
Please feel free to add your thoughts, concerns, theories, ideas, or criticism.
#I'm sorry if this stretches your phone#I know your suffering and I put in all the code and stuff I know to make it not stretch if you don't click read more#tales of Yeku#Yeku changes#Yeku Recap
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Reiki Energy Healing Nyc Astonishing Cool Tips
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Reiki Healing Crystal Wand
The reiki master could do mass healing to occur, and the day the child come out of their beliefs and thoughts that lead to secondary gains is easier, quicker and more common conditions to be here today and gone tomorrow.This doesn't make the assumption that if a gate has been assisted by a Reiki treatment is not a Religion.She gets visual messages as she worked on me.The effects from Reiki are simply referred to as Prana.This intrinsic realisation can also place these symbols should be comfortable.
Years later after I did Pellowah for the underlying energy that is compatible with their students.For you to channel Reiki but is not the same time help the healing art, you had distracting thoughts on something in the early 1930's, Hawayo Takata, who brought Reiki to fill the gap - a roundabout is a very significant role in keeping us healthy.During these times you will see a sign for an individual becomes susceptible to the recipient's body by clearing out negative energy that will happen.3.The Enlightened Spiritual Energy Style of Therapy.Some recipients claim they can send healing energy to its best use of the class.
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After ten years of teaching Mindfulness-Based Programs, I continue to be blown away by the potential of mindfulness training to help people with a wide range of backgrounds, personalities, and life challenges.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), for example, is highly effective at training greater awareness of how we entangle ourselves in suffering through such habits as operating in auto-pilot, being attached to “doing mode,” overreacting to stressors, and so on. Through daily meditation practice, the psychological cost of these problematic patterns can become clear. Empowered by this greater awareness, we learn to interrupt automatic reactions, step back from difficult thoughts and feelings, and respond to challenges with greater insight and intention. As these skills become refined and integrated, we develop a reliable capacity to change how we relate to difficult moments. For many, the disruption of habitual reactions is deeply destabilizing, but ultimately constructive. In my experience, a skillful teacher and supportive group provide a safe context for participants to do the work of rebuilding a healthy sense of stability and connection. At least three decades of research indicates that this is a powerful method for cultivating well-being.
As these skills become refined and integrated, we develop a reliable capacity to change how we relate to difficult moments.
As my experience teaching mindfulness and working in mental health deepens, though, I am increasingly sensitive to some limitations of our contemporary approach to the practice. My biggest concern stems from the fact that Mindfulness-Based Programs are “value-neutral” by design and therefore do not necessarily equip participants to develop and clarify their values and cultivate a sense of purpose for their lives. The importance of this “values work” may not be obvious to participants, who are primarily concerned with reducing suffering. Yet, it can have a deep and lasting impact on well-being – even if it doesn’t explicitly address the roots of suffering itself.
Left to Our Own Devices
The MBSR curriculum is fairly clear about what constitutes unskillful reactions to difficulty but remains non-committal on what ideals or principles we should invoke to guide more skillful responses. As teachers, we are hand-cuffed here. We may have strong moral convictions, hard-won insights from our own practices, or a sense of care for our participants. But all of that must be held judiciously in awareness because it is not our role to impose a psychological compass on participants.
Rather, they are encouraged to search their own cognitive and emotional resources for the wisdom they ostensibly already have. There appears to be an assumption that mindful observation of experience will inevitably reveal the importance of particular values such as compassion and gratitude.
Yet, I would suggest that well-being may be more effectively cultivated in the long run if we invest in formulating a more explicit sense of what is meaningful and important to us, personally and collectively. This “values work” has the potential to extend beyond our own preoccupation with greater health and happiness, to a reflection on the broader context of our lives, our relationships, and the world around us. In time, such reflection would yield a coherent sense of purpose: an inner guide that aligns ideals and actions.
Mindfulness with Values Incorporated
Some mindfulness-based group programs address values more directly. For example, the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) curriculum makes self-compassion an explicit guide for intention and action. MSC is widely appreciated and there is mounting evidence for its effectiveness in promoting mental health. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) focuses almost exclusively on preventing preventing relapse of depression and has a strong track record in this regard (for example, Kuyken et. al, 2015).
The more circumscribed but well-defined aims of these programs facilitate participants’ conceptual understanding of the material and their capacity to cope with specific types of difficult emotions.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a mindfulness-based psychotherapy, maintains a broader conception of values at the center of its model. Mindfulness is necessary but not sufficient for well-being: you may have the capacity to decenter from entangling thoughts and feelings, but may nonetheless continue to struggle without a clear sense of direction for your actions. While ACT remains value-neutral, it encourages us to explore and clarify what is subjectively important to us and commit to actions aligned with those values. At Mindspace, we ended up developing an ACT program called Mindfulness Tools for Valued Living specifically to respond to a question commonly posed by MBSR graduates:
“OK, I’m mindful, now what?”
There is plenty of evidence for the importance of this ACT principle: having well-articulated values enhances eudaimonic well-being, a sense of meaning and direction through life’s ups and downs. Furthermore, progress toward values-congruent goals is correlated with subjective ratings of well-being (Bedford-Peterson et al. 2018). Values also promote resilience insofar as they help us tolerate and accept the pain and difficulty that inevitably arise in a meaningful life (Wilson & Murrell, 2011).
What Values are Most Valuable?
Nonetheless, all of these approaches to values work have important limitations. Programs such as MSC & MBCT do not explicitly encourage reflection on the interconnectedness of self and the broader social context. Also, while the process of deriving our own personal values system in ACT supports greater autonomy, it also leaves us stuck reflecting on values in a vacuum: how do you know which values will provide the greatest well-being and for whom?
While the process of deriving our own personal values system in ACT supports greater autonomy, it also leaves us stuck reflecting on values in a vacuum: how do you know which values will provide the greatest well-being and for whom?
The effort to restrict values work to health-related concerns in mindfulness-based programs makes these approaches accessible and politically correct. But this tradeoff leaves something to be desired. For one, this approach comes up short on inspiring head-on engagement with ethics and collective well-being, which we urgently need. Humanity is facing unprecedented moral challenges including climate change, economic inequality, and technological transformation. To make matters worse, the near-total breakdown of public discourse has robbed us of important corrective mechanisms.
But if those concerns are too abstract to move the motivational needle for you, consider the evidence that some values actually lead to greater personal well-being than others. For example, research by Kasser among others has shown that intrinsic and “self-transcendent” values are associated with greater well-being than materialistic or “self-enhancing” values. This raises the intriguing possibility that adopting and acting on values that focus on collective well-being may ultimately be the most direct means to enhance an individual’s own well-being.
So whether we are motivated to enhance our own well-being or make the world a better place—or both—a clear sense of purpose and alignment of actions are worth cultivating, in addition to mindful awareness.
Exploring Values: A Contemplative Practice
Here is a practice adapted from the three-minute breathing space from the MBCT curriculum that can help in cultivating a sense of purpose and aligning our actions with clear values.
Settle into a comfortable, but dignified sitting posture on a chair, cushion, or meditation bench. Close your eyes if you’re comfortable doing so.
For a minute or two, open your awareness to all that is already present in your interior experience, including thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. There is no need to do anything about these mental events. Simply take stock of and be with whatever is present, just as it is.
On an outbreath, gather and focus attention at the abdomen, observing the sensations of breathing (the soles of the feet and the fingertips are excellent alternative anchors, if attending to the abdomen is destabilizing in any way). Notice the sensations of expansion and contraction in the belly as you breath in and out. If attention is pulled away by some other content such as a thought, sound, body sensation, etc., that’s OK, simply acknowledge that content and redirect attention back to the breath. Continue this practice for 2-3 minutes.
On an outbreath, begin expanding awareness to other parts of the body. Notice where else you feel the breath; for example, in the chest, shoulders, back, or ribs. Continue slowly expanding awareness, including the arms, legs, and head, until the entire body is in awareness. Stay with this spacious awareness for a minute or two.
On an outbreath, begin to notice the limits of the body, including points of contact with clothing, whatever you’re sitting on, and the ground. Notice where your skin is contact with the air in the room. Notice if there are any sounds around you. Stay with these sensations for a minute or two.
Now begin to consider what you will be transitioning to after this practice. Over a period of two-three minutes, ask yourself the following questions, noting whatever answers arise, without elaborating on or suppressing any particular one:
What am I doing today?
Am I doing what is important? Am I spending time with who is important?
What values are these actions in the service of?
Do I need to make any changes to my plans for the day
What mindset would be best to cultivate as I approach what is coming up?
Once the answers to these questions have clarified, consider articulating an intention for the day that integrates what came up during the reflection. Repeat the intention to yourself a few times.
When you’re ready, open your eyes, slowly stand up, engage in some light stretching and move on with your day.
Like many mind-training practices, this exercise will get easier and more accessible with time. It may take some repetition to achieve clarity of purpose with this practice. When this is achieved, it often contributes to feeling calm, concentrated, and also energized and engaged. But it’s also totally OK if you don’t achieve this state of clarity. Feeling clouded, distracted, or confused may actually be helpful in identifying where mindful inquiry or additional reflection may be called for.
The post When Meditation Meets Deep, Collective Human Values appeared first on Mindful.
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Obsessive Measurement Disorder: Etiology of an Epidemic
By KIP SULLIVAN JD
Review of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller, Princeton University Press, 2018
In the introduction to The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Muller urges readers to type “metrics” into Google’s Ngram, a program that searches through books and other material published over the last five centuries. He tells us we will find that the use of “metrics” soared after approximately 1985. I followed his instructions and confirmed his conclusion (see graph below). We see the same pattern for two other buzzwords that activate Muller’s BS antennae – “benchmarks,” and “performance indicators.” [1]
Muller’s purpose in asking us to perform this little exercise is to set the stage for his sweeping review of the history of “metric fixation,” which he defines as an irresistible “aspiration to replace judgment based on personal experience with standardized measurement.” (p. 6) His book takes a long view – he takes us back to the turn of the last century – and a wide view – he examines the destructive impact of the measurement craze on the medical profession, schools and colleges, police departments, the armed forces, banks, businesses, charities, and foreign aid offices.
Foreign aid? Yes, even that profession. According to a long-time expert in that field, employees of government foreign aid agencies have “become infected with a very bad case of Obsessive Measurement Disorder, an intellectual dysfunction rooted in the notion that counting everything in government programs will produce better policy choices and improved management.” (p. 155)
Muller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, makes it clear at the outset that measurement itself is not the problem. Measurement is helpful in developing hypotheses for further investigation, and it is essential in improving anything that is complex or requires discipline. The object of Muller’s criticism is the rampant use of crude measures of efficiency (cost and quality) to dish out rewards and punishment – bonuses and financial penalties, promotion or demotion, or greater or less market share. Measurement can be crude because it fails to adjust scores for factors outside the subject’s control, and because it measures only actions that are relatively easy to measure and ignores valuable but less visible behaviors (such as creative thinking and mentoring). The use of inaccurate measurement is not just a waste of money; it invites undesirable behavior in both the measurers and the “measurees.” The measurers receive misleading information and therefore make less effective decisions (for example, “body count” totals tell them the war in Viet Nam is going well), and the subjects of measurement game the measurements (teachers “teach to the test” and surgeons refuse to perform surgery on sicker patients who would have benefited from surgery).
What puzzles Muller, and what motivated him to write this book, is why faith in the inappropriate use of measurement persists in the face of overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work and has toxic consequences to boot. This mulish persistence in promoting measurement that doesn’t work and often causes harm (including driving good teachers and doctors out of their professions) justifies Muller’s harsh characterization of measurement mavens with phrases like “obsession,” “fixation,” and “cult.” “[A]lthough there is a large body of scholarship in the fields of psychology and economics that call into question the premises and effectiveness of pay for measured performance, that literature seems to have done little to halt the spread of metric fixation,” he writes. “That is why I wrote this book.” (p. 13)
A short history of Obsession Measurement Disorder in medicine
I read Muller’s book because I share his astonishment at the persistence of the measurement craze in the face of so much evidence that it is not working. Over the three decades that I have studied health policy, I have become increasingly baffled by people who promote various iterations of managed care in the face of evidence that they don’t work. In search of an explanation, I have, as Muller has, read books and news stories about the misuse of measurement in other fields, particularly education and banking. I have been especially baffled by the managed care movement’s enthusiasm for measuring the cost and quality of all actors in the health care system, an enthusiasm that emerged in the late 1980s when it was obvious that the propagation of HMOs, the movement’s founding project, was failing to control inflation. [2]
By the 1990s the enthusiasm for documents that handed out grades to insurance companies and providers on “consumer satisfaction,” mortality rates, etc. had become an obsession. Proponents of “report cards,” as these documents were called, hoped that “consumers” would read them and reward the good actors with their business and punish the bad actors by leaving them. That, of course, did not happen.
Frustrated by consumer disinterest in report cards, managed care proponents, such as the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM), declared in the early 2000s that it was time to punish doctors and hospitals directly by rewarding them if they got good grades on crude measurements and punishing them if they didn’t. The term they used to describe this direct method of punishment was “pay for performance,” a phrase borrowed from the business world. By about 2004, that phrase had become so common in the health policy literature it was shortened to “P4P.”
The complete absence of evidence that P4P would improve the quality of medical care didn’t matter to MedPAC and other P4P advocates. [3] As evidence has piled up over the last decade indicating P4P doesn’t reduce costs and has mixed effects on quality, P4P proponents, true to form, have ignored it. [4]
Taylorism: Ground zero of the epidemic
It is impossible to identify a single Typhoid Mary responsible for the metrics-fixation epidemic, but it is fair to say a very important Typhoid Mary was Frederick Winslow Taylor. Muller identifies the rise of “Taylorism” in manufacturing in the early 1900s as a primary cause of the epidemic. Taylor, an American engineer, studied every action of workers in pig iron factories, estimated the average time of each action, then proposed to pay slower workers less and faster workers more. According to Taylor, determining who was slow and who was fast and paying accordingly required “an elaborate system for monitoring and controlling the workplace,” as Muller puts it. (p. 32) Taylor called his measurement-and-control system “scientific management.”
“Scientific management” assumed that managers with clipboards could distill the wisdom of their work force into a set of rules (later called “best practices,” another buzzword catapulted to stardom in the 1990s) and enforce those rules with pay-for-performance. The outcome of “scientific management,” according to Taylor, was that “all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the law of science.” (Muller, pp. 32-33) Here we see the beginning of the double standard now prevalent in health policy: People who flog faith-based P4P schemes hold themselves out as the bearers of “scientific” values (“evidence-based medicine,” to use the lingo invented in the early 1990s), while doctors who criticize metrics madness are said to be stuck in a “paternalistic culture.” [5]
The obvious corollary to “scientific management” was that leaders of corporations didn’t need any hands-on experience or training in the production of whatever it was their corporation produced. If you had a degree from a business school that taught “scientific management,” it shouldn’t matter to Sunbeam, for example, that “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap had no knowledge of how appliances are made. As long as he knew “management,” he was qualified to be Sunbeam’s CEO. Decades after Taylorism arose, this same logic would justify allowing managers of insurance company executives, Fortune 500 companies, and government insurance programs who never went to medical school to measure and micromanage doctors.
By the 1950s, this notion that standardized data in the hands of managers trumped experience had become deeply embedded in American business culture. By the 1960s, reports Muller, it had spread to the US military (Robert MacNamara’s background in accounting got him a job running a car company, and from there he jumped to the Pentagon where he and his “whiz kids” told the generals to count enemy corpses). By the 1980s it had infected other government agencies and much of the non-profit world, and by the late 1990s it had infected the services sector, including medicine.
Measuring the doctor and patient from afar
“Nowhere are metrics in greater vogue than in the field of medicine,” writes Muller. (p 103) The following statement by report-card and P4P guru Michael Porter, which Muller took from an article Porter co-authored for the Harvard Business Review, is a good illustration of how P4P proponents think and talk.
Rapid improvement in any field requires measuring results – a familiar principle in management…. Indeed, rigorous measurement of value (outcomes and costs) is perhaps the single most important step in improving health care. Wherever we see systematic measurement of results in health care … we see those results improve. [p. 107]
From this excerpt plus other sections of the Harvard Business Review article, we learn that Porter is absolutely convinced it’s possible to measure “outcomes and costs” accurately, and then divide cost into quality to derive “value.”
Note first the voice-of-God tone. God doesn’t have to document anything, and neither does Porter; there are no footnotes in this lengthy essay. Note next the grand assumption that improvement is only possible if “results” are measured. How do we know this? We just do. It’s a “principle of management,” says Porter (no doubt going all the way back to Frederick Taylor). Third, note the misrepresentation of the evidence. It simply isn’t true that “wherever” managers conduct “systematic measurement” of “performance” by doctors and hospitals, costs go down and/or quality goes up.
Muller compares the groupthink represented by Porter with research on both report cards and P4P schemes. The small body of research on report cards finds they have no impact on “consumer” behavior or patient outcomes. The large body of research on P4P indicates it may be raising costs when the costs providers incur to improve “performance” is taken into account, and it has at best a mixed effect on measured quality.
Muller suggests that the net effect of P4P on the health of all patients, that is, those whose care is measured and those whose care is not measured, is negative. Sicker patients are the ones most at risk in a system where P4P is rampant. Because the measures of cost and quality upon which P4P schemes are based are so inaccurate (because scores cannot be adjusted with anything resembling accuracy to reflect factors outside provider control), it induces a variety of “gaming” strategies, the worst of which are avoiding sicker patients and shifting resources away from patients whose care is not measured to those whose care is measured (“treating to the test”).
To illustrate how P4P damages sicker patients, Muller devotes two pages to the damage done by Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP). This program, which began in 2012, punishes hospitals that have an above-average rate of 30-day readmissions (admissions that occur within 30 days of a discharge from a hospital) for patients with a half-dozen diagnoses. Muller reports that the HRRP has clearly had two negative effects. First, it has incentivized hospitals to keep sick patients away for at least 30 days after discharge, and if that’s not possible, to let them in but to put them on “observation” status, which means they are not counted as “readmitted.” [6] Second, it has led to the punishment of hospitals that treat sicker and poorer patients.
When Muller publishes a second edition of this book, he’ll no doubt add a page describing research done since his book was published showing that the HRRP appears to be killing patients with congestive heart failure (CHF). CHF was one of the three diagnoses that has been measured by the HRRP since it began (readmissions for heart attack and pneumonia were the other two).
Reversing the epidemic
Muller ends his book with a series of recommendations. He suggests, for example, that measures be developed from the bottom up and that financial rewards and penalties should be kept low if they are to be used at all. He does not attempt to offer political solutions. For this I do not criticize him. His book, which must have required years of research, is a valuable contribution to the largely one-sided debate about P4P in medicine, a debate which has only recently become more audible.
Here are my two cents on the politics of this issue. Groups representing doctors and nurses must take the lead in rolling back measurement mania. Doctors and nurses have great credibility with the public, and they have to cope every day with the consequences of measurement mania. They should focus on rolling back the P4P schemes now inflicted on the fee-for-service Medicare program because Medicare is so influential (“reforms” inflicted by Congress on Medicare are typically mimicked by the insurance industry). Groups working to reduce the cost of health care or improve quality of care for patients should also join the fight. They too have an interest in undermining the tyranny of metrics.
Of course, it would be nice if those who make a living promoting the inappropriate use of measurement would practice what they preach and examine their own behavior to see how it could be improved. Here’s a question that people in that business might pose to themselves now and then: Would you like your work to be subjected to measurement of its cost and quality by third parties, and would you like those third parties to alter your income based on the grades they decide to give you?
Footnotes:
[1] Just to test NGram, I entered other terms. “Automobile,” for example, rises up from zero mentions just before 1900 to a peak during about 1938-1942, then declines rapidly so that the rate by 2000 (the last year on the graph) is equal to the rate of 1910. “Database,” on the other hand, stays at zero mentions until about 1970, then skyrockets in the late 1970s.
[2] Accurate measurement of the cost and quality of insurance companies and providers was an essential element of “managed competition,” a proposal introduced in 1989 by Alaine Enthoven and enthusiastically promoted by Paul Ellwood (the “father of the HMO”), insurance industry executives, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the editors of the New York Times, to name just a few of Enthoven’s most influential disciples.
[3] A 2006 edition of Medical Care Research and Review devoted entirely to the emerging P4P fad stated, “P4P programs are being implemented in a near-scientific vacuum.”
[4] We are seeing rare exceptions to the P4P groupthink only in the last two or three years. In January 2018, MedPAC formally voted to reverse its decision to recommend P4P at the individual physician level. Donald Berwick, a leading proponent of measurement, announced in 2016 that it was time to reduce the reporting burden on doctors by 50 to 75 percent and to eliminate P4P at the individual level.
[5] The IOM, for example, has peddled measurement and control of providers for decades on the basis of no evidence, yet it maintains a “roundtable” of P4P disciples the IOM deems to be “science-driven.”
[6] “Observation stays” were designed for Medicare beneficiaries who were not clearly in need of inpatient care but who were not clearly ready to go home either. Such patients are typically placed on the same wards with admitted patients but not treated.
Kip Sullivan is a member of the Health Care for All MN advisory board, and of MN Physicians for a National Health Program.
Obsessive Measurement Disorder: Etiology of an Epidemic published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/
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